So, I’ve been playing dnd 5e for over a year now, and have been DMing every second of it. To this day, I still have so much trouble matching monsters for fights with my players. I never want the fight to be too hard, and usually, it’s way too easy. I know there are rules about how challenge rating works, but if just doesn’t seem to match for me. My party is a group of three; a Druid, a fighter, and a ranger. Right now they’re level 7, and before when they were around 5, I threw some CR 6-7 monsters at them. They absolutely walked through the monsters and didn’t even get hit once. Next encounter, I added two 6-7 CR monster to the fight to see if that would be harder. This time, the monsters just destroyed the players in 1 move. It might be something with my players since some of them don’t really do anything on their move except attack, but something with the CR rules just doesn’t seem to match up with the actual fights. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can put monsters in with a 7th level party to make the fights more fun and less easy or impossible?
There are a lot of problems with the CR system. The things that "adjust" CR up or down are not all created equal. Some abilities are much more generally useful all the time (like Regeneration) than others (like a Reaction, which CAN be more useful than Regen, IF the condition is triggered). Also, some parties are just really well equipped to deal with one type of threat vs another. For instance, your party (with the druid and fighter) is probably really good at wilderness/outdoor/naturey kinds of things. On the other hand, throw them something with some major magic abilities, and they might struggle, as they don't have any arcane abilities among them. If they have no fire abilities, for instance (usually wizards and sorcerers do all the big fire damage), a distinct possibility depending on their spell choices, a single Troll could give them fits, as they will be hard-pressed to do fire damage to it to prevent it from regenerating.
Unfortunately what this means is, you can use CR as a general gauge but you have to be very careful. For instance, the Basilisk is a CR 3 creature. But if you throw even one of these at a level 3 party you could end up with half of them turning into statues. And at level 3, they do not have access to the types of spells that will restore their friends. You could be looking at, if not a team wipe, certainly a team "stoning." Similarly, a single Mummy (also CR 3) who gets lucky enough to hit one or two of the party members may not cause trouble in the battle, but could in the long run kill them because, again, the cure for Mummy Rot is not available to level 3 characters as a general rule.
That's why you have to read the stat-block carefully. You have to look at that Basilisk and the encounter you have planned, or the Mummy or what have you, and think, "Does this monster's special ability constitute something that could wipe the party?" If so, then this monster will punch way above its weight.
As a general rule, in my experience, if the monster doesn't have any special "out of their league" abilities like Mummy Rot for level 3 parties or something, if all the monster has is ways to do mostly normal damage, and doesn't have any major resistances (like immune to non-magic weapons), then the CR over-estimates individual monster toughness by a couple of steps. So a CR 3 creature that is just hit points, big attacks, and no special abilities, like an Ankylosaurus, is probably more like a CR 1 or 2. It can do a lot of damage, and possibly outright kill a character of level 1 or 2, but unless it gets lucky and goes first, they will probably roast it. On the other hand, something like a Basilisk that could theoretically surprise the party, and start turning them to stone (on failed saving throws) might be more of a CR 4 or 5, despite not having any more hit points than the Ankylo... just because it has an ability that the PCs have no way to counter.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I've found that relying on the CR alone can cause problems as you've found and BioWizard also showed. Do you have the Dungeon Master's Guide? There's a section in there that goes into much more detail about scaling the encounters appropriately. It uses the concept of a daily XP budget for characters and you can use that to figure out how to scale things. It also considers the number of encounters per day. So if you're going to throw 10 combat encounters at them in one day, you're going to want to scale those encounters down but if they're only going to do one or two encounters per day, you can scale up.
So let's say you do the math and see that your character party has a daily XP combat budget of 4,800 XP. So you add up the XP of the monsters you're going to throw at them and the idea is that if you don't want to risk killing them, don't exceed that 4,800 XP total in one day. But if you want to really give them a good fight, you should be able to go right up to 4,800 XP worth of monsters and they'll just barely survive.
In case you have the DMG, here's the link to the relevant section:
I do have the DMG, and have seen these rules. However, I thought them to be a little confusing and maybe a bit too complicated to easily throw together a session. Although you made it sound more important and useful, so I’ll try implementing that into my prep. Thanks for the advice!
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So, I’ve been playing dnd 5e for over a year now, and have been DMing every second of it. To this day, I still have so much trouble matching monsters for fights with my players. I never want the fight to be too hard, and usually, it’s way too easy. I know there are rules about how challenge rating works, but if just doesn’t seem to match for me. My party is a group of three; a Druid, a fighter, and a ranger. Right now they’re level 7, and before when they were around 5, I threw some CR 6-7 monsters at them. They absolutely walked through the monsters and didn’t even get hit once. Next encounter, I added two 6-7 CR monster to the fight to see if that would be harder. This time, the monsters just destroyed the players in 1 move. It might be something with my players since some of them don’t really do anything on their move except attack, but something with the CR rules just doesn’t seem to match up with the actual fights. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can put monsters in with a 7th level party to make the fights more fun and less easy or impossible?
There are a lot of problems with the CR system. The things that "adjust" CR up or down are not all created equal. Some abilities are much more generally useful all the time (like Regeneration) than others (like a Reaction, which CAN be more useful than Regen, IF the condition is triggered). Also, some parties are just really well equipped to deal with one type of threat vs another. For instance, your party (with the druid and fighter) is probably really good at wilderness/outdoor/naturey kinds of things. On the other hand, throw them something with some major magic abilities, and they might struggle, as they don't have any arcane abilities among them. If they have no fire abilities, for instance (usually wizards and sorcerers do all the big fire damage), a distinct possibility depending on their spell choices, a single Troll could give them fits, as they will be hard-pressed to do fire damage to it to prevent it from regenerating.
Unfortunately what this means is, you can use CR as a general gauge but you have to be very careful. For instance, the Basilisk is a CR 3 creature. But if you throw even one of these at a level 3 party you could end up with half of them turning into statues. And at level 3, they do not have access to the types of spells that will restore their friends. You could be looking at, if not a team wipe, certainly a team "stoning." Similarly, a single Mummy (also CR 3) who gets lucky enough to hit one or two of the party members may not cause trouble in the battle, but could in the long run kill them because, again, the cure for Mummy Rot is not available to level 3 characters as a general rule.
That's why you have to read the stat-block carefully. You have to look at that Basilisk and the encounter you have planned, or the Mummy or what have you, and think, "Does this monster's special ability constitute something that could wipe the party?" If so, then this monster will punch way above its weight.
As a general rule, in my experience, if the monster doesn't have any special "out of their league" abilities like Mummy Rot for level 3 parties or something, if all the monster has is ways to do mostly normal damage, and doesn't have any major resistances (like immune to non-magic weapons), then the CR over-estimates individual monster toughness by a couple of steps. So a CR 3 creature that is just hit points, big attacks, and no special abilities, like an Ankylosaurus, is probably more like a CR 1 or 2. It can do a lot of damage, and possibly outright kill a character of level 1 or 2, but unless it gets lucky and goes first, they will probably roast it. On the other hand, something like a Basilisk that could theoretically surprise the party, and start turning them to stone (on failed saving throws) might be more of a CR 4 or 5, despite not having any more hit points than the Ankylo... just because it has an ability that the PCs have no way to counter.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Wow, that was some great advice, thank you so much!
I've found that relying on the CR alone can cause problems as you've found and BioWizard also showed. Do you have the Dungeon Master's Guide? There's a section in there that goes into much more detail about scaling the encounters appropriately. It uses the concept of a daily XP budget for characters and you can use that to figure out how to scale things. It also considers the number of encounters per day. So if you're going to throw 10 combat encounters at them in one day, you're going to want to scale those encounters down but if they're only going to do one or two encounters per day, you can scale up.
So let's say you do the math and see that your character party has a daily XP combat budget of 4,800 XP. So you add up the XP of the monsters you're going to throw at them and the idea is that if you don't want to risk killing them, don't exceed that 4,800 XP total in one day. But if you want to really give them a good fight, you should be able to go right up to 4,800 XP worth of monsters and they'll just barely survive.
In case you have the DMG, here's the link to the relevant section:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/creating-adventures#CreatingaCombatEncounter
I do have the DMG, and have seen these rules. However, I thought them to be a little confusing and maybe a bit too complicated to easily throw together a session. Although you made it sound more important and useful, so I’ll try implementing that into my prep. Thanks for the advice!