Killing Balor: Nostalgic thoughts on Quadratic Wizards and Encounter Balance

I played in many D&D games as a teenager, but my primary campaign started when I was thirteen and ran for about three years. This game always looms large in my mind. Even now, over thirty years later, I think of it as the game. 

We used Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition, though we heavily house-ruled it (like everyone else). I'm pretty sure the first adventure we did was B4: The Lost City. I was the DM, and there were just two players, though they controlled a dozen characters between them. Death and retirement whittled the party down as we progressed. By level 8, there were only two characters left: a magic-user named Zyx and a fighter named Rix. 

Zyx and Rix. Rix and Zyx. They are always hovering nearby when I play D&D. Zyx was an unscrupulous wizard motivated solely by power. Rix was a good-natured bruiser who was mostly interested in the next fight. I dispensed XP precisely by the book, which meant progress was slow, even as we played up to six times a week. I don't think they ever exceeded level 15. But they were formidable. 

I only remember snippets of that campaign, but I will never forget their greatest battle. Interestingly, I think it sheds some light on a couple of ongoing D&D talking points. Let me give you the setup. 

Rix and Zyx lived in Waterdeep and had a fractious relationship with Piergeiron, the city's ruler. I played Piergeiron as a priggish do-gooder who was always interfering in their business. But one day, he and the Blackstaff summoned the characters to ask for their help. A mighty demon lord called Balor was planning a diabolical invasion of the North. Piergeiron wanted Rix and Zyx to perform a pre-emptive strike--specifically, go to the Abyss and destroy Balor on his home plane! He offered a grand prize in return, the Staff of the Magi, which Zyx desperately wanted. The pair agreed.

The Blackstaff transported them to Balor's home plane, a layer of the Abyss resembling a massive asteroid in a sea of gray. Rix and Zyx reconnoitered Balor's imposing palace and discovered the demon in a sizable throne room surrounded by allies and minions of all sorts. Think Jabba the Hutt's palace. It looked like they would have to take on the whole gang. 

I often wonder how I balanced fights back in the AD&D days. Encounter balance is discussed a lot in Fifth Edition circles. I mean, A LOT. There are endless debates about how well the official balancing methodology works and unlimited proposals to fix it. Medieval theologians debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin--modern D&D designers debate the proper calculation of Challenge Rating.  

My recollection is that encounter balance was not a hot topic back in the AD&D days, and a pretty exhaustive review of Dragon Magazine articles seems to confirm that. It just wasn't a big deal. I believe that I balanced encounters by allocating one hit die of monster per character level—no adjustments for special abilities or anything else. Rix and Zyx had about 30 character levels between them, so I probably put about 30 hit dice worth of monsters in Balor's throne room. 

Some might say that the nature of AD&D made combat balance less of a concern, but I would question that. We had plenty of unbalanced encounters in AD&D - sometimes, the enemy was either a pushover or turned out to be much harder than planned. But this was simply part of the game, and I don't recall people complaining about it too much. 

So long as a dice roll has a significant influence, encounter outcomes will be unpredictable. If you think this is more pronounced in Fifth Edition than in Third or Fourth, you would be right. This is because of something the designers called bounded accuracy. Instead of representing power increments primarily by larger static hit bonuses and armor class, Fifth Edition does so by increasing hit points and damage dice. Reducing the influence of static bonuses and increasing the impact of dice rolls creates a less predictable, more swingy game. Attempts to make more accurate systems to model encounters are doomed to failure. 

What should we do with this situation? Taking a leaf from my 1st edition experience, I suggest we simply accept this as part of the game. Sometimes the final boss battle will be a pushover. Sometimes the introductory fight in the tavern will nearly wipe the party out. This variability is part of the fun of the game. It is a feature, not a bug. The remarkable popularity of Fifth Edition suggests that there is no fundamental problem here. 

Back to Rix and Zyx, who are peering anxiously into Balor's throne room. They began devising a strategy, two lone adventurers in the middle of the Abyss facing a room full of fiends. I could see the tension as the discussions grew testy, but they eventually nutted out a plan. And I think their approach offers insight into the "linear fighter/quadratic wizard" problem. 

For those unaware, this trope suggests that an inherent flaw in earlier editions of D&D (and related games) was that, as the game progressed, wizards grew much more powerful, much more quickly, than fighters. One site suggests that wizards became "war gods" at upper levels while fighters became just "okay fighters." Rix and Zyx were a classic fighter/wizard combo, and each had something like 1.5 million hard-earned experience points. After three years of playing up to six times a week, we should have seen this "problem" manifest. But we were never aware of it.

One reason, which I never see discussed, is that powerful monsters in AD&D often had magic resistance. This attribute was a percentage number that, if rolled, meant a particular spell casting did not have any effect. Demons especially had high magic resistance, and Zyx was very aware of that fact. 

But the other contributing factor was magic items, which were design to have a transformative impact on the game. I was reasonably stingy with magic item distribution, but Rix was still very well equipped. His most prized possession was full plate storm armor, which gave him immunity to both fire and electricity damage. He was a dual-wielder, with a mighty magic longsword in one hand and a dagger called deepbiter in the other, which did significant damage under certain circumstances. He also had winged boots and a ring of regeneration. He was a flying death machine. 

A "linear fighter" overshadowed by a "quadratic wizard?" No - and this is shown by the strategy they adopted for Balor. The plan might seem simple, but it was the result of much thought and debate. Rix would fly directly at the demon lord and engage him in melee. Meanwhile, Zyx would lurk in the shadows using AoE spells to take out the minions. Splitting up was a dangerous tactic. Rix's back and flanks would be wholly unprotected while fighting Balor. And Zyx would not have his tanky friend to guard him against assault. 

So, a risky strategy--but it worked perfectly. Rix flew straight at Balor and began pounding the demon lord. He got two attacks per round, which dual-wielding turned into four strikes. He may even have been hastened. Meanwhile, Balor's big damage-dealing trick, self-immolation, was completely ineffective because of Rix's storm armor. Instead, the demon lord had to rely on its sword--but he was no match for Rix in a one-on-one sword fight. At the same time, Zyx used a combination of fireballs, lightning bolts, and ice storms to wreak havoc on the minions while clearing Rix's flanks. 

The fight was over in about three rounds, which was a short fight in AD&D days. Balor lay dead at Rix's feet, slain on his home plane and gone forever. The rest of the minions either fled or begged for mercy. The relief and elation that the players felt were palpable. The stakes, the setup, the planning, the anticipation, and the execution--the drama was pitch-perfect at every stage. Probably the greatest moment in my teenage gaming career.

You may wonder what happened to those characters. Well, the campaign ended in farce. Despite their service to the city, Rix and Zyx soon found themselves in conflict with Piergeiron again--over a building project of all things. Zyx was attempting to construct a "Tower of Dark Sorcery" in the middle of Waterdeep. Piergeiron was berating the pair of them for their anti-social attitudes. The penultimate conversation went like this: 

Rix: I'm so sick of this guy's crap. If he wasn't so tough...

Zyx: He's only a 14th-level paladin, you know.

Rix: 14th level? I can beat him.

Rix flew toward Piergeiron with his sword drawn. The Blackstaff cast disintegrate on him, Rix unluckily failed his save, and that was the end of this mighty warrior and a campaign that had consumed countless hours. We tried to resurrect him a couple of years later, but the magic was gone, and it would be a dozen years before I seriously gamed again. But that is another story...