Hi, I hope this question is not posted too often, I couldn't find specifically what I'm looking for in the existing threads.
My lvl 3 PCs are really tanky and melee-heavy, with a paladin, a melee Fighter, a druid of the moon [and an artificer]. Whenever I have thrown combats at them so far, it was melee heavy-combat heavy (they freed a graveyard of Nekkers from witcher for example, or fought a dire wolf and a couple of usual wolves in the forest). And even though I had planned for it to be a hard encounter, they pretty much tore through them all with ease and I had to throw more creatures at them, to keep it entertaining at all (at least my perception).
So, should I try and create combats that focus more on INT, WIS or CHA saving throws? Do you have any suggestions for creatures that I can throw against my party low-level? Or should I let them ride their tankiness for a while, because it is going to make them feel good, and then later I will **** them up with magic and fear.
I would love to hear you more experienced DMs' opinions on this! Thanks in advance!
my suggestion is throw spellcasters in the mix with some melee casters. if they do good with big fights i'd give each player two melee enemies and then 1-2 spellcasters (for the entire group) also look through the casters spells for combos. look for combos in general. for instance you can trip a player to knock them prone. you could also use homebrew. dnd beyond already has a lot and dandwiki.com has a bit you can use too. you could also make a dmnpc (as long as they aren't super prominent) that could work as like a bbeg that would give the party some difficulty.
ultimately if they are strong you could go with stuff that is a higher cr than they may need typically just because they can take more hits. you should also use features that a monster may have. like a wolf's pack tactics. or traps. goblins set traps to either capture or injure things before they come in themselves
Give them challenges other than just killing everything in front of them. Scouting missions, escort missions, disrupt the ritual, social encounters, trap gauntlets, etc. If they're good at fighting I would just let them be good at fighting, but I also wouldn't let them solve every problem through fighting.
Some of the above can be combined with combat - i.e. stop the ritual while the cultists are trying to prevent you from stopping it - but another way to spice things up would be to keep things dynamic. Put them in environments/terrain where the monsters are favored and they need to keep moving. For example, they get attacked by kobolds in some ruins. The kobolds have several traps rigged up to collapse walls or open pits or otherwise change the battlefield. Maybe they have a tunnel system that they can dart in and out of, but medium creatures have to squeeze to get through. Another easy way to challenge such a melee-heavy party is to just throw in a couple archers/artillery. The challenge isn't in wrecking those archers, it's getting to them in the first place.
You can make combat more dynamic and challenging for your melee tanky party by using challenging terrain (difficult, elevation, traps, hazards etc), by usingenemies that attack at range and with spells, by having them coming in waves, by using different type of monsters with varied abilities and finally insert twist such as a earthquake, landslide, teleported or gated creatures that arrive suddenly out of nowhere.
If you throw targeted enemies at them specificly designed to counter them they may feel victimized. However there are plenty of natural counters out there. Anything as simple as a fireball or physical trap is a Dex save heavy armour users will be worse at. Also use the environment against them. you can force them to fight in an open area where your swarming numbers have an advantage, or a tight doorway with their own tank holding them back as you pepper them with arrows or spells. Generally the counter to high AC is spells with save DCs and traps, the counter to traps is rogue and artificer classes, and the counter to roguelike classes is high AC melee classes. It natural for your party to excel vs physical foes, but they will find things turn rapidly against them as soon as they fight a mage with teleport, or who charms their best fighter with enchantments. Lets not mention that evil, evil rust monster that destroys armour and weapons they come into contact with. A single rust monster will promtly have them running scared, and provide a combat encounter far more nerve wracking for them than an army of bandits.
As was mentioned before, look for suitable counters for their foes through tactics or look to restrict their options dramaticly. Having to fight while protecting a defenseless maiden (using a stereotype), if they have lots of melee weapons have them sniping down from a cliffside ambush. I find it helps to ask "If I was the player, how would I defeat this foe?" As if I was a party of rogues fighting 6 elite, armoured guards rather than them attacking the bandits. In that case my 'party of rogues' would probably come up with a plan like "scatter 3 bags of caltrops down on them from the top of a raised area, rain down poison arrows, and if they get close, drop a smoke screen or darkness spell and change position/flee.
However, this said, there's nothing wrong with letting them win easily. Have subtle consequences drive the story as every action can have a consequence. If they are steamrolling over the cultist you have as foes, then they go into hiding. They may think they've won when actually they have started making long term enemies who begin hiring hitmen, or maybe kidnap a family member to blackmail them. This may put them out of their element for a few missions, keep it interesting and can lead to 'character defining story elements' such as lifelong enemies from a failed rescue or it forcing the party of former soldiers to have to try something more diplomatic or some investigative work.
The issue is most likely just the challenge rating of the combats that you're throwing at them.
If your party is level 3 but if I'm reading your post right they've only fought in 3 combats so far, so I guess you started them at level 3. This is always a mistake if you're new to DM'ing, which again I'm assuming you are. Level 1 combats let you get a feel for what the PCs can and can't handle, but at level 3 there's a lot more to deal with. So you're going to have to learn combat encounter balancing on the fly.
Firstly, use the Encounter Builder on this site:
If the party only fight 1 combat per day, the combat should be well beyond Deadly in the encounter builder. At least double the adjusted XP. Four x level 3 characters can easily handle a CR8 monster if it's the only fight they do that day.
If the party fight 3 combats per day, the combats should all be just about Deadly. They'll still breeze through the first one, the second they'll regret wasting Action Surge on the first one, and the third one will be a challenge.
If the party fight 8 combats per day (this is what the game apparently expects) then you'll want 4 Medium, 3 Hard and 1 Deadly encounter.
It won't matter what monsters you're using if you don't set the encounter levels appropriately for the number of encounters expected. PCs can "Alpha Strike" on turn 1 of the combat, which is to say that they blow all their cooldown abilities, e.g. Action Surge, their level 3 spells etc. and do massive damage to the enemies. This is something you need to control by having multiple encounters between long rests.
Increasing lethality won't definitively increase the challenge that the party faces. If you are running a 5 minute workday (long rest between deadly combats) there is no significant risk or challenge there. One deadly encounter, or even one that is past deadly, won't complete the xp budget for the adventuring day. If you were to use your entire xp budget on your party in one encounter, I would hazard a guess that someone is rolling new characters within 20 minutes. If not, I might suggest that the foes encountered may have been run as mindless brutes that turned into wooden practice dummies.
I would suggest utilizing the enemies as if they had motive and intent behind their actions. Brush up on some The Monsters Know What They Are Doing and maybe some Thinking Through the Eyes of Our Villains. Both resources are good explanations of how to use monsters with tactics that support how they are built. Following this one piece of advice might alter the outcome of even simple combat encounters. Maybe try looking into monsters that attack the party's strengths (acid splash when struck with a melee weapon, fire damage to all creatures within 5 ft. when damaged, explode on death) to introduce the meaningful choice of wading in with your beat-down-stick instead of choosing to not engage. If one party member goes down, it can consume more effort by two party members to get that member to safety or revived/healed. Focusing fire is something the party would use. It might be something that motivated and driven monsters would use as well. When a PC goes down, they suddenly become a liability to the party. Critical thinking needs to set in quick, or things can spiral superfast. Also, there is some value in having easy fights in between harsh encounters. Sometimes it's just fun to crush the baddie, other times warrant a good, hard, challenging fight.
Secondly, you might try increasing the number of encounters between long and short rests and using environmental effects to challenge the party's non-combat survivability. Exhaustion can become brutally effective in softening up your tanky-tankersons with 25 AC and 900 HP. It has already been suggested to introduce spell casters to mix the approaches that your monsters can take. I might include ranged attackers, traps, and physical separation to the ways to mix things up. A portcullis that splits the party can have the effect of halving their combat effectiveness, sometimes even quartering it. A wall of thorns or ice can split the battlefield, and flight adds another dimension that your party may or may not be able to exploit.
Be creative and use as many tools as you have access to. Conventional forces very rarely have a solid response to unconventional aggression.
“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
Terrain, terrain, terrain! Knee-high mud, fog, dead-end hallways, sewers, boulders the monsters hide behind...all of this stuff can turn a breezy combat into a really hard one without much effort on your part. You can throw in some flying monsters to make the melee guys curse their lack of reach weapons. Also, make them fight multiple opponents. Three bruisers are going to go to town against a dire wolf. Three melee fighters against a handful of pterafolk/pteranodons or a couple gargoyles? Now it's a party.
Will-o-wisps are deceptively difficult for low-level parties because they're really tough to hit, do a good amount of damage, and can straight up kill a PC if they fail their CON save at 0hp. I almost TPK'd my level 4 players with two of them on the field. CR 2 monsters in general are always a solid choice, especially if you max out their HP and/or throw multiples into a fight.
If you want casters and don't want mages, how about a troupe of mischievous pixies? They have magic that requires saves and they can turn invisible, which can be a fun challenge. Finally, you can think about throwing creatures with ranged or breath weapons at the party. A white dragon wyrmling is only a CR 2, but one failed CON save against the breath weapon and the tanks could be rolling death saves. And a young dragon is a humbling encounter for a low-level party that's getting too big for their britches.
A lot of those comments have been really helpful, but I was also specifically looking for suggestions on creatures with a relatively low cr, which use tactics other than just hitting the oponent. You know, stuff that I can throw in a combat (maybe even only one creature among the bulk), that will make things hard on them a little bit.
Thank you for all the other advice tho! Some of the stuff said I had already thought of but lots was good information or maybe even reactivation! thank you all!
Using a combination of ranged and close attacks is good as well, a goblin pack where some hang back shooting arrows into the melee combat will force the players to think of different approaches, also mixing up the initiative order, by this I mean rolling initiative for each monster or grouping them, this way if you have a set of monsters all the same (like said goblins) they will be separated out and give you more opportunity to get attacks in in between the players.
Remember as well that your players only have one attack each so if they are facing many lower hit point enemies, this is more dangerous then one or 2 high hit-point enemies. Oh and oozes, I just ran my party through a sewer mission where they where attacked by grey oozes, reducing armour class and damaging weapons, then ochre jellies, split apart meaning the party increased the action economy against them, and then some psychic grey oozes, meaning the attempts to stay away was cancelled out by teh range psychic attack, and then finally some black puddings, a hit point sink of acidic damage that damages weapons and armour and splits :).
If players make characters with certain strengths, it means they want to use those strengths. High AC players probably want to be shrugging off a bunch of blows in combat. They like feeling like they created a good character. It's validation and that is good.
Players like a challenge, but they also like winning. So, just because they're able to get through combat without taking too many hits, don't feel a need to engineer their doom. Or at least not pervasively: save it for boss fights and rare battles. It's pretty frustrating when every fight is tailored to defeat your character. Especially because that is assuming for your players a fairly deep knowledge of mechanics that they explicitly have not been learning or been tutorialised on.
A lot of those comments have been really helpful, but I was also specifically looking for suggestions on creatures with a relatively low cr, which use tactics other than just hitting the oponent. You know, stuff that I can throw in a combat (maybe even only one creature among the bulk), that will make things hard on them a little bit.
Thank you for all the other advice tho! Some of the stuff said I had already thought of but lots was good information or maybe even reactivation! thank you all!
In every fight, the aim of the monsters and the PCs is the same: reduce the enemy to zero hit points. There are generally only so many ways to do this:
Melee attacks
Ranged attacks
Spell attacks
Area effect spells
If you want to stray into the less usual side of things, a Bodak will mix things up and is quite a deadly enemy due to the way it knocks death saves off like coconuts at a shy. A Banshee is an RNG nightmare. The most terrifying creature in the game is the Intellect Devourer. I don't suggest using those unless you also make some modifications to enable PCs to be able to regain Intelligence points that they lose this way. A Death Dog or two can cause some disease based issues. Hell Hounds have potent breath weapons with which to threaten your clumped up melee fighters. A Succubus is dangerous out of combat, but when pressed being able to control party members and turn them on one another is pretty threatening.
But again, I'll just reiterate, none of these will challenge your PCs much even in a Deadly encounter unless they're dealing with multiple fights between long rests!
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Hi, I hope this question is not posted too often, I couldn't find specifically what I'm looking for in the existing threads.
My lvl 3 PCs are really tanky and melee-heavy, with a paladin, a melee Fighter, a druid of the moon [and an artificer]. Whenever I have thrown combats at them so far, it was melee heavy-combat heavy (they freed a graveyard of Nekkers from witcher for example, or fought a dire wolf and a couple of usual wolves in the forest). And even though I had planned for it to be a hard encounter, they pretty much tore through them all with ease and I had to throw more creatures at them, to keep it entertaining at all (at least my perception).
So, should I try and create combats that focus more on INT, WIS or CHA saving throws? Do you have any suggestions for creatures that I can throw against my party low-level? Or should I let them ride their tankiness for a while, because it is going to make them feel good, and then later I will **** them up with magic and fear.
I would love to hear you more experienced DMs' opinions on this! Thanks in advance!
my suggestion is throw spellcasters in the mix with some melee casters. if they do good with big fights i'd give each player two melee enemies and then 1-2 spellcasters (for the entire group) also look through the casters spells for combos. look for combos in general. for instance you can trip a player to knock them prone. you could also use homebrew. dnd beyond already has a lot and dandwiki.com has a bit you can use too. you could also make a dmnpc (as long as they aren't super prominent) that could work as like a bbeg that would give the party some difficulty.
ultimately if they are strong you could go with stuff that is a higher cr than they may need typically just because they can take more hits. you should also use features that a monster may have. like a wolf's pack tactics. or traps. goblins set traps to either capture or injure things before they come in themselves
Give them challenges other than just killing everything in front of them. Scouting missions, escort missions, disrupt the ritual, social encounters, trap gauntlets, etc. If they're good at fighting I would just let them be good at fighting, but I also wouldn't let them solve every problem through fighting.
Some of the above can be combined with combat - i.e. stop the ritual while the cultists are trying to prevent you from stopping it - but another way to spice things up would be to keep things dynamic. Put them in environments/terrain where the monsters are favored and they need to keep moving. For example, they get attacked by kobolds in some ruins. The kobolds have several traps rigged up to collapse walls or open pits or otherwise change the battlefield. Maybe they have a tunnel system that they can dart in and out of, but medium creatures have to squeeze to get through. Another easy way to challenge such a melee-heavy party is to just throw in a couple archers/artillery. The challenge isn't in wrecking those archers, it's getting to them in the first place.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
You can make combat more dynamic and challenging for your melee tanky party by using challenging terrain (difficult, elevation, traps, hazards etc), by usingenemies that attack at range and with spells, by having them coming in waves, by using different type of monsters with varied abilities and finally insert twist such as a earthquake, landslide, teleported or gated creatures that arrive suddenly out of nowhere.
If you throw targeted enemies at them specificly designed to counter them they may feel victimized. However there are plenty of natural counters out there. Anything as simple as a fireball or physical trap is a Dex save heavy armour users will be worse at. Also use the environment against them. you can force them to fight in an open area where your swarming numbers have an advantage, or a tight doorway with their own tank holding them back as you pepper them with arrows or spells. Generally the counter to high AC is spells with save DCs and traps, the counter to traps is rogue and artificer classes, and the counter to roguelike classes is high AC melee classes. It natural for your party to excel vs physical foes, but they will find things turn rapidly against them as soon as they fight a mage with teleport, or who charms their best fighter with enchantments. Lets not mention that evil, evil rust monster that destroys armour and weapons they come into contact with. A single rust monster will promtly have them running scared, and provide a combat encounter far more nerve wracking for them than an army of bandits.
As was mentioned before, look for suitable counters for their foes through tactics or look to restrict their options dramaticly. Having to fight while protecting a defenseless maiden (using a stereotype), if they have lots of melee weapons have them sniping down from a cliffside ambush. I find it helps to ask "If I was the player, how would I defeat this foe?" As if I was a party of rogues fighting 6 elite, armoured guards rather than them attacking the bandits. In that case my 'party of rogues' would probably come up with a plan like "scatter 3 bags of caltrops down on them from the top of a raised area, rain down poison arrows, and if they get close, drop a smoke screen or darkness spell and change position/flee.
However, this said, there's nothing wrong with letting them win easily. Have subtle consequences drive the story as every action can have a consequence. If they are steamrolling over the cultist you have as foes, then they go into hiding. They may think they've won when actually they have started making long term enemies who begin hiring hitmen, or maybe kidnap a family member to blackmail them. This may put them out of their element for a few missions, keep it interesting and can lead to 'character defining story elements' such as lifelong enemies from a failed rescue or it forcing the party of former soldiers to have to try something more diplomatic or some investigative work.
The issue is most likely just the challenge rating of the combats that you're throwing at them.
If your party is level 3 but if I'm reading your post right they've only fought in 3 combats so far, so I guess you started them at level 3. This is always a mistake if you're new to DM'ing, which again I'm assuming you are. Level 1 combats let you get a feel for what the PCs can and can't handle, but at level 3 there's a lot more to deal with. So you're going to have to learn combat encounter balancing on the fly.
Firstly, use the Encounter Builder on this site:
It won't matter what monsters you're using if you don't set the encounter levels appropriately for the number of encounters expected. PCs can "Alpha Strike" on turn 1 of the combat, which is to say that they blow all their cooldown abilities, e.g. Action Surge, their level 3 spells etc. and do massive damage to the enemies. This is something you need to control by having multiple encounters between long rests.
Great responses so far, here's my add-on.
Increasing lethality won't definitively increase the challenge that the party faces. If you are running a 5 minute workday (long rest between deadly combats) there is no significant risk or challenge there. One deadly encounter, or even one that is past deadly, won't complete the xp budget for the adventuring day. If you were to use your entire xp budget on your party in one encounter, I would hazard a guess that someone is rolling new characters within 20 minutes. If not, I might suggest that the foes encountered may have been run as mindless brutes that turned into wooden practice dummies.
I would suggest utilizing the enemies as if they had motive and intent behind their actions. Brush up on some The Monsters Know What They Are Doing and maybe some Thinking Through the Eyes of Our Villains. Both resources are good explanations of how to use monsters with tactics that support how they are built. Following this one piece of advice might alter the outcome of even simple combat encounters. Maybe try looking into monsters that attack the party's strengths (acid splash when struck with a melee weapon, fire damage to all creatures within 5 ft. when damaged, explode on death) to introduce the meaningful choice of wading in with your beat-down-stick instead of choosing to not engage. If one party member goes down, it can consume more effort by two party members to get that member to safety or revived/healed. Focusing fire is something the party would use. It might be something that motivated and driven monsters would use as well. When a PC goes down, they suddenly become a liability to the party. Critical thinking needs to set in quick, or things can spiral superfast. Also, there is some value in having easy fights in between harsh encounters. Sometimes it's just fun to crush the baddie, other times warrant a good, hard, challenging fight.
Secondly, you might try increasing the number of encounters between long and short rests and using environmental effects to challenge the party's non-combat survivability. Exhaustion can become brutally effective in softening up your tanky-tankersons with 25 AC and 900 HP. It has already been suggested to introduce spell casters to mix the approaches that your monsters can take. I might include ranged attackers, traps, and physical separation to the ways to mix things up. A portcullis that splits the party can have the effect of halving their combat effectiveness, sometimes even quartering it. A wall of thorns or ice can split the battlefield, and flight adds another dimension that your party may or may not be able to exploit.
Be creative and use as many tools as you have access to. Conventional forces very rarely have a solid response to unconventional aggression.
“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
Terrain, terrain, terrain! Knee-high mud, fog, dead-end hallways, sewers, boulders the monsters hide behind...all of this stuff can turn a breezy combat into a really hard one without much effort on your part. You can throw in some flying monsters to make the melee guys curse their lack of reach weapons. Also, make them fight multiple opponents. Three bruisers are going to go to town against a dire wolf. Three melee fighters against a handful of pterafolk/pteranodons or a couple gargoyles? Now it's a party.
Will-o-wisps are deceptively difficult for low-level parties because they're really tough to hit, do a good amount of damage, and can straight up kill a PC if they fail their CON save at 0hp. I almost TPK'd my level 4 players with two of them on the field. CR 2 monsters in general are always a solid choice, especially if you max out their HP and/or throw multiples into a fight.
If you want casters and don't want mages, how about a troupe of mischievous pixies? They have magic that requires saves and they can turn invisible, which can be a fun challenge. Finally, you can think about throwing creatures with ranged or breath weapons at the party. A white dragon wyrmling is only a CR 2, but one failed CON save against the breath weapon and the tanks could be rolling death saves. And a young dragon is a humbling encounter for a low-level party that's getting too big for their britches.
Good luck!
Increasing the number of creatures will make the action economy harder for the PCs.
Ensure the attack bonus of the creatures is good enough based on the AC of the PCs.
A lot of those comments have been really helpful, but I was also specifically looking for suggestions on creatures with a relatively low cr, which use tactics other than just hitting the oponent. You know, stuff that I can throw in a combat (maybe even only one creature among the bulk), that will make things hard on them a little bit.
Thank you for all the other advice tho! Some of the stuff said I had already thought of but lots was good information or maybe even reactivation! thank you all!
Using a combination of ranged and close attacks is good as well, a goblin pack where some hang back shooting arrows into the melee combat will force the players to think of different approaches, also mixing up the initiative order, by this I mean rolling initiative for each monster or grouping them, this way if you have a set of monsters all the same (like said goblins) they will be separated out and give you more opportunity to get attacks in in between the players.
Remember as well that your players only have one attack each so if they are facing many lower hit point enemies, this is more dangerous then one or 2 high hit-point enemies.
Oh and oozes, I just ran my party through a sewer mission where they where attacked by grey oozes, reducing armour class and damaging weapons, then ochre jellies, split apart meaning the party increased the action economy against them, and then some psychic grey oozes, meaning the attempts to stay away was cancelled out by teh range psychic attack, and then finally some black puddings, a hit point sink of acidic damage that damages weapons and armour and splits :).
If players make characters with certain strengths, it means they want to use those strengths. High AC players probably want to be shrugging off a bunch of blows in combat. They like feeling like they created a good character. It's validation and that is good.
Players like a challenge, but they also like winning. So, just because they're able to get through combat without taking too many hits, don't feel a need to engineer their doom. Or at least not pervasively: save it for boss fights and rare battles. It's pretty frustrating when every fight is tailored to defeat your character. Especially because that is assuming for your players a fairly deep knowledge of mechanics that they explicitly have not been learning or been tutorialised on.
In every fight, the aim of the monsters and the PCs is the same: reduce the enemy to zero hit points. There are generally only so many ways to do this:
If you want to stray into the less usual side of things, a Bodak will mix things up and is quite a deadly enemy due to the way it knocks death saves off like coconuts at a shy. A Banshee is an RNG nightmare. The most terrifying creature in the game is the Intellect Devourer. I don't suggest using those unless you also make some modifications to enable PCs to be able to regain Intelligence points that they lose this way. A Death Dog or two can cause some disease based issues. Hell Hounds have potent breath weapons with which to threaten your clumped up melee fighters. A Succubus is dangerous out of combat, but when pressed being able to control party members and turn them on one another is pretty threatening.
But again, I'll just reiterate, none of these will challenge your PCs much even in a Deadly encounter unless they're dealing with multiple fights between long rests!