In lost lines of Phandelver the party come across a cave system, its small consisting of several interlinked caves with a number of encounters terms in them, 3 wolves, a number of goblins, a bug bear.
Now taken in isolation each of these encounters can be relatively straight forward for a party. But it is also possible that enemies warn other enemies and the groups combine.
So how would you as a DM set the CR for this, would you treat each area in isolation determine the difficulty one at a time, take the whole system in its entirety and work out a CR for the whole, knowing that if it comes in high that’s ok because in reality the party probably won’t fight it all in one go, or something else?
Traditionally I don’t use the CR tables provided, I let my experience and just a gut feel help me decide things and generally it works out well, but I just got to thinking that this example is one reason why CR seems to be a bad way to estimate threat, unless you have very distinct rooms the moment you have all sorts of possibilities it becomes harder and harder to calculate the CR of a system.
If the PCs can, with ordinary caution, deal with the encounters separately, treat as two separate encounters and just make a note "this could go south if the PCs make mistakes".
If the encounters are separated enough that they would be separate fights, but someone will react before the PCs can finish a short rest, treat as separate encounters but remember that more than about a third of the daily budget before resting may be exceptionally hard.
If the encounters have a high probability of chaining, but it will take multiple rounds for reinforcements to arrive (so the first group is probably beaten by the time the second arrives), just add their xp together.
If the encounters have a high probability of combining (i.e. you have to deal with them both at the same time), a decent rule of thumb is to double the adjusted xp value of the weaker group(s). This doesn't match the DMG exactly, but it's close enough.
Another log on this is that sometimes the dungeon can work against you as the DM. Example:
You've got 4 rooms worth of goblins in a dungeon. The party decides to go full Leroy on the first encounter and as is logical goblins scatter to warn the others. Pretty soon you've got 4 "encounters" of goblins converging on the party. But here's the good news:
There just isn't room for 5 PC's and 30 goblins in the space. Or if there is, there isn't room for more than 4 to get into combat positions around the one fighter without opening themselves to the rogue. Plus there's travel and prep time for the goblins as they discuss charging in vs setting a trap. You may have a set of chained encounters but you don't have to force the PC's through all of them at once.
Heck even trying to take a short rest could trigger the party go "wait... why's it so quiet all of a sudden? That wasn't all of them was it?"
Do not do this, if they are the level recommended for this cave.
Goblins can kill low level players much easier than other monsters for that CR because of their high AC. The start of lost mines has a reputation for killing players, especially Klarg the bugbear.
That cave specifically does say the running water drowns out sounds, partially because having more goblins hearing battle and piling on to a fight can be deadly.
If you do want to do this in some way, have goblin run away from a hopeless fight to warn others that come as they are finish off the last of the goblins that remained. If you just add bodies to an encounter the action economy swings drastically in favor of the monsters and just a few bad rolls vs high AC monsters can kill your players.
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In lost lines of Phandelver the party come across a cave system, its small consisting of several interlinked caves with a number of encounters terms in them, 3 wolves, a number of goblins, a bug bear.
Now taken in isolation each of these encounters can be relatively straight forward for a party. But it is also possible that enemies warn other enemies and the groups combine.
So how would you as a DM set the CR for this, would you treat each area in isolation determine the difficulty one at a time, take the whole system in its entirety and work out a CR for the whole, knowing that if it comes in high that’s ok because in reality the party probably won’t fight it all in one go, or something else?
Traditionally I don’t use the CR tables provided, I let my experience and just a gut feel help me decide things and generally it works out well, but I just got to thinking that this example is one reason why CR seems to be a bad way to estimate threat, unless you have very distinct rooms the moment you have all sorts of possibilities it becomes harder and harder to calculate the CR of a system.
If the PCs can, with ordinary caution, deal with the encounters separately, treat as two separate encounters and just make a note "this could go south if the PCs make mistakes".
If the encounters are separated enough that they would be separate fights, but someone will react before the PCs can finish a short rest, treat as separate encounters but remember that more than about a third of the daily budget before resting may be exceptionally hard.
If the encounters have a high probability of chaining, but it will take multiple rounds for reinforcements to arrive (so the first group is probably beaten by the time the second arrives), just add their xp together.
If the encounters have a high probability of combining (i.e. you have to deal with them both at the same time), a decent rule of thumb is to double the adjusted xp value of the weaker group(s). This doesn't match the DMG exactly, but it's close enough.
Another log on this is that sometimes the dungeon can work against you as the DM. Example:
You've got 4 rooms worth of goblins in a dungeon. The party decides to go full Leroy on the first encounter and as is logical goblins scatter to warn the others. Pretty soon you've got 4 "encounters" of goblins converging on the party. But here's the good news:
There just isn't room for 5 PC's and 30 goblins in the space. Or if there is, there isn't room for more than 4 to get into combat positions around the one fighter without opening themselves to the rogue. Plus there's travel and prep time for the goblins as they discuss charging in vs setting a trap. You may have a set of chained encounters but you don't have to force the PC's through all of them at once.
Heck even trying to take a short rest could trigger the party go "wait... why's it so quiet all of a sudden? That wasn't all of them was it?"
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Do not do this, if they are the level recommended for this cave.
Goblins can kill low level players much easier than other monsters for that CR because of their high AC. The start of lost mines has a reputation for killing players, especially Klarg the bugbear.
That cave specifically does say the running water drowns out sounds, partially because having more goblins hearing battle and piling on to a fight can be deadly.
If you do want to do this in some way, have goblin run away from a hopeless fight to warn others that come as they are finish off the last of the goblins that remained. If you just add bodies to an encounter the action economy swings drastically in favor of the monsters and just a few bad rolls vs high AC monsters can kill your players.