I'm new to actually creating a campaign so I am trying to find monsters that are suitable to my players for their growth as well as just so they don't overpower my players. It is a group of 6 for context, I know it's more than the average number of players which would be like 4, but when you're playing with people from your friend group, you can end up with more than you wanted.
Like what CR would be good as mobs for player 1's and up? As well as good CR for bosses at 1st level and up (Don't forget it's a group of 6 though).
For context the party is a wizard, a monk, a cleric, a barbarian, a paladin, and a druid. And I know this is quite terrible, but the team has bad teamwork (so far as I've played with them), so monsters they need teamwork to beat aren't ideal atm
Challenge Rating can be a tricky metric to figure sometimes. It's okay as a general guide, but don't get too caught up in the math of it. A low CR creature that can fly is going to be much more dangerous to a party that doesn't have any good ranged attacks. Also, consider the number of attacks each side will be making each round. A party of 6 low level characters will generally be making 6 attacks per round. But they might only hit 50% of the time, so let's say they'll get 3 hits per round. If each hit does, let's say, 8 hit points of damage, they'll be pumping out around 24 hp of damage per round. That's 2 bandits, or 1 gnoll, or a little less than half of an ogre. Now consider how much damage the characters can absorb before they die (at first level that's between 6 to 15 hit points each).
So 6 bandits would be a pretty balanced fight, maybe a tad on the easier side if you decide that the last 1 or 2 bandits might run or surrender near the end. Gnolls are a bit trickier, because if the fight starts to go bad for the players, it'll go worse real fast. And gnolls never give up. So maybe start with just 3 or 4 gnolls and if the party is doing good, have the sound of that combat attract a few more. But the ogre, well, the ogre is going to be killing one character per round. And it'll take about 8 hits to kill it. So it'll take the party the better part of 3 rounds to kill the ogre. If the party is smart, uses a lot of ranged attacks, and has a healer, they'll be fine. But if it's a melee party, they're gonna have a real bad time.
Combat is always nerve racking at low levels. Being an adventurer is a dangerous line of work. People die. As a DM we have to find a delicate balance - we want combat to feel thrilling and dangerous, but we also don't want our players to get discouraged because the character they put so much heart into creating dies in the first encounter. So there are a few tricks to find that happy balance.
First, remember that not every monster fights to the death. Most creatures have a survival instinct. Once a monster is 1 hit (say maybe 5 hit points) away from death, they may consider fleeing. Also, if the party is fighting a group of 8 monsters and the party has already killed 6 of them, those last 2 might make a run for it. You'll need to keep in mind how close your characters are to death AND how close your players are to feeling frustrated and discouraged. The more intelligent the monster, the more likely they are to consider their own survival and try to live to fight another day.
Secondly, remember that the party are not the only people in the world who fight monsters. A great low level mission is to have the party help guard a caravan of wagons through a dangerous area. The caravan may already have maybe 6 regular guards, but the last caravan was attacked by monsters so this caravan hires some extra muscle. This doubles the number of target that the monsters will be aiming at, which basically doubles your party's chances of survival. And this allows you to throw a much bigger force against the party without risking a Total Party Kill. When the caravan gets ambushed by 8 goblins, 8 orcs, and an ogre, you will see real fear in the players' eyes. They'll feel the adrenaline rush. It'll feel really dangerous, until they see monsters dropping dead every round. And again, if the fight is going too easy for the party, maybe another ogre shows up. If the fight is going really badly and party members start dropping, well, maybe the next orc aims for a caravan guard rather than a party member.
Finally, the terrain in which the fight takes place will have a big effect on how dangerous it feels. Fighting an ogre in an open field is a heckuva lot easier than getting halfway across a long rope bridge when 2 goblins start firing arrows at you from behind a rock. Fighting in a swamp will slow you down. Fighting on an icy hillside will risk characters slipping and falling downhill. In many encounters, the party is not just fighting the monsters, they're also fighting the terrain!
The bottom line is this: IT'S A GAME! We play D&D to have fun. Some days it's fun to wade through a horde of monsters, nearly dying every round. But there will be days when you and/or your players have maybe had a rough day at work, or someone's going through some personal drama. Be aware of the mood of the players when the game starts. If everybody has had a rough day already, it's okay to give them a happy little boost by maybe letting them win a fight. Nobody's gonna arrest you for fudging a die roll now and then. As long as everyone at the table is having fun, you're doing it right.
Couple of things that i'd offer that could be added to an otherwise great response post already provided:
1) Players will get better the more they get to know how each others characters work. If you want to push them to work better, it's often just as important to include non-combat situations where they might need a few different peoples unique skillsets to get the job accomplished.
2) If you want to make combat test them, but are concerned you might accidentally overwhelm them, then to borrow the 6 bandit example from above i'd say that you can simply plan for a few waves of bandits to come in rather than all at once. Maybe have 3-4 bandits start the fight, the battle breaks out and the noise being made brings in another 3-6 nearby bandits. If the first two rounds look pretty mediocre or you've over-tuned the bandits by either home-brewing their build slightly or adding higher ranking command-type bandits to the initial group, then you drop the wave of nearby available bandits to assist them. Additionally, i tend to also have HP markers in place for each bandit be different, so i take the number listed as the average and range a few to have a few less and a few to have a few more. If i see only minor struggling, the inbound bandits i just drop their HP maybe 3-5 HP each before they enter the battle, just to reduce the hits needed to remove them by 1. This point was covered in the secondly point above, but it's a slightly different wrinkle so i figured i'd throw it in as another example.
3) If you miss on the difficulty early, i'd mostly lean towards 'too easy' rather than too difficult. you can work towards progressively making it a bit more difficult until you find the 'sweet spot'. I sometimes give enemies a homebrew special attack (my group knows i homebrew things in advance, so they are ready for it. you might have to let them know if it's the first time you are bringing it out) and only use it if things are too trivial in combat and the party was looking for more action or threat, else pretend it isn't there if the balance is proper.
I'm new to actually creating a campaign so I am trying to find monsters that are suitable to my players for their growth as well as just so they don't overpower my players. It is a group of 6 for context, I know it's more than the average number of players which would be like 4, but when you're playing with people from your friend group, you can end up with more than you wanted.
Like what CR would be good as mobs for player 1's and up? As well as good CR for bosses at 1st level and up (Don't forget it's a group of 6 though).
For context the party is a wizard, a monk, a cleric, a barbarian, a paladin, and a druid. And I know this is quite terrible, but the team has bad teamwork (so far as I've played with them), so monsters they need teamwork to beat aren't ideal atm
My recommendation is to keep track of how much damage the players do. This is important. This gives you a baseline of what you can expect during an encounter, when you look at multiple encounters. You can create similar encounters before the PCs face a boss. (Though I wouldn't worry about a boss fight until level 3 at least). For example the PCs thought two Barghast in my campaign to give me a general idea of how they would go against an encounter with similar HP, but more difficult.
Figuring out what is going to be too powerful is fairly easy. Assume your monsters always hit. Then assume they always deal Max damage (Unless you are only going to use average damage). I would always do this for level 1-2. Once you get to level 3+ you can factor in likelihood of hitting and average damage. Players are too weak at level 1, that max damage (or a crit) will often times knock them to 0 right off the bat. (and average damage needs 3+ rounds to be a useful measure)
Basically at level one use any monster that can't kill a PC in one round. Then determine how many you need. Likely you probably want to increase some hp on the monsters because you have 6 players. If the monsters have low hp, you might be able to use more, especially if you are going to split initiative.
So my overall advice is to start off with easy encounters and judge how well the party is doing with those. Get a baseline for how much damage they are going to be doing each round.
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I'm new to actually creating a campaign so I am trying to find monsters that are suitable to my players for their growth as well as just so they don't overpower my players. It is a group of 6 for context, I know it's more than the average number of players which would be like 4, but when you're playing with people from your friend group, you can end up with more than you wanted.
Like what CR would be good as mobs for player 1's and up? As well as good CR for bosses at 1st level and up (Don't forget it's a group of 6 though).
For context the party is a wizard, a monk, a cleric, a barbarian, a paladin, and a druid. And I know this is quite terrible, but the team has bad teamwork (so far as I've played with them), so monsters they need teamwork to beat aren't ideal atm
Challenge Rating can be a tricky metric to figure sometimes. It's okay as a general guide, but don't get too caught up in the math of it. A low CR creature that can fly is going to be much more dangerous to a party that doesn't have any good ranged attacks. Also, consider the number of attacks each side will be making each round. A party of 6 low level characters will generally be making 6 attacks per round. But they might only hit 50% of the time, so let's say they'll get 3 hits per round. If each hit does, let's say, 8 hit points of damage, they'll be pumping out around 24 hp of damage per round. That's 2 bandits, or 1 gnoll, or a little less than half of an ogre. Now consider how much damage the characters can absorb before they die (at first level that's between 6 to 15 hit points each).
So 6 bandits would be a pretty balanced fight, maybe a tad on the easier side if you decide that the last 1 or 2 bandits might run or surrender near the end. Gnolls are a bit trickier, because if the fight starts to go bad for the players, it'll go worse real fast. And gnolls never give up. So maybe start with just 3 or 4 gnolls and if the party is doing good, have the sound of that combat attract a few more. But the ogre, well, the ogre is going to be killing one character per round. And it'll take about 8 hits to kill it. So it'll take the party the better part of 3 rounds to kill the ogre. If the party is smart, uses a lot of ranged attacks, and has a healer, they'll be fine. But if it's a melee party, they're gonna have a real bad time.
Combat is always nerve racking at low levels. Being an adventurer is a dangerous line of work. People die. As a DM we have to find a delicate balance - we want combat to feel thrilling and dangerous, but we also don't want our players to get discouraged because the character they put so much heart into creating dies in the first encounter. So there are a few tricks to find that happy balance.
First, remember that not every monster fights to the death. Most creatures have a survival instinct. Once a monster is 1 hit (say maybe 5 hit points) away from death, they may consider fleeing. Also, if the party is fighting a group of 8 monsters and the party has already killed 6 of them, those last 2 might make a run for it. You'll need to keep in mind how close your characters are to death AND how close your players are to feeling frustrated and discouraged. The more intelligent the monster, the more likely they are to consider their own survival and try to live to fight another day.
Secondly, remember that the party are not the only people in the world who fight monsters. A great low level mission is to have the party help guard a caravan of wagons through a dangerous area. The caravan may already have maybe 6 regular guards, but the last caravan was attacked by monsters so this caravan hires some extra muscle. This doubles the number of target that the monsters will be aiming at, which basically doubles your party's chances of survival. And this allows you to throw a much bigger force against the party without risking a Total Party Kill. When the caravan gets ambushed by 8 goblins, 8 orcs, and an ogre, you will see real fear in the players' eyes. They'll feel the adrenaline rush. It'll feel really dangerous, until they see monsters dropping dead every round. And again, if the fight is going too easy for the party, maybe another ogre shows up. If the fight is going really badly and party members start dropping, well, maybe the next orc aims for a caravan guard rather than a party member.
Finally, the terrain in which the fight takes place will have a big effect on how dangerous it feels. Fighting an ogre in an open field is a heckuva lot easier than getting halfway across a long rope bridge when 2 goblins start firing arrows at you from behind a rock. Fighting in a swamp will slow you down. Fighting on an icy hillside will risk characters slipping and falling downhill. In many encounters, the party is not just fighting the monsters, they're also fighting the terrain!
The bottom line is this: IT'S A GAME! We play D&D to have fun. Some days it's fun to wade through a horde of monsters, nearly dying every round. But there will be days when you and/or your players have maybe had a rough day at work, or someone's going through some personal drama. Be aware of the mood of the players when the game starts. If everybody has had a rough day already, it's okay to give them a happy little boost by maybe letting them win a fight. Nobody's gonna arrest you for fudging a die roll now and then. As long as everyone at the table is having fun, you're doing it right.
Hope this helps.
Anzio Faro. Protector Aasimar light cleric. Lvl 18.
Viktor Gavriil. White dragonborn grave cleric. Lvl 20.
Ikram Sahir ibn-Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad. Brass dragonborn draconic sorcerer Lvl 9. Fire elemental devil.
Wrangler of cats.
Couple of things that i'd offer that could be added to an otherwise great response post already provided:
1) Players will get better the more they get to know how each others characters work. If you want to push them to work better, it's often just as important to include non-combat situations where they might need a few different peoples unique skillsets to get the job accomplished.
2) If you want to make combat test them, but are concerned you might accidentally overwhelm them, then to borrow the 6 bandit example from above i'd say that you can simply plan for a few waves of bandits to come in rather than all at once. Maybe have 3-4 bandits start the fight, the battle breaks out and the noise being made brings in another 3-6 nearby bandits. If the first two rounds look pretty mediocre or you've over-tuned the bandits by either home-brewing their build slightly or adding higher ranking command-type bandits to the initial group, then you drop the wave of nearby available bandits to assist them. Additionally, i tend to also have HP markers in place for each bandit be different, so i take the number listed as the average and range a few to have a few less and a few to have a few more. If i see only minor struggling, the inbound bandits i just drop their HP maybe 3-5 HP each before they enter the battle, just to reduce the hits needed to remove them by 1. This point was covered in the secondly point above, but it's a slightly different wrinkle so i figured i'd throw it in as another example.
3) If you miss on the difficulty early, i'd mostly lean towards 'too easy' rather than too difficult. you can work towards progressively making it a bit more difficult until you find the 'sweet spot'. I sometimes give enemies a homebrew special attack (my group knows i homebrew things in advance, so they are ready for it. you might have to let them know if it's the first time you are bringing it out) and only use it if things are too trivial in combat and the party was looking for more action or threat, else pretend it isn't there if the balance is proper.
My recommendation is to keep track of how much damage the players do. This is important. This gives you a baseline of what you can expect during an encounter, when you look at multiple encounters. You can create similar encounters before the PCs face a boss. (Though I wouldn't worry about a boss fight until level 3 at least). For example the PCs thought two Barghast in my campaign to give me a general idea of how they would go against an encounter with similar HP, but more difficult.
Figuring out what is going to be too powerful is fairly easy. Assume your monsters always hit. Then assume they always deal Max damage (Unless you are only going to use average damage). I would always do this for level 1-2. Once you get to level 3+ you can factor in likelihood of hitting and average damage. Players are too weak at level 1, that max damage (or a crit) will often times knock them to 0 right off the bat. (and average damage needs 3+ rounds to be a useful measure)
Basically at level one use any monster that can't kill a PC in one round. Then determine how many you need. Likely you probably want to increase some hp on the monsters because you have 6 players. If the monsters have low hp, you might be able to use more, especially if you are going to split initiative.
So my overall advice is to start off with easy encounters and judge how well the party is doing with those. Get a baseline for how much damage they are going to be doing each round.