I'm a fairly new DM and although people are enjoying it there is definitely some slowdown between turns including (but not limited too) people going on phones, chatting between other inactive players and generally not paying attention. I've had a read through a few posts and have a few ideas on how to speed things up but I feel the biggest problem is the difficulty of encounters (they're too easy with such a large group) and I'm looking for advice on how I can make them more interesting, currently I have a few ideas but unsure which is the best course of action:
Increase the damage output and AC of the set monsters in the adventure book.
Add more monsters to each skirmish.
Add other interesting creatures to the skirmish that normally wouldn't be there.
Lump skirmishes together reducing the overall number of fights, while not reducing the adventure books guidelines.
Well you are the DM, right? Monsters generally don't have to die until you say they do. If you feel confident about being able to keep the action going, you can move from monster HP to a more "hit-based" system where you decide ahead of time how many solid hits a monster will take before they go down. It's a pretty arbitrary and fluid system, so I don't recommend it for everyone, but it does sort of let you control the flow of combat better and let your monsters die on your terms, during more cinematic moments.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"The mongoose blew out its candle and was asleep in bed before the room went dark." —Llanowar fable
I personally don't keep track of monster's hitpoints and always have back-up plans for making the encounter easier / difficult. I know some DMs are opposed to "fudging" the results, I typically shy away from doing that too often, but I find it a good way to artificially install tension or protect a player character when it makes sense. Just keep in mind that when it comes to Hitpoints there is a "range" for a creatures hitpoints and you don't have to use the average for every monster. If you are opposed to fudging results, you can always ignore the third option from my list :-).
If I feel an encounter is too easy I might do one (or all) of the following:
I'll let the creature "survive" for a round or two longer than it should
Have the creature call for back up (if available)
Have the creature hit / critically hit even if the attack the creature rolled wouldn't have actually resulted in a hit / critical hit.
If I feel an encounter is too difficult I might do one (or all) of the following:
Let the creature die earlier than it should (hey, perhaps it wasn't as hardy as the normal creature?)
Have a few of the more severely wounded run away
Have the creature miss (or downgrade a critical hit to just a hit) even if the attack the creature rolled would have actually resulted in a hit / critical hit
So, one thing that can make adventures more challenging without breaking things is making "named" enemies. These might be significantly more powerful enemies who have lore implications; perhaps they've killed a powerful adventurer and acquired powerful gear, or grown stronger through some secret ritual. The advantage of an enemy like this is twofold:
You can add class levels, features, or spells that regular enemies at that level do not have. This is especially helpful with veteran players; whether or not they're trying to metagame, after years of playing D&D it's hard to really worry about another generic goblin. A goblin with a name, however? That's worth noticing.
You can play the creature against type. A named Umberhulk might not be as mindlessly aggressive as its more common kin. It hunts and stalks, burrowing into the earth to reappear when party members separate, using its gaze to attack stragglers and paralyze any adventurer foolish enough to break formation.
You can bring the creature back if it survives. When the tide turns south, the creature can flee. Depending on the situation, it can either get away or force the party to act recklessly to eliminate it, breaking formation to chase after a target. Remember that, as the DM, you do have the final say when things die. Granted, you shouldn't make these creatures impossible to kill, but simply hard to kill. Also, quietly roll death saves for the target as if it were a player character. If someone complains when the creature returns after being "dead", ask the party if anyone checked the body. Just make sure your DM narration of that awesome natural 20 the ranger got on the last shot didn't explicitly kill the creature. Add scars, make it threatening, buff it a few levels, and the party has a rival that doesn't need to advance the plot but keeps the players on their feet.
Other solutions (and common mistakes) and how to fix them:
What I would not do: buff AC or to hit. I know this sounds like an easy answer, and in 3.5 I would totally have done it. But in 5e, to hit numbers just don't scale like they used to, and a +11 to hit and ~18 AC is what you can expect from a level 20 with a maxed ability score (before magical items) unless they do really impressive shenanigans. Bumping AC up too high can make encounters take longer without actually threatening the party, and bumping to hit bonuses up means that the less armored characters in the party will almost always get hit. Generally, you want characters to feel like they have a good chance to hit but also a chance to evade attacks; otherwise dice rolls get tedious.
What I would do instead: Buff enemy damage and health. Make HP a more precious commodity. With a party of seven, most modules will be doing far too little damage to actually deal with the party quickly. Add flat damage and health boosts to enemies for each player past the module's recommended number (the percent is flexible, I would do 100%/module suggested player limit, so for a module with a recommendation of up to four characters, I'd add 25% per subsequent character; you can find what works). One slight addendum I would use is not autokilling characters who take too much damage in a single hit; give them regular death saves. Be sure to spread the damage if you can justify it at all in game. You may also need to increase monster saves to respond to more player characters if you have a bunch of casters using crowd control; don't make it extreme though. Add +1 to saves that the monsters already have bonuses in for just an extra player, but if you notice that your monsters are getting charmed, restrained, or otherwise incapacitated in ways that don't help the flow of combat, gradually increase this bonus to be stronger and across all attributes.
Don't: Add a bunch more enemies. This seems like a good idea, and it actually very effectively solves the problem of balance. Unfortunately, it makes turns take way longer. By the time goblin #73 has acted, your combat has already taken an hour and a half out of your session. If your party is mainly in it for combat, that's fine, but if they want story and roleplay as well, you'll want to not increase the number of creatures acting.
Do: Make enemies individually more intimidating. There are many ways to do this; named creatures as per above is one way, but there are other ways to do so that don't make combat as bogged down as adding more enemies per se. One alternative is to use squads; so each "goblin" is actually a squad of two goblins. They take the same actions in combat and may even use the same roll if you want, don't make the board more messy with more enemies, and are more effective speedbumps for the party because they will never die in a single hit; one will go down, and then the second will go down after the next hit, but even with one HP they take multiple shots. Weaknesses of this approach are AoE spells that just kill everything in a room, but it's not that big a deal since if it would kill the squads, it would kill the base encounter enemies also. Additionally, stronger enemies don't necessarily make sense to double, because why would there be two dragons defending one hoard? An alternative in this case is to amp up the dragon to being a stronger dragon. Obviously, this requires an awareness of what your party can handle, but a young dragon can be fairly easily adjusted to a more mature dragon with very little rewriting necessary. You may want to, if you're doing damage scaling like I suggested above, negate this for certain powerful enemies or abilities that do a lot of damage. Additionally, give enemy spellcasters (and if there are none, add some) spells that do area of effect damage or status effects so that they can deal with groups of players and take players temporarily out of the action. Your players have more spells to fling around, so give the baddies some more too.
Don't: Lump all the fights into one. This is fairly subjective, because in some cases this does help, but it can turn sessions into a fairly rote walk somewhere, do one fight, walk back tempo that isn't very interesting. Part of having varied encounters is fighting in interesting and different environments, and having one big fight reduces what you can do as a DM.
Do: Force the party to fight against momentum. Ambush them when they go to rest between fights. Move encounters from "safe" areas to ones with environmental hazards (bonus points for being more interesting combat wise). Have wandering monsters, ambushes, and traps that aren't in the module/adventure keep chipping at party resources. One problem with having that many players is that the party has collectively more spell slots, diverse proficiency slots, HP, etc. Force them to economize with encounters that are very short but dangerous. Perhaps an umber hulk appears from a cavern wall and paralyzes the fighter before the party can react. It will die fairly easily, but the party will have to burn spells healing injuries or risk going into the next battle at less than 100% health. The barbarian springs a trap with his face (to be fair, probably intentionally). He's alive, but the poison makes him less effective in combat if he fails is save and the party doesn't spend a restoration spell. The enemies attack on a narrow bridge, ambushing the party from both sides. Your party is limited tactically because of the narrow space, but so are the enemies, so the party and enemies don't have significant relative advantages, but need to use their resources more efficiently. The problem with this method is that things get stale; you can't have every fight be on a bridge after a trap after fighting an umber hulk out of the blue. It requires constant creativity and adaptation, and some party members (particularly perceptive rogues who notice hidden enemies and traps, for example) mitigate the effectiveness of this strategy. Don't make their skills worthless, but toss out some nasty DCs and make them move slowly (and therefore open to ambushes or the enemy rotations changing) when searching for traps. This is in the rules, so it's not a jerk move, but many DMs sort of wave it off as unnecessary for small groups because it does mess with the narrative flow of gameplay.
Don't: Split the party. It's just not worth it. It adds drama when players don't want to split, makes things confusing (especially when players know a bunch of things that their characters weren't present for; even the best of us inadvertently bring in outside knowledge on accident every once in a while), and makes for awkwardly balanced encounters.
Do: Punish splitting the party. I saw a player wander off from the party at level 1 and get absolutely murdered once. I can guarantee you that party, most of whom were first/second timers (and myself, the only real veteran besides the DM) never did anything that stupid again (until the ranger, a free spirit who was a bit over dramatic, did basically the same thing, but that was in character and the player wasn't salty about it). Keeping the party together keeps you from having to sidebar and do a bunch of other bookkeeping. Sometimes it's helpful, such as in a city when the party needs to cover more ground for information gathering, but not in combat-likely situations.
These are soft suggestions. You're free to ignore them if you think you can make something else work, use one of them, or use any combination of them. Just be aware that when you use more than one of these simultaneously, you might bump the risk to the party too high to be enjoyable, so play it by ear and be ready to adjust between encounters should things get too hairy.
Edit: On other table discipline, I suggest limiting turn time to around 30 seconds to a minute per player. Obviously, this doesn't need to be enforced tyrannically, but casters are almost always problems for this (I know I am when I play a caster). Players should learn their spell lists and spell effects enough to be able to select and use a spell in combat without much deliberation. There may be times when players need more information; which enemies are injured or special looking, etc. This is fine, but if this information was clearly revealed to the player and they just weren't paying attention, force a perception check for their character. Forcing the player to actually know what's going on will keep attention spans focused, as will moving quickly through turns. Lumping enemies together in initiative and having them act simultaneously is also a thing (you could even, to be super fast, just "take ten" for monster initiative and add their initiative bonus to 10 (5 if surprised, 15 if ambushing) for their spot in the turn order and move all enemies of the same type simultaneously. This helps with initiative tracking and reduces the "bouncing" between players and GMs that happens all the time. Another speed tool is using a digital dice roller for large rolls; sure, 10d6 isn't terrible, but most dice rollers like the WotC one do the math for you instantly. That said, many people do prefer physical dice to digital dice, so check with your players. Some people don't trust digital rollers, despite the fact that they, uh, are usually fine. Some people are traditionalists and just like the feel of dice. It's not worth drama at the table over it, just make sure that the rolls are honest and that players trust you as a DM if you make private rolls. The group I GM'ed for last kept looking at my dice rolls, checking me, and it frustrated me because I bought a DM screen for that particular reason. Make sure you keep discipline, but if you roll something spectacular show the party and let them know you're not BS'ing. You run the game, and players should abide by your rules. Be reasonable though; you are, after all, doing this for the benefit of your players, and being a jerk will just make everyone angry.
I'm running LMoP at the moment with a group of 7.
I'm a fairly new DM and although people are enjoying it there is definitely some slowdown between turns including (but not limited too) people going on phones, chatting between other inactive players and generally not paying attention. I've had a read through a few posts and have a few ideas on how to speed things up but I feel the biggest problem is the difficulty of encounters (they're too easy with such a large group) and I'm looking for advice on how I can make them more interesting, currently I have a few ideas but unsure which is the best course of action:
Any and all advice would be appreciated.
Well you are the DM, right? Monsters generally don't have to die until you say they do. If you feel confident about being able to keep the action going, you can move from monster HP to a more "hit-based" system where you decide ahead of time how many solid hits a monster will take before they go down. It's a pretty arbitrary and fluid system, so I don't recommend it for everyone, but it does sort of let you control the flow of combat better and let your monsters die on your terms, during more cinematic moments.
I personally don't keep track of monster's hitpoints and always have back-up plans for making the encounter easier / difficult. I know some DMs are opposed to "fudging" the results, I typically shy away from doing that too often, but I find it a good way to artificially install tension or protect a player character when it makes sense. Just keep in mind that when it comes to Hitpoints there is a "range" for a creatures hitpoints and you don't have to use the average for every monster. If you are opposed to fudging results, you can always ignore the third option from my list :-).
So, one thing that can make adventures more challenging without breaking things is making "named" enemies. These might be significantly more powerful enemies who have lore implications; perhaps they've killed a powerful adventurer and acquired powerful gear, or grown stronger through some secret ritual. The advantage of an enemy like this is twofold:
You can add class levels, features, or spells that regular enemies at that level do not have. This is especially helpful with veteran players; whether or not they're trying to metagame, after years of playing D&D it's hard to really worry about another generic goblin. A goblin with a name, however? That's worth noticing.
You can play the creature against type. A named Umberhulk might not be as mindlessly aggressive as its more common kin. It hunts and stalks, burrowing into the earth to reappear when party members separate, using its gaze to attack stragglers and paralyze any adventurer foolish enough to break formation.
You can bring the creature back if it survives. When the tide turns south, the creature can flee. Depending on the situation, it can either get away or force the party to act recklessly to eliminate it, breaking formation to chase after a target. Remember that, as the DM, you do have the final say when things die. Granted, you shouldn't make these creatures impossible to kill, but simply hard to kill. Also, quietly roll death saves for the target as if it were a player character. If someone complains when the creature returns after being "dead", ask the party if anyone checked the body. Just make sure your DM narration of that awesome natural 20 the ranger got on the last shot didn't explicitly kill the creature. Add scars, make it threatening, buff it a few levels, and the party has a rival that doesn't need to advance the plot but keeps the players on their feet.
Other solutions (and common mistakes) and how to fix them:
What I would not do: buff AC or to hit. I know this sounds like an easy answer, and in 3.5 I would totally have done it. But in 5e, to hit numbers just don't scale like they used to, and a +11 to hit and ~18 AC is what you can expect from a level 20 with a maxed ability score (before magical items) unless they do really impressive shenanigans. Bumping AC up too high can make encounters take longer without actually threatening the party, and bumping to hit bonuses up means that the less armored characters in the party will almost always get hit. Generally, you want characters to feel like they have a good chance to hit but also a chance to evade attacks; otherwise dice rolls get tedious.
What I would do instead: Buff enemy damage and health. Make HP a more precious commodity. With a party of seven, most modules will be doing far too little damage to actually deal with the party quickly. Add flat damage and health boosts to enemies for each player past the module's recommended number (the percent is flexible, I would do 100%/module suggested player limit, so for a module with a recommendation of up to four characters, I'd add 25% per subsequent character; you can find what works). One slight addendum I would use is not autokilling characters who take too much damage in a single hit; give them regular death saves. Be sure to spread the damage if you can justify it at all in game. You may also need to increase monster saves to respond to more player characters if you have a bunch of casters using crowd control; don't make it extreme though. Add +1 to saves that the monsters already have bonuses in for just an extra player, but if you notice that your monsters are getting charmed, restrained, or otherwise incapacitated in ways that don't help the flow of combat, gradually increase this bonus to be stronger and across all attributes.
Don't: Add a bunch more enemies. This seems like a good idea, and it actually very effectively solves the problem of balance. Unfortunately, it makes turns take way longer. By the time goblin #73 has acted, your combat has already taken an hour and a half out of your session. If your party is mainly in it for combat, that's fine, but if they want story and roleplay as well, you'll want to not increase the number of creatures acting.
Do: Make enemies individually more intimidating. There are many ways to do this; named creatures as per above is one way, but there are other ways to do so that don't make combat as bogged down as adding more enemies per se. One alternative is to use squads; so each "goblin" is actually a squad of two goblins. They take the same actions in combat and may even use the same roll if you want, don't make the board more messy with more enemies, and are more effective speedbumps for the party because they will never die in a single hit; one will go down, and then the second will go down after the next hit, but even with one HP they take multiple shots. Weaknesses of this approach are AoE spells that just kill everything in a room, but it's not that big a deal since if it would kill the squads, it would kill the base encounter enemies also. Additionally, stronger enemies don't necessarily make sense to double, because why would there be two dragons defending one hoard? An alternative in this case is to amp up the dragon to being a stronger dragon. Obviously, this requires an awareness of what your party can handle, but a young dragon can be fairly easily adjusted to a more mature dragon with very little rewriting necessary. You may want to, if you're doing damage scaling like I suggested above, negate this for certain powerful enemies or abilities that do a lot of damage. Additionally, give enemy spellcasters (and if there are none, add some) spells that do area of effect damage or status effects so that they can deal with groups of players and take players temporarily out of the action. Your players have more spells to fling around, so give the baddies some more too.
Don't: Lump all the fights into one. This is fairly subjective, because in some cases this does help, but it can turn sessions into a fairly rote walk somewhere, do one fight, walk back tempo that isn't very interesting. Part of having varied encounters is fighting in interesting and different environments, and having one big fight reduces what you can do as a DM.
Do: Force the party to fight against momentum. Ambush them when they go to rest between fights. Move encounters from "safe" areas to ones with environmental hazards (bonus points for being more interesting combat wise). Have wandering monsters, ambushes, and traps that aren't in the module/adventure keep chipping at party resources. One problem with having that many players is that the party has collectively more spell slots, diverse proficiency slots, HP, etc. Force them to economize with encounters that are very short but dangerous. Perhaps an umber hulk appears from a cavern wall and paralyzes the fighter before the party can react. It will die fairly easily, but the party will have to burn spells healing injuries or risk going into the next battle at less than 100% health. The barbarian springs a trap with his face (to be fair, probably intentionally). He's alive, but the poison makes him less effective in combat if he fails is save and the party doesn't spend a restoration spell. The enemies attack on a narrow bridge, ambushing the party from both sides. Your party is limited tactically because of the narrow space, but so are the enemies, so the party and enemies don't have significant relative advantages, but need to use their resources more efficiently. The problem with this method is that things get stale; you can't have every fight be on a bridge after a trap after fighting an umber hulk out of the blue. It requires constant creativity and adaptation, and some party members (particularly perceptive rogues who notice hidden enemies and traps, for example) mitigate the effectiveness of this strategy. Don't make their skills worthless, but toss out some nasty DCs and make them move slowly (and therefore open to ambushes or the enemy rotations changing) when searching for traps. This is in the rules, so it's not a jerk move, but many DMs sort of wave it off as unnecessary for small groups because it does mess with the narrative flow of gameplay.
Don't: Split the party. It's just not worth it. It adds drama when players don't want to split, makes things confusing (especially when players know a bunch of things that their characters weren't present for; even the best of us inadvertently bring in outside knowledge on accident every once in a while), and makes for awkwardly balanced encounters.
Do: Punish splitting the party. I saw a player wander off from the party at level 1 and get absolutely murdered once. I can guarantee you that party, most of whom were first/second timers (and myself, the only real veteran besides the DM) never did anything that stupid again (until the ranger, a free spirit who was a bit over dramatic, did basically the same thing, but that was in character and the player wasn't salty about it). Keeping the party together keeps you from having to sidebar and do a bunch of other bookkeeping. Sometimes it's helpful, such as in a city when the party needs to cover more ground for information gathering, but not in combat-likely situations.
These are soft suggestions. You're free to ignore them if you think you can make something else work, use one of them, or use any combination of them. Just be aware that when you use more than one of these simultaneously, you might bump the risk to the party too high to be enjoyable, so play it by ear and be ready to adjust between encounters should things get too hairy.
Edit: On other table discipline, I suggest limiting turn time to around 30 seconds to a minute per player. Obviously, this doesn't need to be enforced tyrannically, but casters are almost always problems for this (I know I am when I play a caster). Players should learn their spell lists and spell effects enough to be able to select and use a spell in combat without much deliberation. There may be times when players need more information; which enemies are injured or special looking, etc. This is fine, but if this information was clearly revealed to the player and they just weren't paying attention, force a perception check for their character. Forcing the player to actually know what's going on will keep attention spans focused, as will moving quickly through turns. Lumping enemies together in initiative and having them act simultaneously is also a thing (you could even, to be super fast, just "take ten" for monster initiative and add their initiative bonus to 10 (5 if surprised, 15 if ambushing) for their spot in the turn order and move all enemies of the same type simultaneously. This helps with initiative tracking and reduces the "bouncing" between players and GMs that happens all the time. Another speed tool is using a digital dice roller for large rolls; sure, 10d6 isn't terrible, but most dice rollers like the WotC one do the math for you instantly. That said, many people do prefer physical dice to digital dice, so check with your players. Some people don't trust digital rollers, despite the fact that they, uh, are usually fine. Some people are traditionalists and just like the feel of dice. It's not worth drama at the table over it, just make sure that the rolls are honest and that players trust you as a DM if you make private rolls. The group I GM'ed for last kept looking at my dice rolls, checking me, and it frustrated me because I bought a DM screen for that particular reason. Make sure you keep discipline, but if you roll something spectacular show the party and let them know you're not BS'ing. You run the game, and players should abide by your rules. Be reasonable though; you are, after all, doing this for the benefit of your players, and being a jerk will just make everyone angry.