To be entirely upfront, I'm still learning 5th Edition and D&D Beyond seems to lack a strong Index for searching out answers (that, and/or my barely there familiarity). My question: Is there any kind of Guideline to encounter design that suggests the lowest level and highest level CR's to be used for a Party of such and such a level, at least going from 3rd and up? By example, in a past edition (3rd?), I seem to recall that Monsters of a CR more than 7 below the party's average level did not pose any effective danger to the heroes and thus granted no XP, their contribution to the encounter being practically non existent. Are there similar guidelines for 5e? My basic searches really show I don't know how to phrase the question or perhaps I'm not using the right terms.
Note: I own all the current Sourcebooks available as well as CoS on DnD Beyond.
The way 5e is designed, monsters with a CR higher than 0 never stop being a threat because they always have a non-negligible chance to hit and deal damage or succeed on a grapple or shove. Granted, they'll be easy to kill, but they're still forcing the party to deal with them rather than ignore them.
DMG chapter 3 and XGtE chapter 2 have guidelines for estimating encounter difficulty (in my opinion the guidelines in Xanathar's are better.) An encounter that's rated as deadly has a decent chance of killing the players theoretically. However you still have to check if the players have tools that could drastically change the difficulty of the encounter, and it's generally a bad idea to throw a single monster at the party if it's not a legendary creature because it's easy for the players to shut it down with save-or-suck spells, grapples and shoves, etc.
D&D Beyond also has an encounter builder in the Tools section, though I haven't used it yet.
DMG has a good guideline under Encounters. And some "behind the screen" info under Custom Monsters.
There are two main reasons, action economy and bounded accuracy, which determine how challenging something will be for the most part.
In general, if you take average level of the party, that gives you one baseline, the number of party members is another baseline. Here is a general rule:
For every FOUR party members, take their average level and their average number of attack actions. A Medium encounter will be a single CR creature equal to that average with as many attack options as the average of the party +/- 1. If there is no single creature that fits the bill, then use two creatures which are 1/2 avg. party level in CR with attack options +/- 1. The CR really matters less than the attack actions, once you go to +2 attack actions for every 4 party members average it becomes hard, doubling them can quickly become deadly.
Keep an eye on how much damage the critters can put out in a single turn, they are "figured" on a three round average. So that spike damage can quickly get out of hand.
There is an Encounter Builder here on DnDBeyond that perhaps will show you some examples.
I completely forgot about Xanathar's Guide, thank you! I remembered *thinking* I had seen some similar table to the one I mentioned from 3rd, but my searches were failing and I just couldn't remember otherwise.
If you find yourself using more than a dozen monsters to make up the xp budget it's probably going to be an unplayable mess, whether or not it's an interesting challenge, and the DMG rules on modifying encounter difficulty based on numbers work poorly with a large CR mismatch, but 100 goblins with decent tactics could actually be a problem for an 18th level party that didn't come properly prepared (okay, 100 archers try to turn the wizard into a pincushion. Unfortunately, even with a shield spell he only has ac 21, so he gets hit twenty times, five of them for crits, and takes 170 damage).
It's a very short article and I like their take on a formula for encounter building. Just two steps.
Choose the monsters that make sense in the current story and situation.
Determine potential deadliness by comparing the sum total of monster challenge ratings to half of the sum total of character levels, or a quarter of character levels if below 5th.
Then it goes on to give a couple of examples. I like it because it makes a point to have the story inform the monster selection and then you can use the formula to fine-tune the intensity of the threat.
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To be entirely upfront, I'm still learning 5th Edition and D&D Beyond seems to lack a strong Index for searching out answers (that, and/or my barely there familiarity). My question: Is there any kind of Guideline to encounter design that suggests the lowest level and highest level CR's to be used for a Party of such and such a level, at least going from 3rd and up? By example, in a past edition (3rd?), I seem to recall that Monsters of a CR more than 7 below the party's average level did not pose any effective danger to the heroes and thus granted no XP, their contribution to the encounter being practically non existent. Are there similar guidelines for 5e? My basic searches really show I don't know how to phrase the question or perhaps I'm not using the right terms.
Note: I own all the current Sourcebooks available as well as CoS on DnD Beyond.
The way 5e is designed, monsters with a CR higher than 0 never stop being a threat because they always have a non-negligible chance to hit and deal damage or succeed on a grapple or shove. Granted, they'll be easy to kill, but they're still forcing the party to deal with them rather than ignore them.
DMG chapter 3 and XGtE chapter 2 have guidelines for estimating encounter difficulty (in my opinion the guidelines in Xanathar's are better.) An encounter that's rated as deadly has a decent chance of killing the players theoretically. However you still have to check if the players have tools that could drastically change the difficulty of the encounter, and it's generally a bad idea to throw a single monster at the party if it's not a legendary creature because it's easy for the players to shut it down with save-or-suck spells, grapples and shoves, etc.
D&D Beyond also has an encounter builder in the Tools section, though I haven't used it yet.
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DMG has a good guideline under Encounters. And some "behind the screen" info under Custom Monsters.
There are two main reasons, action economy and bounded accuracy, which determine how challenging something will be for the most part.
In general, if you take average level of the party, that gives you one baseline, the number of party members is another baseline. Here is a general rule:
For every FOUR party members, take their average level and their average number of attack actions. A Medium encounter will be a single CR creature equal to that average with as many attack options as the average of the party +/- 1. If there is no single creature that fits the bill, then use two creatures which are 1/2 avg. party level in CR with attack options +/- 1. The CR really matters less than the attack actions, once you go to +2 attack actions for every 4 party members average it becomes hard, doubling them can quickly become deadly.
Keep an eye on how much damage the critters can put out in a single turn, they are "figured" on a three round average. So that spike damage can quickly get out of hand.
There is an Encounter Builder here on DnDBeyond that perhaps will show you some examples.
I completely forgot about Xanathar's Guide, thank you! I remembered *thinking* I had seen some similar table to the one I mentioned from 3rd, but my searches were failing and I just couldn't remember otherwise.
If you find yourself using more than a dozen monsters to make up the xp budget it's probably going to be an unplayable mess, whether or not it's an interesting challenge, and the DMG rules on modifying encounter difficulty based on numbers work poorly with a large CR mismatch, but 100 goblins with decent tactics could actually be a problem for an 18th level party that didn't come properly prepared (okay, 100 archers try to turn the wizard into a pincushion. Unfortunately, even with a shield spell he only has ac 21, so he gets hit twenty times, five of them for crits, and takes 170 damage).
I was reading an article about trying to simplify encounter building around CR just this week.
It's a very short article and I like their take on a formula for encounter building. Just two steps.
Then it goes on to give a couple of examples. I like it because it makes a point to have the story inform the monster selection and then you can use the formula to fine-tune the intensity of the threat.
"Not all those who wander are lost"