A thing that I struggle with a lot is running creatures with extensive statblocks. The basics like hp, ac, speed, ability modifiers and basic attacks (melee and ranged) are easy. But then there's equipement (ring of protection, rod of rulership, ...etc.), immunities and vulnerabilities, legendary actions, lair actions, saving throws and skills, features, a spell list with more than 20 spells, spell slots, ...etc. It seems so much to take in consideration. I'm guessing the challenge rating of the creature is based on all those things combined. So if I forget about 2 or 3 things during combat the challenge rating is off, right? And then there might be other creatures on the battlefield as well so they all have their own "complex" statblocks.
So how do you prep a creature with big statblocks like that?
If a creature has a special magical item then build it into the monster's stats. But ask yourself whether it really needs the item - usually it's only going to exist on the battlemap for 2-5 turns. Why are you bothering with a Ring of Protection?
CR is an almost useless stat once creatures are past CR4. Parties of level 9 characters can take on CR21 monsters and win. According to the DM Guide, an Owlbear is CR2 by its stats, but is rated as CR3. There's no point worrying about whether remembering a resistance or not makes a difference to it.
Some tips on what to do:
During your pre-adventure prep, read the stat block and consider the following:
Do the party have magic weapons/spells that impact the resistances, e.g. if you have a tempest cleric then Resistance to Lightning is more likely to come into play. Remember it.
For spellcasters, work out in advance which spells they'll use in any given situations. Blow all their big spell-slots first, opting to hit multiple enemies over single-target spells unless they are really threatened and have the likes of finger of death. You don't need to know all their spells, just about 3 or 4 from their highest level slots, you can ignore the rest. But you should be preparing by reading these ahead of time. Read them all if you want to be really prepared.
Legendary Actions are easy. List them in the initiative order. If you have 4 PCs, and the BBEG has 3 legendary actions and a Lair action, then initiative looks like this:
Character A - Initiative 23
Legendary Action 1
Lair Action - Initiative 20
Character B - Initiative 18
Legendary Action 2
BBEG - Init 15
Character C - Init 11
Legendary Action 3
Character D - Init 4
Before you get to an encounter, you should have an idea in your head as to how the encounter will run, which means knowing what a creature's turn looks like. Work out if it requires PCs to make saving throws each turn or some other odd effect. Think it through in your head before they ever get to it.
I tend to lean more on the concept of focused preparation that BigLizard led with, in that if you have magic items, spells and special action abilites that you want your monsters to be able to do, put them on the statblock as actions, bonus actions, reactions or legendary actions. Dispense with as much of the information from the statblock as possible until you are down to the amount of information that will be useable in 3 to 5 rounds of combat. This does mean that you may have to run some mock battles in the space that you have designed to better massage the monster into the lethality that you desire. If you, or your players, enjoy longer combats, I would suggest that you split your one long combat into a multi-stage affair that is two or more smaller combat encounters that are so closely spaced that they almost feel like one encounter. Be prepared to dial difficulty up or down, depending on what your players actually do. Dials of Monster Difficulty.
Focus your building of that monster on just that combat. If you want some convoluted reason as to why it has allies or traps: It just does. Let the players ponder the connections of the story. They'll come up with more material pondering why the BBE had those allies.
Lastly, I might suggest that if you put a magic item on a monster, you'd better be ready for the PCs to snatch that thing up and use it. If you don't want a particular item to fall into the PCs hands, you might want to have some mechanic that dissolves the body of the BBE, or teleports the corpse and everything it was wearing or carrying to one of the Outer Planes. Think Chekhov's Gun here.
Everything that isn't used, or that gets used incorrectly or inefficiently, is useless. If you find a way for the thing to serve you in making the game more fun/enjoyable, it is useful.
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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
What it does it provides included hyperlinks to everything in the core rules for spells, conditions and tracking. It allows you to include timers based on when something can/should end. Example if a PC gets hit with a "frightened until the end of the monster's next turn" you can click on the tag, type in frightened", click the timer and then select from the drop downs "until the end" and what turn it's based off of. The tracker keeps track for you.
For me the big bang for the buck (aside from the easy tracking for the PC's to see relative health of enemies) is the linking to the rules for spells and conditions. I can click and easily get reminders of the rules. For monsters not listed in the basic rules, you can use a "scraper" (requires patreon membership) that lets you scrap a DND page and pull all of the data into the tracker rather than manually re-typing it all in. Very nice and very convenient.
It doesn't do a ton of prep work for me, but it does make running the combat itself much easier to do.
Modern D&D, which is to say 5e works on a principle of focused preparation so the idea being that you aren't going to have 10 fights in a session or roll for random encounters.. stuff like that probably doesn't belong in 5e
5e was most certainly designed around having multiple fights, random encounters, and so on. Modern players and DMs don't want to deal with those things, and that disconnect is the source of a lot of problems in 5e.
Modern D&D, which is to say 5e works on a principle of focused preparation so the idea being that you aren't going to have 10 fights in a session or roll for random encounters.. stuff like that probably doesn't belong in 5e
5e was most certainly designed around having multiple fights, random encounters, and so on. Modern players and DMs don't want to deal with those things, and that disconnect is the source of a lot of problems in 5e.
I agree with that - I don't think I've ever played in a game that runs 6-8 encounters in a day. 5 is the absolute max I've run, I think, and that was a really long (10 hours) dungeon crawl, split over 2 sessions.
A flow chart can be useful if you really need it, but I'm not ever going to run a monster with literally 20 spells. I would pare that list down to about 5. If being resourceful and flexible is their thing, I'll keep another list of spells that they have off to the side to consult if they get in a bind. But generally you can boil down your options to the Big Guns, the Signature Move, and Basic Attacks. If you want something more complicated, Kaavel's suggestion of different stages of the fight is a great one. You essentially run 2-3 different monsters across different phases of the encounter.
Spell slots/item charges I likewise don't track. These guys generally have a lifespan of one encounter and are extremely unlikely to run out of resources in that timeframe. Just don't do something silly like casting Wish for four turns in a row.
I think these are the exceptions though, and meant to be big BBEG set pieces. The vast majority of 5e monsters are quite simple, bordering on bland for me, and I do believe they were designed so to make for simple, streamlined combat encounters.
I agree with that - I don't think I've ever played in a game that runs 6-8 encounters in a day. 5 is the absolute max I've run, I think, and that was a really long (10 hours) dungeon crawl, split over 2 sessions.
I've recently been able to match this pattern by disallowing "true" long rests during travel, so that essentially traveling a week or so from one place to another takes up one "adventuring day," and you throw something at them each in-game day. This has worked pretty well for me so far, and lends itself well to lower-risk, lower-stakes type random encounters.
A thing that I struggle with a lot is running creatures with extensive statblocks. The basics like hp, ac, speed, ability modifiers and basic attacks (melee and ranged) are easy. But then there's equipement (ring of protection, rod of rulership, ...etc.), immunities and vulnerabilities, legendary actions, lair actions, saving throws and skills, features, a spell list with more than 20 spells, spell slots, ...etc. It seems so much to take in consideration. I'm guessing the challenge rating of the creature is based on all those things combined. So if I forget about 2 or 3 things during combat the challenge rating is off, right? And then there might be other creatures on the battlefield as well so they all have their own "complex" statblocks.
So how do you prep a creature with big statblocks like that?
If a creature has a special magical item then build it into the monster's stats. But ask yourself whether it really needs the item - usually it's only going to exist on the battlemap for 2-5 turns. Why are you bothering with a Ring of Protection?
CR is an almost useless stat once creatures are past CR4. Parties of level 9 characters can take on CR21 monsters and win. According to the DM Guide, an Owlbear is CR2 by its stats, but is rated as CR3. There's no point worrying about whether remembering a resistance or not makes a difference to it.
Some tips on what to do:
During your pre-adventure prep, read the stat block and consider the following:
I write a list of which actions it is supposed to take in each turn beforehand and circumstances innwhich it would do something different.
Lot of good pointers in here.
I tend to lean more on the concept of focused preparation that BigLizard led with, in that if you have magic items, spells and special action abilites that you want your monsters to be able to do, put them on the statblock as actions, bonus actions, reactions or legendary actions. Dispense with as much of the information from the statblock as possible until you are down to the amount of information that will be useable in 3 to 5 rounds of combat. This does mean that you may have to run some mock battles in the space that you have designed to better massage the monster into the lethality that you desire. If you, or your players, enjoy longer combats, I would suggest that you split your one long combat into a multi-stage affair that is two or more smaller combat encounters that are so closely spaced that they almost feel like one encounter. Be prepared to dial difficulty up or down, depending on what your players actually do. Dials of Monster Difficulty.
Focus your building of that monster on just that combat. If you want some convoluted reason as to why it has allies or traps: It just does. Let the players ponder the connections of the story. They'll come up with more material pondering why the BBE had those allies.
Lastly, I might suggest that if you put a magic item on a monster, you'd better be ready for the PCs to snatch that thing up and use it. If you don't want a particular item to fall into the PCs hands, you might want to have some mechanic that dissolves the body of the BBE, or teleports the corpse and everything it was wearing or carrying to one of the Outer Planes. Think Chekhov's Gun here.
Everything that isn't used, or that gets used incorrectly or inefficiently, is useless. If you find a way for the thing to serve you in making the game more fun/enjoyable, it is useful.
“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
I use a site called Improved Initiative.
Combat Tracker - Improved Initiative
What it does it provides included hyperlinks to everything in the core rules for spells, conditions and tracking. It allows you to include timers based on when something can/should end. Example if a PC gets hit with a "frightened until the end of the monster's next turn" you can click on the tag, type in frightened", click the timer and then select from the drop downs "until the end" and what turn it's based off of. The tracker keeps track for you.
For me the big bang for the buck (aside from the easy tracking for the PC's to see relative health of enemies) is the linking to the rules for spells and conditions. I can click and easily get reminders of the rules. For monsters not listed in the basic rules, you can use a "scraper" (requires patreon membership) that lets you scrap a DND page and pull all of the data into the tracker rather than manually re-typing it all in. Very nice and very convenient.
It doesn't do a ton of prep work for me, but it does make running the combat itself much easier to do.
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5e was most certainly designed around having multiple fights, random encounters, and so on. Modern players and DMs don't want to deal with those things, and that disconnect is the source of a lot of problems in 5e.
I agree with that - I don't think I've ever played in a game that runs 6-8 encounters in a day. 5 is the absolute max I've run, I think, and that was a really long (10 hours) dungeon crawl, split over 2 sessions.
A flow chart can be useful if you really need it, but I'm not ever going to run a monster with literally 20 spells. I would pare that list down to about 5. If being resourceful and flexible is their thing, I'll keep another list of spells that they have off to the side to consult if they get in a bind. But generally you can boil down your options to the Big Guns, the Signature Move, and Basic Attacks. If you want something more complicated, Kaavel's suggestion of different stages of the fight is a great one. You essentially run 2-3 different monsters across different phases of the encounter.
Spell slots/item charges I likewise don't track. These guys generally have a lifespan of one encounter and are extremely unlikely to run out of resources in that timeframe. Just don't do something silly like casting Wish for four turns in a row.
I think these are the exceptions though, and meant to be big BBEG set pieces. The vast majority of 5e monsters are quite simple, bordering on bland for me, and I do believe they were designed so to make for simple, streamlined combat encounters.
I've recently been able to match this pattern by disallowing "true" long rests during travel, so that essentially traveling a week or so from one place to another takes up one "adventuring day," and you throw something at them each in-game day. This has worked pretty well for me so far, and lends itself well to lower-risk, lower-stakes type random encounters.
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