Last week I ran an encounter with one Water Elemental VS the party of 4 level 5 characters: fighter, cleric, rogue, and sorcerer. The fight started with surprise against the party and in water. They all failed strength checks against the whelm attack to which I chose to ignore grapple part of the attack. The encounter lasted 8 rounds. the cleric was downed first. It's player's decisions kept it as the closest to the elemental as the players fell back 100 feet to dry land to remove it's advantage of being nearly Invisible. The fighter was downed next on turn 5 with a failed check against the recharged whelm attack. And by the 8th round the rogue was almost the 3rd victim, if the sorcerer hadn't held back and used a rather big hitting spell to finish it off. Based an CR this fight should not have been nearly this deadly. The success and failure rate of attacks I don't think was out of the ordinary. And the party's damage output is such that I typically set enemy hit points to max to retain the expected challenge of each encounter. By setting this one to max HP did I inadvertently change this to a deadly CR fight? Or is it perhaps something else entirely I overlooked?
The CR is indeed correct, though I would suggest 2 things to consider:
Firstly, I suggest maintaining the average HP, I find it the best area to set things up at is average. You can change things on the fly based on how the party is doing without them realizing. Drop the damage by 1 die, increase Max HP by a maxed out Hit Dice, or just have an additional monster later. Find out to what limits your group and yourself might be comfortable with this tinkering, but don't ever tell the players your doing it, otherwise it could ruin the game. If your not comfortable with doing it, don't do it! If you think it's a betrayal of your players, don't do it!
Secondly, don't use the strongest attack during the surprise round and start the enemy with their recharge action already exhausted and roll for the recharge. Creatures and people don't usually use all their energy immediately, this can slightly reduce the challenge and make the use more special.
As a longtime player, I love a challenging encounter!
Also, many of us have played and/or DM'd for a very long time, and have read all the sourcebooks. So while we try not to metagame (because metagaming ruins the fun) we can't help but already know the CR and relative strengths and weaknesses of most of the things we encounter. So it's a refreshing change of pace when the unexpected pops up. I mean, sure the sourcebooks may say that a certain monster has a certain number of hit dice, or attacks, or whatever. But that's an average. Not every monster will be average. Maybe your party just had bad luck with dice rolls, or maybe what they encountered was actually an "Elder Elemental" or whatever you want to call it.
Basically... sh-t happens. Some days you're the windshield and some days you're the bug.
Roll with it.
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Tayn of Darkwood. Lvl 10 human Life Cleric of Lathander. Retired.
Ikram Sahir ibn Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad, Second Son of the House of Ra'ad, Defender of the Burning Sands. Lvl 9 Brass Dragonborn Sorcerer + Greater Fire Elemental Devil.
Viktor Gavriil. Lvl 20 White Dragonborn Grave Cleric, of Kurgan the God of Death.
From the players perspective I don't think there was a problem with the outcome of this encounter. They like combat as long as they aren't missing far too many attacks all the time. They want a challenge without feeling like bad luck with their rolls is the reason why they aren't succeeding at an encounter. And because the die rolls aspect of the encounter didn't appear to contribute to this one being deadly I was looking to find out what may have caused it. My thoughts on how a creature would use attacks such as the whelm attack would be when it can harm as many threats to it as possible. But this did end up doing nearly half each players HP in a single attack. The cleric did do a party heal in one of the two rounds after which healed about half the damage to each player. And they used ranged attacks as they fell back. From there the elemental attacked the nearest (the cleric). Which also seemed logical for such a creature to have done. Tactically if I had opened with just two slam attacks on random two players the cleric would have gone down one turn later assuming he was not one of the two hit. Same for the fighter who was downed a couple rounds before the encounter ended. If I went with average HP the encounter would have ended one maybe two turns sooner depending on if the cleric and or fighter ended up the initial targets. If both weren't initial targets then only the cleric would have gone down.
Was there anything tactical the players could have done different? The dry land was only 30 ft by 30 ft. The sorcerer used Scorching Ray each round for 3 rounds, Burning Hands for 1 or two rounds, and fireball the killing blow. The fighter didn't hold back any attacks two weapon fighting with extra attack and even used his action surge. The rogue had sneak attack every turn except the 3 turns they were falling back to dry land. The cleric failed two of 3 dragonborn breath weapon attacks during falling back. One player used an action to throw a rope to the cleric to which I granted 30 ft of pulling distance for that action and no attack of opportunity for the elemental.
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Last week I ran an encounter with one Water Elemental VS the party of 4 level 5 characters: fighter, cleric, rogue, and sorcerer. The fight started with surprise against the party and in water. They all failed strength checks against the whelm attack to which I chose to ignore grapple part of the attack. The encounter lasted 8 rounds. the cleric was downed first. It's player's decisions kept it as the closest to the elemental as the players fell back 100 feet to dry land to remove it's advantage of being nearly Invisible. The fighter was downed next on turn 5 with a failed check against the recharged whelm attack. And by the 8th round the rogue was almost the 3rd victim, if the sorcerer hadn't held back and used a rather big hitting spell to finish it off. Based an CR this fight should not have been nearly this deadly. The success and failure rate of attacks I don't think was out of the ordinary. And the party's damage output is such that I typically set enemy hit points to max to retain the expected challenge of each encounter. By setting this one to max HP did I inadvertently change this to a deadly CR fight? Or is it perhaps something else entirely I overlooked?
Having a water elemental in water ups the difficulty of the encounter.
You could have changed the HP max in the middle of the fight.
Challenge doesn't mean pushover, if two PCs were taken down it's how it goes.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
The CR is indeed correct, though I would suggest 2 things to consider:
Firstly, I suggest maintaining the average HP, I find it the best area to set things up at is average. You can change things on the fly based on how the party is doing without them realizing. Drop the damage by 1 die, increase Max HP by a maxed out Hit Dice, or just have an additional monster later. Find out to what limits your group and yourself might be comfortable with this tinkering, but don't ever tell the players your doing it, otherwise it could ruin the game. If your not comfortable with doing it, don't do it! If you think it's a betrayal of your players, don't do it!
Secondly, don't use the strongest attack during the surprise round and start the enemy with their recharge action already exhausted and roll for the recharge. Creatures and people don't usually use all their energy immediately, this can slightly reduce the challenge and make the use more special.
As a longtime player, I love a challenging encounter!
Also, many of us have played and/or DM'd for a very long time, and have read all the sourcebooks. So while we try not to metagame (because metagaming ruins the fun) we can't help but already know the CR and relative strengths and weaknesses of most of the things we encounter. So it's a refreshing change of pace when the unexpected pops up. I mean, sure the sourcebooks may say that a certain monster has a certain number of hit dice, or attacks, or whatever. But that's an average. Not every monster will be average. Maybe your party just had bad luck with dice rolls, or maybe what they encountered was actually an "Elder Elemental" or whatever you want to call it.
Basically... sh-t happens. Some days you're the windshield and some days you're the bug.
Roll with it.
Tayn of Darkwood. Lvl 10 human Life Cleric of Lathander. Retired.
Ikram Sahir ibn Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad, Second Son of the House of Ra'ad, Defender of the Burning Sands. Lvl 9 Brass Dragonborn Sorcerer + Greater Fire Elemental Devil.
Viktor Gavriil. Lvl 20 White Dragonborn Grave Cleric, of Kurgan the God of Death.
Anzio Faro. Lvl 5 Prot. Aasimar Light Cleric.
From the players perspective I don't think there was a problem with the outcome of this encounter. They like combat as long as they aren't missing far too many attacks all the time. They want a challenge without feeling like bad luck with their rolls is the reason why they aren't succeeding at an encounter. And because the die rolls aspect of the encounter didn't appear to contribute to this one being deadly I was looking to find out what may have caused it. My thoughts on how a creature would use attacks such as the whelm attack would be when it can harm as many threats to it as possible. But this did end up doing nearly half each players HP in a single attack. The cleric did do a party heal in one of the two rounds after which healed about half the damage to each player. And they used ranged attacks as they fell back. From there the elemental attacked the nearest (the cleric). Which also seemed logical for such a creature to have done. Tactically if I had opened with just two slam attacks on random two players the cleric would have gone down one turn later assuming he was not one of the two hit. Same for the fighter who was downed a couple rounds before the encounter ended. If I went with average HP the encounter would have ended one maybe two turns sooner depending on if the cleric and or fighter ended up the initial targets. If both weren't initial targets then only the cleric would have gone down.
Was there anything tactical the players could have done different? The dry land was only 30 ft by 30 ft. The sorcerer used Scorching Ray each round for 3 rounds, Burning Hands for 1 or two rounds, and fireball the killing blow. The fighter didn't hold back any attacks two weapon fighting with extra attack and even used his action surge. The rogue had sneak attack every turn except the 3 turns they were falling back to dry land. The cleric failed two of 3 dragonborn breath weapon attacks during falling back. One player used an action to throw a rope to the cleric to which I granted 30 ft of pulling distance for that action and no attack of opportunity for the elemental.