I put a team of 6 17th level characters up against 4 legendary beholders (the standard CR 13 ones). The monsters still only got 3 legendary actions and 3 legendary resistances, despite there being 4 of them, since I thought breaking that would seriously break action economy.
Just on a gut feeling, with the party having multiple magic items they are faring well. It feels like a medium to hard encounter.
I was wondering if anyone had a way to calculate or estimate the CR of an encounter for multiple legendaries (as I understand the game wasn't designed to have multiple legendaries in an encounter?). I would like to make encounters like this again.
Creatures are generally given a CR in line with all of their abilities including their Legendary Actions and Resistances. I dont know of any creature where that CR changes when you add more of that same type of Creature aside from Hags. I know for them when you have 3 their individual (or group) CR changes because they get new spells they can cast when they're together. Aside from that the CR of a creature is their CR regardless of there being 1 or 5 of them. Also note that a Beholder's CR changes if they're in their Lair to 14.
And it seems to me that 4 beholders against 6 17th level PC's doesn't sound too terribly difficult. At that level I could imagine that they would likely be able to down 2 of them quite easily if they focus fire enough, depending of course on how geared and optimized they are and how well they roll on initiative.
My recommendation would be to homebrew a master beholder of some sort with a few brainwashed underbeholders to up the CR, make their eye rays hit harder or have new abilties and give them some different lair actions. If you wanted to give them a challenge of course.
Belx, sorry for confusion, I meant the CR of the encounter not the monster. I thought the CR for legendaries worked differently since they were intended to be solo monsters.
Just be aware of the action economy; 4 monsters with 3 legendary actions each effectively get 12 extra things they can do per round. Throwing in a lair action further adds to the challenge, so unless the players are well equipped with magic gear, I'd personally avoid this sort of encounter.
This gets even crazier when such creatures have access to powerful party-wide options, like dragons' breath weapons or spellcasting. This could easily lead to a TPK if the party happens to roll poorly on initiative.
So long as you keep an eye on your EXP allowance for the encounter, theoretically things should be fine, but some monsters can hit well over their CR. Banshees and Sea Hags come to mind (auto-drop to 0 HP), even if they're not legendary be default.
Belx, sorry for confusion, I meant the CR of the encounter not the monster. I thought the CR for legendaries worked differently since they were intended to be solo monsters.
I sort of figured thats what you were going for, but no, the rules dont change for the encounter (officially) just cause there are more creatures with legendaries in the fight. The calculation remains the same. And as Rexir2 said, the action economy is really the important part of an encounter to consider when going against a party of adventurers.
Also, you have to remember that a beholder gets 3 eye ray attacks on their turn, can focus their central eye on something and gets 3 more eye ray attacks as legendary actions per round. So 6x4 per round means the DM has to make 24 eye attacks each round. Thats a lot of targeting and can lead to a lot of damage or control. And remember that beholders (specifically) are super paranoid and are isolationists who absolutely hate others of their kind and see them as inferior. It would be super rare unless your versions of beholders are not like that. But RAW, you wouldnt likely find more than 1 in a given area anyway.
Ultimately you'd have an easier time coming up with an encounter that has a beholder as the main bad guy, buff him up then give him a mix of melee and caster/ranged minions who may or may not have legendary actions/resistances.
Yeah, I decided to just still limit them to 3 legendary actions even though it was multiple. Thats kind of why I'm not sure how to calculate the CR for the encounter.
For something like the beholder CR 13, where does its offensive damage put it on the table in chapter 9? It seems its defense is a little less than 13, meaning its offence would be a bit higher if they were averaged. It gets 3 rolls on a random table a round, and some of the rays dont do damage. I know there's not really a set formula, just curious how others think through those things.
The basic CR math is checking durability and damage per round, and is counting legendary actions as part of dpr. You can convert a legendary to non-legendary by just moving its legendary actions to its main action, so a Beholder would just use 6 eye rays on its turn.
Eliminating the legendary actions roughly halves its dpr, which reduces overall CR to about 10.
Personally? I think you're looking at CR a little too closely, at least in this specific case. Beholders fall into the category of something that punches above its own weight class. This is why I dont think you should try to do the straight math on the CR using defense and damage as the baseline. These creatures are versatile in what they can do, how they act and how they defeat their foes. For instance, they only have an 18 AC, which isnt all that high really, but they float, and very rarely do they put themselves in a position where they can be attacked by melee characters. So what they'll usually do is sit in an area where its hard to reach them, then point their anti-magic cone at the access point and prevent people from getting to them.
Then you have the eye rays. Sleep, Petrification, Slow, Fear, Charm. All these eyes dont do any damage at all and take opponents out of the fight or even bring them on to their side temporarily. I mean, only 3 of the 10 rays actually do damage, so attempting to calculate CR off damage is almost pointless for these guys. So changing the calculation for the fight is unnecessary beyond whats available in the Encounter Builder or Kobold Fight Club.
So my thoughts on this are, look at how deadly they are and plan accordingly. Also, its been stated before that WOTC has not released their actual CR calculator out into the wild and whats in the DMG is only a basic guideline for when you're creating your own monsters or how to adjust the CR of something once you've added or removed abilities. One of the things ive learned as a DM over the last few years is that each party is different and their capabilities vary wildly. You know your PC's and what they can handle. Have they fought a beholder in the past? How did that go? Base it off that?
I get what you're saying. And yes, it feels like a medium to hard encounter...was just wondering if a way to quantify it existed other than just learning by experience. But no biggie, overthinking it for no reason really.
was just wondering if a way to quantify it existed other than just learning by experience
Sadly not really. As mentioned, some monsters are tougher than their CR and others are weaker, and the only way to know that is to actually run them. You could also have the same party go up against something and the players will just decimate the fight with a few good rolls, and if you were to replay the exact fight and the monster rolled well it would roll over the players.
The Challenge Rating is just a quick overview of the relative power level of a creature, but how the fight goes is based on too many factors.
Another issue with beholders is that their antimagic ray will interfere with a lot of the capabilities level 17 characters have, but also interferes pretty heavily with the beholder's own capabilities.
If you want a super annoying fight, you have one beholder that just hangs out at a distance, just using its central eye to prevent any area effect spells and suppress defenses, while a swarm of weenie monsters beats on the party. One beholder and 25-70 kobolds is theoretically medium encounter for a party of 6 at level 17, but inside an antimagic cone it's actually pretty nasty.
Well the antimagic is a cone that gets placed at the beginning of the beholders turn, and it turned out was pretty easy to avoid (just walk out of it, the cone is pretty narrow up in melee range...even if you can't see it 10 ft left or right gets you free). Its main use was to drop them out of their overland travel flight. I did however show them the boundaries of the antimagic zones after a 22 Arcana check.
It was a 5 round fight in the end, one PC ended up down to about half health and there were a few close calls with petrify, but really not much danger. At one point 3 of 6 PCs were disabled for a round. Action denial stuff like that. No one hit zero. The sleep ray was surprisingly the most devastating of the 10 rays, since unconscious makes str and dex saves autofail.
They have the magic item distribution recommended for 17th level characters from XGtE, pretty decked out in other words. By the CR calculator it would be a deadly but like I said this really felt like a medium or low hard. So, I guess I learned their magic items are cranking down the difficulty 2 notches and can try adjusting future encounters accordingly.
I put a team of 6 17th level characters up against 4 legendary beholders (the standard CR 13 ones). The monsters still only got 3 legendary actions and 3 legendary resistances, despite there being 4 of them, since I thought breaking that would seriously break action economy.
Just on a gut feeling, with the party having multiple magic items they are faring well. It feels like a medium to hard encounter.
I was wondering if anyone had a way to calculate or estimate the CR of an encounter for multiple legendaries (as I understand the game wasn't designed to have multiple legendaries in an encounter?). I would like to make encounters like this again.
I think the "legendary" is already factored in the creature's CR, so the normal calculations should work.
Creatures are generally given a CR in line with all of their abilities including their Legendary Actions and Resistances. I dont know of any creature where that CR changes when you add more of that same type of Creature aside from Hags. I know for them when you have 3 their individual (or group) CR changes because they get new spells they can cast when they're together. Aside from that the CR of a creature is their CR regardless of there being 1 or 5 of them. Also note that a Beholder's CR changes if they're in their Lair to 14.
And it seems to me that 4 beholders against 6 17th level PC's doesn't sound too terribly difficult. At that level I could imagine that they would likely be able to down 2 of them quite easily if they focus fire enough, depending of course on how geared and optimized they are and how well they roll on initiative.
My recommendation would be to homebrew a master beholder of some sort with a few brainwashed underbeholders to up the CR, make their eye rays hit harder or have new abilties and give them some different lair actions. If you wanted to give them a challenge of course.
Belx, sorry for confusion, I meant the CR of the encounter not the monster. I thought the CR for legendaries worked differently since they were intended to be solo monsters.
Just be aware of the action economy; 4 monsters with 3 legendary actions each effectively get 12 extra things they can do per round. Throwing in a lair action further adds to the challenge, so unless the players are well equipped with magic gear, I'd personally avoid this sort of encounter.
This gets even crazier when such creatures have access to powerful party-wide options, like dragons' breath weapons or spellcasting. This could easily lead to a TPK if the party happens to roll poorly on initiative.
So long as you keep an eye on your EXP allowance for the encounter, theoretically things should be fine, but some monsters can hit well over their CR. Banshees and Sea Hags come to mind (auto-drop to 0 HP), even if they're not legendary be default.
I sort of figured thats what you were going for, but no, the rules dont change for the encounter (officially) just cause there are more creatures with legendaries in the fight. The calculation remains the same. And as Rexir2 said, the action economy is really the important part of an encounter to consider when going against a party of adventurers.
Also, you have to remember that a beholder gets 3 eye ray attacks on their turn, can focus their central eye on something and gets 3 more eye ray attacks as legendary actions per round. So 6x4 per round means the DM has to make 24 eye attacks each round. Thats a lot of targeting and can lead to a lot of damage or control. And remember that beholders (specifically) are super paranoid and are isolationists who absolutely hate others of their kind and see them as inferior. It would be super rare unless your versions of beholders are not like that. But RAW, you wouldnt likely find more than 1 in a given area anyway.
Ultimately you'd have an easier time coming up with an encounter that has a beholder as the main bad guy, buff him up then give him a mix of melee and caster/ranged minions who may or may not have legendary actions/resistances.
Yeah, I decided to just still limit them to 3 legendary actions even though it was multiple. Thats kind of why I'm not sure how to calculate the CR for the encounter.
For something like the beholder CR 13, where does its offensive damage put it on the table in chapter 9? It seems its defense is a little less than 13, meaning its offence would be a bit higher if they were averaged. It gets 3 rolls on a random table a round, and some of the rays dont do damage. I know there's not really a set formula, just curious how others think through those things.
The basic CR math is checking durability and damage per round, and is counting legendary actions as part of dpr. You can convert a legendary to non-legendary by just moving its legendary actions to its main action, so a Beholder would just use 6 eye rays on its turn.
Eliminating the legendary actions roughly halves its dpr, which reduces overall CR to about 10.
I see. How do you account for the rays that dont do damage?
I mean, you can have a round where all 3 of the normal rays are non damaging rays.
You figure out averages, or you give them a damage equivalent, or you just assume that the designers did the math.
Personally? I think you're looking at CR a little too closely, at least in this specific case. Beholders fall into the category of something that punches above its own weight class. This is why I dont think you should try to do the straight math on the CR using defense and damage as the baseline. These creatures are versatile in what they can do, how they act and how they defeat their foes. For instance, they only have an 18 AC, which isnt all that high really, but they float, and very rarely do they put themselves in a position where they can be attacked by melee characters. So what they'll usually do is sit in an area where its hard to reach them, then point their anti-magic cone at the access point and prevent people from getting to them.
Then you have the eye rays. Sleep, Petrification, Slow, Fear, Charm. All these eyes dont do any damage at all and take opponents out of the fight or even bring them on to their side temporarily. I mean, only 3 of the 10 rays actually do damage, so attempting to calculate CR off damage is almost pointless for these guys. So changing the calculation for the fight is unnecessary beyond whats available in the Encounter Builder or Kobold Fight Club.
So my thoughts on this are, look at how deadly they are and plan accordingly. Also, its been stated before that WOTC has not released their actual CR calculator out into the wild and whats in the DMG is only a basic guideline for when you're creating your own monsters or how to adjust the CR of something once you've added or removed abilities. One of the things ive learned as a DM over the last few years is that each party is different and their capabilities vary wildly. You know your PC's and what they can handle. Have they fought a beholder in the past? How did that go? Base it off that?
I get what you're saying. And yes, it feels like a medium to hard encounter...was just wondering if a way to quantify it existed other than just learning by experience. But no biggie, overthinking it for no reason really.
Sadly not really. As mentioned, some monsters are tougher than their CR and others are weaker, and the only way to know that is to actually run them. You could also have the same party go up against something and the players will just decimate the fight with a few good rolls, and if you were to replay the exact fight and the monster rolled well it would roll over the players.
The Challenge Rating is just a quick overview of the relative power level of a creature, but how the fight goes is based on too many factors.
Another issue with beholders is that their antimagic ray will interfere with a lot of the capabilities level 17 characters have, but also interferes pretty heavily with the beholder's own capabilities.
If you want a super annoying fight, you have one beholder that just hangs out at a distance, just using its central eye to prevent any area effect spells and suppress defenses, while a swarm of weenie monsters beats on the party. One beholder and 25-70 kobolds is theoretically medium encounter for a party of 6 at level 17, but inside an antimagic cone it's actually pretty nasty.
Well the antimagic is a cone that gets placed at the beginning of the beholders turn, and it turned out was pretty easy to avoid (just walk out of it, the cone is pretty narrow up in melee range...even if you can't see it 10 ft left or right gets you free). Its main use was to drop them out of their overland travel flight. I did however show them the boundaries of the antimagic zones after a 22 Arcana check.
It was a 5 round fight in the end, one PC ended up down to about half health and there were a few close calls with petrify, but really not much danger. At one point 3 of 6 PCs were disabled for a round. Action denial stuff like that. No one hit zero. The sleep ray was surprisingly the most devastating of the 10 rays, since unconscious makes str and dex saves autofail.
They have the magic item distribution recommended for 17th level characters from XGtE, pretty decked out in other words. By the CR calculator it would be a deadly but like I said this really felt like a medium or low hard. So, I guess I learned their magic items are cranking down the difficulty 2 notches and can try adjusting future encounters accordingly.