I recently built and ran a one shot session I built myself using recommendations given by the DMG for encounter building. I built 15th level characters for the session and pitted them against frost giants, and discovered to my chagrin that four frost giants, which based on XP budgeting, should be a hard to deadly encounter for 6 15th level characters, wound up being cake. The bosses did as well, but that was mostly a different problem. I feel like I may have done math wrong, but when you consider frost giants have a base AC of 15, and a 15th level character with standard array and ASIs is going to have around a +10 to hit usually, I don't feel like they budget properly.
2 frost giants (3900 each for 7800 X 1.5 = 11700) budget to between an Easy (8400) and Medium (16800) encounter, and four (31200) budgets to nearly deadly (38400), yet they were both kinda cakewalks.
Have I simply fallen into the basic trap of feeling like the numbers panned out and they didn't, or was my assumption for the budget off?
The difficulty categories run under the assumption that there will be multiple battles per long rest! I had the same problem before. I would run all "Deadly" encounters and my party would breeze through them. That is until I learned that their 3rd deadly encounter between rests may well actually be deadly lol
Checking the dnd beyond encounter generator, 4 frost giants is actually a medium encounter, because a party of 6 reduces the multiplier from x2 to x1.5. You need 7 frost giants to be Deadly.
Beyond that, the above poster is correct: a 'deadly' encounter is one where someone might be at risk. If you're only running one fight the casters can use up all their daily spells, which is a pretty major boost to power (it also messes up balance between fighters and casters).
The last issue is level 15; balance issues tend to be more pronounced at higher levels.
Related to this, I heard an idea that I'm considering incorporating into my home-brew campaign but I'm not sure if it could be overkill at lower levels. The idea is that a group of medium-high CR enemies could collectively start effecting the environment around them - kind of like how the environment changes around lairs but less wide ranging.
So I was thinking with a Frost Giant raiding party so long as there are at least 3 of them - any PCs within x amount of feet of them would need to make Constitution saving throws at the beginning of their turn. If they fail they have some sort of penalty. Not sure if that should be slowed movement, some light damage, cant take a bonus actions, etc...
Thoughts?
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I recently built and ran a one shot session I built myself using recommendations given by the DMG for encounter building. I built 15th level characters for the session and pitted them against frost giants, and discovered to my chagrin that four frost giants, which based on XP budgeting, should be a hard to deadly encounter for 6 15th level characters, wound up being cake. The bosses did as well, but that was mostly a different problem. I feel like I may have done math wrong, but when you consider frost giants have a base AC of 15, and a 15th level character with standard array and ASIs is going to have around a +10 to hit usually, I don't feel like they budget properly.
2 frost giants (3900 each for 7800 X 1.5 = 11700) budget to between an Easy (8400) and Medium (16800) encounter, and four (31200) budgets to nearly deadly (38400), yet they were both kinda cakewalks.
Have I simply fallen into the basic trap of feeling like the numbers panned out and they didn't, or was my assumption for the budget off?
The difficulty categories run under the assumption that there will be multiple battles per long rest! I had the same problem before. I would run all "Deadly" encounters and my party would breeze through them. That is until I learned that their 3rd deadly encounter between rests may well actually be deadly lol
Checking the dnd beyond encounter generator, 4 frost giants is actually a medium encounter, because a party of 6 reduces the multiplier from x2 to x1.5. You need 7 frost giants to be Deadly.
Beyond that, the above poster is correct: a 'deadly' encounter is one where someone might be at risk. If you're only running one fight the casters can use up all their daily spells, which is a pretty major boost to power (it also messes up balance between fighters and casters).
The last issue is level 15; balance issues tend to be more pronounced at higher levels.
Related to this, I heard an idea that I'm considering incorporating into my home-brew campaign but I'm not sure if it could be overkill at lower levels. The idea is that a group of medium-high CR enemies could collectively start effecting the environment around them - kind of like how the environment changes around lairs but less wide ranging.
So I was thinking with a Frost Giant raiding party so long as there are at least 3 of them - any PCs within x amount of feet of them would need to make Constitution saving throws at the beginning of their turn. If they fail they have some sort of penalty. Not sure if that should be slowed movement, some light damage, cant take a bonus actions, etc...
Thoughts?