Newbie DM here. Can someone help me with challenge levels? I see the charts in the DM guide on making monsters, and the challenge level ratings in the MM. How do you select the proper challenge level for the fight? I have a party of 5, at lvl 10 right now. I've been playing around with the challenge levels of the baddies, and haven't really gotten it right. I keep having to change the HP and damage of the bad guys in the middle of the fight.
How much higher/lower than the parties level should the challenge level be for mobs, minibosses, bosses, ect. How do i adjust challenge level for party size? Any other helpful information would be greatly appreciated.
What level did you start at? Encounters in D&D are more art than science, and math can only get you so far. If you start at level one and work up, you can gage encounters by how well the PCs have done previously. Especially being a new DM, the lower levels really help learn the ropes and the players. But to answer your questions.
Generally speaking a creature with a CR = a PCs level, is a decent challenge for that PC. The less Monsters, the higher you can go with CR without risking death. The more monsters, the less CR you want. Important to note how much damage a Monster is capable of doing each round and keeping track of how much damage your PCs are doing each round on average.
D&D is a bit archaic. It still assumes you are going to fight in a dungeon (dungeon being any place with multiple rooms), thus multiple rooms and multiple encounters. So the more encounters the PCs have before resting, the easier you want the challenges to be, the less encounters, the more challenging you can go. May need to adjust on the fly based on what the PCs do. This is where I think D&D has become archaic, as a lot of groups seem to be more involved with RP now and as a consequence end up outside a dungeon where realistically there aren't going to be a lot of fights, especially once you get to the point where encounters take half the night and having multiple rooms eventually becomes rather boring for the modern roleplayer who actually likes roleplaying and not just killing things.
So quick answers. The CR for mobs should be lower than the PCs CR as more monsters means more attacks for those monsters, which means the can go toe to toe with the PCs a lot easier than one monster. (Its why the big guys all get like 3 attacks and legendary actions, because the PCs are doing roughly 2 attacks each (most spells do damage equal to two attacks). For minibosses and bosses this really depends on a lot of things. First, are the PCs going to encounter the miniboss and the boss at the same time? or different times? If its the same time, then each has to be weaker than if they were encountered separately. The exception is if the PCs can rest (even a short rest) allows you to increase the difficulty. Both the miniboss and boss has to be weaker if the PCs have had other encounters before them, but can be stronger if the PCs haven't.
So Typically, you would select a CR appropriate for the level of the Characters. Since they are ten you can pick anything CR ?-10. (You can go as low as you want, just pay attention to the attack bonus, as if you go to low, the monsters won't be able to hit the PCs and the lower you go the more monsters you need to make it a challenge). Going above the CR level of the PCs requires more planning on your part. Generally one CR above isn't going to break anything, it will just make it a harder challenge. But you have to watch the HP of the monster, the damage it can do, and the number of attacks it can make. Note there isn't a lot of monsters with CR 10, so we'll go below that.
We will go with a fire Giant, which is CR 9. Notice that it also gives an XP amount? So each fire Giant is worth 5,000 xp. Click Here For Building Encounters
Basically look at how challenging you want the encounter to be. So for a 10nth level character it gives 1,900 for a hard encounter which is what we are going to go with. Assuming we have four players, that would give us a total XP budget of 7,600. Once we subtract the 5,000 we are left with 2,600 xp. This is where you look for other monsters worth approx. that amount, however the math gets harder. If you select two monsters, you multiple their total xp value by 1.5. If you select 3-6 you multiple it by 2.
So if we selected two fire giants, it would be 10,000 xp x 1.5 or 15,000. That's way more than the 7,600 we have so only one fire giant will work.
As written you would need to find monsters to total 7,600 adjusted for the number of monsters you end up with. Lets go with two monsters. That means we need a second monster whose xp value is (7,600/1.5) - 5000. Which ends up being like 66xp .... basically not worth our effort. So we are left with one fire Giant, who ends up being a medium encounter. (I am fairly certain that a CR Creature = the party's level should probably always end up a medium encounter.)
But this is where everything gets complicated. Its assumed that the PCs are going to run into this fire giant, then run into another one, then maybe short rest, then run into another one, possibly short rest again if need be and eventually come to the boss who is going to be a bit harder and then finally have a long rest. The guide says the PCs can actually handle six to eight of these encounters in a single day....
But getting a party to do that is hard unless they are stuck in a dungeon. So what happens if you don't want to do 6 to 8 encounters before the PCs rest? What if you only intend on them having one? Well, you can make the encounter harder. You can do this by adding hit points, increasing the monsters AC, letting the monster do more damage, give the monster a friend, or an extra attack. This is where it gets a lot harder to say do this one thing and it will work. A lot depends on how many encounters you want before the PCs rest.
If you are doing only one encounter that day, maybe the PCs really can fight two Fire Giants after all. So one fire giant is going to do about 30 damage per turn to two PCs. The fire giant is going to hit those in plate armor (+shield) roughly 50% of the time. If you have an AC lower than plate armor, the Fire Giant is going to probably hit most of the time. Does this matter? Yes! If we attack the more heavily armored individuals more than the lower AC PCs then adding a second fire Giant becomes less deadly. We are essentially stacking it in the PCs favor. It can do up to 43 damage to that PC. This is where knowing the AC of your specific party and how many party members you have. With 4 Party Members (we'll assume no one has full plate) both fire giants are going to hit each PC for 30 damage on average. Lets assume its 30damage . For the sake of Math, lets assume the party can on average return 40 damage to the Monsters and act stupidly and divide to attack each monster instead of focus firing.
So Round one, each PC has a 8+9d8 +2*10 hp or 28+ 9d8 We will go with on average 60 hp. Where a fire giant has 162 hp. So Round One, each PC drops to about 30 hp. This should flag us that the combat might be too dangerous as the PCs aren't going to survive round two, and any PC unfortunate to get hit twice is potentially already out of combat. Likewise the PCs would do 60 points to each Fire Giant dropping them to 100 hp each. Not nearly enough to survive, so looks like we should stick with one fire giant.... or should we?
One chain lighting can do 10d8 damage. so around 40 damage on a non save. But it hits more than just one Fire Giant. Both giants would have taken around 20-40 damage possibly. (Intentionally keep the giants close enough for the PC to use the spell on both of them) Of course maybe your PC likes fireball, which fire giants are immune to. Basically at this point, all I can say is that you have to either follow the game rules and have the PCs fight one Fire Giant or know your players enough to know whether or not two fire giants are going to be deadly. (Since they potentially are, but if the PCs get to rest afterward, they might be able to do it.)
Basically assume your PCs are doing average damage and the monsters are doing near max damage. Adjust for spells you know the PCs will likely use. And pay attention to the Players HP they have. To make a truly challenging encounter really depends on knowing the PCs.
Instead of looking at CR you could have looked to find the XP amount and ignore CR. CR is only important to make sure that while a certain monster may fit in the XP guidelines it isn't too powerful.
Not sure if this helps or was a lot more confusing since my only answer is,
Know your party and adjust the encounters for them. Do they usually take One fire giant out without a problem? Toss in some terrain, (avalanche?) Maybe a weaker monster attacks the PCs from behind (and the fire giant occasionally attacks them to helping even things out). Add more encounters prior to the main fight to help drain resources. (Especially spells)
Best way to make a challenging encounter is to go for multiple creatures with a CR less (trying to Max out the xp levels) than the PCs level and know your PCs.
Thanks for the help! We started at level 3, and have been on this one campaign weekly since late November. This game has been going for about 5 months now, but no one in the group has been playing longer than about 10 months. Glad to know there isnt some hard rule I've been missing.
Quick question. If you were to have a party 4 lvl 5 characters in a party would they be fighting against 20 cr bosses or 5 cr? Basically, what I'm asking is are you counting all the pc's when doing an evaluation of cr (so 5x4) or one pc.
4 lvl 5 char are gonna be destroyed by a 20cr monster. CR by itself is calculated for a medium encounter of 4 players of the same level as the CR (so 4 lvl 5 player vs a CR5).
Keep in mind this is just a suggestion and in my experience it usually means the encounter is gonna be easy or very easy. What I usually do is have them face multiple monsters (be careful there, many monsters together become a very hard encounter easily) and don't go too high on the CR. That's because a monster with the CR too high might insta-kill a player.
CR breaks when you start adding in magic items. The game can't really account for what you have or don't have, since magic items vary in power level so vastly.
I personally take notes on my combats. I scribble a quick note when something didn't happen as I expected, or happened in a greater/lesser way than I expected. I use those notes to better tune my combats, focusing on a monster's abilities and damage output than its CR. My party is 2.5/4 magic (2 full casters and 1 half caster) so I know if I throw out something that resists magic that the party is in far more trouble than if I throw in a monster resistant to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage-- even if the monsters have an identical CR.
Once you're past tier 1 (level 1-4) you really need to pay attention to how your party likes to deal with combat, and then either throw things in that let them do that and be heroic, or throw things in to counter those abilities to make them work hard for their victory.
For vanilla encounter building, I very much like Kobold Fight Club. However, CR breaks as Party level goes up.
I think MellieDM's advice is spot on - make notes on how encounters go, and use those notes to tune combat.
Magic items - as noted - are very hard to factor in.
One system that I've used occasionally, to good effect, is to work out the amount of average damage per round the Party can dish out, including a usual selection of spells. Do the same for the creatures.
Collectively your bad guys should have about 4x-6x this in HP. If you figure out average HP across your party, then the bad guys should - on average - dish out 1/4th to 1/6th this amount in damage.
If you're going for a lot of creatures, over a few, I'd add 2-3 of the creatures up front, on top of everything else - since the Party will start killing them off, and their average amount of damage per turn will go down.
If you've balanced everything out this way, the Party and the bad guys should kill each other off in 4-6 rounds. Clearly you don't want that - but you haven't factored in clever tactics and ideas that the Party can come up with.
You want the Party to win, but you want that victory to feel like a hard won and deserved accomplishment.
Play your bad guys realistically, but smart - they want to win. They can run, take prisoners, leverage the environment ( bad guys set fire to the forest as a screen to escape, concentrate fire on one Character, and once they're down, take them hostage to get the Party to surrender, etc.), try and surrender, try and parley and buy their way out of the situation that's suddenly gone bad on them, etc.
Combat really doesn't need to be a toe-to-toe melee slug-fest.
And at the end of it all - take notes as MellieDM suggested.
Between these two approaches, I think you'll be able to focus in on good encounter design for your party pretty quickly, but it's not really as simple as the CR numbers.
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Hi! I have 6 7th level players, and I'm looking for a good challenge. I thought about using 2-3 young green dragons, but would that be too hard or too easy?
Hi! I have 6 7th level players, and I'm looking for a good challenge. I thought about using 2-3 young green dragons, but would that be too hard or too easy?
It seems like it might pose a challenge, but I really don't think so. I mean at this point if you were to have 3 dragons. they could split into groups of two and 2v1 the dragons. Maybe they'll do some damage with the claws... Not enough to pose any sort of threat. If you're looking for a good threat. either add more dragons or if you're looking for a more epic encounter. An Adult Green dragon will give 'em something to remember. Add some 1 or 2 wyrmlings in there and you've got yourself a bossfight.
'
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"Uh, I have Illusory Script. I think I can read that."
Hi! I have 6 7th level players, and I'm looking for a good challenge. I thought about using 2-3 young green dragons, but would that be too hard or too easy?
It seems like it might pose a challenge, but I really don't think so. I mean at this point if you were to have 3 dragons. they could split into groups of two and 2v1 the dragons. Maybe they'll do some damage with the claws... Not enough to pose any sort of threat. If you're looking for a good threat. either add more dragons or if you're looking for a more epic encounter. An Adult Green dragon will give 'em something to remember. Add some 1 or 2 wyrmlings in there and you've got yourself a bossfight.
'
Thank you! I think I'll just go with the three young green dragons, and some other enemies around them as well.
A decent rule of thumb for tier 2 is one monster of CR equal to the party level per 2 PCs. That's accomplished by the proposed setup. The main problem is that green dragons suffer from the fact that they use poison damage, which is a damage type that it's quite easy to have the entire party be resistant to.
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Newbie DM here. Can someone help me with challenge levels? I see the charts in the DM guide on making monsters, and the challenge level ratings in the MM. How do you select the proper challenge level for the fight? I have a party of 5, at lvl 10 right now. I've been playing around with the challenge levels of the baddies, and haven't really gotten it right. I keep having to change the HP and damage of the bad guys in the middle of the fight.
How much higher/lower than the parties level should the challenge level be for mobs, minibosses, bosses, ect. How do i adjust challenge level for party size? Any other helpful information would be greatly appreciated.
What level did you start at? Encounters in D&D are more art than science, and math can only get you so far. If you start at level one and work up, you can gage encounters by how well the PCs have done previously. Especially being a new DM, the lower levels really help learn the ropes and the players. But to answer your questions.
Generally speaking a creature with a CR = a PCs level, is a decent challenge for that PC. The less Monsters, the higher you can go with CR without risking death. The more monsters, the less CR you want. Important to note how much damage a Monster is capable of doing each round and keeping track of how much damage your PCs are doing each round on average.
D&D is a bit archaic. It still assumes you are going to fight in a dungeon (dungeon being any place with multiple rooms), thus multiple rooms and multiple encounters. So the more encounters the PCs have before resting, the easier you want the challenges to be, the less encounters, the more challenging you can go. May need to adjust on the fly based on what the PCs do. This is where I think D&D has become archaic, as a lot of groups seem to be more involved with RP now and as a consequence end up outside a dungeon where realistically there aren't going to be a lot of fights, especially once you get to the point where encounters take half the night and having multiple rooms eventually becomes rather boring for the modern roleplayer who actually likes roleplaying and not just killing things.
So quick answers. The CR for mobs should be lower than the PCs CR as more monsters means more attacks for those monsters, which means the can go toe to toe with the PCs a lot easier than one monster. (Its why the big guys all get like 3 attacks and legendary actions, because the PCs are doing roughly 2 attacks each (most spells do damage equal to two attacks). For minibosses and bosses this really depends on a lot of things. First, are the PCs going to encounter the miniboss and the boss at the same time? or different times? If its the same time, then each has to be weaker than if they were encountered separately. The exception is if the PCs can rest (even a short rest) allows you to increase the difficulty. Both the miniboss and boss has to be weaker if the PCs have had other encounters before them, but can be stronger if the PCs haven't.
So Typically, you would select a CR appropriate for the level of the Characters. Since they are ten you can pick anything CR ?-10. (You can go as low as you want, just pay attention to the attack bonus, as if you go to low, the monsters won't be able to hit the PCs and the lower you go the more monsters you need to make it a challenge). Going above the CR level of the PCs requires more planning on your part. Generally one CR above isn't going to break anything, it will just make it a harder challenge. But you have to watch the HP of the monster, the damage it can do, and the number of attacks it can make. Note there isn't a lot of monsters with CR 10, so we'll go below that.
We will go with a fire Giant, which is CR 9. Notice that it also gives an XP amount? So each fire Giant is worth 5,000 xp. Click Here For Building Encounters
Basically look at how challenging you want the encounter to be. So for a 10nth level character it gives 1,900 for a hard encounter which is what we are going to go with. Assuming we have four players, that would give us a total XP budget of 7,600. Once we subtract the 5,000 we are left with 2,600 xp. This is where you look for other monsters worth approx. that amount, however the math gets harder. If you select two monsters, you multiple their total xp value by 1.5. If you select 3-6 you multiple it by 2.
So if we selected two fire giants, it would be 10,000 xp x 1.5 or 15,000. That's way more than the 7,600 we have so only one fire giant will work.
As written you would need to find monsters to total 7,600 adjusted for the number of monsters you end up with. Lets go with two monsters. That means we need a second monster whose xp value is (7,600/1.5) - 5000. Which ends up being like 66xp .... basically not worth our effort. So we are left with one fire Giant, who ends up being a medium encounter. (I am fairly certain that a CR Creature = the party's level should probably always end up a medium encounter.)
But this is where everything gets complicated. Its assumed that the PCs are going to run into this fire giant, then run into another one, then maybe short rest, then run into another one, possibly short rest again if need be and eventually come to the boss who is going to be a bit harder and then finally have a long rest. The guide says the PCs can actually handle six to eight of these encounters in a single day....
But getting a party to do that is hard unless they are stuck in a dungeon. So what happens if you don't want to do 6 to 8 encounters before the PCs rest? What if you only intend on them having one? Well, you can make the encounter harder. You can do this by adding hit points, increasing the monsters AC, letting the monster do more damage, give the monster a friend, or an extra attack. This is where it gets a lot harder to say do this one thing and it will work. A lot depends on how many encounters you want before the PCs rest.
If you are doing only one encounter that day, maybe the PCs really can fight two Fire Giants after all. So one fire giant is going to do about 30 damage per turn to two PCs. The fire giant is going to hit those in plate armor (+shield) roughly 50% of the time. If you have an AC lower than plate armor, the Fire Giant is going to probably hit most of the time. Does this matter? Yes! If we attack the more heavily armored individuals more than the lower AC PCs then adding a second fire Giant becomes less deadly. We are essentially stacking it in the PCs favor. It can do up to 43 damage to that PC. This is where knowing the AC of your specific party and how many party members you have. With 4 Party Members (we'll assume no one has full plate) both fire giants are going to hit each PC for 30 damage on average. Lets assume its 30damage . For the sake of Math, lets assume the party can on average return 40 damage to the Monsters and act stupidly and divide to attack each monster instead of focus firing.
So Round one, each PC has a 8+9d8 +2*10 hp or 28+ 9d8 We will go with on average 60 hp. Where a fire giant has 162 hp. So Round One, each PC drops to about 30 hp. This should flag us that the combat might be too dangerous as the PCs aren't going to survive round two, and any PC unfortunate to get hit twice is potentially already out of combat. Likewise the PCs would do 60 points to each Fire Giant dropping them to 100 hp each. Not nearly enough to survive, so looks like we should stick with one fire giant.... or should we?
One chain lighting can do 10d8 damage. so around 40 damage on a non save. But it hits more than just one Fire Giant. Both giants would have taken around 20-40 damage possibly. (Intentionally keep the giants close enough for the PC to use the spell on both of them) Of course maybe your PC likes fireball, which fire giants are immune to. Basically at this point, all I can say is that you have to either follow the game rules and have the PCs fight one Fire Giant or know your players enough to know whether or not two fire giants are going to be deadly. (Since they potentially are, but if the PCs get to rest afterward, they might be able to do it.)
Basically assume your PCs are doing average damage and the monsters are doing near max damage. Adjust for spells you know the PCs will likely use. And pay attention to the Players HP they have. To make a truly challenging encounter really depends on knowing the PCs.
Instead of looking at CR you could have looked to find the XP amount and ignore CR. CR is only important to make sure that while a certain monster may fit in the XP guidelines it isn't too powerful.
Not sure if this helps or was a lot more confusing since my only answer is,
Know your party and adjust the encounters for them. Do they usually take One fire giant out without a problem? Toss in some terrain, (avalanche?) Maybe a weaker monster attacks the PCs from behind (and the fire giant occasionally attacks them to helping even things out). Add more encounters prior to the main fight to help drain resources. (Especially spells)
Best way to make a challenging encounter is to go for multiple creatures with a CR less (trying to Max out the xp levels) than the PCs level and know your PCs.
Thanks for the help! We started at level 3, and have been on this one campaign weekly since late November. This game has been going for about 5 months now, but no one in the group has been playing longer than about 10 months. Glad to know there isnt some hard rule I've been missing.
Quick question. If you were to have a party 4 lvl 5 characters in a party would they be fighting against 20 cr bosses or 5 cr? Basically, what I'm asking is are you counting all the pc's when doing an evaluation of cr (so 5x4) or one pc.
4 lvl 5 char are gonna be destroyed by a 20cr monster. CR by itself is calculated for a medium encounter of 4 players of the same level as the CR (so 4 lvl 5 player vs a CR5).
Keep in mind this is just a suggestion and in my experience it usually means the encounter is gonna be easy or very easy. What I usually do is have them face multiple monsters (be careful there, many monsters together become a very hard encounter easily) and don't go too high on the CR. That's because a monster with the CR too high might insta-kill a player.
CR breaks when you start adding in magic items. The game can't really account for what you have or don't have, since magic items vary in power level so vastly.
I personally take notes on my combats. I scribble a quick note when something didn't happen as I expected, or happened in a greater/lesser way than I expected. I use those notes to better tune my combats, focusing on a monster's abilities and damage output than its CR. My party is 2.5/4 magic (2 full casters and 1 half caster) so I know if I throw out something that resists magic that the party is in far more trouble than if I throw in a monster resistant to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage-- even if the monsters have an identical CR.
Once you're past tier 1 (level 1-4) you really need to pay attention to how your party likes to deal with combat, and then either throw things in that let them do that and be heroic, or throw things in to counter those abilities to make them work hard for their victory.
For vanilla encounter building, I very much like Kobold Fight Club. However, CR breaks as Party level goes up.
I think MellieDM's advice is spot on - make notes on how encounters go, and use those notes to tune combat.
Magic items - as noted - are very hard to factor in.
One system that I've used occasionally, to good effect, is to work out the amount of average damage per round the Party can dish out, including a usual selection of spells. Do the same for the creatures.
Collectively your bad guys should have about 4x-6x this in HP. If you figure out average HP across your party, then the bad guys should - on average - dish out 1/4th to 1/6th this amount in damage.
If you're going for a lot of creatures, over a few, I'd add 2-3 of the creatures up front, on top of everything else - since the Party will start killing them off, and their average amount of damage per turn will go down.
If you've balanced everything out this way, the Party and the bad guys should kill each other off in 4-6 rounds. Clearly you don't want that - but you haven't factored in clever tactics and ideas that the Party can come up with.
You want the Party to win, but you want that victory to feel like a hard won and deserved accomplishment.
Play your bad guys realistically, but smart - they want to win. They can run, take prisoners, leverage the environment ( bad guys set fire to the forest as a screen to escape, concentrate fire on one Character, and once they're down, take them hostage to get the Party to surrender, etc.), try and surrender, try and parley and buy their way out of the situation that's suddenly gone bad on them, etc.
Combat really doesn't need to be a toe-to-toe melee slug-fest.
And at the end of it all - take notes as MellieDM suggested.
Between these two approaches, I think you'll be able to focus in on good encounter design for your party pretty quickly, but it's not really as simple as the CR numbers.
Good luck!
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
Hi! I have 6 7th level players, and I'm looking for a good challenge. I thought about using 2-3 young green dragons, but would that be too hard or too easy?
Xenia Joan Vala
It seems like it might pose a challenge, but I really don't think so. I mean at this point if you were to have 3 dragons. they could split into groups of two and 2v1 the dragons. Maybe they'll do some damage with the claws... Not enough to pose any sort of threat. If you're looking for a good threat. either add more dragons or if you're looking for a more epic encounter. An Adult Green dragon will give 'em something to remember. Add some 1 or 2 wyrmlings in there and you've got yourself a bossfight.
'
"Uh, I have Illusory Script. I think I can read that."
Thank you! I think I'll just go with the three young green dragons, and some other enemies around them as well.
Xenia Joan Vala
A decent rule of thumb for tier 2 is one monster of CR equal to the party level per 2 PCs. That's accomplished by the proposed setup. The main problem is that green dragons suffer from the fact that they use poison damage, which is a damage type that it's quite easy to have the entire party be resistant to.