In the game I'm running, the adventuring party (6 4th level characters) hired four NCPs, Knight, to join them to delve into the game's final dungeon. The problem I'm running into is that this creates a considerable encounter disparity that allows the party to breeze through the dungeon.
I'd like to up the difficulty to a certain degree where there is a challenge for specific encounters. The issue I'm running into is properly determining the difficulty level for an encounter when NPCs assist the party versus a group of monsters.
If you have any advice or rule of thumb, I'd greatly appreciate it.
You could kill off the npcs? It’s easy to say they don’t get death saves since they aren’t PCs, so you only need to drop them to 0. Heck, you take out one or two that way, and suddenly the party can’t rely on whack-a-mole healing, it will change their entire strategy, and maybe force them to use more spells than they’d like (which would up the difficulty a bit). Or if a couple die, the others decide this is more dangerous than they signed up for and also leave (maybe giving the money back if they’re the honest type). And narratively, killing a couple red shirts helps the PCs realize the danger level. Plus, if the NPC’s are around for the final fight, it would be a real anticlimax if Knight No. 2 lands the killing blow instead of a party member.
Build them as regular characters rather than using monster stat blocks. Monsters and characters are built differently. (They generally have more HP and average less damage.)
You could kill off the npcs? It’s easy to say they don’t get death saves since they aren’t PCs, so you only need to drop them to 0. Heck, you take out one or two that way, and suddenly the party can’t rely on whack-a-mole healing, it will change their entire strategy, and maybe force them to use more spells than they’d like (which would up the difficulty a bit). Or if a couple die, the others decide this is more dangerous than they signed up for and also leave (maybe giving the money back if they’re the honest type). And narratively, killing a couple red shirts helps the PCs realize the danger level. Plus, if the NPC’s are around for the final fight, it would be a real anticlimax if Knight No. 2 lands the killing blow instead of a party member.
I didn't think about Red Shirt those Knights and let them set off some traps throughout the dungeon, slowly killing them off. That is an excellent approach to managing them. Knowing this adventuring party, they may return to the surface and hire more "Red Shirts." Eventually, the party gold will run out, and possible rumors will start to circulate that people are not returning to the party, so they may be warry about taking on their job.
Another good point about an anticlimax final fight is if one of the NPCs kills the big bad, something I need to consider, but I don't want to fudge dice rolls or make the Knights inept once the battle occurs.
Build them as regular characters rather than using monster stat blocks. Monsters and characters are built differently. (They generally have more HP and average less damage.)
I considered that, and I have enough time to go that route; I was concerned that this approach is making the NPCs too complicated for what, as Xalthu described, a bunch of "Red Shirts."
I considered that, and I have enough time to go that route; I was concerned that this approach is making the NPCs too complicated for what, as Xalthu described, a bunch of "Red Shirts."
I was figuring it'd help making the rebalancing easier.
Also, what level are the PCs? Theoretically, a CR 3 monster is supposed to be a match for a party of four level 3 characters. (Where "match" is defined as "will lose, but if they have 6-8 of these fights between long rests, it'll have been a moderately challenging day".)
I considered that, and I have enough time to go that route; I was concerned that this approach is making the NPCs too complicated for what, as Xalthu described, a bunch of "Red Shirts."
I was figuring it'd help making the rebalancing easier.
Also, what level are the PCs? Theoretically, a CR 3 monster is supposed to be a match for a party of four level 3 characters. (Where "match" is defined as "will lose, but if they have 6-8 of these fights between long rests, it'll have been a moderately challenging day".)
I should include that in my opening post, I'm looking at six 4th level party.
Also, they don't have to be redshirts. Give them names and personalities. It's more work for you, but your players should consider them people. It's also more fun. (In a game I was in, one of the PCs married an NPC who started as a hireling. In the game I'm running, an NPC seems to have precipitated a relationship between two PCs.)
My general rule with larger parties is to have them fight a leader, his 'general' and then a group of minions, just choose them thematically. It doesn't matter how strong your party is (within reason) they will be forced to attack multiple enemies and so even if they hit well, they'll find it much tougher. Choosing a minion with an interesting attack is a great way to send a shock through the party, even if they will die in the first or second round. I'm thinking something like a Boggle - real easy to kill but with their oils and dimensional rift they can be very disorienting. These minions can keep spawning for as long as you need, they pop up from a hole in the ground, drop from the ceiling crawl out from the sewer, etc.
Mix them with a Yeth Hound and/or a grumpy Eladrin and you've got a fey party.
Also, they don't have to be redshirts. Give them names and personalities. It's more work for you, but your players should consider them people. It's also more fun. (In a game I was in, one of the PCs married an NPC who started as a hireling. In the game I'm running, an NPC seems to have precipitated a relationship between two PCs.)
The thing is, that’s a lot more work. And then practically, in a combat, the DM is running the monsters and 4 PC complexity NPCs. Which would mean adding in many more bad guys. There will end up long stretches of fights where it’s just the DM rolling and making notes about who, among the NPCs and enemies, is losing hp and using which resources while the players sit there doing nothing. Even if you make them all champion fighters with no feats, there’s still second winds and deciding when to action surge, and tracking their hit dice during a short rest.
And with this being the final dungeon, there likely won’t be much time to develop them as NPCs.
...it’s just the DM rolling and making notes about who, among the NPCs and enemies, is losing hp and using which resources while the players sit there doing nothing. Even if you make them all champion fighters with no feats, there’s still second winds and deciding when to action surge, and tracking their hit dice during a short rest.
And with this being the final dungeon, there likely won’t be much time to develop them as NPCs.
Xalthu's right. If your concern is about timing treat these guys as as a single stat block. If you're worried about justification, hey, they were just hired and they're going to look after each other in a pinch. Single role their initiative, add their HP together, add all their attacks - which can still hit multiple targets- and any damage taken is taken as a group. Then surround them with minions and let the real people fight the real battle.
My suggestion is to have the 'knights' turn on the PCs and try to rob and kill them (and then return to town with stories about their tragic fate, killed by monsters). That will (a) be a very very difficult fight for the PCs at their current level, and (b) make the problem moot for the rest of the dungeon.
In general I recommend against allowing the PCs to hire allies with a CR exceeding something like level/3-1, because it's very hard to make encounters that are challenging but not a TPK when the allies have higher base hit points than the PCs.
I just add the knights xp as monsters to the xp budgets in calculations. This mathematically basically means you add monsters of equal xp value to the knights to get the same difficulty i.e 4 knights nullifies 4 knights. So since there is 3 that's an additional 5600xp worth of monsters a day and the difficulty of each encounter with them is functionally reduced by that much until they die. I wouldn't add that much xp worth of monsters to every encounter because that would completely nullify the knights all the time (making them useless) and they'd probably quickly die leaving players with encounters that are too hard ( making them a liability).
To avoid making encounter that will just completely destroy the party you might have to wear them out a bit by adding additional encounters that will be easy between rests. For any big battle you might need to add something to keep the knights busy or kill them before hand as any single fight hard enough for the players + the knights will be extremely deadly for players, as in 1 hit kill deadly. Essentially the knights collectively act like something between a level 13 and a level 14 character in the party with this math and are easily equivalent on their own to any normally deadly encounter for the players which is why everything is so easy.
As others have mentioned, you might want to consider limiting how many helpers are available to be hired, limiting the level/CR of the helpers, and generally finding ways to discourage the party from hiring too much help (not everybody selling their services is trustworthy, for example). However, it sounds like you've already passed the point where you can do that, and now you just need to deal with a situation where "too much help" already exists.
When my players decide to bring NPCs to an adventure, I've had good results by just "keeping the NPCs busy" with environmental hazards or crowd-control effects that limit their impact on the encounters. The idea is that this added factor in the encounter takes care of the NPCs through D&D's "action economy" rather than just piling on more monsters. Added magical effects can charm them, put them to sleep, confuse them, entangle them in vines or webs, and so on. I usually find some monster stat blocks with "lair actions" for inspiration. When one of the NPCs gets into trouble, one of the others is likely to go save their friend, so each time it happens it can take 2 of them out of the action for a round or two. If the PCs are getting caught up in these effects too, the NPCs are helping to pull them out of danger instead of actively fighting the threat. This approach uses the NPCs to increase the dramatic tension of a fight, while letting the PCs shine in the actual combat.
The risk with that approach, though, is that your players might end up saying "wow, good thing we brought so many people, that would have been really tough to do alone!" So you can't do it all the time. You'd have to mix it up with some other approaches.
Sometimes, you can limit the number of helpers involved in a particular encounter, while the adventure is underway. If the party has to sneak around at all, bringing knights in armor isn't practical. When traveling, a wagon or rowboat can only hold so many passengers, or there may not be enough horses for everyone to ride. During a boss battle, the hired knights can be kept busy holding off an unexpected horde of minions at a choke-point, "giving the party their chance to fight the boss." You can also consider the effect that an adventure has on the morale of the hired help, especially if they're only getting a flat fee, and not a share of the treasure -- at a certain point, that 20gp payment (or whatever it was) just isn't worth it.
If you're worried that an NPC will land the killing blow on a boss-type enemy, you could have the NPCs focus on helping PCs, by drawing fire or making a distraction- sometimes using the "Aid Another" action rules to give a PC advantage on their attack, if the situation warrants it. That can still mess with the overall level of challenge, though.
In the game I'm running, the adventuring party (6 4th level characters) hired four NCPs, Knight, to join them to delve into the game's final dungeon. The problem I'm running into is that this creates a considerable encounter disparity that allows the party to breeze through the dungeon.
I'd like to up the difficulty to a certain degree where there is a challenge for specific encounters. The issue I'm running into is properly determining the difficulty level for an encounter when NPCs assist the party versus a group of monsters.
If you have any advice or rule of thumb, I'd greatly appreciate it.
I might point out that your party (potentially) indicated to you that they wanted to, effectively, add sidekicks to the party to make the final dungeon easier. I'm assuming that they spent gold they had accumulated, and/or roleplayed convincing these mercenaries to join with them to make it easier for the group, as a whole, to succeed. And you said: "Yes."
Intentionally countering this, by adjusting the difficulty setting of your dungeon already plotted dungeon is more about countering player choice in-game, than encounter balance. And while I get the fact that hindsight is 20/20, I won't advocate for bumping the encounters up to offset what the party has done to make their lives easier.
I might suggest diving into what would make the NPCs forsake their agreement, and lean on that. They are hirelings or henchmen, or mercenaries. They have a breaking point that will make them quit their job. Everyone does. If the NPCs start noticing that they are taking a majority load of the fighting or trap-finding tasks, they might be inclined to ask for more gold, or leave. Maybe they constantly renegotiate with the party about pay. Maybe they have a change of heart about the danger and injury that they are willing to suffer and decide to leave. After you kill off the first of them, the others will undoubtedly reconsider the nature of their buisiness relationship with the party.
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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
In the game I'm running, the adventuring party (6 4th level characters) hired four NCPs, Knight, to join them to delve into the game's final dungeon. The problem I'm running into is that this creates a considerable encounter disparity that allows the party to breeze through the dungeon.
I'd like to up the difficulty to a certain degree where there is a challenge for specific encounters. The issue I'm running into is properly determining the difficulty level for an encounter when NPCs assist the party versus a group of monsters.
If you have any advice or rule of thumb, I'd greatly appreciate it.
I might point out that your party (potentially) indicated to you that they wanted to, effectively, add sidekicks to the party to make the final dungeon easier. I'm assuming that they spent gold they had accumulated, and/or roleplayed convincing these mercenaries to join with them to make it easier for the group, as a whole, to succeed. And you said: "Yes."
Intentionally countering this, by adjusting the difficulty setting of your dungeon already plotted dungeon is more about countering player choice in-game, than encounter balance. And while I get the fact that hindsight is 20/20, I won't advocate for bumping the encounters up to offset what the party has done to make their lives easier.
DM shame :( . You are correct; I was increasing the threat level to counter the party, essentially buying their way for a leisurely journey through the dungeon. Yeah, they spent the gold they earned in other adventures, so that is fair to have that pointed out to me.
I might suggest diving into what would make the NPCs forsake their agreement, and lean on that. They are hirelings or henchmen, or mercenaries. They have a breaking point that will make them quit their job. Everyone does. If the NPCs start noticing that they are taking a majority load of the fighting or trap-finding tasks, they might be inclined to ask for more gold, or leave. Maybe they constantly renegotiate with the party about pay. Maybe they have a change of heart about the danger and injury that they are willing to suffer and decide to leave. After you kill off the first of them, the others will undoubtedly reconsider the nature of their buisiness relationship with the party.
I agree with this as well. I was planning on the NPC looking out for themselves and now turning them into official 'Red Shirts' and tossed into danger first at every possible moment.
I suspect much of the problem is just making them too cheap; four CR 3s should probably exceed the available budget for a level 4 party.
Valid point. I was using Knights as a baseline, but I can always drop it down to Thugs or something within the CR 1/2 to CR 1 range. At this point, the established toughness was for the narrative, so I'd say the stats could be skinned to something other than CR 3s.
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In the game I'm running, the adventuring party (6 4th level characters) hired four NCPs, Knight, to join them to delve into the game's final dungeon. The problem I'm running into is that this creates a considerable encounter disparity that allows the party to breeze through the dungeon.
I'd like to up the difficulty to a certain degree where there is a challenge for specific encounters. The issue I'm running into is properly determining the difficulty level for an encounter when NPCs assist the party versus a group of monsters.
If you have any advice or rule of thumb, I'd greatly appreciate it.
You could kill off the npcs?
It’s easy to say they don’t get death saves since they aren’t PCs, so you only need to drop them to 0. Heck, you take out one or two that way, and suddenly the party can’t rely on whack-a-mole healing, it will change their entire strategy, and maybe force them to use more spells than they’d like (which would up the difficulty a bit). Or if a couple die, the others decide this is more dangerous than they signed up for and also leave (maybe giving the money back if they’re the honest type).
And narratively, killing a couple red shirts helps the PCs realize the danger level. Plus, if the NPC’s are around for the final fight, it would be a real anticlimax if Knight No. 2 lands the killing blow instead of a party member.
Build them as regular characters rather than using monster stat blocks. Monsters and characters are built differently. (They generally have more HP and average less damage.)
I didn't think about Red Shirt those Knights and let them set off some traps throughout the dungeon, slowly killing them off. That is an excellent approach to managing them. Knowing this adventuring party, they may return to the surface and hire more "Red Shirts." Eventually, the party gold will run out, and possible rumors will start to circulate that people are not returning to the party, so they may be warry about taking on their job.
Another good point about an anticlimax final fight is if one of the NPCs kills the big bad, something I need to consider, but I don't want to fudge dice rolls or make the Knights inept once the battle occurs.
I considered that, and I have enough time to go that route; I was concerned that this approach is making the NPCs too complicated for what, as Xalthu described, a bunch of "Red Shirts."
I was figuring it'd help making the rebalancing easier.
Also, what level are the PCs? Theoretically, a CR 3 monster is supposed to be a match for a party of four level 3 characters. (Where "match" is defined as "will lose, but if they have 6-8 of these fights between long rests, it'll have been a moderately challenging day".)
I should include that in my opening post, I'm looking at six 4th level party.
Also, they don't have to be redshirts. Give them names and personalities. It's more work for you, but your players should consider them people. It's also more fun. (In a game I was in, one of the PCs married an NPC who started as a hireling. In the game I'm running, an NPC seems to have precipitated a relationship between two PCs.)
My general rule with larger parties is to have them fight a leader, his 'general' and then a group of minions, just choose them thematically. It doesn't matter how strong your party is (within reason) they will be forced to attack multiple enemies and so even if they hit well, they'll find it much tougher. Choosing a minion with an interesting attack is a great way to send a shock through the party, even if they will die in the first or second round. I'm thinking something like a Boggle - real easy to kill but with their oils and dimensional rift they can be very disorienting. These minions can keep spawning for as long as you need, they pop up from a hole in the ground, drop from the ceiling crawl out from the sewer, etc.
Mix them with a Yeth Hound and/or a grumpy Eladrin and you've got a fey party.
The thing is, that’s a lot more work. And then practically, in a combat, the DM is running the monsters and 4 PC complexity NPCs. Which would mean adding in many more bad guys. There will end up long stretches of fights where it’s just the DM rolling and making notes about who, among the NPCs and enemies, is losing hp and using which resources while the players sit there doing nothing. Even if you make them all champion fighters with no feats, there’s still second winds and deciding when to action surge, and tracking their hit dice during a short rest.
And with this being the final dungeon, there likely won’t be much time to develop them as NPCs.
Xalthu's right. If your concern is about timing treat these guys as as a single stat block. If you're worried about justification, hey, they were just hired and they're going to look after each other in a pinch. Single role their initiative, add their HP together, add all their attacks - which can still hit multiple targets- and any damage taken is taken as a group. Then surround them with minions and let the real people fight the real battle.
My suggestion is to have the 'knights' turn on the PCs and try to rob and kill them (and then return to town with stories about their tragic fate, killed by monsters). That will (a) be a very very difficult fight for the PCs at their current level, and (b) make the problem moot for the rest of the dungeon.
In general I recommend against allowing the PCs to hire allies with a CR exceeding something like level/3-1, because it's very hard to make encounters that are challenging but not a TPK when the allies have higher base hit points than the PCs.
I just add the knights xp as monsters to the xp budgets in calculations. This mathematically basically means you add monsters of equal xp value to the knights to get the same difficulty i.e 4 knights nullifies 4 knights. So since there is 3 that's an additional 5600xp worth of monsters a day and the difficulty of each encounter with them is functionally reduced by that much until they die. I wouldn't add that much xp worth of monsters to every encounter because that would completely nullify the knights all the time (making them useless) and they'd probably quickly die leaving players with encounters that are too hard ( making them a liability).
To avoid making encounter that will just completely destroy the party you might have to wear them out a bit by adding additional encounters that will be easy between rests. For any big battle you might need to add something to keep the knights busy or kill them before hand as any single fight hard enough for the players + the knights will be extremely deadly for players, as in 1 hit kill deadly. Essentially the knights collectively act like something between a level 13 and a level 14 character in the party with this math and are easily equivalent on their own to any normally deadly encounter for the players which is why everything is so easy.
As others have mentioned, you might want to consider limiting how many helpers are available to be hired, limiting the level/CR of the helpers, and generally finding ways to discourage the party from hiring too much help (not everybody selling their services is trustworthy, for example). However, it sounds like you've already passed the point where you can do that, and now you just need to deal with a situation where "too much help" already exists.
When my players decide to bring NPCs to an adventure, I've had good results by just "keeping the NPCs busy" with environmental hazards or crowd-control effects that limit their impact on the encounters. The idea is that this added factor in the encounter takes care of the NPCs through D&D's "action economy" rather than just piling on more monsters. Added magical effects can charm them, put them to sleep, confuse them, entangle them in vines or webs, and so on. I usually find some monster stat blocks with "lair actions" for inspiration. When one of the NPCs gets into trouble, one of the others is likely to go save their friend, so each time it happens it can take 2 of them out of the action for a round or two. If the PCs are getting caught up in these effects too, the NPCs are helping to pull them out of danger instead of actively fighting the threat. This approach uses the NPCs to increase the dramatic tension of a fight, while letting the PCs shine in the actual combat.
The risk with that approach, though, is that your players might end up saying "wow, good thing we brought so many people, that would have been really tough to do alone!" So you can't do it all the time. You'd have to mix it up with some other approaches.
Sometimes, you can limit the number of helpers involved in a particular encounter, while the adventure is underway. If the party has to sneak around at all, bringing knights in armor isn't practical. When traveling, a wagon or rowboat can only hold so many passengers, or there may not be enough horses for everyone to ride. During a boss battle, the hired knights can be kept busy holding off an unexpected horde of minions at a choke-point, "giving the party their chance to fight the boss." You can also consider the effect that an adventure has on the morale of the hired help, especially if they're only getting a flat fee, and not a share of the treasure -- at a certain point, that 20gp payment (or whatever it was) just isn't worth it.
If you're worried that an NPC will land the killing blow on a boss-type enemy, you could have the NPCs focus on helping PCs, by drawing fire or making a distraction- sometimes using the "Aid Another" action rules to give a PC advantage on their attack, if the situation warrants it. That can still mess with the overall level of challenge, though.
I might point out that your party (potentially) indicated to you that they wanted to, effectively, add sidekicks to the party to make the final dungeon easier. I'm assuming that they spent gold they had accumulated, and/or roleplayed convincing these mercenaries to join with them to make it easier for the group, as a whole, to succeed. And you said: "Yes."
Intentionally countering this, by adjusting the difficulty setting of your dungeon already plotted dungeon is more about countering player choice in-game, than encounter balance. And while I get the fact that hindsight is 20/20, I won't advocate for bumping the encounters up to offset what the party has done to make their lives easier.
I might suggest diving into what would make the NPCs forsake their agreement, and lean on that. They are hirelings or henchmen, or mercenaries. They have a breaking point that will make them quit their job. Everyone does. If the NPCs start noticing that they are taking a majority load of the fighting or trap-finding tasks, they might be inclined to ask for more gold, or leave. Maybe they constantly renegotiate with the party about pay. Maybe they have a change of heart about the danger and injury that they are willing to suffer and decide to leave. After you kill off the first of them, the others will undoubtedly reconsider the nature of their buisiness relationship with the party.
“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
DM shame :( . You are correct; I was increasing the threat level to counter the party, essentially buying their way for a leisurely journey through the dungeon. Yeah, they spent the gold they earned in other adventures, so that is fair to have that pointed out to me.
I agree with this as well. I was planning on the NPC looking out for themselves and now turning them into official 'Red Shirts' and tossed into danger first at every possible moment.
I suspect much of the problem is just making them too cheap; four CR 3s should probably exceed the available budget for a level 4 party.
Valid point. I was using Knights as a baseline, but I can always drop it down to Thugs or something within the CR 1/2 to CR 1 range. At this point, the established toughness was for the narrative, so I'd say the stats could be skinned to something other than CR 3s.