So I've been dming for well over a year and a half now, multiple campaigns all online. This one ive been running since september and the party is now level 14, and almost nothing I throw at them seems to do all that much. I just cant seem to leave much of a dent on them.
The most recent example of this, is after a smaller combat the group reached the boss of this arc. This fight was 4 level 14 characters, against a Marilith (CR 16) and an archmage (cr 12) with a modified spell list that made him more challenging. I even started the encounter with them all hit by an almost fully charged delayed blast fireball, and early in the fight I successfully Feebleminded the cleric, who did very little in the fight before or after.
So going into this I was genuinely worried about a tpk, but no one in the party was badly hurt and I ended up giving over 200hp extra to the two enemies. So I'm now tearing my hair out trying to work out what to do to challenge them as they havent had many tough fights in a long time. I'm also hoping to take the campaign close to level 20 with the bbeg being a cr23 Empyrean, but im honestly worried he wont pose much of a threat for much longer.
So basically any tips at all on balancing encounters at a higher level, it was going very well up until around level 10 I guess and its gotten more and more difficult to pose a threat without going overboard and throwing a tarrasque at them.
My advice is use the environment, make interesting fights in and around environmental challenges, like fighting around lava, or high up in an Eerie with the chance of being thrown off.
Also think about action economy, 2 large monsters is still a lower number of actions vs the party so throw in more monsters, maybe have waves so you can balance mid combat. Don’t be afraid to use cunning tactics either, the mage that loiters in the back line, put him u see pressure with attackers flanking forcing the party to split fire for a few turns.
How many encounters are you running per day? Yes, higher level characters often roll over even high cr challenges, but remember the game assumes 5 or 6 fights a day. Tax their resources with early fights, so the later ones will be more challenging.
And if your BBEG is looking weaker, you can always use those enemies from Theros, where they basically have to fight 2 legendary enemies back to back.
Agree with the idea of using the environment. Always adds a level of complexity to combat encounters. Action economy is key to challenging your party. If you dump enough minion types into encounter, they can and will swarm your PCs so be careful. Use the mass combat rules I'd you'd like to speed this up. Also lean into their combat prowess by using monsters that deal damage when hit. Start throwing conditions around to further complicate their tactics. Spells like Sickening Radiance can lend some dents to the PCs.
Overall, just run your monsters as if they wanted the PCs dead, and would stop at nothing to achieve this goal. Not that I'm advocating a TPK, but at 14th level, they should have the resources to bounce back from a PC going horizontal.
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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
If its, 2 enemies vs 4 players means the party is going to have double the actions, and unless you are giving your enemies legendary actions, bonus actions, reations, etc, the players are at a massive advantage.
One good way of presenting a challenge is to have the objective be something other than killing the enemy. Something like stopping a theft/kidnapping. This way it's not just a matter of hitting things hard, and if you really want to over tune the encounter to see where the limits are for the party, the enemy isn't trying to kill anyone, their goal is to commit the theft/kidnapping etc, so they'd leave the players on the ground unconscious.
Bodanger's point about action economy is a good one. Try to ensure there is at least one challenging enemy per character. Spells like banishment can rapidly turn the tide in the PC's favour if they can lock out some of the powerful enemies.
Even then, the main issue is that monster hit points in 5e are ridiculously low. To challenge my level 8 players with a boss encounter if they are fully rested, it needs to have 400 hit points. In my last session, 5 level 8 characters went up against 7 CR6 monsters, 4 CR3 monsters, and a CR15 boss who had AC18, 3 legendary resistances (didn't come into play, he saved on the banishment), and over 300 hit points. They managed to blast the boss down to just 78 hit points in 2-3 turns before he used Dimension Door to escape.
Now let's look at other creatures they could face. A CR15 adult green dragon has just over 200 hit points - my level 8 characters will down it in just 2-3 turns of combat if they're fully rested. Most of them have a +1 weapon, so the typical resistance to b/p/s from non-magic isn't all that useful. In future I'll be looking towards boss type creatures that have 400+ hit points as they go up in level. For a level 14 party I'd be looking at bosses having 2 attacks per party member (including legendaries) and around 1,000 hit points if I want them to be a real challenge. Look at the poor archmage - he only has around 100 hit points! He needs double or triple if he's to make an impact.
I third paying attention to action economy and hit points but also suggest you look at whatever your players have in their arsenal that could do the most damage. Pretend they crit. How much damage would your boss take. If it will drop them down to a third of their hit points you need to add HP, up the AC and/or provide your boss with a reaction that can deflect most of the damage. I have a boss fight I've been planning and I used the DMG advice for HP and AC. I recently calculated how much damage my barbarian can do with his flaming ax if he were to crit - which seems to happen often. Needless to say I will be raising HP and adding some immunities.
Now look at your spellcasters. Casters don't just do damage. They can control the battlefield so the martial can hit and hit hard - especially at that level. How would your boss counter Slow, Banishment, etc.? Make them proficient in Wisdom saves, Dex saves, Int. saves (whatever is appropriate for your boss). Give your boss a legendary magic item to use. Legendary actions and lair actions help with the action economy because your boss can hit out of initiative order. Make sure you hit your casters with something that can break their concentration (although if they have War Caster that's more difficult).
By now you know your party and their favorite tactics. Assume they will use them and figure out ways to mitigate the damage, provide resistances and immunities.
Also remember, at the end of the day, your party may roll over your boss due to great rolls on their part and bad rolls on yours. It' okay. You can build a boss that changes form and becomes something just as terrible when reduced to 0 HP.
I would argue that the problem isn't that NPCs don't have enough hp, it's that PCs do too much damage, because:
An even (coin-flip) fight between NPCs lasts about five rounds. That seems like a reasonable duration for an epic fight.
An even (coin-flip) fight between PCs (or NPCs built as PCs) is unlikely to take more than two rounds. That's unreasonably short.
Unfortunately, there isn't a convenient tool for the DM to tone down the glass-cannon nature of PCs, so to get a reasonable duration, you're stuck with large increases in NPC health without corresponding increases in damage output.
I would argue that the problem isn't that NPCs don't have enough hp, it's that PCs do too much damage, because:
An even (coin-flip) fight between NPCs lasts about five rounds. That seems like a reasonable duration for an epic fight.
An even (coin-flip) fight between PCs (or NPCs built as PCs) is unlikely to take more than two rounds. That's unreasonably short.
Unfortunately, there isn't a convenient tool for the DM to tone down the glass-cannon nature of PCs, so to get a reasonable duration, you're stuck with large increases in NPC health without corresponding increases in damage output.
It's no problem for the monsters to have big hit point pools (and NPCs need scaling up as well if they're meant to be challenging). Players like rolling bit hits, and that's part of the design - I am just baffled at how poor monster health so often is compared to their challenge rating.
Candlekeep spoiler
bak mei is a CR11 monster with AC17 and 102 hit points. Unless he wins initiative and stuns two party members he's dead in a single turn, and probably dead regardless of where he places in the initiative order.
I kind of wonder whether there is an element at work whereby the designers want combats to last only 1-2 turns, or if maybe they play extreme magic item light games (and expect others to as well), where their level 7 parties has a single Dagger +1 between them so those "resistance to p/b/s from non-magical weapons' actually doubles hit points instead of doing nothing. It still doesn't make sense for most other monsters though.
Players like rolling bit hits, and that's part of the design - I am just baffled at how poor monster health so often is compared to their challenge rating.
Candlekeep spoiler
That appears to be 'monster designed as PC' -- it's a glass cannon, much like a PC. From the monster design rules, I think they expect typical combat duration should be 3 rounds.
The game assumes five to six encounters each day, not fights. Yes, there is a difference. The bard spending a spell slot to cast charm person on a guard at a check point is still an encounter, but it doesn't have to be a fight.
That said. The action economy is usually the biggest problem that the NPCs will have when facing PCs. Ironically enough, depending on what classes the PCs are they can often have more trouble with many lower CR opponents than just one or two high CR ones. Bigger bosses should always have at least a few mooks around, if nothing else, just to be in the way of the PCs. Those pet attack crows might only do a single hit point of damage but each hit is a concentration save for the wizard. The goblin "bodyguards" might be weak but they can still give cover to the ranged attackers or make attacks of opportunity.
Using the enviroment is also a good thing. The Cleric can't heal the Barbarian if line of sight is blocked but massive pillars, bushes or what have you.
Last but not least, even low CR creatures shouldn't just fight like a bunch of suicidal zombies. Everyone wants to go home and there's no reason why you would risk your life just to become XP fodder for a bunch of adventurers. If you need inspiration, there are just two words you need to know: Tucker's kobolds.
More enemies and more environmental items makes a combat more challenging, and also more fun.
A marilith and a high-level caster is a bit of a challenge. A marilith and a high-level caster and a bunch of lizardfolk (mobile harassers) and an ogre (grapple the PCs and drag them into some nasty AoE cast by the caster) is more challenge. Fighting the same foes in a room with broken flagstones and acid underneath (now the ogre is shoving people into acid) is even more of a challenge.
Doing it in the middle of a [spell]sleet storm[\spell], however, wasn't any fun at all. Well, not for the players - I loved it, and it fit thematically with the enemies in question. *evil grin*
The game assumes five to six encounters each day, not fights. Yes, there is a difference. The bard spending a spell slot to cast charm person on a guard at a check point is still an encounter, but it doesn't have to be a fight.
The game assumes that you use up your xp budget, which requires 6 medium fights, as nothing else consumes xp budget (of course, you can use a smaller number of harder fights. Blowing your entire budget on a single fight favors long rest classes over short rest classes, but is otherwise winnable).
First, not every fight needs to put the PCs up against the wall. I don't think your suggesting that it should, I just wanted to make that clear up front.
I agree that it is difficult to dial in encounters to be the right balance. At higher levels you might expect it to trend to a normal level because the more rolls are needed, the less likely the dice are going to skew the results. But that just doesn't seem to be so with the power growth.
My solution would be ... when you want to have that big encounter that the party is put up against the wall ... hit the party with waves of attackers. In this way, when the fight gets to the point where you think it should conclude, you can just stop adding a new wave to the attack. The players don't know how many waves the attack would last so they'll never be the wiser. It also might get the players to conserve spell slots, which I have found to be bothersome.
I don't like the game to devolve into one large encounter between long rests and the players use most of their spell slots on the combat encounter. To discourage this, I usually hit the party with a combat encounter early in the day. It is my hope they won't try to plop down and have a long rest, but instead ration their spells to handle it with only a few.
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Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
The game assumes five to six encounters each day, not fights. Yes, there is a difference. The bard spending a spell slot to cast charm person on a guard at a check point is still an encounter, but it doesn't have to be a fight.
The game assumes that you use up your xp budget, which requires 6 medium fights, as nothing else consumes xp budget (of course, you can use a smaller number of harder fights. Blowing your entire budget on a single fight favors long rest classes over short rest classes, but is otherwise winnable).
When runnign an XP based campaign (which I generally don't) I put a rough XP against all Roleplay encounters as well as combat, and usually build some of my RP encounters to use up some resources/spell slots etc.
First, not every fight needs to put the PCs up against the wall. I don't think your suggesting that it should, I just wanted to make that clear up front.
I agree that it is difficult to dial in encounters to be the right balance. At higher levels you might expect it to trend to a normal level because the more rolls are needed, the less likely the dice are going to skew the results. But that just doesn't seem to be so with the power growth.
My solution would be ... when you want to have that big encounter that the party is put up against the wall ... hit the party with waves of attackers. In this way, when the fight gets to the point where you think it should conclude, you can just stop adding a new wave to the attack. The players don't know how many waves the attack would last so they'll never be the wiser. It also might get the players to conserve spell slots, which I have found to be bothersome.
I don't like the game to devolve into one large encounter between long rests and the players use most of their spell slots on the combat encounter. To discourage this, I usually hit the party with a combat encounter early in the day. It is my hope they won't try to plop down and have a long rest, but instead ration their spells to handle it with only a few.
Seconding the 'waves of attackers' idea. One of the best fights I ever ran featured 3 randomly spawning groups of slow moving enemies every turn, for 9 turns, with the monsters gradually coming to fill the battlefield as the PCs tried to hold them off until they doodad did its thing. It's much easier to fudge things like this a bit ("there's no spawn on turn 7") as balancing a fight like this is mathematically impossible, but the PCs don't know so all's good.
I agree with everything that's been said already regarding the environment and action economy. One thing to keep in mind as well is the goal of the combat. Sometimes the challenge can be more than just "killing the enemy," which can make for more interesting and refreshing fights at any level. One example is (Critical Role campaign 1 spoilers below):
When the Chroma Conclave first attacks Emon, the characters rush to Greyskull Keep and find an influx of the city's residents there seeking refuge and guidance. A dragon attacks the keep, and the goal then is really to protect as many innocent lives as possible and get them to safety, while also staving off the threat of the dragon
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So I've been dming for well over a year and a half now, multiple campaigns all online. This one ive been running since september and the party is now level 14, and almost nothing I throw at them seems to do all that much. I just cant seem to leave much of a dent on them.
The most recent example of this, is after a smaller combat the group reached the boss of this arc. This fight was 4 level 14 characters, against a Marilith (CR 16) and an archmage (cr 12) with a modified spell list that made him more challenging. I even started the encounter with them all hit by an almost fully charged delayed blast fireball, and early in the fight I successfully Feebleminded the cleric, who did very little in the fight before or after.
So going into this I was genuinely worried about a tpk, but no one in the party was badly hurt and I ended up giving over 200hp extra to the two enemies. So I'm now tearing my hair out trying to work out what to do to challenge them as they havent had many tough fights in a long time. I'm also hoping to take the campaign close to level 20 with the bbeg being a cr23 Empyrean, but im honestly worried he wont pose much of a threat for much longer.
So basically any tips at all on balancing encounters at a higher level, it was going very well up until around level 10 I guess and its gotten more and more difficult to pose a threat without going overboard and throwing a tarrasque at them.
My advice is use the environment, make interesting fights in and around environmental challenges, like fighting around lava, or high up in an Eerie with the chance of being thrown off.
Also think about action economy, 2 large monsters is still a lower number of actions vs the party so throw in more monsters, maybe have waves so you can balance mid combat. Don’t be afraid to use cunning tactics either, the mage that loiters in the back line, put him u see pressure with attackers flanking forcing the party to split fire for a few turns.
How many encounters are you running per day? Yes, higher level characters often roll over even high cr challenges, but remember the game assumes 5 or 6 fights a day. Tax their resources with early fights, so the later ones will be more challenging.
And if your BBEG is looking weaker, you can always use those enemies from Theros, where they basically have to fight 2 legendary enemies back to back.
Agree with the idea of using the environment. Always adds a level of complexity to combat encounters. Action economy is key to challenging your party. If you dump enough minion types into encounter, they can and will swarm your PCs so be careful. Use the mass combat rules I'd you'd like to speed this up. Also lean into their combat prowess by using monsters that deal damage when hit. Start throwing conditions around to further complicate their tactics. Spells like Sickening Radiance can lend some dents to the PCs.
Overall, just run your monsters as if they wanted the PCs dead, and would stop at nothing to achieve this goal. Not that I'm advocating a TPK, but at 14th level, they should have the resources to bounce back from a PC going horizontal.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
Are you paying attention to action economy?
If its, 2 enemies vs 4 players means the party is going to have double the actions, and unless you are giving your enemies legendary actions, bonus actions, reations, etc, the players are at a massive advantage.
One good way of presenting a challenge is to have the objective be something other than killing the enemy. Something like stopping a theft/kidnapping. This way it's not just a matter of hitting things hard, and if you really want to over tune the encounter to see where the limits are for the party, the enemy isn't trying to kill anyone, their goal is to commit the theft/kidnapping etc, so they'd leave the players on the ground unconscious.
Bodanger's point about action economy is a good one. Try to ensure there is at least one challenging enemy per character. Spells like banishment can rapidly turn the tide in the PC's favour if they can lock out some of the powerful enemies.
Even then, the main issue is that monster hit points in 5e are ridiculously low. To challenge my level 8 players with a boss encounter if they are fully rested, it needs to have 400 hit points. In my last session, 5 level 8 characters went up against 7 CR6 monsters, 4 CR3 monsters, and a CR15 boss who had AC18, 3 legendary resistances (didn't come into play, he saved on the banishment), and over 300 hit points. They managed to blast the boss down to just 78 hit points in 2-3 turns before he used Dimension Door to escape.
Now let's look at other creatures they could face. A CR15 adult green dragon has just over 200 hit points - my level 8 characters will down it in just 2-3 turns of combat if they're fully rested. Most of them have a +1 weapon, so the typical resistance to b/p/s from non-magic isn't all that useful. In future I'll be looking towards boss type creatures that have 400+ hit points as they go up in level. For a level 14 party I'd be looking at bosses having 2 attacks per party member (including legendaries) and around 1,000 hit points if I want them to be a real challenge. Look at the poor archmage - he only has around 100 hit points! He needs double or triple if he's to make an impact.
I third paying attention to action economy and hit points but also suggest you look at whatever your players have in their arsenal that could do the most damage. Pretend they crit. How much damage would your boss take. If it will drop them down to a third of their hit points you need to add HP, up the AC and/or provide your boss with a reaction that can deflect most of the damage. I have a boss fight I've been planning and I used the DMG advice for HP and AC. I recently calculated how much damage my barbarian can do with his flaming ax if he were to crit - which seems to happen often. Needless to say I will be raising HP and adding some immunities.
Now look at your spellcasters. Casters don't just do damage. They can control the battlefield so the martial can hit and hit hard - especially at that level. How would your boss counter Slow, Banishment, etc.? Make them proficient in Wisdom saves, Dex saves, Int. saves (whatever is appropriate for your boss). Give your boss a legendary magic item to use. Legendary actions and lair actions help with the action economy because your boss can hit out of initiative order. Make sure you hit your casters with something that can break their concentration (although if they have War Caster that's more difficult).
By now you know your party and their favorite tactics. Assume they will use them and figure out ways to mitigate the damage, provide resistances and immunities.
Also remember, at the end of the day, your party may roll over your boss due to great rolls on their part and bad rolls on yours. It' okay. You can build a boss that changes form and becomes something just as terrible when reduced to 0 HP.
I would argue that the problem isn't that NPCs don't have enough hp, it's that PCs do too much damage, because:
Unfortunately, there isn't a convenient tool for the DM to tone down the glass-cannon nature of PCs, so to get a reasonable duration, you're stuck with large increases in NPC health without corresponding increases in damage output.
It's no problem for the monsters to have big hit point pools (and NPCs need scaling up as well if they're meant to be challenging). Players like rolling bit hits, and that's part of the design - I am just baffled at how poor monster health so often is compared to their challenge rating.
Candlekeep spoiler
bak mei is a CR11 monster with AC17 and 102 hit points. Unless he wins initiative and stuns two party members he's dead in a single turn, and probably dead regardless of where he places in the initiative order.
I kind of wonder whether there is an element at work whereby the designers want combats to last only 1-2 turns, or if maybe they play extreme magic item light games (and expect others to as well), where their level 7 parties has a single Dagger +1 between them so those "resistance to p/b/s from non-magical weapons' actually doubles hit points instead of doing nothing. It still doesn't make sense for most other monsters though.
That appears to be 'monster designed as PC' -- it's a glass cannon, much like a PC. From the monster design rules, I think they expect typical combat duration should be 3 rounds.
The game assumes five to six encounters each day, not fights. Yes, there is a difference. The bard spending a spell slot to cast charm person on a guard at a check point is still an encounter, but it doesn't have to be a fight.
That said. The action economy is usually the biggest problem that the NPCs will have when facing PCs. Ironically enough, depending on what classes the PCs are they can often have more trouble with many lower CR opponents than just one or two high CR ones. Bigger bosses should always have at least a few mooks around, if nothing else, just to be in the way of the PCs. Those pet attack crows might only do a single hit point of damage but each hit is a concentration save for the wizard. The goblin "bodyguards" might be weak but they can still give cover to the ranged attackers or make attacks of opportunity.
Using the enviroment is also a good thing. The Cleric can't heal the Barbarian if line of sight is blocked but massive pillars, bushes or what have you.
Last but not least, even low CR creatures shouldn't just fight like a bunch of suicidal zombies. Everyone wants to go home and there's no reason why you would risk your life just to become XP fodder for a bunch of adventurers. If you need inspiration, there are just two words you need to know: Tucker's kobolds.
Good luck and have fun! :)
More enemies and more environmental items makes a combat more challenging, and also more fun.
A marilith and a high-level caster is a bit of a challenge. A marilith and a high-level caster and a bunch of lizardfolk (mobile harassers) and an ogre (grapple the PCs and drag them into some nasty AoE cast by the caster) is more challenge. Fighting the same foes in a room with broken flagstones and acid underneath (now the ogre is shoving people into acid) is even more of a challenge.
Doing it in the middle of a [spell]sleet storm[\spell], however, wasn't any fun at all. Well, not for the players - I loved it, and it fit thematically with the enemies in question. *evil grin*
The game assumes that you use up your xp budget, which requires 6 medium fights, as nothing else consumes xp budget (of course, you can use a smaller number of harder fights. Blowing your entire budget on a single fight favors long rest classes over short rest classes, but is otherwise winnable).
First, not every fight needs to put the PCs up against the wall. I don't think your suggesting that it should, I just wanted to make that clear up front.
I agree that it is difficult to dial in encounters to be the right balance. At higher levels you might expect it to trend to a normal level because the more rolls are needed, the less likely the dice are going to skew the results. But that just doesn't seem to be so with the power growth.
My solution would be ... when you want to have that big encounter that the party is put up against the wall ... hit the party with waves of attackers. In this way, when the fight gets to the point where you think it should conclude, you can just stop adding a new wave to the attack. The players don't know how many waves the attack would last so they'll never be the wiser. It also might get the players to conserve spell slots, which I have found to be bothersome.
I don't like the game to devolve into one large encounter between long rests and the players use most of their spell slots on the combat encounter. To discourage this, I usually hit the party with a combat encounter early in the day. It is my hope they won't try to plop down and have a long rest, but instead ration their spells to handle it with only a few.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
When runnign an XP based campaign (which I generally don't) I put a rough XP against all Roleplay encounters as well as combat, and usually build some of my RP encounters to use up some resources/spell slots etc.
Seconding the 'waves of attackers' idea. One of the best fights I ever ran featured 3 randomly spawning groups of slow moving enemies every turn, for 9 turns, with the monsters gradually coming to fill the battlefield as the PCs tried to hold them off until they doodad did its thing. It's much easier to fudge things like this a bit ("there's no spawn on turn 7") as balancing a fight like this is mathematically impossible, but the PCs don't know so all's good.
I agree with everything that's been said already regarding the environment and action economy. One thing to keep in mind as well is the goal of the combat. Sometimes the challenge can be more than just "killing the enemy," which can make for more interesting and refreshing fights at any level. One example is (Critical Role campaign 1 spoilers below):
When the Chroma Conclave first attacks Emon, the characters rush to Greyskull Keep and find an influx of the city's residents there seeking refuge and guidance. A dragon attacks the keep, and the goal then is really to protect as many innocent lives as possible and get them to safety, while also staving off the threat of the dragon