I'm DM'ing a home brew campaign. I just started and all four players are level one. I tried to create a fun and challenging first encounter in a cemetery and my players beat the tar out of me. They successfully beat 1 Giant Wolf Spider, 2 Spiders, 1 Swarm of Bats, 3 Skeletons, and 1 Zombie. The zombie was the last creature remaining and I had to lie on rolls to keep things close. I ended up bumping his HP by 15 and his AC up to a 17. I even gave them 4 health potions because I thought it would be a tough encounter, but they only needed to use one.
Can someone help me either 1) find a better way to determine my encounter difficulty or 2) teach me how to properly scale the difficulty of a fight mid round? I'm afraid my players are going to TPK me...
Somewhere in the DMG is a table to help you scale encounters based on party size and level.
I would suggest buying some content here at DNDBeyond. There is an encounter generator you can enter your party size and level and it will scale the monsters based on that. And tell you how difficult it should be for your party.
Sure... just give them more encounters in a day. Most parties can safely take on stuff that exceeds what CR recommends if they have a single fight in an adventuring day that they can comfortably use all their resources for. The game largely assumes 3-5 separate fights within an adventuring day... they may have steamrolled this fight, but if they have two more fights of equal difficulty they'll be sweating.
You might not being doing as badly as you think. Level 1 encounters are always tricky since both sides usually have the ability to one shot the other. My experience is that either the rolls are lucky on the player side and each monster goes down to one blow, or they are lucky on the monster side and it's all you can do to keep them alive.
That being said page 82 of the DMG is where you'll find the recommendations on creating encounters. If you weren't using it, I would retroactively figure out where that encounter fell on that scale. Then you'll have a better idea of whether you should have had more encounters on that same day or not. Also you mentioned they won, but they are supposed to win. This isn't a video game with game saves so they can go back and try again. And first level characters don't have the resources to bring someone back from the dead.
So how many rounds did it take? Again if they were one hitting all your monsters, that was probably good luck on their end. If I'm counting correctly you had 8 monsters for 4 players. So if every player hit one monster a round and did enough damage to fully kill it in one hit, that would have been 2 rounds. That also would have been a lot of luck on their part because it assumes no misses, which at level one is pretty lucky, and there's nothing you can do about that.
Also, I know it may just have been a slip of the keyboard but... your players are not beating you. Your players' characters are beating the monsters. You aren't playing against them.
I know what you meant but it helps not to be in the adversarial mindset.
Your players will routinely crush what the DMG or Monster Manual claim are "deadly +" encounters if you only do one of them per long rest. The DMG assumes 6-8 encounters in between long rests. If you do less than that, you have to bump the difficulty to give the party a true challenge.
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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.
I'm DM'ing a home brew campaign. I just started and all four players are level one. I tried to create a fun and challenging first encounter in a cemetery and my players beat the tar out of me. They successfully beat 1 Giant Wolf Spider, 2 Spiders, 1 Swarm of Bats, 3 Skeletons, and 1 Zombie. The zombie was the last creature remaining and I had to lie on rolls to keep things close. I ended up bumping his HP by 15 and his AC up to a 17. I even gave them 4 health potions because I thought it would be a tough encounter, but they only needed to use one.
Can someone help me either 1) find a better way to determine my encounter difficulty or 2) teach me how to properly scale the difficulty of a fight mid round? I'm afraid my players are going to TPK me...
Yeah, sounds like this *was* a fun and challenging first encounter. The players can't TPK you! You still seem to be in the PC mindset that you have to defeat stuff. The entire point of being a DM is having your bad guys' plots get thwarted, this is not a design flaw.
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Help! I'm getting womped!
I'm DM'ing a home brew campaign. I just started and all four players are level one. I tried to create a fun and challenging first encounter in a cemetery and my players beat the tar out of me. They successfully beat 1 Giant Wolf Spider, 2 Spiders, 1 Swarm of Bats, 3 Skeletons, and 1 Zombie. The zombie was the last creature remaining and I had to lie on rolls to keep things close. I ended up bumping his HP by 15 and his AC up to a 17. I even gave them 4 health potions because I thought it would be a tough encounter, but they only needed to use one.
Can someone help me either 1) find a better way to determine my encounter difficulty or 2) teach me how to properly scale the difficulty of a fight mid round? I'm afraid my players are going to TPK me...
Somewhere in the DMG is a table to help you scale encounters based on party size and level.
I would suggest buying some content here at DNDBeyond. There is an encounter generator you can enter your party size and level and it will scale the monsters based on that. And tell you how difficult it should be for your party.
It is a pretty slick tool
Sure... just give them more encounters in a day. Most parties can safely take on stuff that exceeds what CR recommends if they have a single fight in an adventuring day that they can comfortably use all their resources for. The game largely assumes 3-5 separate fights within an adventuring day... they may have steamrolled this fight, but if they have two more fights of equal difficulty they'll be sweating.
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You might not being doing as badly as you think. Level 1 encounters are always tricky since both sides usually have the ability to one shot the other. My experience is that either the rolls are lucky on the player side and each monster goes down to one blow, or they are lucky on the monster side and it's all you can do to keep them alive.
That being said page 82 of the DMG is where you'll find the recommendations on creating encounters. If you weren't using it, I would retroactively figure out where that encounter fell on that scale. Then you'll have a better idea of whether you should have had more encounters on that same day or not. Also you mentioned they won, but they are supposed to win. This isn't a video game with game saves so they can go back and try again. And first level characters don't have the resources to bring someone back from the dead.
So how many rounds did it take? Again if they were one hitting all your monsters, that was probably good luck on their end. If I'm counting correctly you had 8 monsters for 4 players. So if every player hit one monster a round and did enough damage to fully kill it in one hit, that would have been 2 rounds. That also would have been a lot of luck on their part because it assumes no misses, which at level one is pretty lucky, and there's nothing you can do about that.
Also, I know it may just have been a slip of the keyboard but... your players are not beating you. Your players' characters are beating the monsters. You aren't playing against them.
I know what you meant but it helps not to be in the adversarial mindset.
Your players will routinely crush what the DMG or Monster Manual claim are "deadly +" encounters if you only do one of them per long rest. The DMG assumes 6-8 encounters in between long rests. If you do less than that, you have to bump the difficulty to give the party a true challenge.
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.
Yeah, sounds like this *was* a fun and challenging first encounter. The players can't TPK you! You still seem to be in the PC mindset that you have to defeat stuff. The entire point of being a DM is having your bad guys' plots get thwarted, this is not a design flaw.