Designing Encounters, Part 2: Mook

Let's review:

A mook is a simple type of enemy whose power comes from numbers. They are the faceless horde. They are the basic grunts in an army. The player is expected to effortlessly destroy a single mook. The heroes of the game masscre their way through tons and tons of mooks in the course of a game.

The single easiest pitfall when it comes to designing mooks is erring on the specialization vs. homogenization scale.

The second easiest pitfall is not considering mooks as a party.

Pitfall #1a - Having a million mooks with the same role (Homogenization)

I am being attacked by what appears to be a zombie, a giant bear and what appears to be a guy in leather armor with a dagger. I am being attacked by the same thing, three times over. If the entire game is like this, I will literally be repeating the same actions over and over again, on different colored/skinned mooks.

I offer, as a sacrifice to free thinking, how would you design an army?

Would it consist entirely of infantry? Of infantry, tanks and artillery? Of infantry, tanks, artillery and sappers? Would it be all spearman? Some spearman and some archers? Some spearman, some archers and a medic?

In any large ground force, there are roles to be played by the faceless mass. So for each individual monster, do not design them as different flavors of the same role. There is no need for 20 different types of tanks. There is no need for 200 types of infantry. Have a few unique types of each role in your design.

Pitfall #1b - Having a mook that does too much (Overspecialization)

This monster I'm facing shoots lightning, ice, fire, dances around on the walls, teleports, splits into mirror images of himself.... and there's 10 of them.

...and dies in a single hit? wait what?

...Well, whatever. Wait, now they're healing other people! Seriously? And charging at me? When could they stun attack or summon little beetles?

Oh, and he just happens to bounce all missile attacks back at me? What?

There is nothing wrong with having a character that is special or unique.

But it is absolutely criminal to give a standard guy 10 different abilities that get pulled out seemingly at random.

Why?

1) It violates expectation - Such a common monster with so many tricks?
2) Expected Value - Should a common monster have so many tricks? Should so much time be spent on designing a common monster?
3) Memory Issues - Can a player remember that a common monster has that many abilities?
4) Balance Issues - This monster interaction with other things seems difficult.
5) Rule of Cool and Poor Execution - The more complex something is, the harder it is to execute perfectly.

Pitfall #2a - Monster Role Homogenization

This is slightly different from pitfall #1a. That one talks about individual monster design. This one is about encounters as a group. You could have 10 monsters that do drastically different roles. But the makeup of the group of mooks that attacks you have drastically different effects.

This problem is the bane of monster encounters. Imagine for a second, you were fighting all monsters of the same type.

That is, what would happen if you fight 12 healers that constantly healed each other? You wouldn't be in much danger, but the fight would last forever.

Or what happens if you fight 12 high damaging enemies that charged at you? The game would turn into a damage race, where you must kill them first, or you die. Repeatedly.

What if you fight all guys who were big and massive that blocked your way? Repeatedly? It would just be a long tedious fight trying to clear a path for you to run through them.

Note, what this inevitably leads to? More damage. The solution to all problems is more damage. In fact, the only solution that works in all the above situations is more damage. So the game becomes an arms race. Can the game kill you before you kill them? You just have to take down X guys. There is no order that is important. Positioning is somewhat important, but either you die if you're in the wrong place (against the chargers) or it doesn't matter (against low damage healers.)

Instead, consider what mooks do in an army.

A large brute + a healer = A positioning fight where you must get around the brute in order to win. Damage racing is essentially inconsequential because you must kill the healer first.

Chargers + Brutes = A positioning fight where each individual brute restricts your mobility makes it very hard to get around the damaging chargers. The fight is won by either splitting off the group from one, or simply being fast enough.

Brutes + Ranged DPS = Similar to the fight above, only that the goal this time isn't to split them off, so much as neutralize the threat by slipping through the brutes to do damage to what is actually damaging you.

Pitfall #2b - Exponential Difficulty Growth Potential of Groups

I know I can kill archers individually. And I can kill those stupid brutes individually. But when you put them together, I can't seem to kill them fast enough before dying. :(

Toss in those annoying healing guys, and I quit.

The difficulty of any encounter is geometric with the amount of roles fulfilled. Balance accordingly.

If you have an encounter with 10 brutes, and you replace that with an encounter of 5 brutes and 5 healers, the encounter takes on a drastically different metric where the brutes are essentially nigh invincible until the healers are taken down.

Always consider the geometric difficulty rise when having complex encounter groups. Additionally, consider the geometric difficult decay as monsters start dying. (The Domino effect, where if one group falls, the rest of monsters fall over.) You may wish to have monsters that grow stronger when they are not being pacified or healed, etc.

All this leads to more interesting tactics and gameplay in generic mook encounters.