I'm not sure, but I feel the math is off when calculating a daily budget of encounters. It might be too easy with some parties. How do you truly know how much your party can handle, especially during end-game type sessions?
I just finished a second session of a quest where in one in-game day (well...more like 4 hours) my group had 4 encounters (this is the last mission for the whole nearly 2 year campaign, so end-game difficulty). This party of 4x LV12s and a LV12 sidekick managed to stay alive and conserve BARELY enough resources to complete 114,075 of the Max 57,500 converted daily budget XP. So nearly DOUBLE of what the calculator said. And they're LOVING how difficult and scary this has been.
They're attempting to get a much needed long rest in the dungeon, which is actually still very early in the day, in-game, but since they accomplished well past their daily budget, I'll let them rest, as long as they make the right kind of protective arrangements. I'll try to spook them just to maintain the tension and dread having to face whatever is next.
They still have the rest of the dungeon to explore, though. It's a module (Divine Contention - Ebondeath's Mausoleum) and as written, there is only 30,350 - 64,100 XP worth of stuff left (Death Knight, Skeletal Swarms, and Ebondeath), which is currently in-line with the Encounter Daily Budget formula. I feel like if I keep it this way, it'll be too easy and anti-climactic once they get to the big boss, which THEY think is a big scary Dracolich, but as written, Ebondeath is just a re-skinned CR4 Ghost.
I haven't really run parties of this level before, so I'm still learning how much they can handle (which is surprisingly a lot!). Should I just go ham and throw in a few extra things to bring it back up to nearly double of what they "should" be able to handle (since they've proven they definitely can!)? Has anyone else gone well past the max to keep things challenging?
At high levels, the xp math starts breaking down, because it assumes roughly linear increase in damage output and durability as level increases, and the actual progression in PC capabilities is generally faster than that, particularly if the game has more than minimal magic items.
The rules for Long Rest say, "A character can't benefit from more than one long rest in a 24-hour period, and a character must have at least 1 hit point at the start of the rest to gain its benefits."
So if they try to long rest early in the day then they will hanging around in a place for a long time - more than enough time for wandering monsters/guards/etc to come across them - which they will have to deal with before the long rest finishes (although they might qualify for the benefits of a short rest).
I've never used the XP system to try and balance encounters, since it is quite random. In fact I used milestone levelling instead of XP to make it easier to manage their progress through published modules.
Yes, they've attempted to do some short rests in room they fortified. I had the death knight breach their barriers, but they were holed up in a tiny hut. So yes, they'll have to wait a long long while in the room, with all kinds of spooky noises going on outside of it, until 24 hours has passed...not knowing WHAT will be next.
And we're doing milestone, too. So I never calculate XP after each encounter....it kind of creates a murderhobo party, anyway, and we have more fun with RP which is pretty ambiguous when it comes to earning XP for RP. So milestone is way easier. I've just never built encounters on my own, yet, because I'm afraid I might throw too much or too little at the party.....and after seeing how this calculator works, I think I'd always be throwing too little!
I guess I can see this. Magic items and even spells at higher level will definitely do more damage. And it'd be hard to know what kind of party you'll have at that point (a bunch of spellcasters or just some melee fighters, or some multiclassed PCs that have crazy builds).
Is there some sort of adjustment calculator? It'd be nice if you can take the Party's dndbeyond character builds to throw into the calculator, so it can see what kind of party it is, and what kinds of spells and attacks they have.
I'd hate to do trial and error, and just put stuff together and HOPE it doesn't TPK them, but I'm guessing that's how it'll have to be for now, until the calculator factors in higher level damage output.
I would say it's always best to put the PCs up against 4 Deadly encounters in a single adventuring day, if you can, and feel free to go wildly over the XP budget for a Deadly encounter. I don't bother with any encounter that's lower than deadly, it's generally just a bit of a waste of everyone's time since even Hard encounters are dealt with pretty easily.
Trust your own judgement, which you have plenty of having run this campaign all this way, and throw things that you think they probably can't handle and I expect they will. My players are 6 x level 10, and recently they easily handled a single CR22, and breezed past 7 x CR4's and a CR8 leader. The next big enemy they have to go up against will need around 600 hit points so that the fight should last around 5-6 turns.
Is there some sort of adjustment calculator? It'd be nice if you can take the Party's dndbeyond character builds to throw into the calculator, so it can see what kind of party it is, and what kinds of spells and attacks they have.
Other than experience with your party, not really. There's a logic behind the way 5e does CR and daily budget (I did some derivation here), but neither PCs nor monsters are sufficiently consistent to make it more than a crude approximation, and then there's monsters whose difficulty doesn't actually scale at all well with PC level, such as a banshee or intellect devourer.
The math and CR are never going to be able to account for playstyle and strategy. Two identical parties, playing differently, can have very different experiences. Balancing encounters for high level play is more trial and error than exact science.
Trying to clarify this part here, your party is trying to LR after ~4 hours of in-game time, inside the dungeon? Effectively after the first 4 rooms? Your party consists of 4-LVL 12 PCs and 1-LVL 12 Sidekick, and has an adjusted Daily Budget of 57.5K. If I read the adventure correctly, those first four encounters account for an adjusted 94.2K xp. The remaining three encounters come up to an adjusted 70.8K, again if I'm reading the adventure correctly and applying the appropriate monster per character and sidekick ratio.
I'm going to assume that all of the encounters happened linearly, one room after the next, with no dynamic intermingling of the encounters. So, 1 round after contact in room 2, the zombie from room 3 barrels into the fray. The next round the war priest from room 4 joins the party. And by the time the fracas has ended in room 2, the cultist in room 5 have completed their summoning and there is a bone devil waiting for the party behind the next door.
Thus far, the party has managed to make it about half-way through the mausoleum which, IMHO, isn't that large to begin with. I would suggest that the party could have a very difficult time trying to rest inside said mausoleum. Especially if they didn't find and secure both secret passages. At the point that the party is at, low on resources, potentially injured and trying to make a safe haven in another entity's home for around 20 hours. I would fully expect the owner to have something to say about that. Also of note, did the party kill the green dragon Claugiyliamatar, is it still possessed by Ebondeath, or have they not done this event yet? If still possesssed by Ebondeath, they get to face the green dragon again, and then Ebondeath, who will try to possess PCs to turn them against each other before fighting to the death. If you still feel that Ebondeath fails to pose a significant threat, I might suggest meshing the statblock of a ghost dragon, or any other dragon really, in with the statblock of Ebondeath. Use sparingly.
TL;DR: There's plenty of room left to knock off a PC. Your party has blown through its resources for an entire day in 4 encounters and they still have 4-5 more to go. I'm uncertain that attempting a long rest inside enemy territory is going to work out well for the party. I would think that the Death Knight or the skeleton swarms would be deployed against the interlopers as a counter offensive to drive them from the area. Lastly, a DC 20 Charisma Save vs. Possession is no laughing matter, especially if it's the party barbarian that wiffs that roll.
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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
The CR system depends on how much you allow multi-classing, ASI/Feats and magic item dole out. If you follow what Xanatars wrote for magic items (which includes potions), well its not for most people. Plus you have to think about what you are actually awarding in the first place. Tossing in a flame tongue to a Fighter for instance adds an extra 2d6 fire damage to their attacks, which can turn them into ginsu knives, just add haste.
If your party has a lot of optimancers, you are going to up the difficulty of the encounters to keep people interested. When I go by the encounter calculator, at the end of the day, I'll have maybe one or two players drop for 2nd tier, at 3rd tier and above its about as good as a soup sandwich.
I honestly don't really get why ANY DM would follow the XP way of leveling up, it just seems utterly stupid to me. If you're in control of the story... just level them when you find it suitable. Like, I make sure my players need WEEKS of gaming before they get another level past lv 10, cuz it's ridicouless if a player goes from lv 1-demigod level in under an actual in game year....
I honestly don't really get why ANY DM would follow the XP way of leveling up, it just seems utterly stupid to me.
It's Old School (though the xp charts in old school had way sharper curves in than 5e, basically doubling exp required every level for the first 8-10 levels). 5e is the only edition where killing orcs is actually a practical method of gaining experience for mid to high levels.
Trying to clarify this part here, your party is trying to LR after ~4 hours of in-game time, inside the dungeon? Effectively after the first 4 rooms? Your party consists of 4-LVL 12 PCs and 1-LVL 12 Sidekick, and has an adjusted Daily Budget of 57.5K. If I read the adventure correctly, those first four encounters account for an adjusted 94.2K xp. The remaining three encounters come up to an adjusted 70.8K, again if I'm reading the adventure correctly and applying the appropriate monster per character and sidekick ratio.
I'm going to assume that all of the encounters happened linearly, one room after the next, with no dynamic intermingling of the encounters. So, 1 round after contact in room 2, the zombie from room 3 barrels into the fray. The next round the war priest from room 4 joins the party. And by the time the fracas has ended in room 2, the cultist in room 5 have completed their summoning and there is a bone devil waiting for the party behind the next door.
Thus far, the party has managed to make it about half-way through the mausoleum which, IMHO, isn't that large to begin with. I would suggest that the party could have a very difficult time trying to rest inside said mausoleum. Especially if they didn't find and secure both secret passages. At the point that the party is at, low on resources, potentially injured and trying to make a safe haven in another entity's home for around 20 hours. I would fully expect the owner to have something to say about that. Also of note, did the party kill the green dragon Claugiyliamatar, is it still possessed by Ebondeath, or have they not done this event yet? If still possesssed by Ebondeath, they get to face the green dragon again, and then Ebondeath, who will try to possess PCs to turn them against each other before fighting to the death. If you still feel that Ebondeath fails to pose a significant threat, I might suggest meshing the statblock of a ghost dragon, or any other dragon really, in with the statblock of Ebondeath. Use sparingly.
TL;DR: There's plenty of room left to knock off a PC. Your party has blown through its resources for an entire day in 4 encounters and they still have 4-5 more to go. I'm uncertain that attempting a long rest inside enemy territory is going to work out well for the party. I would think that the Death Knight or the skeleton swarms would be deployed against the interlopers as a counter offensive to drive them from the area. Lastly, a DC 20 Charisma Save vs. Possession is no laughing matter, especially if it's the party barbarian that wiffs that roll.
Story wise, I had to have Ularan appear earlier, just outside the Mausoleum entrance. He had previously stolen their skeletal horse friend (so I had to wrap that story thread up). The sorcerer in the group was also trying to multi-class with Warlock (Ebondeath as the Patron), because she was secretly helping the Myrkul cult with their mission (she didn't know the details or end goal of the mission, though, was just assigned certain tasks in order to please Ebondeath to gain powers). After Ebondeath successfully got the ruinstone (his spirit split from the Green Dragon) he rewarded her with a taste of warlock magic. The party caught on and the jig was up. They convinced her to stop following Myrkul & Ebondeath, Ebondeath was upset, so he sent Ularan out to punish her. So there was an encounter right before and on the same day they got to the Mausoleum. He was accompanied by 3 basic skeletons and 3 CR9 Deathwisps (ToB), which I think tipped the scales to make the long rest situation as bit more complex. Not to mention they're using the tiny hut to protect themselves within Ularan's room. The Death Knight knows they're there, and in the bubble, but how do you get past that with a couterspell-happy sorcerer? I also don't want to TPK them, which, would probably happen if the Death Knight returns with some backup to pop the bubble.
Unfortunately, I think the party has put themselves in a very untenable position. You're in the right mindset in not *wanting* a TPK, but you're also at the realisation that the inhabitants might not be willing to allow them to coexist in their space. The only suggestion I can offer at this point is to remain neutral in your adjudication, and play the rest of the dungeon as close to your interpretation of its intended purpose and personality. Your players chose to put their characters into harms way. Hopefully armed with the knowledge that one or more could be killed. If the foreshadowing were there to indicate that "this place be dangerous", then let it be as dangerous as indicated.
If you have a counterspell happy sorcerer that is in need of a long rest, you just need to keep them awake. Same as anything else that needs a long rest. Don't let it sleep. Also, the Sorc can't counterspell from within the hut. Spells cannot pass through the dome. Dispel on one side of the barrier cannot be effected by counterspell from the other side.
At the end of all of this, your party bit off more than they could chew, and the daily budget is the barometer that indicated this first. They are out of gas, but not out of the fight. Back is not the PCs favorite direction, but it could be the smart one. If you don't want to kill a PC, or all of them, you are almost down to a binary decision: convince the players to have the PCs run while they can (they won't feel like this is fair and will push back at it with everything they have), or make sure that everyone is cool with the concept of PC death, and play the monsters like you think they would react to this group of interlopers.
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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
Unfortunately, I think the party has put themselves in a very untenable position. You're in the right mindset in not *wanting* a TPK, but you're also at the realisation that the inhabitants might not be willing to allow them to coexist in their space. The only suggestion I can offer at this point is to remain neutral in your adjudication, and play the rest of the dungeon as close to your interpretation of its intended purpose and personality. Your players chose to put their characters into harms way. Hopefully armed with the knowledge that one or more could be killed. If the foreshadowing were there to indicate that "this place be dangerous", then let it be as dangerous as indicated.
If you have a counterspell happy sorcerer that is in need of a long rest, you just need to keep them awake. Same as anything else that needs a long rest. Don't let it sleep. Also, the Sorc can't counterspell from within the hut. Spells cannot pass through the dome. Dispel on one side of the barrier cannot be effected by counterspell from the other side.
At the end of all of this, your party bit off more than they could chew, and the daily budget is the barometer that indicated this first. They are out of gas, but not out of the fight. Back is not the PCs favorite direction, but it could be the smart one. If you don't want to kill a PC, or all of them, you are almost down to a binary decision: convince the players to have the PCs run while they can (they won't feel like this is fair and will push back at it with everything they have), or make sure that everyone is cool with the concept of PC death, and play the monsters like you think they would react to this group of interlopers.
Speaking of Counterspelling or casting spells through the hut....they seem to think if they stick their casting hand or top half of their body outside the hut, they can cast a spell. But this might require movement, which can't be done as a reaction? I don't know how to rule that for sure.
Unfortunately, I think the party has put themselves in a very untenable position. You're in the right mindset in not *wanting* a TPK, but you're also at the realisation that the inhabitants might not be willing to allow them to coexist in their space. The only suggestion I can offer at this point is to remain neutral in your adjudication, and play the rest of the dungeon as close to your interpretation of its intended purpose and personality. Your players chose to put their characters into harms way. Hopefully armed with the knowledge that one or more could be killed. If the foreshadowing were there to indicate that "this place be dangerous", then let it be as dangerous as indicated.
If you have a counterspell happy sorcerer that is in need of a long rest, you just need to keep them awake. Same as anything else that needs a long rest. Don't let it sleep. Also, the Sorc can't counterspell from within the hut. Spells cannot pass through the dome. Dispel on one side of the barrier cannot be effected by counterspell from the other side.
At the end of all of this, your party bit off more than they could chew, and the daily budget is the barometer that indicated this first. They are out of gas, but not out of the fight. Back is not the PCs favorite direction, but it could be the smart one. If you don't want to kill a PC, or all of them, you are almost down to a binary decision: convince the players to have the PCs run while they can (they won't feel like this is fair and will push back at it with everything they have), or make sure that everyone is cool with the concept of PC death, and play the monsters like you think they would react to this group of interlopers.
Speaking of Counterspelling or casting spells through the hut....they seem to think if they stick their casting hand or top half of their body outside the hut, they can cast a spell. But this might require movement, which can't be done as a reaction? I don't know how to rule that for sure.
If they want to try that, then anything outside will be readying actions to strike as soon as something gets stuck out of the dome.
Of course, if they have only their hand outside of the dome, then the magic can't get from the caster's mouth to the caster's finger, because the verbal parts can't pass through the dome. Or for pure somatic spells, how is the magic getting from the caster's mind to those fingertips?
Unfortunately, I think the party has put themselves in a very untenable position. You're in the right mindset in not *wanting* a TPK, but you're also at the realisation that the inhabitants might not be willing to allow them to coexist in their space. The only suggestion I can offer at this point is to remain neutral in your adjudication, and play the rest of the dungeon as close to your interpretation of its intended purpose and personality. Your players chose to put their characters into harms way. Hopefully armed with the knowledge that one or more could be killed. If the foreshadowing were there to indicate that "this place be dangerous", then let it be as dangerous as indicated.
If you have a counterspell happy sorcerer that is in need of a long rest, you just need to keep them awake. Same as anything else that needs a long rest. Don't let it sleep. Also, the Sorc can't counterspell from within the hut. Spells cannot pass through the dome. Dispel on one side of the barrier cannot be effected by counterspell from the other side.
At the end of all of this, your party bit off more than they could chew, and the daily budget is the barometer that indicated this first. They are out of gas, but not out of the fight. Back is not the PCs favorite direction, but it could be the smart one. If you don't want to kill a PC, or all of them, you are almost down to a binary decision: convince the players to have the PCs run while they can (they won't feel like this is fair and will push back at it with everything they have), or make sure that everyone is cool with the concept of PC death, and play the monsters like you think they would react to this group of interlopers.
Speaking of Counterspelling or casting spells through the hut....they seem to think if they stick their casting hand or top half of their body outside the hut, they can cast a spell. But this might require movement, which can't be done as a reaction? I don't know how to rule that for sure.
If they want to try that, then anything outside will be readying actions to strike as soon as something gets stuck out of the dome.
Of course, if they have only their hand outside of the dome, then the magic can't get from the caster's mouth to the caster's finger, because the verbal parts can't pass through the dome. Or for pure somatic spells, how is the magic getting from the caster's mind to those fingertips?
How does subtle casting or casting psionic spells (basically subtle casting if sorcery points were used to cast the spell) work from within the dome?
Speaking of Counterspelling or casting spells through the hut....they seem to think if they stick their casting hand or top half of their body outside the hut, they can cast a spell. But this might require movement, which can't be done as a reaction? I don't know how to rule that for sure.
You can use ready to move as a reaction, but since it consumes your reaction you won't be counterspelling. There aren't options that won't leave them vulnerable to being attacked.
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At high levels, the xp math starts breaking down, because it assumes roughly linear increase in damage output and durability as level increases, and the actual progression in PC capabilities is generally faster than that, particularly if the game has more than minimal magic items.
The rules for Long Rest say, "A character can't benefit from more than one long rest in a 24-hour period, and a character must have at least 1 hit point at the start of the rest to gain its benefits."
So if they try to long rest early in the day then they will hanging around in a place for a long time - more than enough time for wandering monsters/guards/etc to come across them - which they will have to deal with before the long rest finishes (although they might qualify for the benefits of a short rest).
I've never used the XP system to try and balance encounters, since it is quite random. In fact I used milestone levelling instead of XP to make it easier to manage their progress through published modules.
Yes, they've attempted to do some short rests in room they fortified. I had the death knight breach their barriers, but they were holed up in a tiny hut. So yes, they'll have to wait a long long while in the room, with all kinds of spooky noises going on outside of it, until 24 hours has passed...not knowing WHAT will be next.
And we're doing milestone, too. So I never calculate XP after each encounter....it kind of creates a murderhobo party, anyway, and we have more fun with RP which is pretty ambiguous when it comes to earning XP for RP. So milestone is way easier. I've just never built encounters on my own, yet, because I'm afraid I might throw too much or too little at the party.....and after seeing how this calculator works, I think I'd always be throwing too little!
I guess I can see this. Magic items and even spells at higher level will definitely do more damage. And it'd be hard to know what kind of party you'll have at that point (a bunch of spellcasters or just some melee fighters, or some multiclassed PCs that have crazy builds).
Is there some sort of adjustment calculator? It'd be nice if you can take the Party's dndbeyond character builds to throw into the calculator, so it can see what kind of party it is, and what kinds of spells and attacks they have.
I'd hate to do trial and error, and just put stuff together and HOPE it doesn't TPK them, but I'm guessing that's how it'll have to be for now, until the calculator factors in higher level damage output.
I would say it's always best to put the PCs up against 4 Deadly encounters in a single adventuring day, if you can, and feel free to go wildly over the XP budget for a Deadly encounter. I don't bother with any encounter that's lower than deadly, it's generally just a bit of a waste of everyone's time since even Hard encounters are dealt with pretty easily.
Trust your own judgement, which you have plenty of having run this campaign all this way, and throw things that you think they probably can't handle and I expect they will. My players are 6 x level 10, and recently they easily handled a single CR22, and breezed past 7 x CR4's and a CR8 leader. The next big enemy they have to go up against will need around 600 hit points so that the fight should last around 5-6 turns.
Other than experience with your party, not really. There's a logic behind the way 5e does CR and daily budget (I did some derivation here), but neither PCs nor monsters are sufficiently consistent to make it more than a crude approximation, and then there's monsters whose difficulty doesn't actually scale at all well with PC level, such as a banshee or intellect devourer.
The math and CR are never going to be able to account for playstyle and strategy. Two identical parties, playing differently, can have very different experiences. Balancing encounters for high level play is more trial and error than exact science.
I'm going to assume that all of the encounters happened linearly, one room after the next, with no dynamic intermingling of the encounters. So, 1 round after contact in room 2, the zombie from room 3 barrels into the fray. The next round the war priest from room 4 joins the party. And by the time the fracas has ended in room 2, the cultist in room 5 have completed their summoning and there is a bone devil waiting for the party behind the next door.
Thus far, the party has managed to make it about half-way through the mausoleum which, IMHO, isn't that large to begin with. I would suggest that the party could have a very difficult time trying to rest inside said mausoleum. Especially if they didn't find and secure both secret passages. At the point that the party is at, low on resources, potentially injured and trying to make a safe haven in another entity's home for around 20 hours. I would fully expect the owner to have something to say about that. Also of note, did the party kill the green dragon Claugiyliamatar, is it still possessed by Ebondeath, or have they not done this event yet? If still possesssed by Ebondeath, they get to face the green dragon again, and then Ebondeath, who will try to possess PCs to turn them against each other before fighting to the death. If you still feel that Ebondeath fails to pose a significant threat, I might suggest meshing the statblock of a ghost dragon, or any other dragon really, in with the statblock of Ebondeath. Use sparingly.
TL;DR: There's plenty of room left to knock off a PC. Your party has blown through its resources for an entire day in 4 encounters and they still have 4-5 more to go. I'm uncertain that attempting a long rest inside enemy territory is going to work out well for the party. I would think that the Death Knight or the skeleton swarms would be deployed against the interlopers as a counter offensive to drive them from the area. Lastly, a DC 20 Charisma Save vs. Possession is no laughing matter, especially if it's the party barbarian that wiffs that roll.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
The CR system depends on how much you allow multi-classing, ASI/Feats and magic item dole out. If you follow what Xanatars wrote for magic items (which includes potions), well its not for most people. Plus you have to think about what you are actually awarding in the first place. Tossing in a flame tongue to a Fighter for instance adds an extra 2d6 fire damage to their attacks, which can turn them into ginsu knives, just add haste.
If your party has a lot of optimancers, you are going to up the difficulty of the encounters to keep people interested. When I go by the encounter calculator, at the end of the day, I'll have maybe one or two players drop for 2nd tier, at 3rd tier and above its about as good as a soup sandwich.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/xgte/awarding-magic-items
I honestly don't really get why ANY DM would follow the XP way of leveling up, it just seems utterly stupid to me. If you're in control of the story... just level them when you find it suitable. Like, I make sure my players need WEEKS of gaming before they get another level past lv 10, cuz it's ridicouless if a player goes from lv 1-demigod level in under an actual in game year....
It's Old School (though the xp charts in old school had way sharper curves in than 5e, basically doubling exp required every level for the first 8-10 levels). 5e is the only edition where killing orcs is actually a practical method of gaining experience for mid to high levels.
Story wise, I had to have Ularan appear earlier, just outside the Mausoleum entrance. He had previously stolen their skeletal horse friend (so I had to wrap that story thread up). The sorcerer in the group was also trying to multi-class with Warlock (Ebondeath as the Patron), because she was secretly helping the Myrkul cult with their mission (she didn't know the details or end goal of the mission, though, was just assigned certain tasks in order to please Ebondeath to gain powers). After Ebondeath successfully got the ruinstone (his spirit split from the Green Dragon) he rewarded her with a taste of warlock magic. The party caught on and the jig was up. They convinced her to stop following Myrkul & Ebondeath, Ebondeath was upset, so he sent Ularan out to punish her. So there was an encounter right before and on the same day they got to the Mausoleum. He was accompanied by 3 basic skeletons and 3 CR9 Deathwisps (ToB), which I think tipped the scales to make the long rest situation as bit more complex. Not to mention they're using the tiny hut to protect themselves within Ularan's room. The Death Knight knows they're there, and in the bubble, but how do you get past that with a couterspell-happy sorcerer? I also don't want to TPK them, which, would probably happen if the Death Knight returns with some backup to pop the bubble.
Unfortunately, I think the party has put themselves in a very untenable position. You're in the right mindset in not *wanting* a TPK, but you're also at the realisation that the inhabitants might not be willing to allow them to coexist in their space. The only suggestion I can offer at this point is to remain neutral in your adjudication, and play the rest of the dungeon as close to your interpretation of its intended purpose and personality. Your players chose to put their characters into harms way. Hopefully armed with the knowledge that one or more could be killed. If the foreshadowing were there to indicate that "this place be dangerous", then let it be as dangerous as indicated.
If you have a counterspell happy sorcerer that is in need of a long rest, you just need to keep them awake. Same as anything else that needs a long rest. Don't let it sleep. Also, the Sorc can't counterspell from within the hut. Spells cannot pass through the dome. Dispel on one side of the barrier cannot be effected by counterspell from the other side.
At the end of all of this, your party bit off more than they could chew, and the daily budget is the barometer that indicated this first. They are out of gas, but not out of the fight. Back is not the PCs favorite direction, but it could be the smart one. If you don't want to kill a PC, or all of them, you are almost down to a binary decision: convince the players to have the PCs run while they can (they won't feel like this is fair and will push back at it with everything they have), or make sure that everyone is cool with the concept of PC death, and play the monsters like you think they would react to this group of interlopers.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
Speaking of Counterspelling or casting spells through the hut....they seem to think if they stick their casting hand or top half of their body outside the hut, they can cast a spell. But this might require movement, which can't be done as a reaction? I don't know how to rule that for sure.
If they want to try that, then anything outside will be readying actions to strike as soon as something gets stuck out of the dome.
Of course, if they have only their hand outside of the dome, then the magic can't get from the caster's mouth to the caster's finger, because the verbal parts can't pass through the dome. Or for pure somatic spells, how is the magic getting from the caster's mind to those fingertips?
How does subtle casting or casting psionic spells (basically subtle casting if sorcery points were used to cast the spell) work from within the dome?
You can use ready to move as a reaction, but since it consumes your reaction you won't be counterspelling. There aren't options that won't leave them vulnerable to being attacked.