During quarantine, my group has been playing DnD a lot. A lot, a lot. And though early on the fighting was fun and challenging, these days (as the DM) I find myself having difficulty making encounters where the creature CR makes it fun. All five players are lvl 12-14 and without just simply throwing a high volume of enemies at them (that has been the only way to challenge them recently) I am looking for other ways to make fights more difficult. Please advise.
There are lots of ways to keep the fights challenging. Use the terrain to your advantage, use darkness, buff up the enemy mob's abilities. Use the enemies intelligently - make plans, strategise, target the weakest. Don't just go for hitting their ac, use saves and target their weak areas. That said, you are in the zone where most games fizzle out. Few go much further than 15 unless they start high level and the whole aim is to play end game stuff.
You need to have battles that have either a bunch of minions and one "boss" with Legendary Actions and/or Lair Actions, or need to have 3+ "bosses" of equal power. Also, you can use the environment to your favor to force the PCs to split up or force them to take damage if they want to attack their opponent(s). Another thing that can impact how well they do is how often they take rests. On average, a player should take one long rest and two short rests in a day, assuming that they have 5-6 combat encounters of least medium difficulty.
All stars fade. Some stars forever fall. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Homebrew (Mostly Outdated):Magic Items,Monsters,Spells,Subclasses ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If there was no light, people wouldn't fear the dark.
My technique is to insert relatively few combat encounters per long rest much of the time and then hit ‘em with a meat grinder day where every encounter is Deadly+.
Hitting that ridiculous benchmark of 6-8 encounters per day is simply impractical at best, if not outright infeasible most days. So I could maybe do a fraction of the number of combat encounters that day and it would just end up taking a bunch of time, and not actually achieve the intended goal of depleting the PC’s resources to any real degree. There may be a combat encounter or two those days, but they are in no way intended to be any real challenge since I know the party will be practically fresh and able to go nova. So those encounters I plan more to bolster verisimilitude in the world, or to further one or more of the plots I am developing.* I then just plan the rest of the encounters for that adventuring day to be primarily social, exploratory, or mystery and puzzle solving. They still have to work for it, just not with mayhem.
*
I always do my best to have B and C plots floating about in addition to the A plot. I find it to be more realistic, give the players more agency in what goals they set for themselves, and it gives me more options to help make sure that my players can’t jam me up with no way to progress things. If there’s one thing upon which every DM can count, it’s that the players will inevitably throw all of the DM’s plans right out the window at any possible moment, so I like having options available.
When I know that I’ma have a good opportunity for some bloodshed that will actually challenge the party, I hit ‘em with everything I can. By the 4th or 5th Deadly+ encounter in a single advertising day, the players most definitely feel challenged. (If I did it right, they are worrying about a potential TPK one encounter earlier, and then I still hit ‘em with the last one just to up the stakes again.) When the day finally ends, the players feel like they went through the ringer right alongside their characters. I cannot even begin to extols the sheer, unadulterated pleasure I derive from watching the actual people at my table collapse back in their chairs with a mixture of relief and exhaustion when they finally hear the words “eventually you all wake up, the evening passed without incident, you can now all gain the benefits of a Long Rest.” (I know that sounds a little sadistic, but that’s only because it is.)
During quarantine, my group has been playing DnD a lot. A lot, a lot. And though early on the fighting was fun and challenging, these days (as the DM) I find myself having difficulty making encounters where the creature CR makes it fun. All five players are lvl 12-14 and without just simply throwing a high volume of enemies at them (that has been the only way to challenge them recently) I am looking for other ways to make fights more difficult. Please advise.
There are lots of ways to keep the fights challenging. Use the terrain to your advantage, use darkness, buff up the enemy mob's abilities. Use the enemies intelligently - make plans, strategise, target the weakest. Don't just go for hitting their ac, use saves and target their weak areas. That said, you are in the zone where most games fizzle out. Few go much further than 15 unless they start high level and the whole aim is to play end game stuff.
You need to have battles that have either a bunch of minions and one "boss" with Legendary Actions and/or Lair Actions, or need to have 3+ "bosses" of equal power. Also, you can use the environment to your favor to force the PCs to split up or force them to take damage if they want to attack their opponent(s). Another thing that can impact how well they do is how often they take rests. On average, a player should take one long rest and two short rests in a day, assuming that they have 5-6 combat encounters of least medium difficulty.
All stars fade. Some stars forever fall.
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Homebrew (Mostly Outdated): Magic Items, Monsters, Spells, Subclasses
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If there was no light, people wouldn't fear the dark.
Much appreciated. I have not had the opportunity to DM high lvl campaigns before, so I am grateful for your input!
My technique is to insert relatively few combat encounters per long rest much of the time and then hit ‘em with a meat grinder day where every encounter is Deadly+.
Hitting that ridiculous benchmark of 6-8 encounters per day is simply impractical at best, if not outright infeasible most days. So I could maybe do a fraction of the number of combat encounters that day and it would just end up taking a bunch of time, and not actually achieve the intended goal of depleting the PC’s resources to any real degree. There may be a combat encounter or two those days, but they are in no way intended to be any real challenge since I know the party will be practically fresh and able to go nova. So those encounters I plan more to bolster verisimilitude in the world, or to further one or more of the plots I am developing.* I then just plan the rest of the encounters for that adventuring day to be primarily social, exploratory, or mystery and puzzle solving. They still have to work for it, just not with mayhem.
*
I always do my best to have B and C plots floating about in addition to the A plot. I find it to be more realistic, give the players more agency in what goals they set for themselves, and it gives me more options to help make sure that my players can’t jam me up with no way to progress things. If there’s one thing upon which every DM can count, it’s that the players will inevitably throw all of the DM’s plans right out the window at any possible moment, so I like having options available.
When I know that I’ma have a good opportunity for some bloodshed that will actually challenge the party, I hit ‘em with everything I can. By the 4th or 5th Deadly+ encounter in a single advertising day, the players most definitely feel challenged. (If I did it right, they are worrying about a potential TPK one encounter earlier, and then I still hit ‘em with the last one just to up the stakes again.) When the day finally ends, the players feel like they went through the ringer right alongside their characters. I cannot even begin to extols the sheer, unadulterated pleasure I derive from watching the actual people at my table collapse back in their chairs with a mixture of relief and exhaustion when they finally hear the words “eventually you all wake up, the evening passed without incident, you can now all gain the benefits of a Long Rest.” (I know that sounds a little sadistic, but that’s only because it is.)
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