Creating Combat Encounters Using the New Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual

When it comes to making combat encounters, the new Monster Manual and Dungeon Master's Guide go together like a wizard and their spellbook! You'll find everything you need, from advice on structuring encounters to which monsters can be found in the same habitat, making prep a breeze!

In this article, we'll explore how you can put the 2024 Core Rulebooks together to create exciting combat, with an example encounter featuring the new ghast gravecaller provided at the end.

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Planning the Encounter

Artist: ANDREY KUZINSKIYA horde of skeletons assaulting a party of adventurers.

When planning out your encounters, the best place to start is chapter 4 of the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide, Creating Adventures. Here, you'll find loads of useful tips, tricks, and advice for creating your own D&D adventure, including a section dedicated to planning the three types of encounters: social interactions, exploration, and combat.

What is the Objective of the Encounter?

When creating your encounter, consider thinking outside the box to create an objective that makes it more of a unique experience. The new Dungeon Master's Guide has various options to pick from in the Character Objectives section of chapter 4, which can be great starting points for building a fun encounter.

These examples include:

  • Brokering peace between hostile factions
  • Retrieving an important item
  • Taking out a special target
  • Stopping a cult's ritual

Let's take a look at the “stopping a cult's ritual” example.

When presented with this kind of encounter, the characters should immediately realize there's an objective beyond defeating the opposing side, and there's likely a time limit in which it must be completed.

This objective doesn't have to be a combat encounter, either. Depending on how the characters approach the situation, it could be a social interaction encounter, like if they disguise themselves as cultists to try to foil the ritual from the inside.

Achieving the Objective

While it's optional, you could also include a unique solution to how the characters can stop the ritual beyond killing all its participants. It could be that a priest must be stopped from lighting magical candles or that eight desecrated idols need to be destroyed in a certain order.

If you decide to go with a unique solution to the encounter, ensure it is adequately described to the players when setting the scene for the encounter so they have all the information needed to be able to come up with the solution.

Failing the Objective

These encounter objectives can also help brainstorm potential failure scenarios that aren't just a TPK. If the characters fail to stop the ritual, a powerful entity could be released, the main antagonist could be made stronger, or the cult could recover a dark and powerful artifact.

Encounter Difficulty

Artist: VIKO MENEZESA Lich and its initiates participating in a ritual

So, we've got an idea for the encounter. Now, we need to take this idea and define the boundaries of what monsters to use. This can be achieved by referencing the Combat Encounter Difficulty section of chapter 4 in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide.

Determine the Difficulty of the Encounter

Creating combat encounters at a desired difficulty level is a straightforward process in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. First, you decide on your target difficulty: low, moderate, or high:

Low Difficulty. A low-difficulty encounter represents one where the characters might have a dangerous moment or two but should emerge victorious with no casualties. However, they may still need healing resources to be successful.

Moderate Difficulty. For adventurers with all of their features available to them, a moderate-difficulty encounter shouldn't be too difficult. However, if the characters have been stripped of their resources (healing, spell slots, class features, etc.), it has the potential to be lethal for one or more characters.

High Difficulty. A high-difficulty encounter could be lethal for one or more characters, and the party will need to employ cunning tactics and quick thinking to emerge victorious. And even then, they still might need some luck.

Set the XP Budget Per Character

You can then cross-reference the party's level with the chosen difficulty using the XP Budget per Character table. Take this number and multiply it by the number of characters in the party, and you'll have your “XP budget.”

For our ritual encounter, let's assume we have a party of five level 5 characters, and we want a moderate difficulty encounter. The XP budget per level 5 character for a moderate-difficulty encounter is 750, meaning that for a party of five, the XP budget for our encounter is 3,750 XP (750 x 5).

This is how much XP you can “spend” on picking monsters for your encounter. Every creature has an XP value listed in its stat block. For example, a Skeleton has an XP value of 50. Using two skeletons would count as 100 XP spent from your XP budget.

You'll want to spend as much of your XP budget as possible, but having a few unspent XP left over is perfectly fine.

Unique Situations

When balancing encounters, it's important to consult the Troubleshooting section in chapter 4 to see if your encounter uses any of the unique situations listed there. In this section, you'll find advice on things such as handling many creatures, adjusting encounters for a player's absence, and how to adapt your encounter to factor in unusual monster features.

Choosing the Right Monsters for the Job

Artist: Viko MenezesA collection of Red Wizards of Thay participating in a ritual

We've got the skeleton of our encounter, and we know we have 3,750 XP to spend on monsters, but what monsters do we pick? The new Monster Manual has over 500 monsters to pick from, so we're spoiled for choice. That's where Appendix B and its collection of monster lists comes in.

Encounter Objective

Given the XP budget and the fact the encounter is about stopping a group who are performing a ritual, we will want to choose a variety of monsters with a low XP value relative to our budget rather than one or two creatures with a high XP value relative to our budget.

Types of Enemies

The characters will be dealing with an evil necromancer and their cult attempting to summon a powerful Undead spirit.

Location of the Encounter

Finally, let's say the encounter takes place in the sewers under a temple.

Picking Our Monsters

All of this combines to give us three important pieces of information for using Appendix B to find the right monsters:

  • CR. A CR range between 1/8 and 5 should make sure we can include a variety of creatures.
  • Creature Type. Monsters with the Humanoid and Undead creature types are suitable for our encounter.
  • Habitat. Monsters in the Urban habitat, plus any monster on the Any Habitat list, will work in our encounter.

Based on those criteria, you can search any of the lists in Appendix B to find the creatures you want. For example, you may look at the Monsters by Creature Type list and see the Cultist and Cultist Fanatic listing, which will enable you to look up their stat blocks and see they have a respective CR of 1/8 and 2, making them perfect additions to the encounter.

For our example, we will use the following creatures, which brings the total XP spent to 3,750 XP:

Finally, if we look at the Monsters by Challenge Rating list, we can pick out a powerful Undead to summon should the characters fail to stop the ritual. Looking at the CR 5 and CR 6 options, the Wraith seems like a good choice.

The wraith's 1,800 XP takes the encounter's difficulty from moderate (3,750 XP) to slightly higher than hard (5,550 XP). This is fine, especially because the characters won't be fighting all of these monsters at once. Still, failing to stop the ritual will mean the party will have a tough fight on their hands.

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Example Encounter: A Ghastly Ritual

Artist: ALEX BROCKA wraith rising from a tomb

To show how you can combine an objective, an XP budget, and some monster listings into an encounter for your adventure, we've homebrewed an example encounter! This encounter includes a description, objective, and scenario that have been extrapolated from the choices we made above:

Dark Ritual

When the characters enter the chamber, read the following:

As you step into the chamber, the air crackles with dark energy, and the flickering glow of a ritual circle bathes the room in crimson light. At the edge of the circle, three cultists stand with a chanting, ghastly figure cloaked in stained robes.

Four cultists kneel inside the circle, chanting in unison with the robed figure. Before each of them is a lit black flame candle that sparks with malevolent magic.

The characters will encounter the ritual in its final moments. Once the characters are noticed, the Cultist Fanatics and Ghast Gravecaller fight to the death to protect the four chanting Cultists engaged in the ritual.

The four cultists in the ritual circle don't fight since they fear interrupting the ritual. They maintain their chanting and don't take any movement or actions until they're killed or Incapacitated.

How the Ritual Works. If any of the four chanting cultists in the circle remain alive after 4 rounds, the ritual is completed successfully.

Completing the Ritual. Once the ritual is complete, a Wraith is summoned into the ritual circle and joins the fight against the characters at Initiative 13.

Thwarting the Ritual. If all of the chanting cultists are killed before four rounds have elapsed, the ritual fails.

Knowing is Half the Battle

This foray through the selection of tools available to you in the new Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual will hopefully give you some Heroic Inspiration when it comes to making encounters of your own. With all of the advice within the Dungeon Master's Guide and a selection of over 500 creatures within the pages of the Monster Manual, you'll be creating unforgettable encounters in no time!

You can pre-order your copy of the new Monster Manual now!

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Davyd is a Dungeon Master living in the south of England with his wife Steph, daughter Willow, and two cats Khatleesi and Mollie. In addition to D&D, he loves writing, 3D printing, and experimenting home automation, often combining all four with varying degrees of success.

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