Greetings, fellow DMs,

My party is descending into a rat-filled dungeon of a witch. She created shadows to abduct children at the start of the campaign and as a callback I wanted my party (four level 2 players) to fight off three shadows (because 4 would be 'deadly' and I'd rather avoid that). Afterwards they can free some of the kids, but after freeing them, the witch will appear for her battle. According to the Encounter Creator, the witch/a modified hag, would also be 'hard'.

My party has begged me to make the encounters more challenging (they've been rather easy so far, I must admit. I didn't dare to make them harder yet because most of the players are new to DnD), but are two 'hard' encounters in such a short proximity of time TOO hard? What would you suggest? Should I push them to heal beforehand or give a hint that the witch is coming? Or should I just get rid of the shadow-encounter altogether? 

Your help is much appreciated!

2 hard encounters, if they are the only ones between long rests, will be no problem. They won't actually be hard.

The encounter builder system is based on the DMG assumption of 6-8 encounters in between long rests. So those encounters will only be hard if along with them, you have 4 other "easy" or "medium" encounters. If they do just those 2, the encounters will not be hard. You might want to bump the hag one to 'deadly.' I would.  

Alright! Thank you for the tip! I'll see how my adventurers will handle the two 'hard' encounters then!

I'm sure they will be fine. Again, if those are the only 2 encounters they won't be all that hard.

In particular you may find the witch encounter underwhelming, since when they outnumber an enemy 4-to-1, the party can often mop the floor with it.

I personally do some “adventuring days” with no combat whatsoever, and other adventuring days where it’s nothing but combat, and a few with both just to help maintain verisimilitude. When planning for a combat heavy day, I do not design a single encounter easier than “Hard,” and usually they are all Deadly+. I find it easier to do 3-4 incredibly difficult combats in a single adventuring day than 6-8 easy-medium combat encounters.

”Deadly” doesn’t actually mean that one single combat is actually deadly, just like “nightmare mode” on a video game won’t actually give you any nightmares. PCs could certainly die in a deadly encounter, but it isn’t actually all that likely unless something goes very wrong, or the party is very low on resources. The whole point of the number of encounters by difficulty is to incrementally force the party to expend resources throughout the day, and the ratio also presumes 2 short rests per day to regain resources. So, if all the combats are Easy - Medium, then the party needs 2-3 fights, a short rest, 2-3 fights, another short rest, 2-3 fights, and finally a long rest. If all of your fights are Deadly, then it might only be 1 fight, a short, another fight, another short, another fight, and the long rest. One way I commonly see people express it is like this: 8 Easy ≈ 6 Medium ≈ 5 Hard ≈ 4 Deadly. (My preferred scale is more like this: 9 Easy - Medium ≈ 6 Hard - Deadly  ≈ 3 Deadly+)

So, if 8 Easy encounters are roughly equivalent to 4 Deadly encounters, then as long as the party can take their 2ish short rests that day, it should be okay unless something goes wrong.

Another way to ratchet up the dutifully without actually making the combats that much harder is to put a ticking clock on the mission. Make it so that if the Heroes haven’t stopped the Villain(s) by [deadline], then the villains will.... That might be, “stopped them by the outgoing tide or they escape,” or maybe “by sundown or they start the ritual,” or “by morning or the ritual will be complete!” If the party is faced with the decision between resting to recharge at the risk of the Villain “winning,” or pressing on the meet the deadline, now they start to sweat. So maybe they only stop for one short rest that day, HP start to get lower, short rest abilities were not refreshed as many times that day so maybe they have fewer left by the last fight. In that situation, even if there really wasn’t any real risk of dying, they will feel like it was a much harder day. Heck, even if they do still take both rests, the risk that it might have been the ”wrong decision” will make them nervous. (There really is no wrong decision, just the decision that leads to one outcome, or the decision that potentially leads to another outcome. If they miss the sundown deadline to prevent the ritual, now they have to interrupt that ritual by dawn, and if they miss that one, they still have a couple hours to catch that villain before they escape with that tide. And even if the villain escapes, they still didn’t “win,” they just got away this time.

I just want to say that, even though you didn't get any replies on this a few years ago, this was SUCH A HELPFUL write-up for me today! Thanks so much for taking the time!

I’m happy that you found it helpful.