Tunnel vision, I'm telling you.
Oh, one thing I forgot to bring up regarding RP incentives: Different PCs will have different interests. Some might only be willing to fight undead and optionally constructs (Pixanie is like this, now that she's become a pacifist), others might refuse to fight one or more of the various types of monstrous humanoid that make up the bulk of our content, and some might prefer to fight their fellow non-monstrous humanoids (Rinn and Mainda love beating up other bandits/pirates). Some, like druids, might not want to fight animals and magical beasts unless they've been somehow corrupted by an external force, while others might be interested exclusively in hunting the Sword Coast's wildlife.
While BG is critically low on mechanical diversity (either in NPC or area design), fixing this does not necessarily add RP diversity, and there's still a fair bit of room for improvement on that front too.
gedweyignasia wrote: ↑Mon Mar 14, 2022 11:22 pmAre enemies with higher AC+AB but less HP acceptable for players?
As a universal approach? No more than what we've got right now. But that
is one category that's direly underrepresented in our content right now. Other categories include "fragile spellcaster" (which is currently a category only occupied by PCs) and various other takes on the "glass cannon" archetype, with low HP
and AC counterbalanced by the fact that they'll wreck you if you don't kill them fast.
Putting aside the fact that the content as a whole feels overtuned at times, you need to balance encounters on multiple axes:
- Defense against effects and magic (saves, resistances, SR, and immunities), versus defense against mundane attacks (AC, HP, DR).
BG's mobs tend to rate very highly on all of these, except arguably AC and sometimes DR. Definitely a lot of room for variety here; if you're not dealing tons of damage, and you're not making it possible for someone else to deal tons of damage, then why are you here?
- Frequency of successful attack (AB, spell DCs, spell penetration, difficulty of obtaining immunity against spells/special attacks), versus potency of successful attack (damage, AoE, debuff severity).
A lot of non-casters rate relatively poorly on frequency (... at least against a dedicated tank...), but very strongly on potency. Could do with some diversification there. Meanwhile, casters tend to be very good at both due to a heavy emphasis on saveless and/or SR-ignoring offensive spells mixed in with occasional save-or-sucks/dies and dispels, and there are a few mobs on the server (beholders, illithids, greater basilisks) which rate exceptionally high on both of these simultaneously.
This is further exaggerated by the use of such mobs as mooks instead of minibosses, thereby making it all but inevitable that a character without outright immunity to their special attacks (some of which you can't be immune to) will eventually be defeated either by attrition (illithids, unless you chug so many healing potions as to ruin any chance of turning a profit) or by failed saves (beholders and basilisks, but possibly also illithids if you forgot your Protection from Evil today).
- Encounter difficulty (individual mob difficulties versus group composition) versus encounter reward (XP, loot, gold). Technically, it should just be "individual mob difficulties versus group composition", with the overall difficulty/reward ratio being more or less constant... but we're not even close, and I'm not 100% convinced we'll be able to properly decouple the components of encounter difficulty from the components of encounter reward. Consequently, this is the one axis on which you should aim to have all your encounters land in roughly the same ballpark.
Unfortunately, it's also the only axis on which BG is extremely inconsistent. CR scaling aside, difficulty is generally not calibrated beyond the power levels of individual NPCs (we probably have the MMO spawner to blame for this), and rewards are controlled only by changing spawn rates (because the 50-XP hard cap makes it highly uneconomical to kill small amounts of minibosses when you can kill large amounts of mooks in the same period, for possibly the same amount of XP per kill) or chest count (because the chest RNG is extremely swingy and largely beyond the area builder's control, while NPCs drop no loot except the occasional RIG bits).
Short of writing a whole new spawner, I'm not sure how much we can do about mob distribution right now. For rewards, though? Region-specific loot would help, as would a more flexible XP cap.
Even these axes are too simplistic, too broad - you'd probably need an elaborate point buy system to start to approach a good ruleset for balancing NPCs, but making that system account for all the possible synergistic effects between the various things you've "bought" is a pain in the neck.
I think this also speaks to your mechanical variety question, but if not, please elaborate on that too.
Right now, BG has two primary dungeon types: Dungeons without magic, and dungeons with magic. Technically, both of these may or may not have sneak attacks added into the mix, but with their low-to-moderate AB, these don't often have as drastic an impact on the overall gameplay as spellcasters do. (For the purposes of this conversation, I'm treating stuff like basilisks as spellcasters, since the bulk of their lethality tends to come from their spells and special attacks.)
Our encounters basically all land in roughly the same ballpark on the abovementioned axes (with minor deviations), and
then decide whether to add magic on top of that. This is why dungeons with mages are almost universally considered harder than dungeons without them - because the spells are added as an afterthought, after you've already set up all the stat blocks. (This may not be how it works devside, but it's definitely how it often feels, especially since the casters aren't noticeably weaker than their peers even before you consider their spellcasting potential. I've raised that complaint before.)
Can you explain what artificial difficulty is, give some examples of where it's used, and propose alternative measures to accomplish those same design goals? (I trust you're able to infer the purpose for the "artificial difficulty" mechanisms you don't like.)
Aside from the universality of HP sponges being a form of artificial difficulty in its own right? Arbitrary, undispellable stat buffs and immunities. By and large, it's been my impression that BG's non-boss NPCs can achieve higher health, higher AB, higher AC, higher saves, and higher damage than a PC of the same level, without having to compromise on any of these to quite the same degree as a PC... and then tack on undispellable damage resistances and immunities that the PCs sometimes can't emulate even in a
dispellable form, despite those resistances/immunities not having any basis in PnP stats. (Granted, outright immunity is more commonly seen in bosses... but damage resistances are all over the place. What was it that our mohrgs had? DR 15/[+3, bludgeoning]? I've never actually fought them myself, so I'm going off my memory of a Discord conversation about it.)
Some of these are
supposed to represent the NPCs prebuffing for the fight, or at least drinking potions and elixirs if they don't have any caster friends. But if this is the case, then those effects should be dispellable, and their baseline stats shouldn't (usually) be enough to singlehandedly challenge a decently-buffed PC. Also, maybe some of them should actually have more consumables they can spend during the fight. Healing potions, potions of short-duration spells like Displacement, spare potions of Mage Armor, etc.