I know this is a question that has been asked hundreds of times, but does anyone know of a way to give NPCs a challenge rating so they can be used in a fight? My party is coming up on an encounter with the two BBEGs they've been hunting for the past couple of sessions, but I'm not sure how to make it balanced.
The two bad guys are a warforged sorcerer and an aarakocra fighter, and my party is made up of five level five PCs. I definitely want it to be a difficult fight, and I've tried using the DMG's instructions, but I haven't had any luck. If anyone has any tips or sites they know that can help, it would be greatly appreciated.
Creating a monster stat block is in chapter 9 of the DMG. I just did this yesterday actually for shopkeeper my players keep robbing. Just use hp vs ac and damage vs ummm.... Well it's in chapter 9... Lol. For use on this specific medium I would search "creating a monster stat block" But just in general a PC is half their level in cr.
I'm afraid I don't know any specific sites or tools but here are some general things to keep in mind:
So the biggest thing that pushes thing towards the player advantage is the number of actions they can take. Right now you have 5 players vs. 2 enemies. Which means that the players have more than twice the number of attacks and reactions per round. There's a couple ways to fix that, one is to have some henchmen/minions around to help out in the battle. Or if the battle is going to be on the NPCs home turf there could be some sort of lair actions to help even the odds. Or if you just want it to be between the 2 NPCs and the players, no helpers give them legendary reactions and resistances.
It's good to remember that at level 5, many of your PCs are going to have multiple attacks on their turn, so it's going to be easy for them to wail on your NPCs. I would also maybe look into giving the sorcerer NPC some good crowd control spells.
I know this is a question that has been asked hundreds of times, but does anyone know of a way to give NPCs a challenge rating so they can be used in a fight? My party is coming up on an encounter with the two BBEGs they've been hunting for the past couple of sessions, but I'm not sure how to make it balanced.
Well, it's not that important to actually have a challenge rating. In general PC builds aren't very good for bosses because they tend to be total glass cannons, and it's particularly bad for spellcasters. Let's say the sorcerer is level 9, white draconic bloodline, built as a PC, with 14 Dex, 14 Con, 20 Cha. He'd have AC 15 and 65 hp, so he dies in one round if the PCs focus fire him. On the other hand, if he gets a turn, that's a quickened empowered Cone of Cold which averages around 49 damage at DC 17, followed by a frostbite for 12 damage at DC 17, which could easily wipe the party.
I homebrewed a PC into a monster and then used the encounter builder. You can play test it by running the encounter without your players. If it's not as bad as you want it to be add some low cr humanoids like an acolyte or drow who is a follower to make it more interesting. And, as always, making the terrain difficult or changing the objective from "just kill these guys" to "stop the mage from casting his ritual" or something like that can add to the experience.
I would avoid using NPC's built the same way as characters as it basically turns them into NPC's with high damaging attacks but very little health. It can also cause them very complicated statblocks. To make a challenging but fair fight you should aim to have both NPC's have a Challenge Rating of 5 or 6. I've provided some examples for statblocks you can use below.
Aarakocra Fighter: The Gladiator statblock might be a good start, it's a fairly beefy melee unit with a spear and shield, all you'd need to do is add 50ft flying speed to it. If you want to show your party that it has levels in Fighter, you can also give it the Action Surge or Second Wind abilities.
Warforged Sorcerer: This is slightly trickier as there's only one statblock for a sorcerer across the 3 main monster books, which is the Kobold Scale Sorcerer, a fairly weak opponent for your party. Instead what I'd do is use the Mage statblock, remove the 5th level spells and increase it's ac by 1 (To account for the Warforged's higher nat ac). To show it's a sorcerer, you can give it a pool of 8 sorcery points, and allow it to use the heightened spell, Quickened spell and Twinned Spell metamagics from the sorcerer class.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
I know this is a question that has been asked hundreds of times, but does anyone know of a way to give NPCs a challenge rating so they can be used in a fight? My party is coming up on an encounter with the two BBEGs they've been hunting for the past couple of sessions, but I'm not sure how to make it balanced.
The two bad guys are a warforged sorcerer and an aarakocra fighter, and my party is made up of five level five PCs. I definitely want it to be a difficult fight, and I've tried using the DMG's instructions, but I haven't had any luck. If anyone has any tips or sites they know that can help, it would be greatly appreciated.
Creating a monster stat block is in chapter 9 of the DMG. I just did this yesterday actually for shopkeeper my players keep robbing. Just use hp vs ac and damage vs ummm.... Well it's in chapter 9... Lol. For use on this specific medium I would search "creating a monster stat block" But just in general a PC is half their level in cr.
I'm afraid I don't know any specific sites or tools but here are some general things to keep in mind:
So the biggest thing that pushes thing towards the player advantage is the number of actions they can take. Right now you have 5 players vs. 2 enemies. Which means that the players have more than twice the number of attacks and reactions per round. There's a couple ways to fix that, one is to have some henchmen/minions around to help out in the battle. Or if the battle is going to be on the NPCs home turf there could be some sort of lair actions to help even the odds. Or if you just want it to be between the 2 NPCs and the players, no helpers give them legendary reactions and resistances.
It's good to remember that at level 5, many of your PCs are going to have multiple attacks on their turn, so it's going to be easy for them to wail on your NPCs. I would also maybe look into giving the sorcerer NPC some good crowd control spells.
Well, it's not that important to actually have a challenge rating. In general PC builds aren't very good for bosses because they tend to be total glass cannons, and it's particularly bad for spellcasters. Let's say the sorcerer is level 9, white draconic bloodline, built as a PC, with 14 Dex, 14 Con, 20 Cha. He'd have AC 15 and 65 hp, so he dies in one round if the PCs focus fire him. On the other hand, if he gets a turn, that's a quickened empowered Cone of Cold which averages around 49 damage at DC 17, followed by a frostbite for 12 damage at DC 17, which could easily wipe the party.
I homebrewed a PC into a monster and then used the encounter builder. You can play test it by running the encounter without your players. If it's not as bad as you want it to be add some low cr humanoids like an acolyte or drow who is a follower to make it more interesting. And, as always, making the terrain difficult or changing the objective from "just kill these guys" to "stop the mage from casting his ritual" or something like that can add to the experience.
I would avoid using NPC's built the same way as characters as it basically turns them into NPC's with high damaging attacks but very little health. It can also cause them very complicated statblocks. To make a challenging but fair fight you should aim to have both NPC's have a Challenge Rating of 5 or 6. I've provided some examples for statblocks you can use below.
Aarakocra Fighter: The Gladiator statblock might be a good start, it's a fairly beefy melee unit with a spear and shield, all you'd need to do is add 50ft flying speed to it. If you want to show your party that it has levels in Fighter, you can also give it the Action Surge or Second Wind abilities.
Warforged Sorcerer: This is slightly trickier as there's only one statblock for a sorcerer across the 3 main monster books, which is the Kobold Scale Sorcerer, a fairly weak opponent for your party. Instead what I'd do is use the Mage statblock, remove the 5th level spells and increase it's ac by 1 (To account for the Warforged's higher nat ac). To show it's a sorcerer, you can give it a pool of 8 sorcery points, and allow it to use the heightened spell, Quickened spell and Twinned Spell metamagics from the sorcerer class.