Do CR and balanced encounters hurt 5E? Is the game better played without taking encounter balance into account, and just running "the world as it is"? This topic sort of sucks to cover, since I need to go back to the rulebooks and check exactly what they say to be fair and ensure the game's intent is upheld.
Creating a Combat Encounter
When creating a combat encounter, let your imagination run wild and build something your players will enjoy. Once you have the details figured out, use this section to adjust the difficulty of the encounter.
D&D 2014, Dungeon Master's Guide, pg 81
To me, "use this section to adjust the difficulty" sounds like a subtle nudge towards a requirement to balance encounters. I don't have the 2024 books because I don't want to spend money on them, nor do I have space for books I won't use. Also, 2014 is the more popular version of the game, so that is what I go by.
So, for 2014 D&D, it is "let your imagination run wild" and then "use this section."
There seems to be this huge assumption that we must balance encounters. I suppose the weight of thousands of "how do I balance 5E encounters" videos on YouTube has made the entire subject something we no longer question. What is more confusing is that most say it is just a tool, and many books say it isn't even a sure thing.
BUILDING COMBAT ENCOUNTERS
If you are running a pre-written adventure, combat encounters have likely already been designed for you— with groups of enemies already put together in a way appropriate for the level of the adventure and the events of the story. However, when creating your own adventures or spicing up published material, you may need to create your own combat encounters.
Tales of the Valiant, Monster Vault, Page 7
In ToV? There seems to be a requirement to balance encounters, right in the first pages of the Monster Vault. On page 8, they give three examples of how to create encounters: story-based, lore-based, and encounter-type. The first two seem like you are not using the tables in the chapter, while the last one strongly implies it. ToV does seem to feel like encounter building is a requirement for running a game, since the section is huge, detailed, and full of advice on building encounters.
In TOV, it is, "When creating your own adventures, you may need to create your own combat encounters." There is a tonal difference here, almost sounding like "Just buy published adventures from Kobold Press." The tools are very detailed, better than D&D 2014, and they feel like a more complete system.
A note here: at least there is recognition that "story-based" encounters are in the game, and this will be expanded upon in the next version of 5E we take a look at. Story-based encounters are unbalanced, "it is what it is" encounters with monsters and wandering monsters, and these are NOT rated on CR, nor are they balanced against a daily budget.
Oddly, these are called "story-based" since that implies the story was prewritten. In most of these cases, they are either wandering monsters or "monsters that are just there," and not part of the traditional, pre-written, balanced, story-style adventures.
Combat Encounters
There are two main ways to build a combat scene:
Challenge-Based Encounter. The Narrator may set out to prepare a fun, challenging combat encounter and choose opponents accordingly. A set-piece battle in an important dungeon room or the climactic battle in a story arc are often built to challenge the adventurers.
Story-Based Encounter. Often, the story and player actions determine the nature of a conflict. If adventurers antagonize the city watch they may have to fight guards, and if they anger an archmage they may be forced to battle the archmage. There’s no guarantee that a fight is winnable: the party must deal with the consequences of their choices.
In either case, the Narrator will want to know whether a fight is likely to be trivial, unwinnable, or somewhere in between. In a challenge-based encounter, the Narrator wants to aim for a middle ground of difficulty. In a story-based encounter, the Narrator may want to signal to the adventurers when they’re about to bite off more than they can chew. It’s rarely fun when a crushing defeat or an easy victory is a surprise to everyone (including the Narrator).
Level Up: Advanced 5E, Trials & Treasures, page 40
Level Up A5E does the best job of clarifying when you should use the CR system. If something is "challenge-based," you use the CR. If the encounter is "story-based," you do not use the CR system; it is what it is. This is more of an old-school interpretation, where a traditional "story-based" module was not written with CR in mind, the entire layout of the dungeon "was what it was," and the players went in there and did their own resource management and judged encounter difficulty themselves.
Walk into a room filled with 40 kobolds?
"The party must deal with the consequences of their actions."
This also implies you can play A5E completely like you would a BX game, throwing out CR, just keying a dungeon, and letting players wander around in there and figure out difficulty and how far they can go by themselves. This is the one thing that was so dangerous about the old Goodman Games 5E versions of the classic TSR adventures: they were presented as-is with 5E stats, and while the B1 recreation does go over encounter balance, the entire B2 adventure is presented as a faithful recreation of B2, and they will happily throw 40 kobolds in a room as a 5E encounter, in a first-level adventure, as an encounter first-level players could run into by the third room they enter.
By A5E's definitions, all of the GG TSR module recreations are "story-based encounters" and meant to be run as-is, without consulting a CR chart or trying to balance anything. That makes sense, and players need to think on their feet again, manage resources, and judge challenges instead of the referee doing it for them.
Ever since Wizards took over D&D, they have been obsessed with balancing encounters and forcing the referee to be the final say. You need to buy the next adventure if you found that too challenging. In previous versions, there was very little balance other than "the monsters in this adventure are suitable for this level range." When we ran the game, we guessed, and most of the time it worked out fine. We knew how things went after a few dozen sessions, and balanced things on the fly.
The overemphasis on encounter balance makes the game harder to referee, for some, trying to perfect and obsess about an imperfect tool, which is only a ballpark estimate with a huge margin of error.
The "party balances content" also applies to all the 5E recreations of the Labyrinth Lord modules, such as Barrowmaze. These all exist in this strange alternate universe where nobody playing 5E used the CR ratings, balanced encounters, or spent all this time worrying about a system that was only made to be a "suggestion" for how to balance encounters, that somehow became rules-as-written, and the only way to create an encounter, or your players will revolt and call you a terrible dungeon master.
Encounter balance is probably one of the things most misunderstood between modern 5E players, "playing by the rules," and the old-school crowd, "calling them as they see them." You will see endless YouTube videos on how to balance encounters, and OSR players sit there wondering why any of this is needed.
Back in the day, it was the players who "balanced encounters" by getting out of there when things seemed too dire, and the resources were nearly all gone. We prayed we would not encounter a wandering monster on the way out or on the way back to town. The referee balanced nothing.
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