Category Archives: Gamemastery

RPG boss monster analysis: the Balrog of Moria

For as long as I can remember, I’ve done the same thing every time I’ve acquired a published adventure for Dungeons & Dragons or any other roleplaying game: I flip to the very end to see what the adventure’s Final Boss is.

So you can imagine my joy when I first got my grubby teenage hands on the ultimate fantasy megadungeon and feverishly flipped to the end of the book to read up on the most famous dungeon boss of all. I’m talking about the Mines of Moria, and the famous Balrog that lurks in its depths.

That’s right: in 1984, Iron Crown Enterprises published Moria: The Dwarven City, a 72-page sourcebook detailing Moria for the Middle-Earth Role Playing game (MERP) and its sister game Rolemaster. And sure enough, there at the end are stats for the Balrog.

So could your plucky band of adventurers actually take out Durin’s Bane? Let’s find out!

Reducing Durin’s Bane to a bunch of numbers

Here’s the Balrog’s game statistics and powers:

stats for the Balrog

Egads, that’s a lot of gibberish. What does all that information mean?

Well, for starters, the Balrog is level 66. (Confusingly, the game rules handle it as level 36 for certain attack purposes, hence the number 36 in there.) The Balrog is much higher level than your characters are or ever will be. The longest-running MERP campaign I ran, way back in high school, stretched on for a couple years and when it ended, the PCs were in the level 15-20 range. I think it’s safe to say that unless you’re playing with the world’s most generous dungeon master, you’re never going to get a MERP character leveled up to match the Balrog’s power level.

A 1977 illustration of the Balrog by Greg and Tim Hildebrandt.

The rest of those numbers all boil down to this: the Balrog is extremely powerful in combat and very hard to kill. It’s got a huge amount of hit points and high defenses; combat skills so high that it’s virtually guaranteed to land a one-shot killing blow against anything it swings a weapon at; and the ability to mentally control enemies and/or freeze them with fear. It also has limited flight (the game designers have taken a stand in one of the internet’s oldest debates.)

Does it have weaknesses? Well… the Balrog is a bit of a one-trick pony; it’s an insane combat monster but has few powers that aren’t related to fire or killing. It knows lots of fire-related magic (fireballs and the like); but the other spells at its disposal have less utility in combat, and seem to be geared toward negating obvious player tricks (like an invisible character sneaking up on it…) or keeping track of its domain. When it comes to magic, an extremely powerful wizard (like Gandalf) would have some advantages… as long as they could keep away from the Balrog’s sword and whip.

The Balrog does have one single relatively low statistic. That’s right—just as you suspected, the Balrog lacks empathy. (Bad joke aside, Rolemaster’s “empathy” stat governs a character’s affinity for divine and healing magic. No surprise that’s not the Balrog’s strong suit.)

Most significantly, because it’s a being of fire, its strength and powers are significantly muted if the Balrog is completely submerged in water. A waterlogged Balrog will probably still pulverize you, but it won’t be able to set you on fire while doing so.

Is this faithful to Tolkien’s depiction of the Balrog?

As adaptations go, it’s not bad! From scattered references in various Tolkien texts, we know that Balrogs are pretty much just really tough, mean fiery guys (who can maybe fly). There’s not much depth to them beyond that, either here in the game or in Tolkien’s novel. As statted up here, the Balrog is certainly physically powerful and on fire, and its ability to terrify victims is in keeping with what we see in The Fellowship of the Ring. (It also fits the Tolkien theme of evil as the imposition of one’s will on somebody else.)

If anything, the designers may have even gone a little overboard with the Balrog’s physical power. But it’s hard to get an accurate read on exactly how deadly Tolkien bad guys are in a fight, because so many of them are “plot device” monsters (more on that below).

Is it killable?

The quick answer is “no.” In a straight-up fight with a party of typical player characters, it’s hard to see how the Balrog could lose. Any enemies that got within combat range without being dominated or frozen in fear would quickly get incinerated and/or annihilated.

But of course, the longer answer is… “maybe.” Every experienced dungeon master has watched in horror as players managed to take down a powerful monster by surrounding it and hammering it with spells and attacks; no dungeon master should assume that a lone enemy, even one this powerful, is invincible. The Moria sourcebook anticipates this by noting that the Balrog is accompanied by a host of trolls, demons, and orcs—all of them much less powerful than the Balrog, but easily able to bog down a team of adventurers while the Balrog picks them off.

But in the end, a group of high-level characters, while not a direct match for the Balrog, command significant powers and abilities; it’s very hard to predict the kind of advantages they could create for themselves by working in concert. You can bet they’ll be coming up with ridiculous schemes to drop the Balrog into a lake, or collapse a few hundred tons of cave ceiling down onto it, or something else. An indirect, story-driven approach that avoids physically battling the Balrog is the only way I could possibly imagine a band of adventurers taking down Durin’s Bane.

If it’s not killable, what’s it doing in the game?

Mostly I think this is just a fun exercise to “stat up” one of fantasy literature’s most famous boss monsters. Certainly, I enjoyed poring over these numbers as a teenage gamer, imagining what a Balrog showdown would look like. Be honest: you’d be disappointed if you picked up a roleplaying module about Moria and it didn’t have stats for the Balrog.

But how would you actually use the Balrog in a regular game? MERP is mostly interested in defining the Balrog by its tactical combat abilities, which are far beyond the typical adventuring party’s. But although the module doesn’t discuss it, the Balrog is really a “plot device” monster, like most evil overlords in fiction. Most of the evil bosses in Middle Earth seem nearly invincible in combat but can be defeated by a hero who works out their unique weaknesses and exploits them for narrative effect. Think of Smaug (weakness: that one missing scale), Shelob (weakness: Elvish magic, hobbit tenacity), Sauron (weakness: the Ring), the Witch-king of Angmar (weakness: women), etc. It could be very satisfying to watch the players work hard to uncover the Balrog’s one weakness and use it to banish or destroy the demon without getting into a big physical fight. Finding that weakness would be an epic quest in itself, which sounds perfect for a roleplaying game.

If you’re itching to see the Balrog’s +240 whip attack in action, though, there are a few possibilities. One could see the appeal of an extremely high-level “Balrog hunting” game, in which players control canonical movers and shakers like Gandalf, Saruman, Elrond, and Galadriel in a high-powered raid on Moria. Those characters are statted up in other MERP sourcebooks, and as a team would be a match for the Balrog.

And lastly, bold lower-level characters traveling through Moria might have a close brush with the Balrog without actually engaging it in combat. A group of extremely clever and lucky characters might try stealing treasure from its lair and making a mad dash for the exit before it notices or catches them, much as Bilbo Baggins did with Smaug.

But mostly, it’s just fun to stat up the Balrog.

XP for death and failure; and other interesting uses for Experience Points

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I recently came across an interesting post at Gothridge Manor about one of AD&D’s weirder rules: experience for death. The 1st edition Dungeon Master’s Guide rules that a character who dies and is subsequently brought back to life earns 1000 experience points (XP).

In old-school D&D, you generally got XP for defeating monsters and gaining treasure, with a few interesting exceptions like the above. These days, many games use a fairly abstract system of awarding XP wherein characters are awarded a set amount of XP for a combination of in-game success and good roleplaying.

The cover of the 1989 Rolemaster boxed set.

That’s a fine way to do it. But the “experience for death” rule reminds me of the quirkier and much more ambitious method of awarding XP found in the pages of the Rolemaster RPG. Rolemaster, itself pitched as a more “realistic” take on fantasy adventuring than its contemporary AD&D, awards XP for extremely specific individual in-game actions.

For instance, in classic Rolemaster (2nd edition, and perhaps in other editions too), your character gains experience not just for defeating an enemy, but for each point of damage dealt to an enemy. And going beyond that, you gain experience for each critical hit (i.e., severe wound) you inflict. In fact, you get XP for each wound inflicted on you. (And yes, you get experience for dying and then coming back to life.) Outside of combat, you get XP for every mile your character travels and for every impressive physical maneuver your character pulls off. There are specific XP awards for casting spells and even for coming up with good ideas.

The paperwork is oppressive; even my nerdy junior-high gaming group, always eager to squeeze as much XP out of a gaming session as possible, usually failed to diligently record every single blow landed in combat for later XP calculation. These days I’m lucky if I remember approximately how many orcs the characters beat down in the course of an evening’s game; I can’t imagine filling out Rolemaster’s intimidating experience tracking chart, faithfully marking down the severity of each critical wound delivered in the course of a routine fight.

But this hyper-detailed system has its charms, and there are some neat ideas to be extracted from it even if you recoil from the detail:

Experience for failure. It might seem odd at first that your character would earn experience for being struck or seriously wounded in combat. If your character is getting slapped around in a fight, isn’t he “losing”? Perhaps, but consider the educational power of failure in life. In a combat situation, you might fall for a feint or sneaky manuver once, but assuming you survive said failure, you’re highly unlikely to fall for it again. You’ve learned a lesson you’ll carry with you into future combat situations.
Decreased experience for familiar accomplishments. Another neat little twist in Rolemaster is that your XP earned for accomplishing something—say, defeating a goblin—is multiplied by a different value depending on how many times you’ve accomplished the task in the past. If this is your first goblin kill, you get five times the normal XP for pulling it off. After you’ve taken out a few of the green nuisances, that multiplier value goes down; you’ve done this enough that you’re not learning as much from it. And when you reach the point where you can singlehandedly plow through an ocean of the luckless beasts, you’ve probably got the goblin-whomping down to a science and are getting 1/2 of its normal XP value.

All in all, I’m fine with the more abstracted system of awarding XP. D&D 4e’s method of assigning experience points to the entire group based on the difficulty of a particular challenge is probably close to my ideal. But I do sometimes miss the very detailed method, and the slightly unconventional uses of XP it allows.

My love-hate relationship with random encounter tables

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Of all the skeletons in my GMing closet, perhaps the darkest is this: I almost never use random encounter tables, even when running games with a deliberately “old-school” vibe.

Why do I ignore this staple of roleplaying? Well, my experience with using random encounters can be summed up in these two memories, both of them from my early days of GMing.

Random encounter #1: the best thing ever. When I first started GMing (with Middle-Earth Role Playing, which was a trimmed-down version of Rolemaster), I followed to the letter all of those rules that, in later years, I learned to sometimes skim over: encumbrance, travel times, and—yes—random wilderness encounters. For one of our first-ever games, I ran the “Ar-Gular’s keep” adventure included with the MERP rulebook. Faithfully following the rules for wilderness travel, I rolled on the random encounter chart to see what, if anything, would happen while the party of 1st-level adventurers set up camp.

I rolled, did a double-take at the result, but never even considered “cheating” by ignoring what was almost certainly going to be a total-party kill: a troll.

In Middle-Earth, trolls are nasty. The party, caught unawares while they camped, was almost certainly going to die. But the encounter chart said TROLL, so a troll it was. (This was the Trollshaws, after all.)

A frantic, panicky combat ensued. Things were not looking good for our heroes. And then, in a stroke of awe-inspiring luck only possible when you’re using Rolemaster’s glorious critical hit charts, one of the characters did the impossible: with one frenzied jab of his sword, he killed the troll.

It was, as they say, a one-in-a-million roll, one that turned a nearly-certain party massacre into the most memorable possible introduction to roleplaying. And it would never have happened if I had massaged the random-encounter results or picked out a “balanced” encounter.

This was followed by another random encounter.

Random encounter #2: the worst thing ever. A few months later, the characters had been through many adventures in Middle-Earth and were coming into their own as true adventurers. One character, an elf ranger, had after much heroic toil reached 3rd level (dizzying heights of glory, from our perspective). I was growing more confident in my GMing abilities, and so when the player asked to head off on his own on a personal quest, I heartily agreed.

I spent time designing an adventure around his character’s backstory and goals. Accompanied by a few NPC henchmen, he set off on his quest, which took him through a vast swampland.

I faithfully rolled for random encounters as he journeyed through the swamp, and sure enough—he ran into an obstacle: an alligator. A regular alligator, not a Dire Alligator or a Sauronic Minion Alligator. Figuring that a quick battle against the reptile would get the action going (what is an alligator going to do to a noble elf warrior?), I set the beast loose against the player.

You can guess what happened. A few unbelievable dice rolls and several profanity-filled combat rounds later, the party was dead and the noble elf, hero of Middle-Earth, was bleeding out from a severed leg. With no help anywhere in range, this mighty Noldor, distant heir of Feanor, creator of the Silmarils in an Age long past, bled to death in an alligator attack straight out of late-night TV.

Remember that epic scene from Lord of the Rings where the Fellowship is mauled by a random alligator? Yeah, neither do I. Because that would be stupid.

It seems silly in retrospect, but at the time it was a severely frustrating experience. The player had spent months building up his character and it had all been thrown away not with an epic fight against the Dark Lord’s minions, but with a random and meaningless alligator attack. And the time I had put into adventure prep designing a quest tailored for his character were rendered rather pointless.

I realize now that there were plenty of things that both I and the player could have done differently to avoid stupid, non-heroic reptilian death. But the lesson I learned was that random encounters, while they had the potential to be memorable and entertaining, also had the potential to spoil a game session. Having seen random encounters used to good effect in games like Rogue Trader, I’m starting to accept that they do add something challenging and exciting to a game. These days I make use of what you might call semi-random encounters: encounters rolled randomly but then adjusted a bit for balance or storyline coherence.

But while the memory of that epic troll kill still warms my heart, it will be a while before I put my complete trust in the random encounter table again.

What about you? Do you adhere to random encounter results… and have you ever lived to regret it?

I fought the law, and the law rolled a natural 20: staying off the grid in an RPG

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I’ve been reading this week about the hunt for Evan Ratliff, a Wired writer who wanted to find out how difficult it would be to completely “vanish” in a digital society. He struck out under a false identity, and Wired readers were challenged to locate him. Ratliff managed to stay invisible for about a month before a clever person tracked him down.

I particularly enjoyed listening to Ratliff describe the experience of being “on the run,” and the growing paranoia that gripped him as the chase went on. By the end, he couldn’t stop looking over his shoulder wherever he went, and he began suspecting every person he encountered of being a potential hunter out to get him.

There’s a definite hook here for gamers to consider. Think about the number of roleplaying games (particularly those set in the present day or the future) in which evading the government or a similarly powerful entity is a crucial element. Maybe the PCs are criminals or freedom fighters trying to avoid the law. Maybe they’re secret agents, wizards, vampires, or any other type of being that wants to keep a low profile. Yet how many game books spend much time discussing what keeping “off the grid” actually entails?

Back in The Day, I GM’d a long-running Top Secret/S.I. campaign in which the PCs (secret agents) engaged in a whole lot of… attention-grabbing activity. High-speed chases on motorcycles armed with missiles and flamethrowers. Gunfights on the Golden Gate Bridge. High-rise buildings ravaged by running grenade battles. Typical James Bond stuff—and while we all paid lip service to the PCs’ need to avoid arrest, I really only used law enforcement as a loose, background threat. When it was time to wrap up a scene, I’d announce that sirens could be heard in the distance as a way of telling the PCs to stop dithering around and clear out. (A PC was arrested every great now and then, but we handwaved it away by having his spy agency get the charges against him dropped through an unspecified legal subterfuge.)

For most games, it works best to leave the threat of the law as a simple background element. It’s no fun, after all, if James Bond’s exciting adventures are regularly interrupted by police who tracked him down using spent shell casings recovered from his last gunfight against Soviet spies. But it could be fun to occasionally allow the “evade the long arm of the law” theme take center stage. Playing the fugitive could be a fun change of pace.

I own only one RPG book that deals concretely with the “PCs as fugitives” idea—Crusade of Ashes, from the official Orpheus campaign. In it, the PCs are on the run from the FBI, and so the book spends some time talking about what to do to stay off the grid (don’t use credit cards, take jobs that pay cash under the table, etc.). It’s more of a short primer on the topic rather than an in-depth treatment, but it’s an informative read.

I’m sure there are other RPG books that touch on this. White Wolf’s Tales of the 13th Precinct has tempted me for a while for this reason; and I have a vague memory that one or more Call of Cthulhu rulebooks went into some detail on how criminal investigations are carried out. Law enforcement is just one aspect of the “evading the grid” theme, but it’s an important part.

What other RPG books out there talk about running a game with PCs who must keep off the grid? What books (RPG or otherwise) explain the tools that governments/megacorporations/police detectives employ to track down fugitives?

Insta-dungeon

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Here’s a fun one: an automatic dungeon generator that creates not just a map, but also a complete list of encounters for a dungeon based on the parameters you set. The results are surprisingly game-able, in an old-school sort of way! File this one away for the next time you find yourself at the game table woefully unprepared.

No insta-generated dungeon could possibly be worse than a few of the completely-made-up-on-the-spot dungeons I’ve foisted on my players in the past. Of course, cobbling together random monsters and dungeon layouts is a time-honored D&D tradition, and is made easier by the fact that typical D&D dungeons tend not to be marvels of architectural logic. As long as the players think you know what you’re doing, it’s all good.

It would be a fun gaming challenge to auto-generate a half-dozen of these random dungeon maps and then play straight through them as one mega-dungeon, using the listed encounters as written and not worrying about internal consistency. I’d say that has about an equal chance of either being the most entertaining gaming experience of my life, or the experience that finally makes me consign my Dungeon Masters Guide to the flames and take up a normal hobby, like golf or LARPing.

Resurrecting the Mountains of Madness

The Staging Point

a microscopic cog in the catastrophic plan

Category Archives: Gamemastery

RPG boss monster analysis: the Balrog of Moria

Reducing Durin’s Bane to a bunch of numbers

Is this faithful to Tolkien’s depiction of the Balrog?

Is it killable?

If it’s not killable, what’s it doing in the game?

XP for death and failure; and other interesting uses for Experience Points

My love-hate relationship with random encounter tables

I fought the law, and the law rolled a natural 20: staying off the grid in an RPG

Insta-dungeon

Resurrecting the Mountains of Madness

The ultimate GM screen?