In a simple sense the option would be to throw in "moar enemies!1!" but it depends on what sort of encounters you've been throwing at them so far and what the make up of the party is and how to counter their abilities without completely nullifying them and punishing them for working well together. It's about creating a fun different challenge and making it so the party aren't driving through everything with ease.
One idea is to play smart and find ways of making a menace. The animé/manga Goblin Slayer for example is built around making even the lowly Goblins feel like a threat. They play on their numbers and cunning and are often underestimated leading multiple parties through their naivety to find themselves outmatched and defeated. In D&D terms I would take this and use a fair amount of them and working like a pack, they're smart enough to know how magic users are dangerous so a group of them are going to mob those threats. I'd use the abilities they have like their nimble escape so that they are constantly moving, hiding and hard to pin down. They are going to set traps, there's a group goblins by a camp fire within a cave system, it seems to be a storeroom of some kind. As soon as they become aware of the party coming into the area, they light arrows on the camp fire and launch them at the nearest barrels to the entrance the party entered through, which contain oil and suddenly the party are caught by a fireball and in a bit of a sticky situation. The "oil barrel" idea essentially is built off the idea of finding ways to use the terrain and environment to find ways of making each encounter a bit different and mean they're constantly having to think about things and work out how to handle/use the environment as well as whatever creatures I'm throwing at them.
Manage rests as well in that respect. If they're in that cavern full of goblins and triggered a few of the traps the party should be drawing a lot of attention. They're coming from all directions, some of the avenues of escape are cut off and the Goblin Lord (borrowed statline, a huge brute like an ogre with boosted Int perhaps?) is heading their way. Even a higher level party is going to start to feel it in a war of attrition as their use of spell slots, rages, etc as well as hit points start to dwindle.
I'm largely off the head brain storming here, trying to come up with a scenario that creates an encounter/series of linked encounters to make the party work for it. Obviously I would pace it according to progress and what's happening, if the "fireball trap" room launches maximum fireball damage and leaves the party in danger of a TPK then I won't be throwing hordes of foes at them afterwards and the "Goblin Lord" is going to be in another location but they find a clue in a room just off the storeroom and can make their way to the nearest village to plan their future way of dealing with the goblin menace now they've cleared out that location.
Hope it's given you a couple of ideas on how to even take a simple enemy and build some potentially interesting and challenging encounters.
What do you mean by "encounters" and how are they steamrolling through them? I get the impression that you're talking about combat, even though encounters are not the same as encounters.
Here's some ideas for making combat more challenging ( not the same as more deadly ),
Know what the goals/stakes are for the Bad Guys. This will really change what the bad guys are willing to do, how much they're willing to risk, and what they're willing to lose. Creatures just raiding for loot, hungry creatures looking for food, and creatures defending their homes and families will all behave differently.
Be mindful of the "action economy" and use more & weaker creatures over one, or a few, stronger ones: These keeps the battle more tactically interesting, and flexible. It gives the bad guys the ability to flank, or pull wounded comrades out the fray, rally and reinforce an area, etc.
Intelligently mix up the creatures they are in combat with: Different creatures have different tactical strengths and weaknesses; match these up to make each type more capable than they would be alone. However, make sure there is an in-world reason why these creatures would be associating with each other.
Use the environment: Put interesting features in the environment: cover and screens; patches of rough terrain; pits and hazards; tactically interesting areas such as high ground, large open areas, narrowing choke points ( such as a tunnel or rope bridge ), etc. If this is the bad guys' home turf, figure out how they'd use these. Also consider that the bad guys might not be affected by hazards and rough terrain if they've made preparation, so they can use the environment differently than the Party. Kobolds can use tunnels the Party can't fit down, swamp creatures do not treat the bog as rough terrain, etc. Combat can be really interesting when the two sides are really fighting in a very different environments.
Make the environment dynamic: Use this one sparingly, but the environment can change during the course of the battle ( you'll see this a lot with Legendary Actions ). Areas can be set on fire, collapsed, flooded, rope bridges cut down, large stone pillars toppled to make new bridges, etc.
Play the bad guys Smart: Bad guys want to win; bad guys are not always stupid. Have the bad guys use tactics that make sense for them, and have them react sensibly to the situation. Running at the Party and getting cut down is not a sensible approach. They can always try and run away, and sometimes they can have a scout run away to fetch reinforcements.
Have the bad guys react to opportunities. The Paladin rolled a 1 and dropped her sword? Swarm her. The Rogue was knocked unconscious? Grab him, and threaten to kill him if the Party doesn't lay down their weapons, etc.
Consider what the Bad Guys know ( or can figure out ): The bad guys will adapt their tactics to what they know about the Party. If they don't know anything about the Party ( it's a surprise encounter ), then they'll adapt to what they think they know from what they can see, or what happens in the course of the battle. The unarmored guy in the back threw a magic missile? Maybe concentrate the archers on him. The heavily armored Paladin just mowed through 2 skirmishers? Maybe pull back from her and have someone bring her down with a net, so that she's busy for a round or two. If they have fore-knowledge of who the Party is, what they can do, and what their tactics are like, they can make all kinds of battlefield preparations to minimize the Party's actions. Even setting up a simple ambush is more effective than a toe-to-toe slog.
Have "fall back tactics" figured out ahead of time. If the battle is going very poorly for the bad guys do they have a contingency fall back? These are usually very risky and/or consume valuable resources, so they only get used in an emergency. The Orcs retreat and collapse the tunnel behind them. The shaman whips out a scroll of Summon Elemental. The bad guys set the place on fire to cover their retreat, etc.
Bad guys don't have to fight to the death: Maybe they try and surrender. Or they bring out the hostage and threaten to kill him. Suddenly you can switch up a combat resolution to a social resolution. Of course, the Party may have other plans ...
However, use all of this sparingly, and intelligently!
Pile all of this on at once, and you can suddenly find yourself with a TPK!
So. Let's consider a group of Orc skirmishers. The Party wanders into their local lair by accident. There's some fighters, but there are also women, children, and this is their home. So the Orcs are motivated to repel the Party.
Put them in a large well lit cave, have them use the "run up to the party and beat them with clubs" tactic - and they'll all die in 2-3 rounds - and the Players all yawn from boredom.
So let's put some of the Orcs in the cave, and some in adjacent chambers, joined by tunnels spaced around the main chamber. Now we've got multiple fronts for the Party to defend against. How does the main group get reinforced? Well, let's say the other groups are drawn to the combat noise in 2 rounds, but to keep things interesting let's give one of the Orcs in the main chamber a battle horn that he'll blow to summon them in one round, give the Party a DC ( 15? ) for a Perception check to notice him trying to do that, and see if they can't take him out before he does that to buy one round. Gives a little interest, a little battlefield adaptation to their actions, and something cool to talk about later if they pull it off.
OK - so, mixing up creatures. Let's give them some Goblin or Kobold archers to provide ranged support. And let's use the environment, and put in some rock ledges and tunnels high up in the cavern, that the archers can stay out of reach and pepper the party with arrows. Also the Kobolds can disappear down the tunnels, so they'll hit-and-run, and not stay around to get picked off by the Party.
Let's make it a geothermal cave, so we'll add some columns, and stalagmites, etc. to provide cover. And let's add a few bubbling hot mud pots. Creatures that hunker down next to one have a 1-in-6 chance of getting blorped with scalding mud for 1d4 fire damage. The Orcs and Kobolds know that, so they won't ever get close enough to the pots to suffer damage.
The Orcs don't know anything about the party, but they'll adapt intelligently ( for Orcs ) - they try and pin down the Paladin ( maybe that net attack ), the Orc Shaman may try and engage the spellcasters, etc.
The Orc skirmishers will fight pretty ferociously, adapt, reinforce where they need to, and will try and hold the line to defend their lair. If they can take a hostage and threaten the Party into backing off and leaving, they will.
As a fallback "failsafe", the Orc skirmishers will pull back into one of the caves ( where the non-combatant Orcs are cowering ), try and close a palisade barrier, while the local shaman tries to blast open a rough set stone wall in the main cavern ( they will conveniently always have such a spell on tap ) where they've walled up a hungry creature as a sort of doomsday weapon, hoping that it and the Party wipe each other out, while they cower behind the palisade.
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A quick and easy tactic I've used to make an encounter more difficult if it's being steamrolled is to employ backup/a second wave of enemies. Fighting attracts scavengers, other predators, or friends in the next room. Sometimes dice rolls can make an encounter trivial, but a second wave can add some extra tension if necessary. Chances are it won't totally turn the tide of battle but it can add a second layer to the RP if the party is trying to be stealthy or at least not alert more enemies. And even if the party is winning without issue, a second wave can make them wonder "How many more are there out there?" and add some tension to the battle.
What about traps or environmental hazards, i.e. earthquakes, lava, explosions, magic explosions, more explosions, all the explosions. And, finally, kobolds with Molotov Cocktails!
You can add a slow-moving effect like flooding lava or something that has a time constraint, so the PCs feel forced to finish, and once they finish that, have, say a fire giant come out. A surprise attack once you finished, so no time to regain spell slots.
I dealt with this quite a bit in the first campaign I ever DM'd. Thankfully, everyone had fun plowing through the enemies so I had some freedom to learn and experiment. Had a few epic boss fights become a bit anti-climactic, but again, the players liked having that degree of power. What I like about a bunch of the ideas already presented is the focus on variety and pack tactics, and I'm definitely going to use a bunch of these ideas going into my next campaign.
Well how difficult have the encounters been so far, and what does 'steamrolling encounters' mean? Nobody went down? No characters died? Nobody took damage?
You can also adjust encounters as they happen by having additional 'waves' of enemies, or other unexpected things happening in the fight. This doesn't necessarily have to be something directly detrimental to the players either while still making the players re-think what they are going to do. An example of this could be an Earthquake, rain starting to come down heavily giving everyone partial cover, an avalanche, and explosion (from any number of things), a spell, a trap being triggered, the opposing monsters fleeing, etc.
Thank you all for the insight, I will give a few of these a try the next time I take a crack at DMing.
Yes by encounters I did, in fact mean combat :P
And when I say steamrolling an encounter, i mean blowing through it so fast it might as well have not happened. And I can understand how it would be fun for a while, to a degree. But I think of it like playing skyrim and you only ever face the 1-shottable bandits, eventually you'll get bored of it, you won't feel challenged and you won't feel fulfilled, atleast on the combat end.
Either way, Like I said, thank you all for the ideas. I don't want to punish my players but I do want to make their encounters feel more fulfilling and with these I think I might just be able to.
You can add a slow-moving effect like flooding lava or something that has a time constraint, so the PCs feel forced to finish, and once they finish that, have, say a fire giant come out. A surprise attack once you finished, so no time to regain spell slots.
I like the time pressure element. Picture the Party trying to fight their way back out of the hold of a ship, while the Pirates have them pinned down, and the ship is sinking!
I recall someone ( I believe it was MellieDM ) mentioning a meta-gaming tactic as well, where the DM just said "OK, in 4 rounds, something dramatic is going to happen", and let the Party's paranoia do the rest for the next couple of rounds of combat.
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
Some necrotic/poisonous gas filling the area. Which makes the fighting area smaller. but by filling it, on the map, the gas does get closer to a few torches. Causing the area to get smaller to fight in with the chance everything will blow up in several rounds. Objective doesn't have to be to kill the insane guy, but could be to just capture him and let his flunkies die as the group runs away after extracting the guy. That scenario adds options.
I try to add such environmental combined with time constraints and an objective regularly.
Another thing is to add a riddle/puzzle in the mix. 2 sarcophagi open every other round. Two big heavy plated knightly skeletons get out and swing their great swords. After 5 rows happened it resets after 5 or so in-game minutes. But there is a riddle that basically boils down to praising the sun god or something. Which would fill the chamber with its holy light and purging the effect and stopping the spawning of enemies.
To echo what others have been saying, utilize the environment and the enemy's intelligence as best as you can. For example, I had my party (Druid, Ranger, Rogue, & Fighter) fight an intelligent Wizard - they confronted him in his room (I was running ToA, and without much spoilers its the "target" of chapter 4).
At this point, the Druid had wildshaped into a brown bear, the Fighter was shooting from afar (with a bow and arrow), and the ranger was also shooting from as far back as possible and backed into a corridor to try to be as safe as possible. The corridor itself was about 6ish feet high, & about 5ft wide. The Wizard seeing that the Ranger essentially separated him, took two turns to enact his plan. First and foremost, he cast Polymorph on the rogue as he's really the only one that could get in close without much risk (the fighter was super low on HP) plus the rogue is by far and large the most consistent DPS dealer of the party and had taken next to no damage. He ended up turning him into a Riding Horse - a large creature that isn't really that great at combat, and on the following turn, cast Misty Step to be 5ft in front of the Ranger, cutting him off from the party. The rogue couldn't get into the corridor because he's too big (as riding horses are large), the druid was already a large brown bear, and the Fighter couldn't get in close as he would've certainly died otherwise.
Needless to say, the Ranger died.
The point I'm making is that having intelligent enemies is a giant game changer (especially with favorable terrain); in two turns, my BBEG made the highest DPS dealer irrelevant, the druid irrelevant with a wasted wildshape (if he didn't drop his form he couldn't get to the BBEG), and killed the Ranger. He had nothing to fear from the Fighter because he could see that the Fighter couldn't get close without risking death.
In one round what is the ratio of adventurers damage output to their combined max health? I base my enemy minions equal to that ratio then throw a boss on top of it. I usually wait a couple rounds before revealing the boss. The boss is there to save the minions if they start getting wiped too fast. Timing the boss reveal is key to balancing fight. I often try to error on having too difficult of a foe. And then I favor the players creativity. They don't have to know exactly what the bosses HP is. Try to KO at least one of them. Then let one of their more exciting attacks succeed and Kill the boss. They're always left thinking it was a close battle and they couldn't have done it without their ingenuity.
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I don't want to punish them. But even when I e upped damage and/or hp ive had some of my groups just plow through everything.
I just want to make my encounters more fulfilling.
How do some of you handle this?
Occassional Dungeon Master.
In a simple sense the option would be to throw in "moar enemies!1!" but it depends on what sort of encounters you've been throwing at them so far and what the make up of the party is and how to counter their abilities without completely nullifying them and punishing them for working well together. It's about creating a fun different challenge and making it so the party aren't driving through everything with ease.
One idea is to play smart and find ways of making a menace. The animé/manga Goblin Slayer for example is built around making even the lowly Goblins feel like a threat. They play on their numbers and cunning and are often underestimated leading multiple parties through their naivety to find themselves outmatched and defeated. In D&D terms I would take this and use a fair amount of them and working like a pack, they're smart enough to know how magic users are dangerous so a group of them are going to mob those threats. I'd use the abilities they have like their nimble escape so that they are constantly moving, hiding and hard to pin down. They are going to set traps, there's a group goblins by a camp fire within a cave system, it seems to be a storeroom of some kind. As soon as they become aware of the party coming into the area, they light arrows on the camp fire and launch them at the nearest barrels to the entrance the party entered through, which contain oil and suddenly the party are caught by a fireball and in a bit of a sticky situation. The "oil barrel" idea essentially is built off the idea of finding ways to use the terrain and environment to find ways of making each encounter a bit different and mean they're constantly having to think about things and work out how to handle/use the environment as well as whatever creatures I'm throwing at them.
Manage rests as well in that respect. If they're in that cavern full of goblins and triggered a few of the traps the party should be drawing a lot of attention. They're coming from all directions, some of the avenues of escape are cut off and the Goblin Lord (borrowed statline, a huge brute like an ogre with boosted Int perhaps?) is heading their way. Even a higher level party is going to start to feel it in a war of attrition as their use of spell slots, rages, etc as well as hit points start to dwindle.
I'm largely off the head brain storming here, trying to come up with a scenario that creates an encounter/series of linked encounters to make the party work for it. Obviously I would pace it according to progress and what's happening, if the "fireball trap" room launches maximum fireball damage and leaves the party in danger of a TPK then I won't be throwing hordes of foes at them afterwards and the "Goblin Lord" is going to be in another location but they find a clue in a room just off the storeroom and can make their way to the nearest village to plan their future way of dealing with the goblin menace now they've cleared out that location.
Hope it's given you a couple of ideas on how to even take a simple enemy and build some potentially interesting and challenging encounters.
What do you mean by "encounters" and how are they steamrolling through them? I get the impression that you're talking about combat, even though encounters are not the same as encounters.
Here's some ideas for making combat more challenging ( not the same as more deadly ),
However, use all of this sparingly, and intelligently!
Pile all of this on at once, and you can suddenly find yourself with a TPK!
So. Let's consider a group of Orc skirmishers. The Party wanders into their local lair by accident. There's some fighters, but there are also women, children, and this is their home. So the Orcs are motivated to repel the Party.
Put them in a large well lit cave, have them use the "run up to the party and beat them with clubs" tactic - and they'll all die in 2-3 rounds - and the Players all yawn from boredom.
So let's put some of the Orcs in the cave, and some in adjacent chambers, joined by tunnels spaced around the main chamber. Now we've got multiple fronts for the Party to defend against. How does the main group get reinforced? Well, let's say the other groups are drawn to the combat noise in 2 rounds, but to keep things interesting let's give one of the Orcs in the main chamber a battle horn that he'll blow to summon them in one round, give the Party a DC ( 15? ) for a Perception check to notice him trying to do that, and see if they can't take him out before he does that to buy one round. Gives a little interest, a little battlefield adaptation to their actions, and something cool to talk about later if they pull it off.
OK - so, mixing up creatures. Let's give them some Goblin or Kobold archers to provide ranged support. And let's use the environment, and put in some rock ledges and tunnels high up in the cavern, that the archers can stay out of reach and pepper the party with arrows. Also the Kobolds can disappear down the tunnels, so they'll hit-and-run, and not stay around to get picked off by the Party.
Let's make it a geothermal cave, so we'll add some columns, and stalagmites, etc. to provide cover. And let's add a few bubbling hot mud pots. Creatures that hunker down next to one have a 1-in-6 chance of getting blorped with scalding mud for 1d4 fire damage. The Orcs and Kobolds know that, so they won't ever get close enough to the pots to suffer damage.
The Orcs don't know anything about the party, but they'll adapt intelligently ( for Orcs ) - they try and pin down the Paladin ( maybe that net attack ), the Orc Shaman may try and engage the spellcasters, etc.
The Orc skirmishers will fight pretty ferociously, adapt, reinforce where they need to, and will try and hold the line to defend their lair. If they can take a hostage and threaten the Party into backing off and leaving, they will.
As a fallback "failsafe", the Orc skirmishers will pull back into one of the caves ( where the non-combatant Orcs are cowering ), try and close a palisade barrier, while the local shaman tries to blast open a rough set stone wall in the main cavern ( they will conveniently always have such a spell on tap ) where they've walled up a hungry creature as a sort of doomsday weapon, hoping that it and the Party wipe each other out, while they cower behind the palisade.
I think that's much more interesting ;)
Have fun with it! :)
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
A quick and easy tactic I've used to make an encounter more difficult if it's being steamrolled is to employ backup/a second wave of enemies. Fighting attracts scavengers, other predators, or friends in the next room. Sometimes dice rolls can make an encounter trivial, but a second wave can add some extra tension if necessary. Chances are it won't totally turn the tide of battle but it can add a second layer to the RP if the party is trying to be stealthy or at least not alert more enemies. And even if the party is winning without issue, a second wave can make them wonder "How many more are there out there?" and add some tension to the battle.
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What about traps or environmental hazards, i.e. earthquakes, lava, explosions, magic explosions, more explosions, all the explosions. And, finally, kobolds with Molotov Cocktails!
You can add a slow-moving effect like flooding lava or something that has a time constraint, so the PCs feel forced to finish, and once they finish that, have, say a fire giant come out. A surprise attack once you finished, so no time to regain spell slots.
it's been a long time...
I dealt with this quite a bit in the first campaign I ever DM'd. Thankfully, everyone had fun plowing through the enemies so I had some freedom to learn and experiment. Had a few epic boss fights become a bit anti-climactic, but again, the players liked having that degree of power. What I like about a bunch of the ideas already presented is the focus on variety and pack tactics, and I'm definitely going to use a bunch of these ideas going into my next campaign.
Well how difficult have the encounters been so far, and what does 'steamrolling encounters' mean? Nobody went down? No characters died? Nobody took damage?
You can also adjust encounters as they happen by having additional 'waves' of enemies, or other unexpected things happening in the fight. This doesn't necessarily have to be something directly detrimental to the players either while still making the players re-think what they are going to do. An example of this could be an Earthquake, rain starting to come down heavily giving everyone partial cover, an avalanche, and explosion (from any number of things), a spell, a trap being triggered, the opposing monsters fleeing, etc.
Escort Quest!
Mouahahahahahaha.
For extra evilness, make the escorted character(s) suicidally stupid and/or curious.
Thank you all for the insight, I will give a few of these a try the next time I take a crack at DMing.
Yes by encounters I did, in fact mean combat :P
And when I say steamrolling an encounter, i mean blowing through it so fast it might as well have not happened. And I can understand how it would be fun for a while, to a degree. But I think of it like playing skyrim and you only ever face the 1-shottable bandits, eventually you'll get bored of it, you won't feel challenged and you won't feel fulfilled, atleast on the combat end.
Either way, Like I said, thank you all for the ideas. I don't want to punish my players but I do want to make their encounters feel more fulfilling and with these I think I might just be able to.
Occassional Dungeon Master.
I like the time pressure element. Picture the Party trying to fight their way back out of the hold of a ship, while the Pirates have them pinned down, and the ship is sinking!
I recall someone ( I believe it was MellieDM ) mentioning a meta-gaming tactic as well, where the DM just said "OK, in 4 rounds, something dramatic is going to happen", and let the Party's paranoia do the rest for the next couple of rounds of combat.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
Some necrotic/poisonous gas filling the area. Which makes the fighting area smaller. but by filling it, on the map, the gas does get closer to a few torches. Causing the area to get smaller to fight in with the chance everything will blow up in several rounds. Objective doesn't have to be to kill the insane guy, but could be to just capture him and let his flunkies die as the group runs away after extracting the guy. That scenario adds options.
I try to add such environmental combined with time constraints and an objective regularly.
Another thing is to add a riddle/puzzle in the mix. 2 sarcophagi open every other round. Two big heavy plated knightly skeletons get out and swing their great swords. After 5 rows happened it resets after 5 or so in-game minutes. But there is a riddle that basically boils down to praising the sun god or something. Which would fill the chamber with its holy light and purging the effect and stopping the spawning of enemies.
To echo what others have been saying, utilize the environment and the enemy's intelligence as best as you can. For example, I had my party (Druid, Ranger, Rogue, & Fighter) fight an intelligent Wizard - they confronted him in his room (I was running ToA, and without much spoilers its the "target" of chapter 4).
At this point, the Druid had wildshaped into a brown bear, the Fighter was shooting from afar (with a bow and arrow), and the ranger was also shooting from as far back as possible and backed into a corridor to try to be as safe as possible. The corridor itself was about 6ish feet high, & about 5ft wide. The Wizard seeing that the Ranger essentially separated him, took two turns to enact his plan. First and foremost, he cast Polymorph on the rogue as he's really the only one that could get in close without much risk (the fighter was super low on HP) plus the rogue is by far and large the most consistent DPS dealer of the party and had taken next to no damage. He ended up turning him into a Riding Horse - a large creature that isn't really that great at combat, and on the following turn, cast Misty Step to be 5ft in front of the Ranger, cutting him off from the party. The rogue couldn't get into the corridor because he's too big (as riding horses are large), the druid was already a large brown bear, and the Fighter couldn't get in close as he would've certainly died otherwise.
Needless to say, the Ranger died.
The point I'm making is that having intelligent enemies is a giant game changer (especially with favorable terrain); in two turns, my BBEG made the highest DPS dealer irrelevant, the druid irrelevant with a wasted wildshape (if he didn't drop his form he couldn't get to the BBEG), and killed the Ranger. He had nothing to fear from the Fighter because he could see that the Fighter couldn't get close without risking death.
In one round what is the ratio of adventurers damage output to their combined max health? I base my enemy minions equal to that ratio then throw a boss on top of it. I usually wait a couple rounds before revealing the boss. The boss is there to save the minions if they start getting wiped too fast. Timing the boss reveal is key to balancing fight.
I often try to error on having too difficult of a foe. And then I favor the players creativity. They don't have to know exactly what the bosses HP is. Try to KO at least one of them. Then let one of their more exciting attacks succeed and Kill the boss. They're always left thinking it was a close battle and they couldn't have done it without their ingenuity.