Has anyone 'encountered' this in their campaign. You set up an encounter using 'Encounter Math' from DMG or the tool from Beyond and you want to give the players a challenge. Oh, and they're five 1st level characters. After all, is said and done the encounter comes out to be defined as Hard. That's ok, this was to be a significant fight so as I said before I was looking for a challenge.
Well... Or so you thought.
The result is the five players, (Warlock, Cleric, Sorcerer, Thief, and Paladin) absolutely destroyed the encounter within a round and a half. So Hard was not that Hard, even though the math comes out that way.
Yeah, that was three days ago and other battles for most of the game resulted in a 'ho-hum' attitude from the players. Yes, I could just add more creatures to the battle that could be the simple answer but I'd like to get some others' perspective.
So to my question of fellow DMs, the best advice on setting up Encounters that is more accurate to the players' party. When designing an encounter do you just go by the DMG / Beyond builder or some other methodology and hope that the challenge is actually a challenge? Do you pay attention to the numbers or just throw creatures in and hope for the best. (my goal is not to kill them but on the occasion making them sweat a little bit does not hurt)
A few things to keep in mind when designing encounters.
Action economy is huge. if you have 5 characters attacking 1 or 2 monsters, the characters have a huge advantage, particularly if they get initiative. A solution to this is to give monsters more reactions (you can also scale health, or have them bring in 1hp minions). Personally, i like action-oriented monsters, ones that either have more reactions or that do things at certain levels of health.
Difficulty also assumes you are having some number (3-5) encounters per day. If it's just one encounter and everyone has had a long rest, they have a ton of resources available to use. If that same encounter were their 4th or 5th, it could look a lot different. It's ok to have a few adventuring days with only 1 combat, but that skews power towards long rest based classes. You'll have to find your number of encounters per day balance as appropriate for your characters.
Also consider the terrain available, and if the monsters are more familiar with it than your characters.
From your group makeup, you have 2 short rest classes (thief, warlock) and 3 long rest classes. Make them use their resources.
From levels 1-3 balance can be tough because it is very depending on "hitting" and initiative order. 4 goblins played smartly can easily devastate a level 1 party.
Hope some of the above helps.
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"An' things ha' come to a pretty pass, ye ken, if people are going to leave stuff like that aroound where innocent people could accidentally smash the door doon and lever the bars aside and take the big chain off'f the cupboard and pick the lock and drink it!"
Everything Koradgee said is also true, particularly #2. I like the suggestion in #1 to bring in 1/low HP minions, but not too many because each of them have the chance to hit as well which can easily add up to lots of damage for a super low level party.
If they are 1st level characters you really need to be careful unless you and your players are OK with a first or second session TPK. One max roll on a d8 will drop many 1st level characters to 0 hp and at 1st level they may not have the cure wounds spell or the healing potion available to save the character from dying. I think for 1st level you were better off going a little easier on them.
I agree things listed as "hard" aren't necessarily going to be "hard" in the sense that "the whole party might die," but I'm not sure you want them to be. At 1st level if the monsters get in one hit someone is at half hp, and 1 blow (or less) from faceplanting. Even a couple of easy battles against kobolds and a "moderate" one against a ghoul had my 1st level party out of spell slots and banged up before the final fight with the Necromancer. At the end of about 5 encounters, mostly rated as "easy'" and all of them fairly easy in terms of only going 2 or maybe 3 rounds tops... they ended with one guy at 0 with a failed death saving throw in his pocket, one guy at 1 hp, one at half hp, and one at full HP. That, to me, is hard enough, for 1st level.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
A thing people talked about in prior editions was the 'five minute workday' -- the mechanics for spell recovery favor, if possible, just going in, blowing everything up, then taking a long rest. This is slightly less true in 5th edition because of the severe restrictions on buffing spells, but it's still pretty true; an actually hard fight for a rested party that will be able to rest again afterwards is somewhere around 150% of the Deadly budget, but if you're grinding your way through multiple encounters, that fifth medium encounter in a day might actually be looking pretty scary.
Five against one is going to skew results unless the monster has enough mobility to prevent the party from ganging up on him all at once. Second, if the party got the initiative then except for a resistance to non-magical weapons, they're likely to get significant damage every round.
And on the other hand, first level encounters can be tough because a player can go down because of one good damage roll. Even at second and third level, players can go down because of a good damage roll after rolling a crit. When you get up into level 5 players and use 3 of more monsters, the averages start to become pretty reliable.
I was running the math of my party of level 4 players against a huge number of goblins only armed with melee weapons. I set this up just to make the math easy enough to do the checks. Also assuming a corridor as wide as the 7 player party, how long could the encounter last if I wanted to guarantee no player was going to die, but I was going to let the monsters perform at 10% better than their normal to-hit numbers indicated, (to model bad luck for the players) and give the monsters 5 damage on any round they achieved a hit. Even though the fighter type characters can reliably one-shot the goblins, the encounter has to be stopped pretty early because the AC of two of the characters, (AC=12) was sufficiently low that they could be taken out in only a couple rounds if the goblins concentrated on them.
After two rounds the bard had to step back and heal himself and drink a potion of healing. Two rounds later he did the same thing. Two rounds later he needed to do the same thing but didn't have healing potions. He had to use his cure wounds spell at second level. Not long after this he had to withdraw from the battle permanently. In that time the fighters are mowing down goblins but if the goblins concentrate on a single target it gets ugly quick for the party. Once one member of the party pulls out or falls, the math starts to become a bigger problem.
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Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
I'm not a big fan of the CR system as is, especially for customizing opponents. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind:
1. You need to decide in advance how hard you want the encounter will be (and what defines hard/easy) and how long you want the encounter to last.
2. Using the default CR system, let's assume a total encounter CR = Party average. Now look at how many actions each side gets.
3. For the party do a quick calculation of them hitting 60% of their attacks/spells and doing average damage. (Now adjust your opponents AC/Saves to reflect this reality) Take that total average in a round and multiple it by the number of rounds you want the encounter to last, now round that up to the nearest 10 hp. This will get you in a rough ballpark even with action economy in the party's favor, with some luck it will halve the time of the encounter though.
4. For the opponents you need to figure out how much damage they will output. This is easier than it sounds: Deadly 1 round of hits will drop a PC, Hard 1.5 rounds will drop a PC, Medium 2 rounds, Easy 3+ rounds. A PC is exactly what it means, not average hp, just whatever PC is being attacked, if multiple opponents and PC's then divide as necessary, but the plan should be to drop a PC in round 2 with an average hit rate of round 1. Not kill, just drop.
That's about it. Keep in mind terrain and other factors. If the party can't fly, discount most of their melee damage if opponents can fly.
You can give a creature such as an orc warlord plate with resistance to non magical attacks and magical slashing and piercing to make it harder. That way you wont get your monsters annihilated and the players wont get too much xp. If they try put on the armour, read dialogue such as; The armour looks like someone has repeatedly stabbed, slashed and (insert character attack) and is useless.
An example of how multiple encounters per day makes things harder: the daily budget for a level 1 party of 5 is 1,500 xp, so let's actually fill that up. We'll go with an Evil Cult, that's always a classic. We'll go with the following encounters:
The first encounter is early evening, when 5 cultists (adjusted xp 250, medium) are attempting to kidnap a civilian. When defeated, one of them has a note where he's written down the location (a crypt in the graveyard) and the time (midnight) where the Evil Ritual will happen. There is sufficient time for a short rest.
When the PCs investigate the graveyard, they will encounter a specter (adjusted xp 200). There is not enough time for a rest, because:
The noise alerts 2 skeletons and 2 zombies the evil priest left to guard the graveyard (adjusted xp 400). They will engage with bows. As long as the PCs arrived early, there is time for a rest after this.
The evil priest (replace dispel magic with animate dead) and 4 more cultists arrive, and see the damage. If the PCs immediately attack, that will likely go poorly for the PCs, but if they wait around a bit the priest will go into the ritual site, then send his cultists out to guard the entrance while he cleanses the area. This will allow the PCs to divide and conquer, making it basically two fights of 200 and 450 xp.
These encounters are Medium, Easy, Hard, Easy, and Hard, but there's a fair chance the PCs will be beaten up enough after fight 4a that they'll just avoid fight 4b.
Thanks, everyone for the advice. The battles are not as much as 5 against 1 but in general a variety of encounters that my players have just taken out without much of a sweat.
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Has anyone 'encountered' this in their campaign. You set up an encounter using 'Encounter Math' from DMG or the tool from Beyond and you want to give the players a challenge. Oh, and they're five 1st level characters. After all, is said and done the encounter comes out to be defined as Hard. That's ok, this was to be a significant fight so as I said before I was looking for a challenge.
Well... Or so you thought.
The result is the five players, (Warlock, Cleric, Sorcerer, Thief, and Paladin) absolutely destroyed the encounter within a round and a half. So Hard was not that Hard, even though the math comes out that way.
Yeah, that was three days ago and other battles for most of the game resulted in a 'ho-hum' attitude from the players. Yes, I could just add more creatures to the battle that could be the simple answer but I'd like to get some others' perspective.
So to my question of fellow DMs, the best advice on setting up Encounters that is more accurate to the players' party. When designing an encounter do you just go by the DMG / Beyond builder or some other methodology and hope that the challenge is actually a challenge? Do you pay attention to the numbers or just throw creatures in and hope for the best. (my goal is not to kill them but on the occasion making them sweat a little bit does not hurt)
A few things to keep in mind when designing encounters.
Hope some of the above helps.
"An' things ha' come to a pretty pass, ye ken, if people are going to leave stuff like that aroound where innocent people could accidentally smash the door doon and lever the bars aside and take the big chain off'f the cupboard and pick the lock and drink it!"
I personally use this tool and find it quite accurate: https://donjon.bin.sh/5e/calc/enc_size.html
Everything Koradgee said is also true, particularly #2. I like the suggestion in #1 to bring in 1/low HP minions, but not too many because each of them have the chance to hit as well which can easily add up to lots of damage for a super low level party.
If they are 1st level characters you really need to be careful unless you and your players are OK with a first or second session TPK. One max roll on a d8 will drop many 1st level characters to 0 hp and at 1st level they may not have the cure wounds spell or the healing potion available to save the character from dying. I think for 1st level you were better off going a little easier on them.
I agree things listed as "hard" aren't necessarily going to be "hard" in the sense that "the whole party might die," but I'm not sure you want them to be. At 1st level if the monsters get in one hit someone is at half hp, and 1 blow (or less) from faceplanting. Even a couple of easy battles against kobolds and a "moderate" one against a ghoul had my 1st level party out of spell slots and banged up before the final fight with the Necromancer. At the end of about 5 encounters, mostly rated as "easy'" and all of them fairly easy in terms of only going 2 or maybe 3 rounds tops... they ended with one guy at 0 with a failed death saving throw in his pocket, one guy at 1 hp, one at half hp, and one at full HP. That, to me, is hard enough, for 1st level.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
A thing people talked about in prior editions was the 'five minute workday' -- the mechanics for spell recovery favor, if possible, just going in, blowing everything up, then taking a long rest. This is slightly less true in 5th edition because of the severe restrictions on buffing spells, but it's still pretty true; an actually hard fight for a rested party that will be able to rest again afterwards is somewhere around 150% of the Deadly budget, but if you're grinding your way through multiple encounters, that fifth medium encounter in a day might actually be looking pretty scary.
Five against one is going to skew results unless the monster has enough mobility to prevent the party from ganging up on him all at once. Second, if the party got the initiative then except for a resistance to non-magical weapons, they're likely to get significant damage every round.
And on the other hand, first level encounters can be tough because a player can go down because of one good damage roll. Even at second and third level, players can go down because of a good damage roll after rolling a crit. When you get up into level 5 players and use 3 of more monsters, the averages start to become pretty reliable.
I was running the math of my party of level 4 players against a huge number of goblins only armed with melee weapons. I set this up just to make the math easy enough to do the checks. Also assuming a corridor as wide as the 7 player party, how long could the encounter last if I wanted to guarantee no player was going to die, but I was going to let the monsters perform at 10% better than their normal to-hit numbers indicated, (to model bad luck for the players) and give the monsters 5 damage on any round they achieved a hit. Even though the fighter type characters can reliably one-shot the goblins, the encounter has to be stopped pretty early because the AC of two of the characters, (AC=12) was sufficiently low that they could be taken out in only a couple rounds if the goblins concentrated on them.
After two rounds the bard had to step back and heal himself and drink a potion of healing. Two rounds later he did the same thing. Two rounds later he needed to do the same thing but didn't have healing potions. He had to use his cure wounds spell at second level. Not long after this he had to withdraw from the battle permanently. In that time the fighters are mowing down goblins but if the goblins concentrate on a single target it gets ugly quick for the party. Once one member of the party pulls out or falls, the math starts to become a bigger problem.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
I'm not a big fan of the CR system as is, especially for customizing opponents. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind:
1. You need to decide in advance how hard you want the encounter will be (and what defines hard/easy) and how long you want the encounter to last.
2. Using the default CR system, let's assume a total encounter CR = Party average. Now look at how many actions each side gets.
3. For the party do a quick calculation of them hitting 60% of their attacks/spells and doing average damage. (Now adjust your opponents AC/Saves to reflect this reality) Take that total average in a round and multiple it by the number of rounds you want the encounter to last, now round that up to the nearest 10 hp. This will get you in a rough ballpark even with action economy in the party's favor, with some luck it will halve the time of the encounter though.
4. For the opponents you need to figure out how much damage they will output. This is easier than it sounds: Deadly 1 round of hits will drop a PC, Hard 1.5 rounds will drop a PC, Medium 2 rounds, Easy 3+ rounds. A PC is exactly what it means, not average hp, just whatever PC is being attacked, if multiple opponents and PC's then divide as necessary, but the plan should be to drop a PC in round 2 with an average hit rate of round 1. Not kill, just drop.
That's about it. Keep in mind terrain and other factors. If the party can't fly, discount most of their melee damage if opponents can fly.
You can give a creature such as an orc warlord plate with resistance to non magical attacks and magical slashing and piercing to make it harder. That way you wont get your monsters annihilated and the players wont get too much xp. If they try put on the armour, read dialogue such as; The armour looks like someone has repeatedly stabbed, slashed and (insert character attack) and is useless.
An example of how multiple encounters per day makes things harder: the daily budget for a level 1 party of 5 is 1,500 xp, so let's actually fill that up. We'll go with an Evil Cult, that's always a classic. We'll go with the following encounters:
These encounters are Medium, Easy, Hard, Easy, and Hard, but there's a fair chance the PCs will be beaten up enough after fight 4a that they'll just avoid fight 4b.
Thanks, everyone for the advice. The battles are not as much as 5 against 1 but in general a variety of encounters that my players have just taken out without much of a sweat.