I'm a relatively new DM coming back to the game after not playing since college in the early '80s (using AD&D!). In putting together scenarios for my party, I am finding that the number of hit points for monsters in the various guides seems awfully low. We started out using the Phandelver scenario while I got used to the mechanics of being a DM. The first monsters my party encountered were goblins with only 7 hp. I quickly learned that my Tabaxi monk and hexblade warlock were capable of doing way more damage in one blow than 7 hp. They tore through the goblins like tissue paper. I began doubling or even tripling the hp for all my monsters after that to bring more balance to the encounters.
As I write my own scenarios, I continue to find that the current monster stats hp (as available in the sourcebooks) still seem awfully low. I don't need every fight to be crazy difficult (sometimes it is very satisfying to handle an encounter quickly) but I also want some challenge. Are orcs really supposed to have only 15 hp??
I guess my question is how other DMs are balancing their monster encounters with their party members?
Bear in mind that same Goblin has a damage range between 3 and 8 per hit with an average of 5.5 damage, and a level 1 party, who has an average Max HP of about 10, and should be fighting about 4 simultaneously in an encounter...several times a day. So yeah, you want them to go down fairly quickly.
If you really feel that they need to stand up a bit longer, you can add a bit of HP...but be warned, things can go from fine sailing to bordering on a TPK in an instant, especially at level 1, where they don't have the HP reserves to absorb a run of good rolls from the enemy. I've been burned by that and had to rescue a party that were doing brilliantly...until I added a few HP to the monsters so they could have a bit of challenge..****y to find them getting hammered the very next round after they would have killed all the monsters...oops. boosting HP is more for later levels when the party can more easily absorb monsters doing high damage.
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If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
The monsters were balanced for 6-7 combats a day so that by the last couple you needed them to go down quickly to avoid TPKs. Typically we actually have about 4-5 combats a day so you may not reach that point and adding a few more (upto 50% more) can improve the challenge - but at an creased risk of tpks ( or at least PC deaths) at low levels. If your players are old pros then they are likely to be happy with the challenges and risks, if they are beginners they may be better off with less challenge and more survivability.
When I ran my first encounter, I almost wiped my party with goblins. I thought goblins were easy prey, so I threw like four or five at my two member party at the time. I had to rescue my party with some commoner villagers. It was brutal.
HP vs Damage is in a different ballgame than when you last played in the 80's but i can tell you humanoids had even less hit points and characters were dishing a lot less damage back then.
Keep in mind that Lost Mine of Phandelver is a Starter set adventure with many low CR monsters but they also have thougher one like in spoiler below;
Monster health and general defense is fine in the lower levels (let’s say 5 or 6 and below) but after that it’s just pathetic. My experience in gaming is that most people do not have a slog fest of small fights spread throughout the day but more like 3 max. Check out Critical Role and you’ll see what I mean. A big example is when Matt has them face boss monsters. A combat he had them face at 13th level (Campaign 2, links available on request) featured an abomination with well over 400 hit points, not including it’s various resistances. EDIT: Roughly 571 Hit Points!! Double checked, look to Critical Role on YouTube, Campaign 2, Malice and Mystery Below.
It depends on how many encounters you are going to run per adventuring day. If you are going to run six to eight medium to hard encounters per day like the DMG suggests then you might not have to adjust the HP of the monsters.
I tend to run fewer combat encounters per day as I want more roleplay and less fighting and I adjust the HP and the monsters all the time. The monsters in the monster manual are just guidelines. I mean not all orcs are equal
Just look at the typical kobold, why don't they have armor or decent weapons? Because they are supposed to be fodder for 1st level adventurers and that is the only reason.
At higher levels you will need to adjust HP of bigger monsters or they'll just die in one round. Some members in my 5th level group have managed to do 100+ HP in damage in one round, last session the Great Weapon master Hexblade managed a crit with a smite doing 4d6+15 with his greatsword +2d6 for his hex +8d8 for his smite for a total of 81 damage in his first hit and followed up with two attacks with advantage as he knocked his enemy prone and hit with them both for extra 6d6+30 damage. The ranger in my group has Sharpshooter and regularly does 2d8+2d6+28 in damage if she hits with both attacks with her hunters mark going up (which is most of the time) Then there is a Paladin in the group as well, so the group is fully capable of bursting out 150-200 dmg in a round.
Luckily after level 5 damage only increases incrementally and you'll get a better feeling for what you can throw at your party
It's important to keep in mind that the "challenge" part of "Challenge Rating" can be a bit misleading. CR sets a baseline for an encounter that a party of the equivalent level can consistently clear 6-8 times/day. If you want to actually challenge the party, you'll want to start exploring above that as others have said, but gotta watch how quickly the numbers can swing in first tier. By 2nd there's more of a buffer for people to realize things aren't going well before bodies start dropping.
I'm a relatively new DM coming back to the game after not playing since college in the early '80s (using AD&D!). In putting together scenarios for my party, I am finding that the number of hit points for monsters in the various guides seems awfully low. We started out using the Phandelver scenario while I got used to the mechanics of being a DM. The first monsters my party encountered were goblins with only 7 hp. I quickly learned that my Tabaxi monk and hexblade warlock were capable of doing way more damage in one blow than 7 hp. They tore through the goblins like tissue paper. I began doubling or even tripling the hp for all my monsters after that to bring more balance to the encounters.
As I write my own scenarios, I continue to find that the current monster stats hp (as available in the sourcebooks) still seem awfully low. I don't need every fight to be crazy difficult (sometimes it is very satisfying to handle an encounter quickly) but I also want some challenge. Are orcs really supposed to have only 15 hp??
I guess my question is how other DMs are balancing their monster encounters with their party members?
You might be misremembering how much lower monster HP were back in AD&D...
Goblin in AD&D? 1d8-1 hp (avg 3.5). Goblin in 5e? 2d6 hp (avg 7).
Orc in AD&D? 1d8 hp (avg 4.5). Orc in 5e? 2d8+4 hp (avg 15).
When you get into larger monsters, the hp gap is even wider. Monsters back in AD&D had fewer hp, just as higher-level PCs had fewer hp.
But if you ask one 5e GM, they'll say "oh, monster have too many hit points, and it makes combat really drag for my group", while if you ask another 5e GM they'll say "monster drop so fast against my players, they have too few hit points."
It really depends on player experience, group composition, degree of optimization, GM style, how the monsters are played, overall rest/adventure ratio, etc, etc.
One other thing to consider is tactics. Goblins aren't supposed to form an infantry line and rush the party. They are sneaky and cowardly.
They can Hide or Disengage as a bonus action. This is very strong and should be leveraged as much as possible. Goblins are guerilla fighters, sniping or swiping at the party while they dart in and out of hiding spaces. I had them attack a party in a field of tall grass, and the challenge wasn't to land that killing blow but rather to find them.
But I will also echo what others have said in that I regularly increase hit points in key battles, especially on adventuring days where I can't wear the party down with a few other encounters before the big one.
I'm a relatively new DM coming back to the game after not playing since college in the early '80s (using AD&D!). In putting together scenarios for my party, I am finding that the number of hit points for monsters in the various guides seems awfully low. We started out using the Phandelver scenario while I got used to the mechanics of being a DM. The first monsters my party encountered were goblins with only 7 hp. I quickly learned that my Tabaxi monk and hexblade warlock were capable of doing way more damage in one blow than 7 hp. They tore through the goblins like tissue paper. I began doubling or even tripling the hp for all my monsters after that to bring more balance to the encounters.
As I write my own scenarios, I continue to find that the current monster stats hp (as available in the sourcebooks) still seem awfully low. I don't need every fight to be crazy difficult (sometimes it is very satisfying to handle an encounter quickly) but I also want some challenge. Are orcs really supposed to have only 15 hp??
I guess my question is how other DMs are balancing their monster encounters with their party members?
Keep in mind your DM is playing "nice" for your party most likely by:
He's not blocking passageways with two goblins dodging
He's not having the front liners using nimble action to go to the back for a second while other goblins run up, attack and use nimble action to escape and then putting the dodging goblin front liners
Not using walls to pop out, shoot you with a short bow and then hide again
Cragmaw Hideout can and does do total party kills for many parties. Until you hit level 3 in 5E, death comes fairly easy by a crit. For a level 1 that has 10 hps vs a goblin with 7 hps that hits slightly less than them, they are very close to parity. If it wasn't for sleep being cast by your wizard, a large mob of goblins could overwhelm a party.
Meanwhile at higher levels, you are going to hate the amount of hit points that mobs have.
A key tenet of the old-school philosophy is that characters be met with challenges they can't just kill.
There's nothing wrong with throwing gods and monsters at your players that far exceed the characters in power.
This forces the players to use their wits.
To roleplay.
There was a bit more to it than that. Characters routinely died in those editions, there was an expectation of it. It was no big deal if the PCs got in over their heads because they were probably going to have to roll a new character soon enough anyway. The hp/ac/damage numbers were largely fabricated on gut feelings with no understanding of the underlying math and no attempt to balance things. The current design philosophy tries to produce games which favor the PCs, so death is an option but not an inevitability like it was in 1e.
And, players using their wits is not the same as role playing. Players using their character’s wits is role playing.
Player death is practically impossible in 5e due to how weak the monsters are (for defenses anyway) and thanks to a number of changes such as Revivify.
Player death is practically impossible in 5e due to how weak the monsters are (for defenses anyway) and thanks to a number of changes such as Revivify.
People keep saying this, and yet, I’ve had a character die (mine or someone else’s or both) in every campaign I’ve played in.
Player death is practically impossible in 5e due to how weak the monsters are (for defenses anyway) and thanks to a number of changes such as Revivify.
People keep saying this, and yet, I’ve had a character die (mine or someone else’s or both) in every campaign I’ve played in.
Honestly I just don’t see how. As a DM I had to be intentionally trying to kill a character (not really hard for the DM) or just doing a horrible job with balancing encounters. By example, I threw three or four banshees at a group without considering what all of their insta death wails would do (3 or 4 saves vs what amounted to insta death was a big whoopsie). Another example was putting more than 11 supporting monsters on the field with a Legendary which was maybe 2 levels above the parties average level. By memory (probably flawed I know) the encounter was balanced for a 3 encounters in 1 day kinda thing but in practice it was just a deadly slog that took out two of the 6 players.
Some due to massive damage (so straight to negative hp max). Some with nat 1's on death saves. Some taking damage while down (not DM being a jerk and punching characters, more like auras and AoEs). At higher levels, disintegrate more than once. Pretty sure I'm forgetting a few.
There was a bit more to it than that. Characters routinely died in those editions, there was an expectation of it. It was no big deal if the PCs got in over their heads because they were probably going to have to roll a new character soon enough anyway. The hp/ac/damage numbers were largely fabricated on gut feelings with no understanding of the underlying math and no attempt to balance things. The current design philosophy tries to produce games which favor the PCs, so death is an option but not an inevitability like it was in 1e.
And, players using their wits is not the same as role playing. Players using their character’s wits is role playing.
Character death was more likely. There were still campaigns that lasted years and characters who rose to level 20 before being retired by their players. Those numbers might have been "largely fabricated on gut feelings with no understanding of the underlying math and no attempt to balance things" and yet there remain people who play 1st ed. There are people making versions of 5th ed. that restore that old-school feel where "balance" isn't everything because "balance" makes things ******* boring. There is nothing "balanced" about the latest edition: it feels like one is playing a video game on Easy mode where the PCs are afforded a level of invulnerability that drains it of any drama or tension. Three death saves? Max. hit points recovered upon a single long rest? So many ******* hit points it takes forever for combat to be resolved? That's unrealistic nonsense fabricated on the desire to turn a party of adventurers into a team of ******* superheroes and one with zero understanding of how actual combat and the injuries sustained during and recovery actually work.
Players used their wits to arrive at what their characters would have to do or say. To perhaps bargain with those gods or monsters. So they roleplayed. Instead of just announcing I hit with my axe.
As a DM I had to be intentionally trying to kill a character (not really hard for the DM) or just doing a horrible job with balancing encounters.
If you are balancing encounters, is not that by definition holding back your punches? If my aim is to give my party a deadly experience, I would NOT balance combat encounters, and if necessary, I would even maximize a monster's HP and damage, and pull some monster reinforcement out of my sleeves too if the fight turns out to be too easy. I would still be nice and give them the option to escape, but if they really want to stay and fight, I can give them a taste of death.
I'm a relatively new DM coming back to the game after not playing since college in the early '80s (using AD&D!). In putting together scenarios for my party, I am finding that the number of hit points for monsters in the various guides seems awfully low. We started out using the Phandelver scenario while I got used to the mechanics of being a DM. The first monsters my party encountered were goblins with only 7 hp. I quickly learned that my Tabaxi monk and hexblade warlock were capable of doing way more damage in one blow than 7 hp. They tore through the goblins like tissue paper. I began doubling or even tripling the hp for all my monsters after that to bring more balance to the encounters.
As I write my own scenarios, I continue to find that the current monster stats hp (as available in the sourcebooks) still seem awfully low. I don't need every fight to be crazy difficult (sometimes it is very satisfying to handle an encounter quickly) but I also want some challenge. Are orcs really supposed to have only 15 hp??
I guess my question is how other DMs are balancing their monster encounters with their party members?
Yes.
Bear in mind that same Goblin has a damage range between 3 and 8 per hit with an average of 5.5 damage, and a level 1 party, who has an average Max HP of about 10, and should be fighting about 4 simultaneously in an encounter...several times a day. So yeah, you want them to go down fairly quickly.
If you really feel that they need to stand up a bit longer, you can add a bit of HP...but be warned, things can go from fine sailing to bordering on a TPK in an instant, especially at level 1, where they don't have the HP reserves to absorb a run of good rolls from the enemy. I've been burned by that and had to rescue a party that were doing brilliantly...until I added a few HP to the monsters so they could have a bit of challenge..****y to find them getting hammered the very next round after they would have killed all the monsters...oops. boosting HP is more for later levels when the party can more easily absorb monsters doing high damage.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
The monsters were balanced for 6-7 combats a day so that by the last couple you needed them to go down quickly to avoid TPKs. Typically we actually have about 4-5 combats a day so you may not reach that point and adding a few more (upto 50% more) can improve the challenge - but at an creased risk of tpks ( or at least PC deaths) at low levels. If your players are old pros then they are likely to be happy with the challenges and risks, if they are beginners they may be better off with less challenge and more survivability.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
When I ran my first encounter, I almost wiped my party with goblins. I thought goblins were easy prey, so I threw like four or five at my two member party at the time. I had to rescue my party with some commoner villagers. It was brutal.
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HP vs Damage is in a different ballgame than when you last played in the 80's but i can tell you humanoids had even less hit points and characters were dishing a lot less damage back then.
Keep in mind that Lost Mine of Phandelver is a Starter set adventure with many low CR monsters but they also have thougher one like in spoiler below;
the Venomfang the young green dragon , Gog the ogre, a spectator.Bdholder or Mormesk the wraith who are a more significant threat.
Monster health and general defense is fine in the lower levels (let’s say 5 or 6 and below) but after that it’s just pathetic. My experience in gaming is that most people do not have a slog fest of small fights spread throughout the day but more like 3 max. Check out Critical Role and you’ll see what I mean. A big example is when Matt has them face boss monsters. A combat he had them face at 13th level (Campaign 2, links available on request) featured an abomination with well over 400 hit points, not including it’s various resistances. EDIT: Roughly 571 Hit Points!! Double checked, look to Critical Role on YouTube, Campaign 2, Malice and Mystery Below.
It depends on how many encounters you are going to run per adventuring day. If you are going to run six to eight medium to hard encounters per day like the DMG suggests then you might not have to adjust the HP of the monsters.
I tend to run fewer combat encounters per day as I want more roleplay and less fighting and I adjust the HP and the monsters all the time. The monsters in the monster manual are just guidelines. I mean not all orcs are equal
Just look at the typical kobold, why don't they have armor or decent weapons? Because they are supposed to be fodder for 1st level adventurers and that is the only reason.
At higher levels you will need to adjust HP of bigger monsters or they'll just die in one round. Some members in my 5th level group have managed to do 100+ HP in damage in one round, last session the Great Weapon master Hexblade managed a crit with a smite doing 4d6+15 with his greatsword +2d6 for his hex +8d8 for his smite for a total of 81 damage in his first hit and followed up with two attacks with advantage as he knocked his enemy prone and hit with them both for extra 6d6+30 damage. The ranger in my group has Sharpshooter and regularly does 2d8+2d6+28 in damage if she hits with both attacks with her hunters mark going up (which is most of the time) Then there is a Paladin in the group as well, so the group is fully capable of bursting out 150-200 dmg in a round.
Luckily after level 5 damage only increases incrementally and you'll get a better feeling for what you can throw at your party
It's important to keep in mind that the "challenge" part of "Challenge Rating" can be a bit misleading. CR sets a baseline for an encounter that a party of the equivalent level can consistently clear 6-8 times/day. If you want to actually challenge the party, you'll want to start exploring above that as others have said, but gotta watch how quickly the numbers can swing in first tier. By 2nd there's more of a buffer for people to realize things aren't going well before bodies start dropping.
A key tenet of the old-school philosophy is that characters be met with challenges they can't just kill.
There's nothing wrong with throwing gods and monsters at your players that far exceed the characters in power.
This forces the players to use their wits.
To roleplay.
You might be misremembering how much lower monster HP were back in AD&D...
Goblin in AD&D? 1d8-1 hp (avg 3.5). Goblin in 5e? 2d6 hp (avg 7).
Orc in AD&D? 1d8 hp (avg 4.5). Orc in 5e? 2d8+4 hp (avg 15).
When you get into larger monsters, the hp gap is even wider. Monsters back in AD&D had fewer hp, just as higher-level PCs had fewer hp.
But if you ask one 5e GM, they'll say "oh, monster have too many hit points, and it makes combat really drag for my group", while if you ask another 5e GM they'll say "monster drop so fast against my players, they have too few hit points."
It really depends on player experience, group composition, degree of optimization, GM style, how the monsters are played, overall rest/adventure ratio, etc, etc.
One other thing to consider is tactics. Goblins aren't supposed to form an infantry line and rush the party. They are sneaky and cowardly.
They can Hide or Disengage as a bonus action. This is very strong and should be leveraged as much as possible. Goblins are guerilla fighters, sniping or swiping at the party while they dart in and out of hiding spaces. I had them attack a party in a field of tall grass, and the challenge wasn't to land that killing blow but rather to find them.
But I will also echo what others have said in that I regularly increase hit points in key battles, especially on adventuring days where I can't wear the party down with a few other encounters before the big one.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
Keep in mind your DM is playing "nice" for your party most likely by:
Cragmaw Hideout can and does do total party kills for many parties. Until you hit level 3 in 5E, death comes fairly easy by a crit. For a level 1 that has 10 hps vs a goblin with 7 hps that hits slightly less than them, they are very close to parity. If it wasn't for sleep being cast by your wizard, a large mob of goblins could overwhelm a party.
Meanwhile at higher levels, you are going to hate the amount of hit points that mobs have.
There was a bit more to it than that. Characters routinely died in those editions, there was an expectation of it. It was no big deal if the PCs got in over their heads because they were probably going to have to roll a new character soon enough anyway. The hp/ac/damage numbers were largely fabricated on gut feelings with no understanding of the underlying math and no attempt to balance things. The current design philosophy tries to produce games which favor the PCs, so death is an option but not an inevitability like it was in 1e.
And, players using their wits is not the same as role playing. Players using their character’s wits is role playing.
Player death is practically impossible in 5e due to how weak the monsters are (for defenses anyway) and thanks to a number of changes such as Revivify.
People keep saying this, and yet, I’ve had a character die (mine or someone else’s or both) in every campaign I’ve played in.
Honestly I just don’t see how. As a DM I had to be intentionally trying to kill a character (not really hard for the DM) or just doing a horrible job with balancing encounters. By example, I threw three or four banshees at a group without considering what all of their insta death wails would do (3 or 4 saves vs what amounted to insta death was a big whoopsie). Another example was putting more than 11 supporting monsters on the field with a Legendary which was maybe 2 levels above the parties average level. By memory (probably flawed I know) the encounter was balanced for a 3 encounters in 1 day kinda thing but in practice it was just a deadly slog that took out two of the 6 players.
Some due to massive damage (so straight to negative hp max). Some with nat 1's on death saves. Some taking damage while down (not DM being a jerk and punching characters, more like auras and AoEs). At higher levels, disintegrate more than once. Pretty sure I'm forgetting a few.
Character death was more likely. There were still campaigns that lasted years and characters who rose to level 20 before being retired by their players. Those numbers might have been "largely fabricated on gut feelings with no understanding of the underlying math and no attempt to balance things" and yet there remain people who play 1st ed. There are people making versions of 5th ed. that restore that old-school feel where "balance" isn't everything because "balance" makes things ******* boring. There is nothing "balanced" about the latest edition: it feels like one is playing a video game on Easy mode where the PCs are afforded a level of invulnerability that drains it of any drama or tension. Three death saves? Max. hit points recovered upon a single long rest? So many ******* hit points it takes forever for combat to be resolved? That's unrealistic nonsense fabricated on the desire to turn a party of adventurers into a team of ******* superheroes and one with zero understanding of how actual combat and the injuries sustained during and recovery actually work.
Players used their wits to arrive at what their characters would have to do or say. To perhaps bargain with those gods or monsters. So they roleplayed. Instead of just announcing I hit with my axe.
If you are balancing encounters, is not that by definition holding back your punches? If my aim is to give my party a deadly experience, I would NOT balance combat encounters, and if necessary, I would even maximize a monster's HP and damage, and pull some monster reinforcement out of my sleeves too if the fight turns out to be too easy. I would still be nice and give them the option to escape, but if they really want to stay and fight, I can give them a taste of death.
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Running the Game by Matt Colville; Introduction: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-YZvLUXcR8 >
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