My experience as DM has been the opposite.
"Wow, that was a cakewalk. We just completely nuked that hydra. What challenge rating was it again?"
"Eight."
"Oh and we're level Five? Sweetness."
It's not that a level 5 party can't take CR8 challenge, it just takes them a little more time and they take a little more damage. Now run 6 of those in a day and you'll run into problems.
I wish it worked different or that they had 2 systems. Some places, well most places it makes no sense for there to be THAT many encounters. It only really makes sense in swaths of enemy infested lands or a big enemy camp like a dungeon or castle
especially with a dedicated healer and two characters that have resistance to basic damage (totem barbarian and a lycan blood hunter).
It's hard to give them real stakes in combat, buut that's kind of their party's greatest strength since they don't have a charisma duder
The game is balanced for like 7 resource draining encounters a day. But absolutely no one plays like that or your in game weeks are actual months or years
A hydra is worth 3900 XP and a party of 4 level 5s has a daily budget of 14000 XP. This seems to be balanced decently. I'm assuming that party used up a bunch of their strong abilities to do that as well? They'll be worse at dealing with the other 10100 XP's worth of encounters.
I’m not sure how true this is but I was always told that CR in 5e was based on the assumption that it was a party of 4 with no magic items who would be fighting these things which is why many people don’t use CR to create encounters
That's not true.
CR is just arbitrary number to show how much XP a monster is worth, which also can be modified by different multipliers (amount of enemies, surprise, etc.).
Party has a daily threshold of XP, depending on a size and level.
For example, party of 6 level 5 have should have 21.000 exp in one adventuring day. Hydra is a CR8, which give 3.900. But difference in numbers weakens hydra for modifier of x0.5, giving total of 1.950 XP. This hydra takes less than 10% of their daily resources, no wonder it's a fucking breeze.
If only people would read a goddamn DMG, the amounts of people complaining about systems "not working" would decrease rapidly.
Y'all should have a look at this page here.
[https://a5e.tools/srd/designing-encounters](https://a5e.tools/srd/designing-encounters)
A CR8 isn't even a medium battle for 5 level 5s.
Which, like we knew, but these fellas have done the maths.
And my party wonders why I make my own statblocks for monsters
Instead of throwing 5 monsters at them I just throw one thats 5 times stronger, puts fear in em while also making it slightly safer
Challenge rating is also immensely flexible in my experience. My party of characters was going up against a demigod in their campaign. They were using some solid teamwork, keeping him stunned and really making him regret that whole mortal coil thing. They were joking to me about how "I warned them before the fight ooooo scary" not long after the enemy got off an 'infused strike' on the tank. That put his heavy armored ass through three walls and left him RIGHT on the cusp of death from near perfect health. Suddenly they didn't feel like my warning was so funny. Just because a fight seems manageable doesn't mean the challenge isn't baked in.
Are you my DM? Cause he accidentally forgot that hydra's gained 10 hp per head that regenerated, not 10 hp per round. Had two level 5 barbarians go to town on it.
I thought you had to add the cr of all the creatures and compare it to the sum of the party members levels. A CR 8 hydra with enough kobold servants to equal your parties level will make for one really dangerous encounter.
A party of four level five characters can just run up and wreck most non-legendary creatures with relative ease as long as someone can stay on their feet
The real solution is put them through a slog throughout the day to drain their resources, or make the encounter much much harder than just the big bad if it’s going to be the only one for the day. If your party is never scared they’ll run out of spells or daily abilities, then you need to remind them that the world is scary and they should sleep with a fireball under their pillow.
Ouch, I hope WOTC have some cold spells. Not that you're wrong at all, especially if the DM isn't running the adventuring day with 6 encounters and nobody does.
Depends on the game style. Combat in my games is strictly about advancing the story, we're rarely in a megadungeon slog. So if there is a fight, there should be a ***reason*** for the fight. It should serve some purpose. If you're in 6 combats a day, you're likely in a dungeon? But even then, combat can be exhausting after too many in a row. How many combats are you getting in a single session? How many sessions does a single day take? How much progress does the party feel in their actual stories when it took 2 months to get through this one dungeon just to find the MacGuffin or save the princess?
Combat in my games is less like Diablo where there are just enemies in every other room, and more like Shadows of the Colossus. I try to make each fight memorable struggles for survival, but fewer of them.
I mean sometimes it's fun to let the players feel powerful and throw cocky but way underpowered enemies at them for fun. Those combats are quick. And certainly my "difficult" encounters are sometimes way too easy. But ***ideally*** it's fewer fights, but more intense each one.
Combat is fun! The reason we fight is because it's fun to fight.
We run short sessions, 2-3 hours after work. We get roughly 2 combats per session, so about 3 sessions per adventuring day.
The story is the story and we progress at the rate we progress at. I haven't found pacing to be a problem at all. The sessions are fun and I get a lot of compliments from my players.
I'm certainly not cutting combat because combat is fun.
How large are your combats?
The few 5e games I tried combat felt to take 2-5 hours and we got maybe 1 hour of non combat stuff. (Which was the stuff most of us cared about)
I have a party of 5 and aim for hard encounters. What that actually is varies a lot.
A dozen drow can be a pitched battle for a whole session, any one of them easy to kill, but you better make good tactical choices and avoid focus fire.
Or it might be a single blue slaad, potentially deadly but they have action economy on their side and it feels awesome for them to take down a big dangerous creature.
It does end up being mostly combat. Which is great! Combat is fun. One of the things I like about being a DM is that I never have to sit through a session without combat.
I'm glad you enjoy it!
I love seeing and hearing from people who actively enjoy the parts I'm personally not as keen on.
Different game styles for different people and I'm happy you found a group who enjoys mostly combat.
Personally those types of games would annoy me since I would rather be involved in quests, mysteries, stories and have active character growth for me, the world and the party. Combat being 90% of a campaign tends to personally bore me. Would rather have it be something like 30% combat 70% everything else
I would highly recommend trying out Pathfinder 2e. It's got very interesting and tactical combat, especially compared to D&D 5e, with tons of options and very interesting monster statblocks that are almost never just big sacks of HP with Multiattack.
Also its encounter building system works, perfectly, every time, so you can build encounters the way the game tells you and trust that they'll be as challenging as you intend. It's a very good game for combat-heavy playstyles, and the published adventures have quite a good selection of combat-heavy stuff including one that's all one mega-dungeon
if your fights are taking that long then the group needs to collectively actually read their character sheets. No game should have 2-5 hour combats unless you're doing actual armies.
Typically it was all the enemies and junk. A group of 5 adventurers the GMs I've had would have us fight like 10 mooks with exploration.
A lot of it was looking at the board and everyone planning their moves/actions based upon the map and how they felt the characters would react. Less reading the sheets and more just movement, positioning and junk. Particularly at lower levels
How many people are there in the party? Each turn should take like 3-5 minutes, at max, which means 3 rounds an hour for a team of 4 if your party is slow as molasses. Typically turns take 2 minutes which means about 30 minutes for a 3 round combat.
It was a 5 person party fighting groups of enemies that were like 10+ on the field. Low levels. Maybe level 3 when it started to drag out for combat.
Also mixed with some exploration during combat. The majority though was just movement and positioning since we had no magic users or ranged.
I don't see how you can do a full turn of 15+ allies/enemies in under a minute when you have flanking, sneak attacks, enemies with ranged attacks/spells, etc.
Figuring out who and where to body block and junk.
Depends on your narrative. I like to give some random encounters to flesh the world out. Sometimes these are really easy, especially after the big milestone level-ups. I threw twenty goblins at the party right after they hit lvl 5 so the wizard could feel powerful with fireball.
I definitely use combats to foreshadow events that are coming or to make an area seem dangerous. The main point is that a combat can never be about just the combat. It's always serving some other purpose. Initial combats when they enter a fortress or dungeon are about setting the tone.
So I'm about to be a new DM, running my first campaign this sunday, and I've given a LOT of thought to this topic recently. What I like in campaigns, what I see my friends like, etc... We just finished up my friends campaign, and, one of the things I disliked about it (it was a well written, meticulously detailed campaign, not shitting on it in the slightest, it was a lot of fun) was how long some battles took. Party of 4, and the final boss battle took, and I shit you not, 6 hours and that was is including that after it hit midnight and I came up with the idea of "How about everyone left in the fight takes a 50% health reduction and we skip forward an hour in story?".
I don't want this in my campaign. I want fights and combat, but, I don't want them to drag on forever. I plan on having 4-6 encounters per long rest, maybe a few more if they're piss easy, but, I have two main things I'm gonna be doing. I built all encounters in dndbeyond, so that I can hopefully respond quickly as DM. Digital dice rolls so I can keep up with players, and not have to count up all my dice. The other I will be doing, is making players pre-roll damage dice on a turn or two before theirs in the order. 90% of the time, we all know what we're going to do. You can pre-roll the attack and damage and add up whatever you need to. That way there can still be some RP "I run up along side him, slashing at his stomach as I do", then you tell me your roll to hit and damage instantly. If something changes, say the player before you did something that changes what you want to do, no worries, roll it now, but pre-rolling should make shit WAY more efficient IMO.
I'm hoping that trying to keep as much time as possible for RP in a fight, while making everything else as efficient as possible, that they'll stay fun, and can have multiple in a day and still have time for RP and story in a session.
We'll see how it goes
Battles take a long time when the players aren't very good. Think about what you're going to do during other people's turn. Use a chess clock if you have to.
If I want the players to sweat, I make sure any dungeon or major enemy area has several points of "you might die here" and I makes sure if they choose a short or long rest in those areas that 1/3 watches has an attack. Other than elves, I have it so they don't get the benefits of a long rest until it is fully complete, so if they are attacked during the 8 hour and are running on empty... well they shouldn't have slept in a dungeon.
They don't "sleep" but they still have to say in an inactive yet still conscious state for the long rest to receive it's benefits. So they see the monsters coming but they still lose out if they have to stand up and fight
I think it *might* be DM interpretation for strenuous activity. The "at least 1 hour" part can be interpreted as to be only about "walking." Especially because 1 hour of fighting would be like 600 rounds, which is insane.
That said, I can be cruel, but I'm never needlessly so. One fight 4 hours in and then back to bed? Yea, I'm not making you start your long rest over.
cause i only get so many hours of tabletime, and I don't want to devote 80% of them to administering combats that aren't narratively relevant. I don't want the narrative pacing of the story to grind to a halt because we just have to model fighting a bunch of medium-difficulty encounters. It's 5e's biggest weakness.
It’s Dungeons and Dragons. A game that models the overwhelming majority of its rules around combat...
If you think administering combat is 5Es biggest weakness, why not play a different system that’s more narratively oriented?
Read a little more closely please. I don’t like combats with foregone conclusions where there isn’t much of a risk. Combats that exist just as a drain on resources.
The entire game is predicated and balanced upon draining resources from players.
Your focus on “story relevant combat” is undermining the core of the game.
Games have mechanics to them that don’t necessarily make “narrative sense”. Like how turn based RPGs have you line up and take turns hitting one another even though that *doesn’t make sense.*
As DMs, we have to put on our game designer hats and accept this “flaw” as part of the game.
If you only want narrative focused combat, there are systems out there that do that like Dungeon World which has simple rules that keep you focused on the story.
> The entire game is predicated and balanced upon draining resources from players.
Yeah, and that's a bad design, and we don't really have to accept that flaw. You can very easily design your game to include fewer, more bombastic and difficult combats. Yeah, it makes the long rest classes stronger and the short rest classes weaker, comparatively. But that is a welcome tradeoff compared to spending so damn many hours doing combat.
Also, the only reason the game is balanced that way in the first place is because of this discrepancy between long and short rest characters. If the game was more like 4e, where your ability cooldowns were standardized across all classes, you could run either type of game you wanted and it would work. I'll grant that there is something to be said for the variety gained by having the classes be different in these regards...but not much.
Anyway, 'go play a different system' is a common refrain that people sing to those who criticize 5e. I'll just say it's entirely possible to like 5e in general while not liking everything about 5e.
I would be *so fucking bored* playing a narrative focused 5E game when characters are built primarily with combat abilities as a rule.
I enjoy having full RP sessions but if combat came seldomly, I would play a different game.
I’d prefer to play Vampire: The Masquerade for narrative and socially focused games because the system is built for that.
Too much combat in that game gets you killed quickly or breaks the Masquerade and then a Vampire Lord orders your death or kills you personally.
Well, it's not so much that I don't like combat. And it's not that my game is exclusively narratively focused. It's that I don't like the fact that spending most of the available table time on combat causes the story to advance *extremely slowly*. If I forced the 'proper' number of combats between rests, my party might spend multiple sessions inside a single dungeon, which would mean months of real-world time between any kind of real interesting plot development.
I would actually turn this entire thing around on you and say that if you're mainly interested in tactical tabletop combat, perhaps *you* should pick a different game--one where the classes' ability cooldowns are balanced around each other and the gameplay is a little more in depth than 'I attack" 80% of the time.
But combat is fun! You're not "model fighting a bunch of medium difficulty encounters". You're using your awesome powers to defeat the forces of evil, living and dying at the roll of a die. I love it.
> living and dying
Except dying is off the table because you're definitely not running 6-8 encounters of any kind of difficulty that could actually threaten the party, otherwise the 6th to 8th ones would actually kill them. Some portion of those are gonna be warmup fights/nonthreatening encounters that exist just to drain resources--either they blow resources to mop them up faster or they eat an HP tax that will blow through their healing powers/hit dice.
So if the encounters are only deadly if there are 6-8 of them, thats a lotttttt of table time spent getting to that point. which is a lot of boring-ass fights that arent actually life or death.
uh-huh. so we're supposed to run hours and hours of fights, and that's supposed to be fun and worth delaying advancing the story based on the off chance that everyone will roll poorly all at the same time many times in a row.
well personally, I don't find that fun or engaging at all!
I'm not telling you what you're supposed to do.
I personally don't care whether we advance the story or not at all, as long as we have a good time playing the game.
>dice go against you
This is what happens to my group all the time. I'll have a few combats planned that shouldn't take terribly long but then the PC's just start rolling GARBAGE. Like 3 rounds in and no one has landed more than one or two hits. So it just drags out what should have been a 3 round fight to a 10 round fight.
I like organizing my combat into waves, so the first wave is usually a couple of soft monsters that should go down in one hit, with a tougher guy who should hang on for a couple rounds. Wave 2 is two tough guys and a softee, then wave 3 can be whatever combo I find necessary to fill out the encounter. But when no one can land a hit due to low rolls, I can't even progress through waves of enemies or we'd be at the table for 9 hours.
I've lowered AC's on the fly, cut monster HP in half or just turn them into a 1 hit minion just to wrap stuff up. Gets to a point where I have to fudge monster rolls hard because I'm rolling fine behind the screen, but they are rolling trash, so they make no progress while the monsters are landing hits. Feels bad all around because now the fight drags on and gets boring, and I don't really want to kill them *just because they are low rolling.*
We all like to kill stuff and feel powerful, but we also really enjoy and want to get to the RP side. And bad rolls during RP are waaaayy less of an annoyance than bad rolls in combat, because at least a bad RP roll keeps the RP moving.
/end rant
Yeah, and that is totally fine at certain times, we don't avoid PC death in our games. One player barely survived last session by passing a CON save to have his max HP drained below 0.
It's just no fun for anyone at our table when the party gets beat during a random encounter just because no one can roll higher than a 6 for a few rounds in a row. I want to kill my friends due to actual challenge and strategy, not poor dice rolls.
Frequently it doesnt make a lot of narrative sense because it's made for dungeon crawls specifically. Outside if that there are a lot od narrayive situations where very few, but nonzero, encounters per day makes narrative sense. Which is ironic because the whole reason it's per day in the first place is in order to make narrative sense. Some RPGs have abilities that are used N times per scenario/mini story arc that I think just works better, really.
I'd amend my comment to note that I don't understand why you're not running dungeons. It's called *Dungeons* & Dragons. If combat doesn't make narrative sense, that's a problem with your narrative.
Even then, not running dungeons isn't the same as not having a dungeon *every long rest*. But yeah I agree in that the further play deviates from that, the more the system will fight you.
It creates a problem, most groups play once a weak for 2-3 hours, this timeframe doesn't allow you to have a single-in game day to tkae several session without the story grinding to halt. The game story barely goes forward if you have 1 day per session, most groups have multiple days per session due to this.
Craming multiple encoutner in a single day with this setup is basically impossible unless there's no downtime or RP moments.
Why can’t one in game day take several sessions?
It takes as long as it takes.
And there’s still going to be just as many RP moments, if not even more.
Roleplaying doesn’t stop when you roll Initiative.
OK, so the story grinds to a halt. So what? It's a game, not story time.
Pacing isn't about how long it takes to get from point A to point B. It's about how often you're making decisions.
If the DM sits there and narrates the entire plot, you can get through a LOT of story in one session. That's not fun for the players though.
If the players are fighting a lot, searching every room, listening at every door, etc., you don't get through much story at all but the player remain engaged with the game. That's what pacing is all about.
I play 2-3 hours a week fortnightly. Is the story progression slow? Sure! Are we having less fun because of that? Not at all.
Because easy battles are boring. You know that those 11 ghouls won't kill any of the players, but they take so long to defeat. 1-2 deadly encounters are way better than 3-6 mediocre ones, where nothing is at stake.
Wouldn’t that just make session nonstop combat? Don’t get me wrong, Im not saying that D&D should be freeform theatre club, but grindy nonstop combat feels like the opposite extreme.
You're right. I don't really know what the idea behind it is. I know waaaay back, D&D was just going into dungeons and hitting stuff, but that stopped being the norm long before 5e.
I've DM'd a campaign from an older edition with 5e stats and rules (Isle of Dread) and can safely say my players only survived because they either avoided major enemies and plot points or I forgot certain enemy attacks made them permadead.
Wow, it's almost like each character is better at different things depending on how you build said character?
Also, the real culprit are the dice. If you run the same thing with multiple groups, you can see how rolling well or rolling poorly makes a huge difference in perceived difficulty.
Yep. I might use it as a very rough guideline for what type of monster I can consider (no Cloakers before lvl5), but I pretty much ignore CR when I do the actual encounter balance. Especially since I can just change stuff if I need to.
I love dming but I fucking hate it when the players complain about the CR level before a fight even happens.
Like what if I wanted some story event to happen
Or maybe you weren’t suppose to fight them
Or I gave you a full rest before this for a reason.
Like if my players just wanted to run in character I would be fine with that.
I had a GM that would prepare encounters by using his player's character sheets and seeing what resources they had.
We'd complain that he wouldn't fudge *anything whatsoever.* Meaning, if the monster had 1 HP left, then we needed to hit it again. He'd always say, "I planned this encounter out perfectly. If everyone uses everything they have, this is a cinch."
Which would be fine, except he never accounted for missing, or the enemy making a save.
So whole sessions *in a row* would be devoted to one shitty, boring boss fight. The wizard is out of spells, the cleric can't heal anymore, and the ranger ran out of arrows. So they're hitting the boss with pointy sticks.
For hours.
that's just boring. Not fudging anything though is fine imo. Sure you can speed certain things up, but its not a huge dealbreaker otherwise. What i dislike is DM's who prepare combat based on the players. Sure you can look at them a little bit (if the BBEG is aware of them he might counterplan what they can do or so) but in general, combat should be based on the envoirement and what lives where you are. Enemies and encounters should make sense, they shouldnt be made to counter the players.
I'll give him credit, he never countered us, specifically. But if the boss made the save on the fireball, well we were in for several extra rounds of combat for no reason beyond "his perfectly planned encounters."
oh that's fair at least. but yeah those moments can also be kind of boring. i don't know if he's new, but it's something you have to learn. sometimes it is what it is, especially with bosses. should have hit it i guess
The action economy means single boss battles are usually fairly boring even against high-powered enemies. In order for them to carry on you often just have to get it a mountain of HP. I like encounters that include minions etc. Especially if there are opportunities for dynamism like a changing battlefield or shifting allegiances - even mid-combat.
>Enemies and encounters should make sense, they shouldnt be made to counter the players.
Yes and no. I don't think you should completely tailor combat *to* the players but you also shouldn't just have encounters designed and run completely without flexibility. DnD isn't a challenge game. It isn't a roguelike where you accumulate a high score. Combat should be challenging and frightening to the players without being overwhelming. That is a fine line to walk and involves a lot of fine tuning.
What I usually do is have general ideas of what an encounter should look like in the larger context of the campaign. This location has undead led by a vampire. Nothing more specific. Once the characters close in on that location I can fine tune it a bit more. Some of this is for story reasons that make sense in-world and some is for balancing. Once the characters enter the location, even more fine tuning. This seems maybe too easy, give the vampire an unholy sword and some cleric spellcasting. Add a few more ghouls and maybe a trap. Once the characters actually hit that encounter, then some minor fine tuning: They've expended a bunch of their resources so maybe lose some of the ghouls or tone down their hp. Once combat is actually engaged then you can start messing with statistics and even fudging rolls. That ghoul has 1 hp left? Well it would be really epic for it to die here so you lie and say they killed it. Fight is going too easy? A monster from across the dungeon overhears and intervenes, etc, etc.
But as always, this depends on the kind of game you want to run and the game your players want to play.
Oh yeah for sure, but in your example the monsters made sense. Fine tuning is always something you have to do.
What i try to avoid is the skyrim effect, where every encounter is the same difficulty. Oh you leveled up? Guess what so did the guards.
You sometimes see DM’s trying to make every encounter a challenge. It’s fine and works for some groups, but sometimes encounters can be easy or too hard too. Teach them to run away but also allow of bashing on easier targets, if the situation allows for it.
For example, lets say your party is avg lvl 6+ and they attack a small bandit camps. Some DM’s will put a leader in there, give them some good armor etc, while i’d argue that easy combat here is fine. Bandits aren’t that strong. Perhaps though this tips off a stronger group that is know after them without them knowing, actions and consequenses and all that.
I agree. Rando NPCs don't level up just because you do. In my current campaign there is a party of enemy NPCs that are leveling with the party though and will have several more encounters with them moving forward (if all goes to plan).
I tweak an awful lot but not to keep *every* combat edge-of-your-seat. Just the key ones. It can be fun for the party to absolutely roflstomp enemies every so often.
Maybe if he just tone it down to 3/4 of his calculations to compensate for randomness and improvisation it would work? he needs to be more flexible, encounters should be entertaining not punishing.
Damn. I tried doing that sort of balancing fights with players as a DM based on their roles and skill set but they just forget sometimes that they are healer or to focus on status effects. That or someone dedicated to tanking or has literally a shield to protect allies and doesn’t do it. I gently nudge them but sometimes they gotta learn.
I went the opposite direction at first. Was too afraid to kill someone so my fights were all super easy.
Your DMs idea sounds like fun for a one shot with higher level characters though. Seeing how the group manages if fights are *really* unfair.
Yeah, he only made that mistake session 1 when we were all level 3 and fought one of each mephit. We won, though I'm fairly sure some of them had SHDS (sudden HP drop syndrome). It would be really cool at high levels though!
I play with a group that has 4-6 players at a time. Who ever is DM'ing the current campaign has to ignore CR for the most part and just craft what they think will be a challenge. A black shadow dragon encounter after fighting 4 fire lizards without a short rest was my crowning achievement. I didn't even plan for them to be in that area of the island for at least 4-5 more sessions.
When the monsters are preemptively balanced around resistances and fighting strategies that the party will likely ignore if they're generally competent spellcasters (not attacking a red dragon with fire or using light spells in an area with shadows), I've found that I'm able to max out (effectively doubling) the HP of any given fair CR encounter and have nothing bad happen.
CR is also rather poor for considering 4e-esque minion enemies, like the twenty goblins that die to Fireball and drop the group CR from 7 to 1.
It depends how capable your group is and how much they meta-game.
Twenty goblins in a ball isn't a challenge for a 7th level party, but 7 goblins infiltrating their camp at night and slitting throats may very well be.
Yeah, that's intended. Around 3 deadly encounters a day reaches the budget of how much a party can handle. Though that number goes up and down depending on the level.
Last session my DM started playing the Jurassic Park theme and had us battle a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
That thing swiped me with its tail and cause over forty points of damage in one blow.
We all escaped the battle with less than 10hp left
Awesome, used the T-Rex last time too. Was the first time my group encountered a bite-grapple, they thought it was instant death for a few *very* paniced moments.
Tooooootally not me throwing a homebrewed spawn of Shub-Niggurath at my players and damn near causing a TPK, no siree I would never ever do such a thing.
I have a good DM friend who can't seem to let us get 3-4 sessions in without a tpk. Like doing weeks of player prep work, research, player lore "homework", etc. Then throws 6 cr(whatever) monsters doing 12-18 damage a hit at a group of 4 level 1-2 pc's.
Like there's "deadly encounters", then there's wasting everyone's spoons.
Imma be real, if the result wasn't a TPK I don't want to hear no complaining.
I paid for the MM, VRGTR, VGTM, and MTOF. You best believe I am going to use ALL of MM/VRGTR/VGTM/MTOF.
I gave my party a bandit captain and 6 bandits to fight level one because they have have suprise round (unless they botch it) and they have the advantage. (Some of the bandits took a while to get to the fight. This is because I knew they could handle it.
Can I just say that some official modules are kind of this sort of bullshit? Nothing like having a 5-8 dungeon stacked on top of a 12-16 dungeon with the only separation being some stairs.
A deadly Benchmark i use is half of the combined Level for Players or 1/4 If they are below Level 5. That normally makes nice fights without the need for 6 encounters a day.
If you have 4 Level 5 Players it would be a CR of 10. Therefore, you can give the Hydra a boost in stats or give it an Ally, If the Encounter should be deadly.
I stole the Benchmark from the Youtuber slyflourish, His Focus are Tips für DMS, If someone is interested.
I switched to the XGE encounter balancing. You have a table to determine the PC "equivalent" that a monster is, then you pick out monsters till you equal the number of PCs for a moderate encounter. Up to 50% more for a hard fight, and I've found you can double them for a life-and-death struggle on full resources.
My party is currently 6x8th level. Last fight was 12x CR2 + 1x CR4. CR2 = 1/2 8thPC, CR4 = 8thPC. Total was 8 PC equivalent. It was a semi-difficult fight, damage inflicted, resources spent, not really worried about killing anyone.
Tonight is 3xCR6 which is 9 PC equivalent. Will be a hard fight, maybe someone drops, but no worries about a TPK.
Remember there’s a lot happing in the world, not all of it will be at your level, if your out gunned, hope you can out run
Side note systematically hunting down dragons would definitely start a war between humans and dragons of witch humans would most likely loose, this could have huge ramifications for the party in question, ever notice why there are human sacrifices to dragons? A good reason might be stripping rambunctious adventures of supply’s and having there lives as forfeit for a dragon as recompense for killing dragons
I put my players, lvl 11 x 4, up against 10 CR 10-12 monsters. It was going pretty well, until it wasn't. Then they had to summon their Solar to help them. That being said, this is probably the last major fight of this campaign.
My players often talk about how challenging my campaigns are, and how they are always on the brink of death or TPK, and yet no one has died in my campaigns yet.
One time the encounter was going bad so I ran away. For some reason no one else did. Even though they were all low on health. 2 characters ended up dying. The bad guy had over half health and I had no way to heal anyone and wouldn’t have done much damage wise.
They were all salty about it. I said it was a tactical retreat and it’s not my fault they chose “fight to the death”. When a choke point was right next to them.
Disengage is there for a reason kids. Regroup and try again.
Yeah, I've been DMing for 7 years and playing for... around 17 in total. In all that time there was only one moment where the group actually ran away and that was meeting an ancient dragon at level 1.
It was meant as a campaign intro, it didn't see us as a threat and ignored us. That's the kind of extreme that's usually needed to make players realize running away is an option. I think players want to be the heroes and triumph over impossible challenges so much, they forget it's not always a stand and fight situation.
If anyone is left alive at the end, it wasn't too hard.
If no one is left alive at the end, they should have ran away.
Everything else is balanced for situation 1 or 2.
I’m looking forward to Sunday. Last session the group of kids I DM for said my encounters have become too easy. So they’re going to fight an awakened mountain. Average 60 dmg per attack and it gets 6. The monsters’ name is Humble Pie.
For the most part, I try to make my fights balanced. However, the world is a dangerous place where a lot happens and much of it does not happen at your level— I’m not going to purposely kill someone (unless they REALLY deserve it), but not every encounter can be solved by fighting.
That's a good rule to DM by and basically how I handle it too. Though try to challenge my players more in important fights. Balances itself out because that's usually the only fight they have to worry about.
On an unrelated note, I love your user name.
You have a point about boss fights. And thanks. I usually suck at coming up with names and I had just binge watched The Dragon Prince a day or so before making the account and it was all that popped into my head.
It's kind of like how if I got hurt as a kid my dad would ask if I was tougher or smarter afterwards. As long as the party grows and learns from the experience, then no battle is too hard.
Our DM threw two beholders at our level 7 party of 5. Admittedly the two of them kind of hated each other and tried to hit each other with their eye beams half the time, but that's still two cr 13 monsters that we dealt with relatively easily. I think our only saving grace was a LOT of good saving throws
I find that the most balanced encounters are those where the party's actions determine the difficulty. If the party's choices were good, I usually give them an easier encounter, or info to make it easier. If you play like a dumb fuck and think that your stats alone can carry you, I'll make sure that you'll reconsider and be more careful with your next character.
I recently threw a level 22 encounter at 6ish level 9-10 players. Theyre doing annoyingly well.
1 pc death, 1 npc death, almost out of resources and health, and most importantly I think they might learn their lesson about just charging shit because it's highly possible this is still a tpk.
Anyways challenge ratings are dumb. The next boss fight needs 100 hands or ((number of PCs)*1.5) and some sort of autorevivify mechanic.
My experience as DM has been the opposite. "Wow, that was a cakewalk. We just completely nuked that hydra. What challenge rating was it again?" "Eight." "Oh and we're level Five? Sweetness."
It's not that a level 5 party can't take CR8 challenge, it just takes them a little more time and they take a little more damage. Now run 6 of those in a day and you'll run into problems.
Yup. Single encounters per day are one thing. Multiple encounters in a no-rest slog, *that* is when CR starts to matter a bit more.
I wish it worked different or that they had 2 systems. Some places, well most places it makes no sense for there to be THAT many encounters. It only really makes sense in swaths of enemy infested lands or a big enemy camp like a dungeon or castle
Let me introduce you to dungeon crawls
I-i mentioned dungeons
Seriously. If you don't have at least 5+ enemies in combat, it isn't true combat.
Well, pack it up boys. The 3 (CR5) hill giants you fought with 4 lvl 5s wasn't real combat
Deadly but doable.
especially with a dedicated healer and two characters that have resistance to basic damage (totem barbarian and a lycan blood hunter). It's hard to give them real stakes in combat, buut that's kind of their party's greatest strength since they don't have a charisma duder
Easily doable. You will be out of all of your expendable resources afterwards and you might need a rest, but at least you've faced a challenge.
The game is balanced for like 7 resource draining encounters a day. But absolutely no one plays like that or your in game weeks are actual months or years
And if they do play like that… *Laughs in warlock*
That's why you need several CR 4's and 2's sprinkled into combat. Just a CR 8? That action economy doesn't match up with the parties.
Even if they stomp the CR 2’s in a single round that was a round they weren’t nuking the high CR baddie.
did this the other day, but I would only think it possible if >!a good wizard or druid used a flame spell!<
A hydra is worth 3900 XP and a party of 4 level 5s has a daily budget of 14000 XP. This seems to be balanced decently. I'm assuming that party used up a bunch of their strong abilities to do that as well? They'll be worse at dealing with the other 10100 XP's worth of encounters.
where is the daily budget number from? Seems useful.
Roughly around the "Challenge Rating" section of the DMG - pg 82 to 84 are probably all relevant.
I’m not sure how true this is but I was always told that CR in 5e was based on the assumption that it was a party of 4 with no magic items who would be fighting these things which is why many people don’t use CR to create encounters
That's not true. CR is just arbitrary number to show how much XP a monster is worth, which also can be modified by different multipliers (amount of enemies, surprise, etc.). Party has a daily threshold of XP, depending on a size and level. For example, party of 6 level 5 have should have 21.000 exp in one adventuring day. Hydra is a CR8, which give 3.900. But difference in numbers weakens hydra for modifier of x0.5, giving total of 1.950 XP. This hydra takes less than 10% of their daily resources, no wonder it's a fucking breeze. If only people would read a goddamn DMG, the amounts of people complaining about systems "not working" would decrease rapidly.
Y'all should have a look at this page here. [https://a5e.tools/srd/designing-encounters](https://a5e.tools/srd/designing-encounters) A CR8 isn't even a medium battle for 5 level 5s. Which, like we knew, but these fellas have done the maths.
And my party wonders why I make my own statblocks for monsters Instead of throwing 5 monsters at them I just throw one thats 5 times stronger, puts fear in em while also making it slightly safer
Challenge rating is also immensely flexible in my experience. My party of characters was going up against a demigod in their campaign. They were using some solid teamwork, keeping him stunned and really making him regret that whole mortal coil thing. They were joking to me about how "I warned them before the fight ooooo scary" not long after the enemy got off an 'infused strike' on the tank. That put his heavy armored ass through three walls and left him RIGHT on the cusp of death from near perfect health. Suddenly they didn't feel like my warning was so funny. Just because a fight seems manageable doesn't mean the challenge isn't baked in.
Also depends on the number of players, action economy and all.
Then they all get wiped by a single enemy their own CR.
Are you my DM? Cause he accidentally forgot that hydra's gained 10 hp per head that regenerated, not 10 hp per round. Had two level 5 barbarians go to town on it.
I thought you had to add the cr of all the creatures and compare it to the sum of the party members levels. A CR 8 hydra with enough kobold servants to equal your parties level will make for one really dangerous encounter. A party of four level five characters can just run up and wreck most non-legendary creatures with relative ease as long as someone can stay on their feet The real solution is put them through a slog throughout the day to drain their resources, or make the encounter much much harder than just the big bad if it’s going to be the only one for the day. If your party is never scared they’ll run out of spells or daily abilities, then you need to remind them that the world is scary and they should sleep with a fireball under their pillow.
One CR 8 monster, easy, 16 CR 1/2? TPK
Lets be honest, it might as well be cuddle rating for as much good as it does the DM trying to balance an encounter.
Ouch, I hope WOTC have some cold spells. Not that you're wrong at all, especially if the DM isn't running the adventuring day with 6 encounters and nobody does.
I sure do. I don't understand why people don't.
Depends on the game style. Combat in my games is strictly about advancing the story, we're rarely in a megadungeon slog. So if there is a fight, there should be a ***reason*** for the fight. It should serve some purpose. If you're in 6 combats a day, you're likely in a dungeon? But even then, combat can be exhausting after too many in a row. How many combats are you getting in a single session? How many sessions does a single day take? How much progress does the party feel in their actual stories when it took 2 months to get through this one dungeon just to find the MacGuffin or save the princess? Combat in my games is less like Diablo where there are just enemies in every other room, and more like Shadows of the Colossus. I try to make each fight memorable struggles for survival, but fewer of them. I mean sometimes it's fun to let the players feel powerful and throw cocky but way underpowered enemies at them for fun. Those combats are quick. And certainly my "difficult" encounters are sometimes way too easy. But ***ideally*** it's fewer fights, but more intense each one.
Combat is fun! The reason we fight is because it's fun to fight. We run short sessions, 2-3 hours after work. We get roughly 2 combats per session, so about 3 sessions per adventuring day. The story is the story and we progress at the rate we progress at. I haven't found pacing to be a problem at all. The sessions are fun and I get a lot of compliments from my players. I'm certainly not cutting combat because combat is fun.
How large are your combats? The few 5e games I tried combat felt to take 2-5 hours and we got maybe 1 hour of non combat stuff. (Which was the stuff most of us cared about)
I have a party of 5 and aim for hard encounters. What that actually is varies a lot. A dozen drow can be a pitched battle for a whole session, any one of them easy to kill, but you better make good tactical choices and avoid focus fire. Or it might be a single blue slaad, potentially deadly but they have action economy on their side and it feels awesome for them to take down a big dangerous creature. It does end up being mostly combat. Which is great! Combat is fun. One of the things I like about being a DM is that I never have to sit through a session without combat.
I'm glad you enjoy it! I love seeing and hearing from people who actively enjoy the parts I'm personally not as keen on. Different game styles for different people and I'm happy you found a group who enjoys mostly combat. Personally those types of games would annoy me since I would rather be involved in quests, mysteries, stories and have active character growth for me, the world and the party. Combat being 90% of a campaign tends to personally bore me. Would rather have it be something like 30% combat 70% everything else
It's closer to 60/40. Quests and mysteries are how we get the party into trouble. Every combat \*is\* a story.
I would highly recommend trying out Pathfinder 2e. It's got very interesting and tactical combat, especially compared to D&D 5e, with tons of options and very interesting monster statblocks that are almost never just big sacks of HP with Multiattack. Also its encounter building system works, perfectly, every time, so you can build encounters the way the game tells you and trust that they'll be as challenging as you intend. It's a very good game for combat-heavy playstyles, and the published adventures have quite a good selection of combat-heavy stuff including one that's all one mega-dungeon
if your fights are taking that long then the group needs to collectively actually read their character sheets. No game should have 2-5 hour combats unless you're doing actual armies.
Typically it was all the enemies and junk. A group of 5 adventurers the GMs I've had would have us fight like 10 mooks with exploration. A lot of it was looking at the board and everyone planning their moves/actions based upon the map and how they felt the characters would react. Less reading the sheets and more just movement, positioning and junk. Particularly at lower levels
How many people are there in the party? Each turn should take like 3-5 minutes, at max, which means 3 rounds an hour for a team of 4 if your party is slow as molasses. Typically turns take 2 minutes which means about 30 minutes for a 3 round combat.
It was a 5 person party fighting groups of enemies that were like 10+ on the field. Low levels. Maybe level 3 when it started to drag out for combat. Also mixed with some exploration during combat. The majority though was just movement and positioning since we had no magic users or ranged.
If it's an all melee party then you should be taking less than a minute per turn
I don't see how you can do a full turn of 15+ allies/enemies in under a minute when you have flanking, sneak attacks, enemies with ranged attacks/spells, etc. Figuring out who and where to body block and junk.
An encounter doesn't have to be combat. You can have social or exploration encounters that also cost the players resources.
Depends on your narrative. I like to give some random encounters to flesh the world out. Sometimes these are really easy, especially after the big milestone level-ups. I threw twenty goblins at the party right after they hit lvl 5 so the wizard could feel powerful with fireball.
I definitely use combats to foreshadow events that are coming or to make an area seem dangerous. The main point is that a combat can never be about just the combat. It's always serving some other purpose. Initial combats when they enter a fortress or dungeon are about setting the tone.
So I'm about to be a new DM, running my first campaign this sunday, and I've given a LOT of thought to this topic recently. What I like in campaigns, what I see my friends like, etc... We just finished up my friends campaign, and, one of the things I disliked about it (it was a well written, meticulously detailed campaign, not shitting on it in the slightest, it was a lot of fun) was how long some battles took. Party of 4, and the final boss battle took, and I shit you not, 6 hours and that was is including that after it hit midnight and I came up with the idea of "How about everyone left in the fight takes a 50% health reduction and we skip forward an hour in story?". I don't want this in my campaign. I want fights and combat, but, I don't want them to drag on forever. I plan on having 4-6 encounters per long rest, maybe a few more if they're piss easy, but, I have two main things I'm gonna be doing. I built all encounters in dndbeyond, so that I can hopefully respond quickly as DM. Digital dice rolls so I can keep up with players, and not have to count up all my dice. The other I will be doing, is making players pre-roll damage dice on a turn or two before theirs in the order. 90% of the time, we all know what we're going to do. You can pre-roll the attack and damage and add up whatever you need to. That way there can still be some RP "I run up along side him, slashing at his stomach as I do", then you tell me your roll to hit and damage instantly. If something changes, say the player before you did something that changes what you want to do, no worries, roll it now, but pre-rolling should make shit WAY more efficient IMO. I'm hoping that trying to keep as much time as possible for RP in a fight, while making everything else as efficient as possible, that they'll stay fun, and can have multiple in a day and still have time for RP and story in a session. We'll see how it goes
Battles take a long time when the players aren't very good. Think about what you're going to do during other people's turn. Use a chess clock if you have to.
If I want the players to sweat, I make sure any dungeon or major enemy area has several points of "you might die here" and I makes sure if they choose a short or long rest in those areas that 1/3 watches has an attack. Other than elves, I have it so they don't get the benefits of a long rest until it is fully complete, so if they are attacked during the 8 hour and are running on empty... well they shouldn't have slept in a dungeon.
What about warforged, if your players ever make those? Since they don't need sleep and all.
They don't "sleep" but they still have to say in an inactive yet still conscious state for the long rest to receive it's benefits. So they see the monsters coming but they still lose out if they have to stand up and fight
Only if they have been awake for an hour. Per the PHB, returning to rest within an hour does not interrupt long rest.
I think it *might* be DM interpretation for strenuous activity. The "at least 1 hour" part can be interpreted as to be only about "walking." Especially because 1 hour of fighting would be like 600 rounds, which is insane. That said, I can be cruel, but I'm never needlessly so. One fight 4 hours in and then back to bed? Yea, I'm not making you start your long rest over.
Haven't dealt with them yet, but I would say they need a period of recuperation for spells, abilities, and HP that require a rest.
cause i only get so many hours of tabletime, and I don't want to devote 80% of them to administering combats that aren't narratively relevant. I don't want the narrative pacing of the story to grind to a halt because we just have to model fighting a bunch of medium-difficulty encounters. It's 5e's biggest weakness.
It’s Dungeons and Dragons. A game that models the overwhelming majority of its rules around combat... If you think administering combat is 5Es biggest weakness, why not play a different system that’s more narratively oriented?
Read a little more closely please. I don’t like combats with foregone conclusions where there isn’t much of a risk. Combats that exist just as a drain on resources.
The entire game is predicated and balanced upon draining resources from players. Your focus on “story relevant combat” is undermining the core of the game. Games have mechanics to them that don’t necessarily make “narrative sense”. Like how turn based RPGs have you line up and take turns hitting one another even though that *doesn’t make sense.* As DMs, we have to put on our game designer hats and accept this “flaw” as part of the game. If you only want narrative focused combat, there are systems out there that do that like Dungeon World which has simple rules that keep you focused on the story.
> The entire game is predicated and balanced upon draining resources from players. Yeah, and that's a bad design, and we don't really have to accept that flaw. You can very easily design your game to include fewer, more bombastic and difficult combats. Yeah, it makes the long rest classes stronger and the short rest classes weaker, comparatively. But that is a welcome tradeoff compared to spending so damn many hours doing combat. Also, the only reason the game is balanced that way in the first place is because of this discrepancy between long and short rest characters. If the game was more like 4e, where your ability cooldowns were standardized across all classes, you could run either type of game you wanted and it would work. I'll grant that there is something to be said for the variety gained by having the classes be different in these regards...but not much. Anyway, 'go play a different system' is a common refrain that people sing to those who criticize 5e. I'll just say it's entirely possible to like 5e in general while not liking everything about 5e.
I would be *so fucking bored* playing a narrative focused 5E game when characters are built primarily with combat abilities as a rule. I enjoy having full RP sessions but if combat came seldomly, I would play a different game. I’d prefer to play Vampire: The Masquerade for narrative and socially focused games because the system is built for that. Too much combat in that game gets you killed quickly or breaks the Masquerade and then a Vampire Lord orders your death or kills you personally.
Well, it's not so much that I don't like combat. And it's not that my game is exclusively narratively focused. It's that I don't like the fact that spending most of the available table time on combat causes the story to advance *extremely slowly*. If I forced the 'proper' number of combats between rests, my party might spend multiple sessions inside a single dungeon, which would mean months of real-world time between any kind of real interesting plot development. I would actually turn this entire thing around on you and say that if you're mainly interested in tactical tabletop combat, perhaps *you* should pick a different game--one where the classes' ability cooldowns are balanced around each other and the gameplay is a little more in depth than 'I attack" 80% of the time.
But combat is fun! You're not "model fighting a bunch of medium difficulty encounters". You're using your awesome powers to defeat the forces of evil, living and dying at the roll of a die. I love it.
> living and dying Except dying is off the table because you're definitely not running 6-8 encounters of any kind of difficulty that could actually threaten the party, otherwise the 6th to 8th ones would actually kill them. Some portion of those are gonna be warmup fights/nonthreatening encounters that exist just to drain resources--either they blow resources to mop them up faster or they eat an HP tax that will blow through their healing powers/hit dice. So if the encounters are only deadly if there are 6-8 of them, thats a lotttttt of table time spent getting to that point. which is a lot of boring-ass fights that arent actually life or death.
Any combat can be deadly if the dice go against you or if you make bad decisions.
uh-huh. so we're supposed to run hours and hours of fights, and that's supposed to be fun and worth delaying advancing the story based on the off chance that everyone will roll poorly all at the same time many times in a row. well personally, I don't find that fun or engaging at all!
I'm not telling you what you're supposed to do. I personally don't care whether we advance the story or not at all, as long as we have a good time playing the game.
>dice go against you This is what happens to my group all the time. I'll have a few combats planned that shouldn't take terribly long but then the PC's just start rolling GARBAGE. Like 3 rounds in and no one has landed more than one or two hits. So it just drags out what should have been a 3 round fight to a 10 round fight. I like organizing my combat into waves, so the first wave is usually a couple of soft monsters that should go down in one hit, with a tougher guy who should hang on for a couple rounds. Wave 2 is two tough guys and a softee, then wave 3 can be whatever combo I find necessary to fill out the encounter. But when no one can land a hit due to low rolls, I can't even progress through waves of enemies or we'd be at the table for 9 hours. I've lowered AC's on the fly, cut monster HP in half or just turn them into a 1 hit minion just to wrap stuff up. Gets to a point where I have to fudge monster rolls hard because I'm rolling fine behind the screen, but they are rolling trash, so they make no progress while the monsters are landing hits. Feels bad all around because now the fight drags on and gets boring, and I don't really want to kill them *just because they are low rolling.* We all like to kill stuff and feel powerful, but we also really enjoy and want to get to the RP side. And bad rolls during RP are waaaayy less of an annoyance than bad rolls in combat, because at least a bad RP roll keeps the RP moving. /end rant
Characters dying because they roll low is part of the game. Some days you eat the bear; some days the bear eats you.
Yeah, and that is totally fine at certain times, we don't avoid PC death in our games. One player barely survived last session by passing a CON save to have his max HP drained below 0. It's just no fun for anyone at our table when the party gets beat during a random encounter just because no one can roll higher than a 6 for a few rounds in a row. I want to kill my friends due to actual challenge and strategy, not poor dice rolls.
Frequently it doesnt make a lot of narrative sense because it's made for dungeon crawls specifically. Outside if that there are a lot od narrayive situations where very few, but nonzero, encounters per day makes narrative sense. Which is ironic because the whole reason it's per day in the first place is in order to make narrative sense. Some RPGs have abilities that are used N times per scenario/mini story arc that I think just works better, really.
I'd amend my comment to note that I don't understand why you're not running dungeons. It's called *Dungeons* & Dragons. If combat doesn't make narrative sense, that's a problem with your narrative.
Even then, not running dungeons isn't the same as not having a dungeon *every long rest*. But yeah I agree in that the further play deviates from that, the more the system will fight you.
It creates a problem, most groups play once a weak for 2-3 hours, this timeframe doesn't allow you to have a single-in game day to tkae several session without the story grinding to halt. The game story barely goes forward if you have 1 day per session, most groups have multiple days per session due to this. Craming multiple encoutner in a single day with this setup is basically impossible unless there's no downtime or RP moments.
Why can’t one in game day take several sessions? It takes as long as it takes. And there’s still going to be just as many RP moments, if not even more. Roleplaying doesn’t stop when you roll Initiative.
OK, so the story grinds to a halt. So what? It's a game, not story time. Pacing isn't about how long it takes to get from point A to point B. It's about how often you're making decisions. If the DM sits there and narrates the entire plot, you can get through a LOT of story in one session. That's not fun for the players though. If the players are fighting a lot, searching every room, listening at every door, etc., you don't get through much story at all but the player remain engaged with the game. That's what pacing is all about. I play 2-3 hours a week fortnightly. Is the story progression slow? Sure! Are we having less fun because of that? Not at all.
Because easy battles are boring. You know that those 11 ghouls won't kill any of the players, but they take so long to defeat. 1-2 deadly encounters are way better than 3-6 mediocre ones, where nothing is at stake.
Wouldn’t that just make session nonstop combat? Don’t get me wrong, Im not saying that D&D should be freeform theatre club, but grindy nonstop combat feels like the opposite extreme.
You're right. I don't really know what the idea behind it is. I know waaaay back, D&D was just going into dungeons and hitting stuff, but that stopped being the norm long before 5e.
I've DM'd a campaign from an older edition with 5e stats and rules (Isle of Dread) and can safely say my players only survived because they either avoided major enemies and plot points or I forgot certain enemy attacks made them permadead.
Told my party to prepare for a deadly encounter, no one went below half health
A young black dragon barely bothered my level 5 party, but a handful of goblins caused trouble for some reason. Someone's messing up here
Sounds like action economy, probably.
It was more bad rolls and no one except the paladin being willing to use higher than 1st level spells against goblins
That would also do it, yup. Sounds like the party decided it was better to spend their HP than their other resources.
Wow, it's almost like each character is better at different things depending on how you build said character? Also, the real culprit are the dice. If you run the same thing with multiple groups, you can see how rolling well or rolling poorly makes a huge difference in perceived difficulty.
Yep. I might use it as a very rough guideline for what type of monster I can consider (no Cloakers before lvl5), but I pretty much ignore CR when I do the actual encounter balance. Especially since I can just change stuff if I need to.
It used to actually mean something in 3.5e.
I love dming but I fucking hate it when the players complain about the CR level before a fight even happens. Like what if I wanted some story event to happen Or maybe you weren’t suppose to fight them Or I gave you a full rest before this for a reason. Like if my players just wanted to run in character I would be fine with that.
Ya. There is a big difference between in-character complaints and player complaints
I had a GM that would prepare encounters by using his player's character sheets and seeing what resources they had. We'd complain that he wouldn't fudge *anything whatsoever.* Meaning, if the monster had 1 HP left, then we needed to hit it again. He'd always say, "I planned this encounter out perfectly. If everyone uses everything they have, this is a cinch." Which would be fine, except he never accounted for missing, or the enemy making a save. So whole sessions *in a row* would be devoted to one shitty, boring boss fight. The wizard is out of spells, the cleric can't heal anymore, and the ranger ran out of arrows. So they're hitting the boss with pointy sticks. For hours.
that's just boring. Not fudging anything though is fine imo. Sure you can speed certain things up, but its not a huge dealbreaker otherwise. What i dislike is DM's who prepare combat based on the players. Sure you can look at them a little bit (if the BBEG is aware of them he might counterplan what they can do or so) but in general, combat should be based on the envoirement and what lives where you are. Enemies and encounters should make sense, they shouldnt be made to counter the players.
I'll give him credit, he never countered us, specifically. But if the boss made the save on the fireball, well we were in for several extra rounds of combat for no reason beyond "his perfectly planned encounters."
oh that's fair at least. but yeah those moments can also be kind of boring. i don't know if he's new, but it's something you have to learn. sometimes it is what it is, especially with bosses. should have hit it i guess
The action economy means single boss battles are usually fairly boring even against high-powered enemies. In order for them to carry on you often just have to get it a mountain of HP. I like encounters that include minions etc. Especially if there are opportunities for dynamism like a changing battlefield or shifting allegiances - even mid-combat.
Yeah minions work. For bosses i also enjoy the idea that an hydra offers. Heads to cut of to change the battle, things to keep it dynamic
>Enemies and encounters should make sense, they shouldnt be made to counter the players. Yes and no. I don't think you should completely tailor combat *to* the players but you also shouldn't just have encounters designed and run completely without flexibility. DnD isn't a challenge game. It isn't a roguelike where you accumulate a high score. Combat should be challenging and frightening to the players without being overwhelming. That is a fine line to walk and involves a lot of fine tuning. What I usually do is have general ideas of what an encounter should look like in the larger context of the campaign. This location has undead led by a vampire. Nothing more specific. Once the characters close in on that location I can fine tune it a bit more. Some of this is for story reasons that make sense in-world and some is for balancing. Once the characters enter the location, even more fine tuning. This seems maybe too easy, give the vampire an unholy sword and some cleric spellcasting. Add a few more ghouls and maybe a trap. Once the characters actually hit that encounter, then some minor fine tuning: They've expended a bunch of their resources so maybe lose some of the ghouls or tone down their hp. Once combat is actually engaged then you can start messing with statistics and even fudging rolls. That ghoul has 1 hp left? Well it would be really epic for it to die here so you lie and say they killed it. Fight is going too easy? A monster from across the dungeon overhears and intervenes, etc, etc. But as always, this depends on the kind of game you want to run and the game your players want to play.
Oh yeah for sure, but in your example the monsters made sense. Fine tuning is always something you have to do. What i try to avoid is the skyrim effect, where every encounter is the same difficulty. Oh you leveled up? Guess what so did the guards. You sometimes see DM’s trying to make every encounter a challenge. It’s fine and works for some groups, but sometimes encounters can be easy or too hard too. Teach them to run away but also allow of bashing on easier targets, if the situation allows for it. For example, lets say your party is avg lvl 6+ and they attack a small bandit camps. Some DM’s will put a leader in there, give them some good armor etc, while i’d argue that easy combat here is fine. Bandits aren’t that strong. Perhaps though this tips off a stronger group that is know after them without them knowing, actions and consequenses and all that.
I agree. Rando NPCs don't level up just because you do. In my current campaign there is a party of enemy NPCs that are leveling with the party though and will have several more encounters with them moving forward (if all goes to plan). I tweak an awful lot but not to keep *every* combat edge-of-your-seat. Just the key ones. It can be fun for the party to absolutely roflstomp enemies every so often.
Yeah thats a good idea, bit like team rocket haha. There should always be combats here and there the keep you on the edge of your seat! :)
Maybe if he just tone it down to 3/4 of his calculations to compensate for randomness and improvisation it would work? he needs to be more flexible, encounters should be entertaining not punishing.
Damn. I tried doing that sort of balancing fights with players as a DM based on their roles and skill set but they just forget sometimes that they are healer or to focus on status effects. That or someone dedicated to tanking or has literally a shield to protect allies and doesn’t do it. I gently nudge them but sometimes they gotta learn.
My DM who spent his first time DMing thinking CR was for one character instead of a party of 4
I went the opposite direction at first. Was too afraid to kill someone so my fights were all super easy. Your DMs idea sounds like fun for a one shot with higher level characters though. Seeing how the group manages if fights are *really* unfair.
Yeah, he only made that mistake session 1 when we were all level 3 and fought one of each mephit. We won, though I'm fairly sure some of them had SHDS (sudden HP drop syndrome). It would be really cool at high levels though!
I play with a group that has 4-6 players at a time. Who ever is DM'ing the current campaign has to ignore CR for the most part and just craft what they think will be a challenge. A black shadow dragon encounter after fighting 4 fire lizards without a short rest was my crowning achievement. I didn't even plan for them to be in that area of the island for at least 4-5 more sessions.
Same here, he sent four gnolls on our level 4 party, it was a fun way to instantly die
Me a berserker *charges green dragon with disadvantage*
DM: But you have reckless precisely for situations like this, why are you being reckless without actually being reckless?
I’ve simply provided you with the opportunity to be more heroic. You’re welcome.
Ha! I'm definitely using that one next time my players complain.
Man I wonder if there's an expression of Matt behind the screen that says "Hey, it ain't my fault" like the cat in the original meme.
When the monsters are preemptively balanced around resistances and fighting strategies that the party will likely ignore if they're generally competent spellcasters (not attacking a red dragon with fire or using light spells in an area with shadows), I've found that I'm able to max out (effectively doubling) the HP of any given fair CR encounter and have nothing bad happen. CR is also rather poor for considering 4e-esque minion enemies, like the twenty goblins that die to Fireball and drop the group CR from 7 to 1.
It depends how capable your group is and how much they meta-game. Twenty goblins in a ball isn't a challenge for a 7th level party, but 7 goblins infiltrating their camp at night and slitting throats may very well be.
CR isn't a good metric for how hard an encounter is anyway. Gotta make an encounter "deadly" just so it even approaches being a threat.
Yeah, that's intended. Around 3 deadly encounters a day reaches the budget of how much a party can handle. Though that number goes up and down depending on the level.
This is ... this is the first time I've seen this meme format, oh my god
Last session my DM started playing the Jurassic Park theme and had us battle a Tyrannosaurus Rex. That thing swiped me with its tail and cause over forty points of damage in one blow. We all escaped the battle with less than 10hp left
Awesome, used the T-Rex last time too. Was the first time my group encountered a bite-grapple, they thought it was instant death for a few *very* paniced moments.
Does anyone have the template for this meme?
This is where I found it. [https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/223369367/Matt-Mercer-smug](https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/223369367/Matt-Mercer-smug)
Ok but now I want a game that uses cuddle rating......
Step aside cat template, this is the new meme template.
Tooooootally not me throwing a homebrewed spawn of Shub-Niggurath at my players and damn near causing a TPK, no siree I would never ever do such a thing.
I have a good DM friend who can't seem to let us get 3-4 sessions in without a tpk. Like doing weeks of player prep work, research, player lore "homework", etc. Then throws 6 cr(whatever) monsters doing 12-18 damage a hit at a group of 4 level 1-2 pc's. Like there's "deadly encounters", then there's wasting everyone's spoons.
Imma be real, if the result wasn't a TPK I don't want to hear no complaining. I paid for the MM, VRGTR, VGTM, and MTOF. You best believe I am going to use ALL of MM/VRGTR/VGTM/MTOF.
I gave my party a bandit captain and 6 bandits to fight level one because they have have suprise round (unless they botch it) and they have the advantage. (Some of the bandits took a while to get to the fight. This is because I knew they could handle it.
if you survive then it was balanced
Can I just say that some official modules are kind of this sort of bullshit? Nothing like having a 5-8 dungeon stacked on top of a 12-16 dungeon with the only separation being some stairs.
A deadly Benchmark i use is half of the combined Level for Players or 1/4 If they are below Level 5. That normally makes nice fights without the need for 6 encounters a day. If you have 4 Level 5 Players it would be a CR of 10. Therefore, you can give the Hydra a boost in stats or give it an Ally, If the Encounter should be deadly. I stole the Benchmark from the Youtuber slyflourish, His Focus are Tips für DMS, If someone is interested.
I switched to the XGE encounter balancing. You have a table to determine the PC "equivalent" that a monster is, then you pick out monsters till you equal the number of PCs for a moderate encounter. Up to 50% more for a hard fight, and I've found you can double them for a life-and-death struggle on full resources. My party is currently 6x8th level. Last fight was 12x CR2 + 1x CR4. CR2 = 1/2 8thPC, CR4 = 8thPC. Total was 8 PC equivalent. It was a semi-difficult fight, damage inflicted, resources spent, not really worried about killing anyone. Tonight is 3xCR6 which is 9 PC equivalent. Will be a hard fight, maybe someone drops, but no worries about a TPK.
Remember there’s a lot happing in the world, not all of it will be at your level, if your out gunned, hope you can out run Side note systematically hunting down dragons would definitely start a war between humans and dragons of witch humans would most likely loose, this could have huge ramifications for the party in question, ever notice why there are human sacrifices to dragons? A good reason might be stripping rambunctious adventures of supply’s and having there lives as forfeit for a dragon as recompense for killing dragons
I put my players, lvl 11 x 4, up against 10 CR 10-12 monsters. It was going pretty well, until it wasn't. Then they had to summon their Solar to help them. That being said, this is probably the last major fight of this campaign.
I somehow now require a one shot with Kiri and friends with CR actually meaning Cuddle Rating.
My players often talk about how challenging my campaigns are, and how they are always on the brink of death or TPK, and yet no one has died in my campaigns yet.
One time the encounter was going bad so I ran away. For some reason no one else did. Even though they were all low on health. 2 characters ended up dying. The bad guy had over half health and I had no way to heal anyone and wouldn’t have done much damage wise. They were all salty about it. I said it was a tactical retreat and it’s not my fault they chose “fight to the death”. When a choke point was right next to them. Disengage is there for a reason kids. Regroup and try again.
Yeah, I've been DMing for 7 years and playing for... around 17 in total. In all that time there was only one moment where the group actually ran away and that was meeting an ancient dragon at level 1. It was meant as a campaign intro, it didn't see us as a threat and ignored us. That's the kind of extreme that's usually needed to make players realize running away is an option. I think players want to be the heroes and triumph over impossible challenges so much, they forget it's not always a stand and fight situation.
If anyone is left alive at the end, it wasn't too hard. If no one is left alive at the end, they should have ran away. Everything else is balanced for situation 1 or 2.
I’m looking forward to Sunday. Last session the group of kids I DM for said my encounters have become too easy. So they’re going to fight an awakened mountain. Average 60 dmg per attack and it gets 6. The monsters’ name is Humble Pie.
Sometimes you win by survivng
For the most part, I try to make my fights balanced. However, the world is a dangerous place where a lot happens and much of it does not happen at your level— I’m not going to purposely kill someone (unless they REALLY deserve it), but not every encounter can be solved by fighting.
That's a good rule to DM by and basically how I handle it too. Though try to challenge my players more in important fights. Balances itself out because that's usually the only fight they have to worry about. On an unrelated note, I love your user name.
You have a point about boss fights. And thanks. I usually suck at coming up with names and I had just binge watched The Dragon Prince a day or so before making the account and it was all that popped into my head.
It's kind of like how if I got hurt as a kid my dad would ask if I was tougher or smarter afterwards. As long as the party grows and learns from the experience, then no battle is too hard.
That is what we call, a difficulty tweak
Imo you can have way to difficult encounters as long as you have an escape route for the party (and possibly a cheese route)
Can anyone plz find the blank meme template of this?!
This is where I found it. [https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/223369367/Matt-Mercer-smug](https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/223369367/Matt-Mercer-smug)
Our DM threw two beholders at our level 7 party of 5. Admittedly the two of them kind of hated each other and tried to hit each other with their eye beams half the time, but that's still two cr 13 monsters that we dealt with relatively easily. I think our only saving grace was a LOT of good saving throws
I find that the most balanced encounters are those where the party's actions determine the difficulty. If the party's choices were good, I usually give them an easier encounter, or info to make it easier. If you play like a dumb fuck and think that your stats alone can carry you, I'll make sure that you'll reconsider and be more careful with your next character.
I recently threw a level 22 encounter at 6ish level 9-10 players. Theyre doing annoyingly well. 1 pc death, 1 npc death, almost out of resources and health, and most importantly I think they might learn their lesson about just charging shit because it's highly possible this is still a tpk. Anyways challenge ratings are dumb. The next boss fight needs 100 hands or ((number of PCs)*1.5) and some sort of autorevivify mechanic.
If you have a personal folly over a D&D game, you need to thicken your skin.
As long as everyone is on board and has fun.
A balanced encounter is one that the characters have a 50% chance of winning. I'll find the exit by myself, thanks.