Mistakes are Creative Fertilizer

It's Friday afternoon, which means I've wrapped up my game sessions for the week. Now it's time to take a look at which parts of my design worked, and which didn't.

This week I (re-)learned an important lesson about math and game design. Using mathematical models is a good starting point, but leaning too heavily on them has its pitfalls.

For my approach to monsters, I want to create a monster that is balanced so that X level Y monsters can face off against X level Y characters and yield a challenge fight. That tier of critter has proven tricky to balance.

Looking back at my work, I was trying to hard to capture the damage that different types of characters could output. I ended up with an average that worked for some characters, particularly low level martials and casters, but that other characters could shred.

I realized that I need to calibrate my hit points around fighters, rogues, and other weapon users. By simply modeling out their damage and balancing hit points, I think I am in a better place.

In practical terms, that means calculating the typical damage for a rogue, comparing it to a fighter, and then striking a balance point where both characters can typically drop a monster from this category with two actions.

After doing that, I went back to look at my spreadsheets to see how far off they were.

And that's when I made a great discovery! My spread sheet was using expected damage per action to figure out how long a monster would last. That expectation accounted for accuracy.

However, my final tool to generate the stat block was using values assuming that expected damage did not account for accuracy.

With a small change, my numbers looked close to what I had hand calculated.

Making mistakes is the lifeblood of learning. By taking the time to try a different path and reality check my work, I found a fix that can apply to all of my tools and make everything work better.

So, the lesson here is that when things aren't working, sometimes it's a good idea to take a few steps back, try a different approach to the same problem, and see what you can learn. Without acknowledging a mistake and working to correct it, you'll never grow as a designer.