My party and I stumbled into the Feywild and caused some minor property damage. The locals all decided to kill us: 10 quicklings, 10 pixies, and 10 sprites. We had seven level 7 characters in the party and the enemies numbered 15 or more, so the encounter rules told our DM that this was only a hard encounter. This was wrong. The encounter rules did not expect the DM to use that many spellcasters and monsters. Identical monsters share their initiative rolls, so all the pixies went before everyone. Pixies can cast confusion. The only reason we survived was that the pixies realized a broken wagon wasn't worth killing over, and the quicklings were chaotic stupid and started killing the withdrawing pixies.
Generally a playfield with more than 10+ monsters is already a bad idea but not improbable, maybe the DM did not fully set the encounter properly and read the monsters descriptions. Story wise this is probably a fun concept for an encounter. And actually why did the creatures go on the same initiative? they should be having their own initiative or if there numbers are many delegate them to two or three different groups (same monster) then roll for initiative for them. Eg. Quickling group 1, 3 creatures with an initiative roll of 14, group 2, 4 creatures with an initiative roll of 17, and group 3, 3 creatures with an initiative roll of 7. That many creatures of the same kind will not be overwhelming in one initiative roll. The part about the many spellcasters is right but the battle could have been hard if the DM had avoided grouping them up to one initiative for each type.
And actually why did the creatures go on the same initiative?
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/phb/combat#TheOrderofCombat "Initiative determines the order of turns during combat. When combat starts, every participant makes a Dexterity check to determine their place in the initiative order. The DM makes one roll for an entire group of identical creatures, so each member of the group acts at the same time."
Having large groups of monsters isn't the worst idea, they can make low level monsters a threat even to high level parties. However if the monsters have spellcasting, especially "make this save or waste your next turn" spells, you're essentially guaranteeing that the player you're targeting will fail the saving throw, because you can just keep targeting them until they fail. Even with a +10 bonus to saving throws, you still have a 2 in 3 chance of failing a DC12 saving throw at least once after 10 rolls. Yuan-ti Pureblood with suggestion and Pixie with Polymorph can prove infuriating to deal with.
Monsters who also have debilitating effects with their regular attacks also suffer from this. Carrion Crawler paralyse on a failed saving throw, Drow and Sprite can knock characters unconscious and Cockatrice can petrify.
The problem isn't 10+ monsters, the problem is that pixies are broken -- the combination of '1 hp' and '4th level spells' is the ultimate glass cannon. They should have just given them 30 hp and made them CR 2.
The major problem is Pixies. Pixies are a creature that really could be CR 1 at least.
The ability to cast 3 Fourth level spells (Confusion, Polymorph and Greater Invisibility) and 2 third level spells (Fly, Dispel Magic). They are NOT CR 1/4.
Yeah that "identical creatures go on the same initiative" option is rarely used in my experience.
Yeah, it makes the game unbalanced. This is especially true when you have a huge mob of monsters. Since I exclusively use digital dice that do all the math for me, I don't care about rolling dozens of them at a time. Physical dice are so antiquated and I don't understand the purists who want to spend 15 minutes per round of combat. There's an Auto Roll Initiative button in the Combat Tracker that rolls initiative for all characters instantly, so stop wasting time and use it.
My experience has always been: if you want your party to feel challenged, give them one, big bag of hit points. If you actually want to challenge them, give them a bunch of targets to fight. The more targets you have, the less effective any single attack can be.
But, once you get a lot of targets, it tips to be too dangerous. D&D is very swingy when it comes to numbers of foes, since a successful hit does damage, there is no effective damage mitigation, which means a lot of to-hit rolls means some are going to be successful and damage will get through. Which means character hit points are going to grind down. The more enemies, the faster the grind, and the harder to stop it. The more effective any, individual creature is, the faster the grind. If you have entire groups of effective creatures . . ..
The encounter builder and CR are tools and guidelines. Don't trust them to know anything, though. They can't factor synergies to know how effective something is when combined with something else. So, yeah, the GM should always look at the encounter and tailor it for their party. The game doesn't know, and can't know. It is the GM's job to balance for the party.
If you want a swarm of creatures (and the creature type isn't a swarm to begin with), make sure they don't have a lot of shenanigans they can pull individually. 10 goblins is a different fight from 10 pixies. As would 10 acolytes be a different fight from either of the other two. Swarm enemies shouldn't be able to pull shenanigans. Swarm enemies should be there to block objectives with their bodies and act as ablative armor for the enemies that can pull shenanigans.
My experience has always been: if you want your party to feel challenged, give them one, big bag of hit points. If you actually want to challenge them, give them a bunch of targets to fight.
Yeah that "identical creatures go on the same initiative" option is rarely used in my experience.
The only time I use that option when I’m the DM is when I have a huge number of monsters. I had a batch of 40 skeletons and 20 zombies last Sunday. They all went on the same round in combat and I used the mass combat rules to determine if they hit or not instead of rolling their attacks.
The major problem is Pixies. Pixies are a creature that really could be CR 1 at least.
The ability to cast 3 Fourth level spells (Confusion, Polymorph and Greater Invisibility) and 2 third level spells (Fly, Dispel Magic). They are NOT CR 1/4.
Agreed, It's not generally the fact that your DM used a lot of monsters, but the fact that the monsters were pixies.
Pixies are designed to work in groups at the back. They have good spells but super low HP, to have them in such a big encounter is the problem since it makes sure the pixies can be at their best, Casting spells behind loads of different monsters and taking no damage.
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It also didn't help that all us players were standing right next to each other at the start of the battle while the enemies were spread out everywhere, a fact that wasn't made known until the DM actually placed the tokens on the map.
My experience has always been: if you want your party to feel challenged, give them one, big bag of hit points. If you actually want to challenge them, give them a bunch of targets to fight. The more targets you have, the less effective any single attack can be.
And the more effective area effects are. At any given effective xp budget multiple enemies have higher combined hit points and damage output than single monsters, but are more vulnerable to area damage, and may have difficulty making full use of their numbers. If you're fighting ranged attackers in open terrain, higher numbers of smaller creatures are far more dangerous. If enemies are likely to get in one another's way, limiting how many can attack, or are forced to bunch up to be conveniently AoEd, multiple monsters may not be terribly dangerous.
My experience has always been: if you want your party to feel challenged, give them one, big bag of hit points. If you actually want to challenge them, give them a bunch of targets to fight. The more targets you have, the less effective any single attack can be.
And the more effective area effects are. At any given effective xp budget multiple enemies have higher combined hit points and damage output than single monsters, but are more vulnerable to area damage, and may have difficulty making full use of their numbers. If you're fighting ranged attackers in open terrain, higher numbers of smaller creatures are far more dangerous. If enemies are likely to get in one another's way, limiting how many can attack, or are forced to bunch up to be conveniently AoEd, multiple monsters may not be terribly dangerous.
I think it depends on the situatuation, overall more monsters usually means a harder encounter.
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An encounter with allot of weak monsters can become very swingy and dependent on initiative. Assuming both the players and monsters play optimally what basically happens is that both sides become glass cannons. Save or suck enemies like pixies are worse because saves don't scale with player level as consistently as health does so more pixies just means more chance to fail as well as spell stacking.
Quicklings
If you take the 10 quickling's for example.
We'll assume the players have an average ac of about 18.
The average damage of those quicklings per round becomes 120 including chance to hit. Meaning they can down 1-2 of these level 7 players a round on average, if they go first on initiative the party is likely to lose.
However, if you have a caster with high initiative they could easily kill all of those quick lings with a single spell. To an AoE their effective hit points are still 10.
So functionally 10 quicklings is the equivalent of a monster with 10hp and 120 average damage which is ludicrous.
Pixies
similarly with the pixies
If we assume the players have an average save bonus of about 3 which is their proficiency bonus
The probability of them failing at least one save becomes 99.7% effectively an impossible dc of 30 or higher
Personally I dont think pixies are actually too low a Cr for what they do. They're just one of those monsters that enhances the power of other monsters so your almost better of thinking of them like a powerful magic buff on an enemy as opposed to a monster.
I think it depends on the situatuation, overall more monsters usually means a harder encounter.
Generally, yes. AoE damage spellss are great, if your opponents are clustered (hence "fireball formation" is a term). But, enemies, played intelligently, will probably not be clustered for maximum chunky-salsa-effect. This amplifies the expenditure of spell slots. Area denial spells and abilities are usually better expenditures.
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My party and I stumbled into the Feywild and caused some minor property damage. The locals all decided to kill us: 10 quicklings, 10 pixies, and 10 sprites. We had seven level 7 characters in the party and the enemies numbered 15 or more, so the encounter rules told our DM that this was only a hard encounter. This was wrong. The encounter rules did not expect the DM to use that many spellcasters and monsters. Identical monsters share their initiative rolls, so all the pixies went before everyone. Pixies can cast confusion. The only reason we survived was that the pixies realized a broken wagon wasn't worth killing over, and the quicklings were chaotic stupid and started killing the withdrawing pixies.
Generally a playfield with more than 10+ monsters is already a bad idea but not improbable, maybe the DM did not fully set the encounter properly and read the monsters descriptions. Story wise this is probably a fun concept for an encounter. And actually why did the creatures go on the same initiative? they should be having their own initiative or if there numbers are many delegate them to two or three different groups (same monster) then roll for initiative for them. Eg. Quickling group 1, 3 creatures with an initiative roll of 14, group 2, 4 creatures with an initiative roll of 17, and group 3, 3 creatures with an initiative roll of 7. That many creatures of the same kind will not be overwhelming in one initiative roll. The part about the many spellcasters is right but the battle could have been hard if the DM had avoided grouping them up to one initiative for each type.
Probably should have a large army of the same creature instead of having many of different groups of creatures but that was a town of angry fey.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/phb/combat#TheOrderofCombat
"Initiative determines the order of turns during combat. When combat starts, every participant makes a Dexterity check to determine their place in the initiative order. The DM makes one roll for an entire group of identical creatures, so each member of the group acts at the same time."
Still should have grouped them up to different initiative groups if it was that many don't have to follow every rule their more like guidelines.
Yeah that "identical creatures go on the same initiative" option is rarely used in my experience.
Having large groups of monsters isn't the worst idea, they can make low level monsters a threat even to high level parties. However if the monsters have spellcasting, especially "make this save or waste your next turn" spells, you're essentially guaranteeing that the player you're targeting will fail the saving throw, because you can just keep targeting them until they fail. Even with a +10 bonus to saving throws, you still have a 2 in 3 chance of failing a DC12 saving throw at least once after 10 rolls. Yuan-ti Pureblood with suggestion and Pixie with Polymorph can prove infuriating to deal with.
Monsters who also have debilitating effects with their regular attacks also suffer from this. Carrion Crawler paralyse on a failed saving throw, Drow and Sprite can knock characters unconscious and Cockatrice can petrify.
Had the party been casting conjure woodland beings and getting 8 pixies (I know RAW it is DM choice but many players get to choose).
It could be a case of the DM showing what he can do with such shinnagans
The problem isn't 10+ monsters, the problem is that pixies are broken -- the combination of '1 hp' and '4th level spells' is the ultimate glass cannon. They should have just given them 30 hp and made them CR 2.
The major problem is Pixies. Pixies are a creature that really could be CR 1 at least.
The ability to cast 3 Fourth level spells (Confusion, Polymorph and Greater Invisibility) and 2 third level spells (Fly, Dispel Magic). They are NOT CR 1/4.
Yeah, it makes the game unbalanced. This is especially true when you have a huge mob of monsters. Since I exclusively use digital dice that do all the math for me, I don't care about rolling dozens of them at a time. Physical dice are so antiquated and I don't understand the purists who want to spend 15 minutes per round of combat. There's an Auto Roll Initiative button in the Combat Tracker that rolls initiative for all characters instantly, so stop wasting time and use it.
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My experience has always been: if you want your party to feel challenged, give them one, big bag of hit points. If you actually want to challenge them, give them a bunch of targets to fight. The more targets you have, the less effective any single attack can be.
But, once you get a lot of targets, it tips to be too dangerous. D&D is very swingy when it comes to numbers of foes, since a successful hit does damage, there is no effective damage mitigation, which means a lot of to-hit rolls means some are going to be successful and damage will get through. Which means character hit points are going to grind down. The more enemies, the faster the grind, and the harder to stop it. The more effective any, individual creature is, the faster the grind. If you have entire groups of effective creatures . . ..
The encounter builder and CR are tools and guidelines. Don't trust them to know anything, though. They can't factor synergies to know how effective something is when combined with something else. So, yeah, the GM should always look at the encounter and tailor it for their party. The game doesn't know, and can't know. It is the GM's job to balance for the party.
If you want a swarm of creatures (and the creature type isn't a swarm to begin with), make sure they don't have a lot of shenanigans they can pull individually. 10 goblins is a different fight from 10 pixies. As would 10 acolytes be a different fight from either of the other two. Swarm enemies shouldn't be able to pull shenanigans. Swarm enemies should be there to block objectives with their bodies and act as ablative armor for the enemies that can pull shenanigans.
Pixies are the poster-child for shenanigans.
This is a brilliant distinction.
The only time I use that option when I’m the DM is when I have a huge number of monsters. I had a batch of 40 skeletons and 20 zombies last Sunday. They all went on the same round in combat and I used the mass combat rules to determine if they hit or not instead of rolling their attacks.
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Agreed, It's not generally the fact that your DM used a lot of monsters, but the fact that the monsters were pixies.
Pixies are designed to work in groups at the back. They have good spells but super low HP, to have them in such a big encounter is the problem since it makes sure the pixies can be at their best, Casting spells behind loads of different monsters and taking no damage.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
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Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explain
HERE.It also didn't help that all us players were standing right next to each other at the start of the battle while the enemies were spread out everywhere, a fact that wasn't made known until the DM actually placed the tokens on the map.
And the more effective area effects are. At any given effective xp budget multiple enemies have higher combined hit points and damage output than single monsters, but are more vulnerable to area damage, and may have difficulty making full use of their numbers. If you're fighting ranged attackers in open terrain, higher numbers of smaller creatures are far more dangerous. If enemies are likely to get in one another's way, limiting how many can attack, or are forced to bunch up to be conveniently AoEd, multiple monsters may not be terribly dangerous.
I think it depends on the situatuation, overall more monsters usually means a harder encounter.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explain
HERE.An encounter with allot of weak monsters can become very swingy and dependent on initiative. Assuming both the players and monsters play optimally what basically happens is that both sides become glass cannons. Save or suck enemies like pixies are worse because saves don't scale with player level as consistently as health does so more pixies just means more chance to fail as well as spell stacking.
Quicklings
If you take the 10 quickling's for example.
We'll assume the players have an average ac of about 18.
The average damage of those quicklings per round becomes 120 including chance to hit. Meaning they can down 1-2 of these level 7 players a round on average, if they go first on initiative the party is likely to lose.
However, if you have a caster with high initiative they could easily kill all of those quick lings with a single spell. To an AoE their effective hit points are still 10.
So functionally 10 quicklings is the equivalent of a monster with 10hp and 120 average damage which is ludicrous.
Pixies
similarly with the pixies
If we assume the players have an average save bonus of about 3 which is their proficiency bonus
The probability of them failing at least one save becomes 99.7% effectively an impossible dc of 30 or higher
Personally I dont think pixies are actually too low a Cr for what they do. They're just one of those monsters that enhances the power of other monsters so your almost better of thinking of them like a powerful magic buff on an enemy as opposed to a monster.
Generally, yes. AoE damage spellss are great, if your opponents are clustered (hence "fireball formation" is a term). But, enemies, played intelligently, will probably not be clustered for maximum chunky-salsa-effect. This amplifies the expenditure of spell slots. Area denial spells and abilities are usually better expenditures.