Last night I ran an encounter for my players that should have been deadly, but hardly phased them. I'm trying to figure out how to challenge my players, and I'm finding the standard CR method difficult to tweak.

I have four players, their PCs are all level 9. One Paladin/Cleric, one Rogue/Fighter (arcane archer), one Warlock, and one Barbarian.

The encounter was against two hill giants (CR 5 each), and three Ogre Bolt Launchers (CR 2 each).

According to Kobold Fight Club, this encounter should have been deadly, but while two of the PCs (the Paladin/Cleric and the Barbarian) reached half HP, the other two didn't suffer a scratch, and the giants and ogres were defeated in only a handful of rounds. https://kobold.club/fight/#/encounter-builder

The PCs do have magic, and powerful weapons (like the Sun Sword from Curse of Strahd) but at level 9 shouldn't the game expect that they will have some powerful items and magic?

How can I build truly challenging encounters for the party, when the existing CR method seems so wrong?

Thanks in advance for advice.

CR is a jumping off point, and does not assume any magic items. This is because not all DMs give out magic items, and there is no way for the game to know how little or how much you are giving. So if your party has magic items, you'll already want to give them higher CR challenges.

CR also has no way of actually knowing your party's build. A party of all spellcasters would have a very difficult time against a Rakshasa, while a martial party of the same level would have a much easier time of it. You need to, as a DM, know what things are your parties strengths, and weaknesses. If they are fantastic at ranged combat, but have low AC -- then a creature with heavy attacks that engages them in melee will be more dangerous for them. If they're a group of heavily armored buff martial types, then spellcasters who force saving throws are going to be more effective.

You also have to count for the action economy. The number of attacks the enemy gets to make VS the PCs from the start has a big effect. If you put one CR 12 monster against 4 level 12s, it might seem like the 'appropriate' challenge, but the action economy will automatically favour the greater numbers. That's the problem that Legendary and Lair actions solve, both of which are great game design elements. They also add in an easy way for you to modify an encounter that already has the number of creatures you want, to balance the action economy from the start of the battle. If you want deadly, the monsters should have a greater action pool than the PCs, which (as the PCs knock out the enemies) will shrink and make the battle easier as they turn the tide.

The CR method is not wrong-- It just gives you an absolute baseline, assuming a party with no magic items with a pretty even and average balance of abilities at range, in melee, and in spellcasting. You as a DM need to apply the knowledge you have of your party, and how they like to act within combat to gauge how much you need to add above a CR to match the skills/strategies the party has, and magical tools you've given them. 

I find that CR is not the sole metric you need to consider.

A single high-CR creature can be defeated pretty easily by the party, which a horde of medium-CR creatures can give a party grief. It really comes down the "action economy", how many attacks the bad guys can get in, and how likely they are to hit.

Also - most combats don't last more than "a handful of rounds".

What I try to do is figure out the amount of damage the party can dish out, on average, and scale any individual creature to last about 5 rounds. I also do the reverse, so that on average the bad guys can kill the typical PC in 5 rounds. This tends to lead to more balanced encounters, but allows the party to survive as they can use brains and tactics to better their performance above average.

Example:

The average therbling can dish out an average of 6 ( 30% chance to hit the average party AC, 2d12+4 = 17 avg per hit ) HP per round, average party HP is 35, so I want about about 1.25 therblings for every party members for a 5-round-kill probability. I'd do a similar calculations the other way, to make sure that the average therbling can last about 5 rounds against the average party member. I'd likely add a bit of a fudge-factor by throwing in an extra therbling or two, based on how tactically astute the party has shown itself to be.

If the party is squishy, or heavily armored, you might want to select ( or design ) creatures with differing offensive capabilities.

If the party is offensively weak, or your Arcane Archer can rain mortar fire down on the battlefield, you might want to likewise scale the defensive and HP levels of your creatures.

This technique works if you have a creature with several lighter attacks ( claw, claw, bite ), or a one large attack ( poison tail lash ), since you're looking at average damage.

Another thing is to consider tactics. Playing tactical behavior of monsters well really changes the difficulty a lot. A mixed group of golins and gnolls charging across the plain will be cut down quickly. A cluster of goblin archers under partial cover on the high ground, providing covering fire for an interlocked and coordinated skirmish line of gnoll infantry is a totally different story ( especially with gnoll pack tactics ).

Also - never forget that you can leverage the terrain and setting to make things easier, or harder, for the party. In the above example, goblin archers in trees, above the swampy difficult terrain that the party is slogging through really changes the course of the battle.

These are all really dials-and-levers that you can use to skew the base CR math of encounter design. By using them you can dial in encounter difficulty for your party. As the adventure designer, you're allowed to design encounters to match the party - just don't give the creatures DM-level knowledge. 

It's a bit of an art, as you have to tune encounters for the party capability, and it takes some practice ( and ideally some math ), but it can be done; you can design fair encounters which can be fair and challenging for any party.

Best of luck! :)

In addition to the advice above, which is very good, another reason the calculated CR may appear to be inaccurate is if you're not accounting for how many encounters the party has had since their last long rest.

The DMG describes a Deadly encounter as one that "could be lethal for one or more player characters" and where "survival often requires good tactics and quick thinking, and the party risks defeat." But this definition expects the party will face 6-8 encounters during a single adventuring day.

If a Deadly encounter is one of the only encounters the party faces during an adventuring day, or is one of the first encounters after a long rest, then it can quickly turn from Deadly to Hard, Medium, or even Easy.

I've found these revised XP tables to be useful for defining the amount of XP necessary for an encounter that's actually challenging for PCs with access to certain advantages, like magic items. Under these new definitions, a "challenging" encounter (equivalent to Deadly) for a party of 9th-level characters (with access to feats, multiclassing, and magic items) would be about 13,600 XP. For example, with the encounter you described, you could have added an extra hill giant, bringing it up to 13,500 XP.

But as the definition notes, even this would be considered only "moderately challenging" if the PCs expend more than a quarter of their short and long rest resources during the battle. For a truly deadly encounter ("extremely challenging") for the same party, these revised tables would suggest going all the way up to 17,000 XP. For your encounter, that could have meant adding an entire group of low CR enemies (for example, seven CR 1/2 foes).

What the others have said is very helpful advice. For me, I have found that CR is pointless, it's merely a form of Dewey decimal system for cataloging monsters.

I crafted an encounter with custom made monsters using a combat style similar to that of an MMORPG I had played for a long time. The players had a blast with the encounter, but mechanically they walked through it. The party was 6x level 5 and they were against 4x CR 5 creatures and a CR 7. The encounter had 4 phases, they had to fight each of these creatures twice. They were able to heal twice during the fight, but no regained skills/abilities. I had one player go unconscious through out the entire fight.

Fast forward, they're all level 6, down to 5 players, and fighting 7 Dust mephits, CR 1/4 and then 3x Ankheg CR 2. This was 2 separate encounters, there was time to drink up some healing potions. They also had 6 npc redshirts there to help. When this combat was over they had to take a long rest as they had depleted most of their resources and taken serious damage. 

Taking a look at the difficulty of the combat between the two scenarios, the second encounter proved to be more challenging. The creatures were weaker by far, but they forced the players to use more resources and work for the victory. If you want to make your players work for their victory, don't worry so much about CR, start making your monsters more aware of their fear of death, have them use their native terrains, and use all of their skills/abilities to the best effect whenever possible.

well lets be honest. Mephits are quite horrible. They can summon 1 of their own kind. Meaning those 7 Mephits turned into 14. They all have a pretty strong AoE spell on recharge...x14. When my level 4 party encounter 2 of them I even pulled my punches or it would be a TPK almost instantly. It does illustrate how CR is pretty pointless.

@DMThac0: Party resource availability is definitely something that needs to be taken into consideration. A party with a fully refreshed Cleric supplying healing and a Mage capable of tossing a fireball into the ranks of the bad guys is completely different than a fully healed party where the spell-casters are depleted.

Something I've considered, but not had the time to try, is to sketch out various levels of a single encounter: A long-rested, fully healed,  fully spelled party will encounter this group of creatures in the mountain pass; but if the party is injured, and down a good portion of their spell-casting abilities, or they've depleted their consumable magic healing, they might encounter this group.

For me at least, I don't want to party to actually lose - I just want them to work hard for their victories, and feel like they really accomplished something - so I have no problem dynamically scaling encounters on-the-fly to match the current party state.

It's not wildly different than my current 5-round-kill calculations, it just tries to factor battlefield healing into the average party HP, and offensive spells into the party damage - and pre-calculates different encounter sizes based on rough amounts of offensive and defensive levels of magic/items/Ki that the party might have.

When calculating CR in the rulebooks the monsters rating takes into account the monsters damage output, its health, special rules, and other abilities. It also gets its rating from what the average players health would for the player level. So when building encounters to challenge your players you need to take into account that the use of magic items and other external forces are not accounted for and you need to make the necessary adjustments to the combat. These adjustments could be having to fight in a dark cave causing the monsters AC to be abnormally high, have the monsters ambush the group, or even add story elements that cause the monsters to have new abilities, strengths, or weaknesses to make them more difficult for your specific group. In the past I had the main villain gift one of his bounty hunters with an amulet that protected her from magical attacks and essentially gave her a resistance to all magical items and abilities. I hope that this helps and i wish you luck with your campaign.

the problem with CR is, were you to put a high level party against a tribe of goblins, many DMs would make it a simple walk over, little more than a formality. when in reality, you're supposed to use your brain, kobolds even more so.. where as you would think that a group of ogres would be a harder challenge, trouble is ogres should be played stupidly as should hill giants, so they should  lose their challenge more rapidly as your level increases, once you then add in the vagaries of dice rolling and something which is nominally a challenge becomes a walk over after a couple of dudd rolls for the giants and a couple of crits for your guys. so if you want the big stupid species to be a more relevant challenge then stick an extra giant into the total and play it stupid, but be prepared to get a big swing with a crit.

So, I'm gathering from all of the responses (in addition very helpful advice) that WotC pretty much made CR a useless tool for DMs to create encounters, and we have to do a LOT of extra work to make encounters truly challenging. :-/

Okay, thank you to all of you for your feedback. We'll see what happens next encounter!

I don't know if you can - in all fairness - say that WoTC "made CR a useless tool". It's a non-trivial problem to try and devise a simple metric to help gauge encounter difficulties for all parties, everywhere, based solely on their level: a party of Rogues and a party of Barbarians are very different levels of power, depending on the circumstances.

It's always been a lot of work and guesstimating to balance encounters ... and when you've got it all figured out  ... the dice will get you :p

Hope next time works out! :)

I would not call the CR completely useless. It provides new DMs a structured way for building encounters. When I first start playing 5e, I used the CR to build my encounters and learn the mechanics of the new system. As what the other posters have stated the CR is a starting point. I quickly learned magic items and good players flipped the CR on its head.

I think the CR system is a great place to start but it should not be a sole metric alone.

5e has elements designed to bring first time players and DMs to the tables. I think it is up to the old guard to pass on guidance and lesson learned to keep the flock growing. 

I would not call the CR completely useless. It provides new DMs a structured way for building encounters. When I first start playing 5e, I used the CR to build my encounters and learn the mechanics of the new system. As what the other posters have stated the CR is a starting point. I quickly learned magic items and good players flipped the CR on its head.

Except that, let's be honest, how many people run games where parties are homogeneous, and/or PCs don't end up with magic and powerful items. If the CR system doesn't account for the likely reality of how the game will be played, then it's not very useful. I keep hearing people say it's a good starting place for new DMs, but how good is it for new DMs if all the encounters are either sub-par, or end up with a TPK from over-compensation?

If I can't use the existing system to balance an encounter for my fairly vanilla D&D game, then it's not a useful system. If I have to do a lot of heavy lifting to account for all of the things we would expect players/characters to do/have, then it's a flawed system.

However, you're playing with level 9 characters, they're far from vanilla now. New DMs, new games, vanilla characters generally refer to low level content, you're in mid level content now. Up to about level 5, the cr tables can be used effectively with little tweaks such as adding/removing a monster or adjusting AC/HP. It's generally assumed that by/after level 5 you're starting to introduce magical items and the characters are starting come into the more substantial perks of their respective classes. This is where the CR tables begin to fail and fall apart, when the characters spike in their effectiveness rather than follow a steady linear progression.

Quote from DMThac0 >>

However, you're playing with level 9 characters, they're far from vanilla now. New DMs, new games, vanilla characters generally refer to low level content, you're in mid level content now. Up to about level 5, the cr tables can be used effectively with little tweaks such as adding/removing a monster or adjusting AC/HP. It's generally assumed that by/after level 5 you're starting to introduce magical items and the characters are starting come into the more substantial perks of their respective classes. This is where the CR tables begin to fail and fall apart, when the characters spike in their effectiveness rather than follow a steady linear progression.

 I'm still hearing you say that at some point (after a certain level, in this case) CR becomes a useless tool with the DM having to do work to make it work.

Why does the chart in the DMG have info for building encounters above level 5 that don't take in to account the kind of characters the player's are likely to have? I am agreeing with everyone here who says the DM needs to tweak it, and figure out attack economy, etc etc. I'm arguing that if we have to do all that work, then the tool they've built is either incomplete, or useless as is.

If, as you're saying, the chart in the DMG can't/doesn't account for powerful characters after 5th level, then a new DM using that chart as their "starting point" is going to have a tough time building encounters for PCs above level 5.

It's a good starting point because it establishes a baseline. It would be impossible for any system to account for exactly how each DM awards magic items or other boons, or what every party's structure is, OR even how many encounters you've had previously, so it creates a very standard baseline that everything else can be built on top of.

Remember that it's also built around the assumption described in the book that you are giving your party a certain number of encounters per day. If you're only giving them one encounter for the whole day (including any skill/social encounters that have them expending their resources) then the challenges are going to come in low every single time.

So, here's one option I've done before. Use the knowledge you have of how the CR system works, and the knowledge that you are only giving them one or two challenges and don't use "Easy" "Medium" "Hard" and "Deadly" -- use the full daily budget of their XP! I feel like this gets sorely overlooked since people jump right into automatic encounter builders like KFC, and don't read the text accompanying encounter building in the book, but it's a great method. My party had a stealth encounter followed by their only combat of the day, that combat used almost their entire daily value (the rest was assigned the resource expenditure of the stealth encounter). 2 of the party got KO'd, one of them got KO'd twice, and though it was a very difficult fight, they won. CR worked pretty great then. If I'd used what was a 'deadly' encounter, though, it would have been nearly 15k short. Because I didn't have 6-8 encounters. I just had 2.

I find CR absolutely useful, I use it all the time and I've been DMing 5E since it came out. Once you read and understand the text of how CR is built to work and trade some ideas with other DMs, it becomes an excellent system to build your own baseline daily values against your party's skills and equipment. I use KFC for the majority of my encounters to easily calculate values, and then I design a full encounter using what it gave me, tailored to my party.

Ooh, also... I think it's important to remember that CR doesn't include environment, either-- another factor that the DM must keep in mind while designing. Unless you're making every one of your combats in open fields and gladiatorial arenas (which I advise against... environment is the best tool in the encounter toolbox), your environment might be adding or retracting to/from the CR. If the environment favours the enemy, the CR of the encounter should rise. If the environment favours the players, the CR of the encounter should deflate.

Also important is action economy. How many actions the enemy has VS how many the players has can make a huge difference in CR. Sure, one giant might seem like a big challenge -- but when the party can do 5 turns worth of damage before the giant does 1 turn of damage, it looks a whole lot more pitiful. 

Basically, as has been said throughout this thread: CR gives you a handy baseline that absolutely makes encounter building faster and easier, especially with the use of tools like KFC. But every encounter is a unique design (or should be, anyways), and no system could ever account for the unique situations that players and DMs create in a tabletop game that allows for the freedom that makes this game so bad-ass. Players have the ability to come up with crazy, workable strategies that squash something the DM intended to be a challenge. DMs have the ability to create environments or motivations that completely shift the tide of a battle. Players have the ability to completely forget their features and fail because of that, while the DM facepalms because this wasn't supposed to be hard. 

CR is not a magical system that knows your party, what you're planning as a DM, how experienced/forgetful your players are, if you've given them 20 common magic items with minimal effect of 1 super mega awesome legendary magic item that's going to destroy everything. CR is a system that gives you a generalized average which you can use as a DM to find your party's own baseline more easily. I mean, if you establish that your 4 player level 8 party is actually turning in their best fights at what shows at level 10-- then use the calculation against level 10s.

CR is not broken because it's not giving you precise results for your exact party, in the situation they were in, as the (#)encounter of the day, in the environment you created, with the motivations you instilled in your party, with their magic items, and their level of D&D experience, and their quality of strategy and out-of-the-box thinking, with a comparison of how good at strategic thinking the DM is vs the players. CR was never built to magically calculate properly for every party. It was built to make a baseline which you build on top of. 

I'm in the opposite camp. CR is useless and pointless. After level 3, when your players get exponentially more power as they develop, the discrepancy with the CR system gets worse and worse. Even as a baseline the CR and XP budget is too limiting to even develop proper encounters. The CR system doesn't take most things into consideration so that it isn't even functional as a starting point after a certain level. When I, out of curiosity, put some encounters in a calculator they would be "deadly +++++++++". And there would be several of those in a day and not just 1. Simply because the CR budget wouldn't let me do half the things I want, which would make encounters actually interesting and challenging. Its ok in the earlier levels of play, but once you do lvl5+ encounters just start throwing the CR out of the window. After lvl12+ it just outright isn't usable at all.

Quote from mjsoctober >>

Why does the chart in the DMG have info for building encounters above level 5 that don't take in to account the kind of characters the player's are likely to have? I am agreeing with everyone here who says the DM needs to tweak it, and figure out attack economy, etc etc. I'm arguing that if we have to do all that work, then the tool they've built is either incomplete, or useless as is.

If, as you're saying, the chart in the DMG can't/doesn't account for powerful characters after 5th level, then a new DM using that chart as their "starting point" is going to have a tough time building encounters for PCs above level 5.

 Getting to level 5 takes a while. It isn't something you do in a few hours or even weeks. If by then the DM doesn't have a basic understanding of how AC/HP and defenses work in relation to one another... well that DM needs to step up its game. You don't need to make massive adjustments yet. But environmental hazards, a feel of a few more opponents or not, knowing when to increase a certain defense are things a DM should have a grasp of by then. After level10ish you then get the next bump with lair actions, legendary actions, legendary resistances and what not that the CR doesn't take into account. Nor does it take into consideration how many magical items you gave to the group, nor what kind, nor how creative your players can use said items. The higher level you get, the more variables come into play....which the CR doesn't do anything with and therefore it is gets more and more useless the further in you get.

Two of my players are preparing one-shots at lvl 14 and 17. I warned them about this as well. They're grossly underestimating how game breakingly powerfull the players are at that point. CR doesn't take Scrying/Teleporting into consideration. We're going to trivialize the encounters if they don't think about those things players have at disposal.

I would say that judging CR and building challenging (but not always deadly) encounters has been one of the steepest learning curves for me as a DM. I'm still not as good at is as I'd like to be.

EDIT: I would say one of the most practical skills when designing encounters is to put in enough wiggle room for you to make it tougher of easier on the fly, even as the encounter is progressing. But don't make it obvious or it kills the tension.

We are dealing with a lot of what your talking about. We are going to try to add a resistance to our Giants now from all weapons as my thoughts are there skin or hide I'd way thicker than most. So all weapons will do only half damage to them. This will be our test and will also increase the experience given out as well. And then will look at Giants tossing players more, as this will do falling damage and take away flanking and take them out of combat for a round or 2. Working on this simple idea's and maybe able to add this to other mobs to get more value from them and give the players more options with monsters they normally would have moved on from as the challenge wasn't there anymore. 

Hope this might be something you could dabble in as well.

Good luck fellow gamer!

It's worth noting what a deadly encounter means. 

• It could be lethal 
• The party may be defeated 
• It uses about a third or more of the parties daily resources

From the description it sounds like the encounter did meet that if maybe a little bit under depending how many spells were used. Two players were brought down to half health meaning enough damage was done to kill a player and it's likely used up atleast 1/4 of your parties health resources. 

My advice is lower your expectation of what a deadly encounter is, dnd is designed so that the players likely survive and that they can have multiple deadly encounters between long rests. If you want an encounter that's actually so dangerous that it can be the only encounter for the day then you are looking at about 2-3x the deadly threshold but you cant have that be every encounter. If you want an encounter to be impossible for the players you are looking at something along the lines of 5x deadly.