Encounter Balance

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Important: When should you balance an encounter?

You should only bother balancing a combat scene if you forced that combat encounter on your players, without giving them a way to bypass, or manipulate the conditions of the fight ahead of time.

Make sure to empower your players with information about the hurdles in their way, so they can put together a cogent plan to get past those hurdles in whichever way they deem best.

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Typically, the types of scenes which you'll want to force on your players are either:

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1. The first scene of a new narrative arc, which you use to do exposition and introduce your players to the choices they'll have to make and the hurdles they'll have to face throughout the rest of the arc.
   This could be a combat scene, or something else entirely. But either way, you probably don't want to give your players a chance to even miss this first scene, as it is the hook that will motivate your players to go through the rest of the story.

2. The last scene of an arc, which is often a boss fight to give the story an appropriately climactic conclusion.
   The choices your players make throughout the arc might decide which boss they end up fighting, but either way, you probably don't want to rob your players of an epic final challenge to end their story on a high note.

These are just the two most common types of forced combat scenes. There might be other scenes you decide to run at your table that you decide to make non-skippable (a common example is random travel encounters, which this book doesn't recommend using, but are still popular for old school players).

Just remember: this game is most fun if you balance forced encounters, and don't balance skippable encounters.

The Narrative Arc mental model:

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