So I am joining the ranks of the Dungeon Masters and let me tell you the undertaking is thusfar incredibly rewarding and difficult. I grew up around Dungeons and Dragons, with a Father and Brother who both played extensively but I am brand new to 5e and all of my players will also be new to 5e and DnD in general. I have a million questions, but the first one I would like to ask is how exactly does the CR system work? I will have my players (3 of them) entering the game at lvl 3, what would be a challenging first battle for them without being disastrous? I will most likely be reading through the forums as well as updating this one with questions. Thank you all!
There are also tools that make use of these guidelines, such as http://kobold.club/fight/#/encounter-builder (note D&D beyond is in the process of making an encounter builder of their own, but it won't be available until 2019).
My suggestion for making a first encounter would be: a) make it Easy difficulty and b) make if have a small number of mobs. I'll do an example using the basic rules because I don't know if you have Xanathar's accessible.
Two Thugs (https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/thug) are 100xp each for a total of 200xp and because there are two of them, that's a 1.5 multiplier for 300 xp. That 300xp is the encounter budget.
Your characters are level 3 so an easy threshold for them is 75 so with 3 of them it's 225. Meanwhile the Normal threshold is 150 for a total of 450 per encounter. So your 300xp encounter sits in the Easy range. It's not trivial, but it's not that challenging.
Thugs are also solid because they have a special ability which is only applicable while there are two of them so they get easier once the first is taken down. And if you want to make it harder, you can always have a few bandits (https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/bandit) join in.
The above is just one example. Thugs are CR 1/2 so you could replace them with any other CR 1/2 mob and you'd still probably have an Easy encounter.
Another thing to keep in mind: make sure your enemies are smart enough to retreat. That way, if things are going badly, you can get the players out of it with minimal Deus Ex Machina. The thugs are winning? Wait... is that the town guard. Time to run!
Anyway, that's just an idea. You can absolutely come up with your own. But hopefully those resources help you out.
For my two cents, when I first started DMing, I made my own monsters stats and figured "they would do this" if they were to attack. In some cases I would have an almost exact copy of the monster manuals version but with different base stats.
I would suggest making an easy fight for the first encounter, a slighty harder for the second, then a much harder for the third. If you are using homebrew monsters you can lie about health if it is too difficult to ensure the party lives by simply changing your health pools. To keep it simple I'd mainly just do HP, AC, STR, CON, DEX as a for the stats and have +1-+2 in everything else with a +4 at the highest on their to hit when starting fresh. Keep the number of enemies small at first, either equal to the parties numbers or one less to judge how their characters fare, or simply to see which way luck is swinging that session.
I recently did a game where my group was level 2, they were arguing with themselves on the side of the road for a few minutes before eventually starting to fight themselves. When that happened I let a round go on before I tossed a monster manual ogre at them as it was CR 2. The ogre was able to sneak up on them and get a melee hit in which almost one shotted the groups monk before everyone diverted their attention to him. After three rounds of combat (one they just buffed themselves and threw caltrops down to slow the ogre) they were able to defeat him only suffering from the initial attack and a thrown spear/javelin. This was against four PC's and I think it would have been far worse for them if they didn't have the caltrops to immediately stop the ogre's advance as those two hits brought each of the members attacked down below 5, and the players who were fighting themselves only suffered from the attacks they gave each other. I believe a second ogre would have killed 1-2 of the party members if not have caused a TPK.
Thank you so just as an update I was thinking of having the group encounter a lone Ghoul ( CR 1), just as a "getting their feet wet" fight. The following encounter will contain several Cultists with a Cultist Fanatic or two if my group is making quick work with the Cultists. And I have yet to decide on the end 'boss' yet, but what do you think with that? Any suggestions, the theme of the campaign is an Undead/Cultist monster hunting...group? lol Thank you!
I do not use the CR system. I do some math based on dice probabilities, AC and HP.
Dice: each number will come up on a d20 5% of the time. So the math part is easy.
AC: you need to be aware of the AC of the character's opponent(s). Let's say we have a ghoul with an AC of 12. You average level one character will have their highest stat in their best attack. We will use a Barbarian. He has probably rolled a 15 or used the points system in the PHB. That is +2 to his roll. He will probably be applying his proficiency bonus which at level 1 is +2. So, our L1 Barbarian only needs to roll an 8 to hit the Ghoul. (AC12 -2(STR) -2(Prof Bonus) = 8). This means that they are going to hit on 8 and up, 13 possible rolls of the d20. 13 x 5% per number means that they stand a 65% chance of landing a hit on the ghoul.
If you want to make things a little tougher for your characters, you might increase the AC of this Ghoul by 1 or 2. This means that 1 in 10 rolls that would have hit are now misses.
HP: This is how many times it is going to take to hack away at the poor interloper who just happened to innocently wander in amongst your party of murder hobos and coughed in the wrong tone of voice. Your level one Barbarian probably has a battleaxe or some such. He might cleave the ghoul clean in two but probably will wound him gravely, allowing for a swing at the character. This probably would not be to bad a thing to endure. But were it a Bugbear? This might take a little more effort. AC17 for the Bugbear? Now that level one Barbarian is hitting him 40% of the time. 17-20 equals 20% to hit. +4 for STR mod and Prof Bonus equals another 4(20%). Now he is only going to hit him 40% of the time. Which means he is probably only going to get two hits in five attacks with the 1d8+ battleaxe.
Now, I know we are talking a whole party of combatants and more than one adversary. But you can pretty much figure your party of four first level adventurers are going to have no problem taking out five skeletons or a small party of goblins with a goblin boss. But players like to kill shit. And PLAYERS DO NOT LIKE TO MISS! Yes, you can throw a bugbear or two at them. They will miss a lot of their shots and probably end up winning. Or you can throw them a whole butt load of lower characters and give them more stiff to hit and more often. The players might enjoy this a little bit more.
The rest of the posters have given you good advice on creating an encounter based on CR. There is, however, something that hasn't been mentioned, and it really does affect the difficulty of an encounter.
Besides CR there is a combination of strategy and terrain that goes into a combat encounter as well. While CR can give you a starting point on how difficult an encounter my be, this is a "white room" number. This doesn't, generally, take into account how the creatures will act when they realize they're being overwhelmed, or when they're overwhelming the players. Terrain is not taken into account when it comes to CR. Things like chasms, pits of lava, places to hide, points of cover, and intractable objects are some of the many tools that can be used during combat to drastically change the flow. As you continue in your journey as DM you'll need to introduce these things to manipulate the difficulty of the combat beyond just the CR.
Simple example of Strategy taking a combat to a whole new level:
I had 5 level 6 players, they fought 4 Dust Mephits in a mining facility. This is, according to CR calculations, a 400xp fight adjusted to 800 based on the number of enemies which is well below the 1500xp "easy" threshold. Using the flight of the creatures to keep out of melee range as much as possible and the blinding breath weapon, I had the party struggling to pin down the creatures. Mephits also have a variant ability to allow them to call a new Mephit into the combat, which increases the challenge, I only had 2 of them use the ability since it is a variant I felt it would be "random" as to if they had it. Simply adding 2 more Mephits increased the CR from easy to, just barely into, the hard range going from 1,000 xp adjusted to 1,200.
The players had rested prior to the fight so their resources were full. This is also something that can change the difficulty of a combat, resource management can severely handicap a party if done poorly. In this case I was just trying to show how annoying these creatures were, so I introduced them while the party was at their best. In the end I still knocked out 2 players before they finally killed the creatures off. The tactics and strategy of the Mephits was enough to make them a significant threat even though the CR said that the players should have been able to handle them. A "hard" encounter should tax the players' resources with the risk of death being low, in this instance the risk was increased because the Mephits were mobile and hiding rather than stationary and waiting to get hit.
---
Enjoy your time behind the screen, I wish you many happy games, and may the dice fall in favor of a glorious game.
My recommendation is checking out Matt Colville's amazing Youtube tutorial videos. Not only is he engaging but he's also pretty creative.
I learned a lot from watching others - Mercer, Perkins, etc - but also having a go as a player to get in their mindset a little more as well.
The Kobold Fight Club someone mentioned above is massively useful in determining what's tough and what isn't - but also don't be afraid to mix it up on the fly and add some HP if you want it to feel tougher. The players will never know. ;)
My recommendation is checking out Matt Colville's amazing Youtube tutorial videos. Not only is he engaging but he's also pretty creative.
I learned a lot from watching others - Mercer, Perkins, etc - but also having a go as a player to get in their mindset a little more as well.
I second this so much.
Matt Colville has been a great resource for straight learning and as a resource outside the books.
Watching others (my husband and I watch Critical Role together, and I watch a few others on my own) helps to understand the diversity of how different DMs manage and adjust encounters.
If you have a chance to play as a character outside your game, it never fails to open my eyes again to how my players see everything differently from how I do on my side of the screen.
Thank you to everyone for sharing your advice! I just received my DM's guide as well as the Monster Manual, with those and all the amazing advice I am going to buckle down and get to researching everything. I will most definitely be posting again for advice and hopefully with time to be able to share my own advice with others!
(May the dice forever fall in your favor)
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- Alea iacta est
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Hey all,
So I am joining the ranks of the Dungeon Masters and let me tell you the undertaking is thusfar incredibly rewarding and difficult. I grew up around Dungeons and Dragons, with a Father and Brother who both played extensively but I am brand new to 5e and all of my players will also be new to 5e and DnD in general. I have a million questions, but the first one I would like to ask is how exactly does the CR system work? I will have my players (3 of them) entering the game at lvl 3, what would be a challenging first battle for them without being disastrous? I will most likely be reading through the forums as well as updating this one with questions. Thank you all!
-Lucky
- Alea iacta est
So, there are several guidelines for building encounters:
There are also tools that make use of these guidelines, such as http://kobold.club/fight/#/encounter-builder (note D&D beyond is in the process of making an encounter builder of their own, but it won't be available until 2019).
My suggestion for making a first encounter would be: a) make it Easy difficulty and b) make if have a small number of mobs. I'll do an example using the basic rules because I don't know if you have Xanathar's accessible.
Two Thugs (https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/thug) are 100xp each for a total of 200xp and because there are two of them, that's a 1.5 multiplier for 300 xp. That 300xp is the encounter budget.
Your characters are level 3 so an easy threshold for them is 75 so with 3 of them it's 225. Meanwhile the Normal threshold is 150 for a total of 450 per encounter. So your 300xp encounter sits in the Easy range. It's not trivial, but it's not that challenging.
Thugs are also solid because they have a special ability which is only applicable while there are two of them so they get easier once the first is taken down. And if you want to make it harder, you can always have a few bandits (https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/bandit) join in.
The above is just one example. Thugs are CR 1/2 so you could replace them with any other CR 1/2 mob and you'd still probably have an Easy encounter.
Another thing to keep in mind: make sure your enemies are smart enough to retreat. That way, if things are going badly, you can get the players out of it with minimal Deus Ex Machina. The thugs are winning? Wait... is that the town guard. Time to run!
Anyway, that's just an idea. You can absolutely come up with your own. But hopefully those resources help you out.
Thank you so much! I will take a look at the resources and the example really helped put it into perspective.
- Alea iacta est
For my two cents, when I first started DMing, I made my own monsters stats and figured "they would do this" if they were to attack. In some cases I would have an almost exact copy of the monster manuals version but with different base stats.
I would suggest making an easy fight for the first encounter, a slighty harder for the second, then a much harder for the third. If you are using homebrew monsters you can lie about health if it is too difficult to ensure the party lives by simply changing your health pools. To keep it simple I'd mainly just do HP, AC, STR, CON, DEX as a for the stats and have +1-+2 in everything else with a +4 at the highest on their to hit when starting fresh. Keep the number of enemies small at first, either equal to the parties numbers or one less to judge how their characters fare, or simply to see which way luck is swinging that session.
I recently did a game where my group was level 2, they were arguing with themselves on the side of the road for a few minutes before eventually starting to fight themselves. When that happened I let a round go on before I tossed a monster manual ogre at them as it was CR 2. The ogre was able to sneak up on them and get a melee hit in which almost one shotted the groups monk before everyone diverted their attention to him. After three rounds of combat (one they just buffed themselves and threw caltrops down to slow the ogre) they were able to defeat him only suffering from the initial attack and a thrown spear/javelin. This was against four PC's and I think it would have been far worse for them if they didn't have the caltrops to immediately stop the ogre's advance as those two hits brought each of the members attacked down below 5, and the players who were fighting themselves only suffered from the attacks they gave each other. I believe a second ogre would have killed 1-2 of the party members if not have caused a TPK.
Thank you so just as an update I was thinking of having the group encounter a lone Ghoul ( CR 1), just as a "getting their feet wet" fight. The following encounter will contain several Cultists with a Cultist Fanatic or two if my group is making quick work with the Cultists. And I have yet to decide on the end 'boss' yet, but what do you think with that? Any suggestions, the theme of the campaign is an Undead/Cultist monster hunting...group? lol Thank you!
- Alea iacta est
I do not use the CR system. I do some math based on dice probabilities, AC and HP.
Dice: each number will come up on a d20 5% of the time. So the math part is easy.
AC: you need to be aware of the AC of the character's opponent(s). Let's say we have a ghoul with an AC of 12. You average level one character will have their highest stat in their best attack. We will use a Barbarian. He has probably rolled a 15 or used the points system in the PHB. That is +2 to his roll. He will probably be applying his proficiency bonus which at level 1 is +2. So, our L1 Barbarian only needs to roll an 8 to hit the Ghoul. (AC12 -2(STR) -2(Prof Bonus) = 8). This means that they are going to hit on 8 and up, 13 possible rolls of the d20. 13 x 5% per number means that they stand a 65% chance of landing a hit on the ghoul.
If you want to make things a little tougher for your characters, you might increase the AC of this Ghoul by 1 or 2. This means that 1 in 10 rolls that would have hit are now misses.
HP: This is how many times it is going to take to hack away at the poor interloper who just happened to innocently wander in amongst your party of murder hobos and coughed in the wrong tone of voice. Your level one Barbarian probably has a battleaxe or some such. He might cleave the ghoul clean in two but probably will wound him gravely, allowing for a swing at the character. This probably would not be to bad a thing to endure. But were it a Bugbear? This might take a little more effort. AC17 for the Bugbear? Now that level one Barbarian is hitting him 40% of the time. 17-20 equals 20% to hit. +4 for STR mod and Prof Bonus equals another 4(20%). Now he is only going to hit him 40% of the time. Which means he is probably only going to get two hits in five attacks with the 1d8+ battleaxe.
Now, I know we are talking a whole party of combatants and more than one adversary. But you can pretty much figure your party of four first level adventurers are going to have no problem taking out five skeletons or a small party of goblins with a goblin boss. But players like to kill shit. And PLAYERS DO NOT LIKE TO MISS! Yes, you can throw a bugbear or two at them. They will miss a lot of their shots and probably end up winning. Or you can throw them a whole butt load of lower characters and give them more stiff to hit and more often. The players might enjoy this a little bit more.
Matthew Colville has a great video on this on his YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDjD0Gjtgik
Thank you.
ChrisW
Ones are righteous. And one day, we just might believe it.
A wight might make a reasonable boss monster with a couple extra low level minions: https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/wight
It's intelligent enough to possibly have goals. And it has a weakness which, if exploited, makes it easier to tackle (silver weapons).
But that's hardly the only option. A junior necromancer or evil priest could work. Or anything you can write a story around. Have fun with it.
The rest of the posters have given you good advice on creating an encounter based on CR. There is, however, something that hasn't been mentioned, and it really does affect the difficulty of an encounter.
Besides CR there is a combination of strategy and terrain that goes into a combat encounter as well. While CR can give you a starting point on how difficult an encounter my be, this is a "white room" number. This doesn't, generally, take into account how the creatures will act when they realize they're being overwhelmed, or when they're overwhelming the players. Terrain is not taken into account when it comes to CR. Things like chasms, pits of lava, places to hide, points of cover, and intractable objects are some of the many tools that can be used during combat to drastically change the flow. As you continue in your journey as DM you'll need to introduce these things to manipulate the difficulty of the combat beyond just the CR.
Simple example of Strategy taking a combat to a whole new level:
I had 5 level 6 players, they fought 4 Dust Mephits in a mining facility. This is, according to CR calculations, a 400xp fight adjusted to 800 based on the number of enemies which is well below the 1500xp "easy" threshold. Using the flight of the creatures to keep out of melee range as much as possible and the blinding breath weapon, I had the party struggling to pin down the creatures. Mephits also have a variant ability to allow them to call a new Mephit into the combat, which increases the challenge, I only had 2 of them use the ability since it is a variant I felt it would be "random" as to if they had it. Simply adding 2 more Mephits increased the CR from easy to, just barely into, the hard range going from 1,000 xp adjusted to 1,200.
The players had rested prior to the fight so their resources were full. This is also something that can change the difficulty of a combat, resource management can severely handicap a party if done poorly. In this case I was just trying to show how annoying these creatures were, so I introduced them while the party was at their best. In the end I still knocked out 2 players before they finally killed the creatures off. The tactics and strategy of the Mephits was enough to make them a significant threat even though the CR said that the players should have been able to handle them. A "hard" encounter should tax the players' resources with the risk of death being low, in this instance the risk was increased because the Mephits were mobile and hiding rather than stationary and waiting to get hit.
---
Enjoy your time behind the screen, I wish you many happy games, and may the dice fall in favor of a glorious game.
My recommendation is checking out Matt Colville's amazing Youtube tutorial videos. Not only is he engaging but he's also pretty creative.
I learned a lot from watching others - Mercer, Perkins, etc - but also having a go as a player to get in their mindset a little more as well.
The Kobold Fight Club someone mentioned above is massively useful in determining what's tough and what isn't - but also don't be afraid to mix it up on the fly and add some HP if you want it to feel tougher. The players will never know. ;)
I second this so much.
Matt Colville has been a great resource for straight learning and as a resource outside the books.
Watching others (my husband and I watch Critical Role together, and I watch a few others on my own) helps to understand the diversity of how different DMs manage and adjust encounters.
If you have a chance to play as a character outside your game, it never fails to open my eyes again to how my players see everything differently from how I do on my side of the screen.
Thank you to everyone for sharing your advice! I just received my DM's guide as well as the Monster Manual, with those and all the amazing advice I am going to buckle down and get to researching everything. I will most definitely be posting again for advice and hopefully with time to be able to share my own advice with others!
(May the dice forever fall in your favor)
- Alea iacta est