Encounter Difficulty

One of the (surprisingly fun) challenges that I ran into when I started running D&D games is designing combat encounters. There's a lot of math involved. Ultimately, you add up a bunch of numbers that represent how strong the monsters are, multiply to total by a modifier based on how many monsters there are (and how big the party is), then compare the product to a set of numbers that tell you how much your party can handle, based on the level and number of adventurers in the party.

What I ultimately got out of all of this is that whether an encounter is Easy, Medium, Hard, or Deadly isn't based solely on the monsters involved. They're only half of the equation. The other half is the adventurers. An Easy fight for one party might be a Deadly fight for another. That's partly why I don't think we should label any challenge as being "easy" or "difficult" without also qualifying that label by saying whom that challenge is "easy" or "difficult" for.

For example, I write a lot (assuming you count these blog posts as "writing"). I get a great deal of practice typing words onto a page on my computer. I regularly string thousands of characters and hundreds of words together into sentences and paragraphs that usually, hopefully, end up making some sense. I have a great deal of experience at writing. So, when I am called upon to write a few hundred words or a few pages on a given topic, my challenge is not in finding the 's' key or in forming coherent sentences. Those "challenges" are easy for me. Yet, I know that that isn't easy for everyone. Not everyone does a lot of typing. Not everyone speaks English fluently.  Not everyone has as much experience with writing as I have. Writing a few paragraphs can be a great challenge for some people, even though it's not that much of a challenge to me.

We shouldn't judge how easy or difficult other people's challenges are based on how easily we think we could overcome them. Something that would be easy for us could still be a terribly difficult challenge for them. So we shouldn't judge others for the challenges that make them struggle. Perhaps they just have less experience dealing with that sort of challenge than we do. Or perhaps this is another case where "the grass is always greener on the other side." We don't really know how tough other people's challenges are, and we certainly don't fully understand how tough those challenges are for them.

That's why I'm glad that our challenges are being designed by Someone who knows how much we can handle, and that each hardship in the whole human experience is tailor-made for the humans who will experience them. God gives everyone challenges that are easy enough for them to overcome but that are also difficult enough to actually challenge them. In that sense, every challenge is, in fact, challenging. So, we shouldn't be hard on anyone who struggles with anything that would be easy for us. There's a reason God gave that challenge to them instead of us, and there are reasons why God gives us the challenges He does. It's not that some people are given difficult challenges and others are given easy challenges. "Easy" and "difficult" are relative. Everyone is given challenges that are difficult for them.