The most insane combat I've fought in is against the BBEG who had a massive mechanical dragon, had three legendary actions *per round* AND a liar action that hit everything each round. But of course it was 4 kobolds in a cave that killed 2 of our players.
My party at the moment is crazy powerful and morally dubious, they killed two ancient silver dragons and an adult gold, they had some help but honestly, they did most of the work. The next session everyone apart from the rogue got dropped by a single beholder alone in a medium-sized room.
There are times when it should be unbalanced in the other way, like if a level 5 party needs to interact with an adult dragon. Combat-wise, they'd be screwed, but a social character could possibly dominate the encounter by handling it in a different way.
@@RJ-1580 you can absolutely get a huge sense of accomplishment from a well balanced encounter, do not get me wrong! If your players are enjoying and getting that from an even encounter then you're killing it.
@@deanholderde5959 Absolutely, throwing an encounter that used to be a challenge a few levels ago at a higher level party really helps demonstrate how far they've come with their abilities when they steam-roll it.
My wife just started DMing and did this to us at our last session. We are level 6 and she had us fight 7 redcaps. Thats a CR 21 encounter! She did alot of these suggestions as we could have run away, didnt, they scattered into the forest then came back in waves. We ended up using every spell slot and power we had but no one died and we defeated them. That will certianly be a memorable session. I just hope we get to rest or the next encounter with angry squirrels will kill us.
That's actually a CR 14 encounter for a 4 player party, CR12 for a 6 Player group. You don't multiply the CR you multiply the XP based on the Number of Monsters Multiplier. 1 Monster is x1 while 2 is only 1.5, 7 is 2.5. So you have 7 Redcaps at 700XP each which is 4,900 multiplied by 2.5, which gives you 12,250XP which falls between Challenge rating 14 and 15 assuming 4 player party. A 21 CR would be 33,000XP to 40,999XP Or 14 Redcaps... and one goblin. 15 Redcaps would take it over to 22 and without the goblin it doesn't reach 21 by a small amount. Also- Sorry for being that guy! Your comment is still totally relevant and a good thing to read, Just wanted to make sure people knew that CR is a bit more complicated than multiplying CRs, it also matters if you are doing XP over Milestones for levels.
@@SageSaga25 Good to know! I've been DMing for a long time and have not been doing that correctly in my head. Though I generally run published campaigns and always thought the CR system was a bit broken. My wife on the other hand stepped out big, this is her first time DMing and she wrote a from scratch campaign set in Farun. I'm pretty proud of her if you cant tell. I'll have to apologize for the slight freak out I had about the CR21 I thought it was, LOL I mean CR 14 is still pretty high though but still LOL.
That's far off a CR 21 and I'd dare say that I throw worse stuff at my players. The problem with that encounter is that once players hit lvl 6 they have big AOE spells like Spirit guardians, fireballs etc and if those CR3 bags of 45 HP group up for even the slightest bit they just pop to 3/4 big lvl 3 spells
"That allows them to use their character in the way they envisioned when they created them." This is amazing advice. Many times have I played D&D and felt like the abjuration wizard I made never had a good chance to stick glyphs on something, or my ranger always got stuck in melee range. As a DM, my current party likes to kill circle everything at melee range, so the thought of throwing a troll at them seems like a great way to make things interesting. I'll definitely start making encounters with your advice.
I played a druid many years ago, and I could finally transform into a man eating tree but we never had encounters with man size humanoids for me to use that wild shape ability. So I asked my DM for one.
Give that troll a potion of fire or ice breathing and have a caster cast haste on it. That surround and pound will change a little bit I think lol oh and a casting of grease on the high Dex characters might spice things up as well. Lol
Definitely gotta talk to your DM in those times. I personally put in a LOT of effort into building content for players that want to play a certain role (both inside and outside combat). I really see that as a big part of being a DM in the first place.
I'm reminded of the fight with Cyanwrath at the very beginning of my current Hoard of the Dragon Queen campaign. Our fighter decided to accept his challenge and duel him, despite all of us knowing it probably wouldn't go well. Our DM allowed the rest of us to make attempts to interfere in the fight in ways that wouldn't get the hostages killed, including a lot of taunts and insults aimed at Cyanwrath. With these things getting under his skin and distracting him, he ended up with disadvantage on some key rolls. This led to more taunting for his lack of coordination, and he basically spent the entire fight with disadvantage. He ended up getting tripped, disarmed, and, due to a timely crit, having his entire jaw chopped off. He ended up retreating with single digit HP remaining. The DM allowing that creative problem solving turned the unbalanced fight into one of the most memorable moments of the campaign so far.
As someone who has DMd a good portion of this module, the entire start of the book is super unbalanced for a party of level ones. It gives such a terrible time crunch right off the bat (giving no chance for a long rest unless the party wants to leave the town to the raiders all night) and even a short rest eats up precious time. And there are like 4-6 encounters your expected to throw at a level 1 group (cultists, Kobolds and the occasional guard drake) all in one in game night, ending with this fight you spoke of, which is the only part the book handled well, suggesting there is little chance to win but giving ways to insure whoever fights hims survival. Needless to say, make sure you thank your DM for running that game, its a hard one to run, theres alot of altering going on behind that screen to make sure you guys get a fair game instead of the suicide mission it is written as. Sounds like you made it past the worst part tho!
We had something similar in our run of HotDQ, the Dwarf Fighter was sent alone and we were somewhat worried, especially given his player had not managed to hit anything for all 6 or so encounters leading up to that point. Player wasn't present for the session in question, though, and I rolled 2 crits in a row and consistently hit enough to nearly kill Cyanwrath. Was mostly memorable as the most useful Ugni had been the entire campaign.
@@buttmunchmcnugget328 You're absolutely right about the issues at the start of the campaign. The only change our DM told us he made was putting some ballistas on the castle walls so we could actually do something when the dragon showed up, but it wouldn't surprise me if he made other tweaks for balance as well.
When my group played HOTDQ (my first dnd game ever :D), I barely survived running away from a mass of enemies like maybe 10-12 cultists at the sanctuary place. But I did get to lvl 3, chose champion subclass, and so I decided to go against the half dragon dude and (apparently he was supposed to be a recurring character, sry DM) killed him. Action surge plus 2 crits to finish him off. :) never been that lucky since but it was really cool. Made sure to tell the DM i beheaded the dude because I was always scared enemies coming back to life
9:40 “[CR] definitely skews up, meaning most listed CRs are probably higher than they are. Not counting Klarg the Bugbear, who has probably killed more player characters than any NPC in the history of D&D. You Phandelver DMs know EXACTLY what I’m talking about!” Having just played Phandelver for the first time this past Sunday where two of the four players (myself included) dropped to Klarg, followed by - no exaggeration - 12 rolls under 10 (two players rolling death saves and the other two rolling Medicine to stabilize) leading to two player deaths, I felt this.
The first time I went through this encounter in a party of 5 only one PC lived to tell the tale, and only due to two separate crits on death saves which held me and one of the other PC's long enough to finish the monster.
(Lost Mines spoilers ahead!) I dont know what I'm doing wrong (maybe not using the pre-defined characters) but Klarg never killed a single person. Theres usually always a Tank that avoids getting hit by him because his +hit is a bit underwhelming for a "boss". However, in 3 out of 4 sessions he ended up killing the dwarf. All of the groups allerted him so he had the dwarf hostage, and all of them ignored his threat to drop their weapons or the dwarf is going to die. I might need to add that I specifically say and rule that if the dwards throat is slit, its an insta death. It feels odd to have him cut the dwarves throat just to then have someone healing-word him up a few seconds later.
i wish that happened but my players split the party before they just crit nat 20 on all there first attacks rolled higher than average damage and killed him round 2 of combat after they guerilla war style attacked the cave and killed a few goblins before retreating repeatedly, I doubled the number of goblins inside the cave and they still managed to kill them all.
Cody, I have been playing since 79'. One of the greatest weaknesses I have found with 5e is the notion of balanced encounters. They can really suck the life out of the game, making it feel safe and risk free. There is nothing like the cycle a player goes through in an unbalanced encounter, from the despair of realizing that you probably aren't going to make it out of this one alive, to the determination to die well and take as many with you as you can, to that glimmer of hope that begins to form when you start to think that maybe, just maybe, you might make it out of this alive, to the exhilaration of actually surviving the encounter by the skin of your teeth. The best way I know to create unbalanced encounters for the players, is to stop designing the encounters with the PC's in mind. Design the encounters with your world in mind, make them make sense for the world first and foremost. That eliminates most of the problems of balanced encounters because D&D isn't World of Warcraft, the world isn't necessarily level appropriate. There are going to be things out there that your PC's only choice is going to be to flee from. If they choose to fight they will die, and that is okay. Part of being a good player is knowing when you have to get the hell out of Dodge, and knowing when you can stay and fight. In a campaign I was soloing in last week (2e AD&D based), I ended up in a running fight with nine NPC's because I wandered into a part of a sewer system that wasn't where I was "supposed" to go. Fortunately for me, the DM allowed me to do it, and didn't pull his punches and even though I lost two weapons and accomplished nothing I went in there to do, it was by far the best encounter I have had in the five different campaigns I have played in recently. The encounter was there because it made sense in the overall concept of the city I was in, not because I happened to be playing in the city. It made the city seem far more real. It made it seem alive. And it made it seem like it existed outside of whatever it was I was doing. There is a reason in 1e AD&D that the first segments of every combat round were: Avoid engagement, Attempt to parley, Await action by other party. It was something that used to be engrained in the game itself, and something WotC lost over time, that sense that you should consider your options every round instead of just continuing to swing a sword over and over again, and the concept that the world existed for itself, not for the PC's. I am very glad to see you giving folks advice about this because it will make their games much, much better when they stop balancing every encounter to the party, and start allowing the party to encounter things that are seemingly way beyond their ability to survive. All of this, though, only works if you are actually willing to kill PC's. If you pull your punches doing this, the encounter will be the most phony feeling thing in your game. Thanks for the video!
I've been doing this from 2e through 5e, and now in a5e. However, I do include warning signs. Indications of serious danger. So the players can choose to go into risky areas, not just stumble upon them.
My father at 65 JUST beat that same cancer...had the most radiation they allow a human being to be treated with. We are big 280 guys about 5'10 in height. He is now 170 pounds and cancer free for three months. The big thing that helps is fat stores cause eating is very very hard on the throat and ensure...lots of ensure, the extra nutrients goes a long way. But the number 1 rule is not to treat him that differently. Talk to him about the good in life and enjoy every moment you have. Good luck to your family.
Highlighting certain character's strength in combat is actually ingenious. I'll definitely be practicing this for our next session. Two survival stories come to mind. The first was when my group were playing a Warcraft-based campaign. Three out of four of us were on the floor, with only a low-level goblin priest standing against four kobolds slinging rocks at us from a distance. The priest shoved one off of the narrow bridge we were on and healed our troll berserker back to barely standing. After dodging three stones, he managed to throw an axe at one, killing it. The next turn, the kobolds missed both their attacks on the troll, resulting in another dead kobold. The last kobold managed to land a critical on our priest, knocking her unconscious. The berserker then moved to the last remaining kobold and roared menacingly at the little rodent, forcing him into submission. We then kept the kobold and named him Larry. A couple sessions later, he fell off a ledge into a boiling lake of lava because he saw his own shadow. The second was when my character, a former ship captain who was now in shackles applied by his own shipmates, struck a game-changing deal with Helya (Warcraft's version of the Viking Goddess Hel) to retake his ship in turn for his eternal servitude. My character's power grew immense very rapidly. He burst out of his manacles, ripped the door from the fixtures, grabbed an iron shard that flew off of the door and viciously killed all that were in his path. Upon coming face to face with his unfaithful first mate, my character wore a wicked grin, the blood of his ex-shipmates dripping from his hands. The first mate began to speak when my character drove the iron shard through the center of his left eye and out the back of his skull, reclaiming the ship once more. Helya summoned a crew of dead sailors for her new ship captain and they sailed off, leaving the rest of the party (They were off, buying supplies from a nearby town). After all this happened, the dm and I agreed to make a new character, as the captain was now going to be the main villain of the campaign.
6:57 - Back in 2.5 or maybe it was 3.0, I had a Lasher who was all about whip+trip, whip+trip, whip+trip. Our DM responded by ensuring every mob we encountered in combat was a floating undead or had 4+ legs. If you want to really take the wind out of someone's sails, well, that's how to do it. =P
My first campaign with high school friends was The dragon of ice spire peak, the next was a war setting campaign, and when it was my turn to DM I wanted to focus more on the role playing and less of the fighting so majority of my encounters are difficult but that’s to emphasize the stealth and persuading your way out of combat. Last session I threw 3 air elementals at a lvl 4 party of 2 rogues, a monk, a bard, and a barbarian. By the end of it the air genasi bard had convinced the air elementals to wrestle him and everyone was having a great time while the rogues stole everything not bolted down or on fire. Long story short I think unbalanced encounters are useful when you want to try and direct the party away from being murder hobos all the time.
Non-combat options are only worth as much as the potential losses from taking on a tough combat encounter. If the fight isn't tough, why bother avoiding it? Knowing you probably couldn't take on a fight without major losses makes avoiding it worthwhile.
The year was 2008. Barack Obama was still a senator, earnestly campaigning against Clinton in the primary, and I was a young PoliSci undergrad. We had a party of five, a druid, barbarian, cleric, warlock, and my humble scout. Two of our number were missing due to midterms. The barbarian, druid and I forged ahead without our comrades - more the fool us, we were shipwrecked and stranded on a deserted island. Interpid in the face of the unknown, we strode forth into the wilderness, heading for the volcanic cone of the island's mountain. There, we discovered the ruins of a dwarven city, full of faded splendor and the hope of treasure. We found a lift to the bottom and smirked at our good fortune. As we entered, the doors sealed behind us and a mild, magically automated voice asked us for a passcode. Two rounds later, the golem is hostile and engaged in melee with the barbarian, our only party member with a chance of overcoming the golem's DR. The druid panicked and set floor aflame, preventing her from getting to the barbarian to provide heals, and I'm using my rope and grapple in a crude imitation of the Battle of Hoth. Eventually, we bring the servitor down, realizing too late that the barbarian is only up due to temp HP and as his rage ends, so too does his life. I, and our druid are stuck alone in a small stone box, the lingering flames consuming the last of our oxygen...
@@unfortunatesun, *cries a single manly tear* that barbarian was a true Bro. May the Halls of Valhalla welcome him with bottomless booze and battle... That was well-narrated.
> Subtle trick to unbalance encounters > Blightsteel Colossus in the thumbnail stopped me right on my tracks when I saw that. brb going to homebrew something real fast.
Blightsteel Colossus: Infinite HP AC30, but that's irrelevant "Well bois, I hope you have your banishment spells ready to send this fella back to New Phyrexia!" "But man, we're level 6!" 🤷♂️
My players (and sometimes not even my players, a DM who hears about the encounters) constantly whine about my encounters being "deadly" because they think the CR system is good. Whenever I say "guys, I'm literally putting you up against enemies that I've reviewed for your level, making sure these encounters aren't TPKs" they don't seem to take notice. So I'm gonna show them how bad CR is calculated, so I made a character with immunity to blindness and deafness, most senses, legendary resistance and spellcasting. His CR is 8.
Yep, CR calculation really doesn't count for some important stuff. I watched a sage advice once and Jeremy Crawford said that they create official monsters using a sheet with a lot more data on it. The CR calculation shown on DMG and XGtE are rough simplifications of the original sheet. Like almost everyone else, I also tend to tweak what I get from the CR results but I really don't understand why people think of it so badly. I mean, it is not perfect but it is a starting point and I NEVER seen anyone presenting a better option that is not a poor variation of the same calculation done there (usually based on potential total damage or HP of the monsters). And if you spare 2 min thinking about how the real calculation should be, you'd soon realize we need a big spreadsheet with scores and modifiers for a lot of things, including terrain features, relative starting locations, dynamic features, etc. My bet is that if we had something like it available, we would not use it until it was programmed in way that would probably become a detriment to the imaginative part of the game. You say you reviewed your encounter just to make sure it is not a TPK and for sure I believe that although I didn't see any data. But forcing a monster creation using the weak points everyone knows from CR calculation just to prove your point is a little bit concerning. I mean, you should think about it instead of implementing this as a punishment.
I made recently a mini boss that on paper he is cr 6 but he has an ability that can give a lot of disadvantages on the party, broken bones to be more exact and I spoke with one of my DM friend and he said that this thing is just good for a TPK
Just make an Easy encounter for their level, consisting only from Shadows and Intellect Devourers. Works best at higher levels. After inevitable TPK show them CR calculations and the literal pages of MM. Edit: that more fair and obvious, because that demonstrates a mistake everyone can and regularly do make with CR - found out the hard way. Six 1/2 CR Shadows looked like a nice encounter for mid-level party, all numbers lined up. You know what happened.
OK, some misconceptions, I have backup plans for if they get bad rolls. THIS IS NOT MEANT TO TPK. It's only to show them how dumb CR can be, some deadly encounters can be easy if they're weak to the character's strengths and some medium encounters are very challenging, my players will be fine.
@@agustdgames3120 You won't prove anything about the CR system unfortunately, you'll only show what happens when your group (and other DMs, it seems) give you honest and meaningful feedback that may hurt your ego. Seriously, maybe they are tired of your "backup plans" by now. When a lot of people are saying the same thing about your style, you should take that into consideration. Now, I already agreed that the CR system is problematic but I disagree that it is dumb. As I asked earlier, do you have a better way to prepare your encounters difficulty that is not an indirect approach of the current method from the book? If you do, please share with us mortals. Your players may be fine by the end, but I find your approach a detriment to the game as it will only create a bad experience and probably spread the wrong conclusions. As a final note, I'll say that most of the things you say are dumb about the calculation have special instructions in the DMG about the care you should take when using it and how it may lead to unexpected results. So having this "by the book" approach but ignoring the parts that actually force you to use reasoning and critical thinking is a cheap shot. As I said, you are not proving anything.
My tip: As the players often build the party to compensate each other weaknesses, especially min/maxers, do the same. Put on a tanky monster with a strong ranged one, 1 or 2 spellcasters and some way to heal them. Low CR encounters or equal CR becomes really hard, and they dont feel cheated this way because they are doin exactly that already
In this corner, six level 8 characters! And FIGHTING out of the red corner, a bone claw, a troll, a stone golem, a necromancer, and 1,300 of his undead horde! Yeah, our cleric was a busy man.
1 time I almost did a tpk was when one of my players decided to say to a chain up, adult ancient black dragon “guess what idiot we’re gonna kill you later”. I look the party in they eyes and whisper, roll initiative. Truly one of my favourite things to happen in a DnD game. (The escaped through a portal btw)
We were playing Lost Mines of Phandelver, and at lvl 4 we found Venomfang away from his lair. At some point it wanted to bail, but we tried to deceive it, offering it some gold and allowing it to plan killing me off since I certainly stood no chance of survival if I went to deliver the gold. Or so it thought. The dragon stood close enough, I (the rogue) readied my action to throw a dagger at it when I saw it open its mouth to use its breath weapon on me, and at the same time so did the rest of the party: the barbarian yeeted a javelin at it, the 2 druids used their most powerful spells on it, and the beast fell.
@@kyleweir689 I may have been describing it a bit weird, but we deceived it that it had the upper hand and that we were taking a trade we thought was better for us but looked unfavorable
@@JohnSmith-dr5zn also, the breath weapon should have happened first, then all your readied attacks. I have a hard time believing 2 druids, a barbarian throwing a javelin and a rogue throwing a knife (no sneak attack, likely) would deal over 130 damage at Level 4, too.
@@kyleweir689 My group of level 3 killed 3 frost giants in 2 rounds, (their total health combined was 362) it's not that unbelievable if you get some lucky roles and have minmaxers.
**SPOILERS** Oh man. I'll try to keep this short. We had the most amazing, harrowing and unexpected encounter last week. I am DMing The Lost Mine of Phandelver for my group and they have had a few close calls so far (Stonehill Inn being burned to the ground by the remaining Redbrands as they ambushed the PCs while they slept) and a couple of others. But the best was at the Old Owl Well. I had set the wizard at lvl 7, not expecting the PCs to get in a battle with him, but for him to be powerful enough to make them think twice. It was supposed to be an interesting parleying encounter. They were fighting the zombies and he came out of his tent demanding to know what was going on. He even paused his zombies' attacks for a turn so they could talk about it, but the PCs were like..."nope - Undead must be destroyed!" so they kept attacking. He warned them to stop. They didn't. He blasted off some magic missiles to get their attention. They moved to attack him, but he backs off and drops a fireball, taking down 2 PCs and severely wounding the others. The downed PCs are revived and a couple of the PCs are chasing the mage as he continues to back off. He hits them with ANOTHER fireball, dropping most of them again, except for the ones who arrive late who just got healed from the last fireball. He taunts them and calls for their surrender. They surrender. The wizard casts detect magic and demands their magic items and weapons be put down in front of him. He takes the magic sword and shield and begins burning their weapons with magic fire. To me, I was thinking that they had learned their lesson and they would have to lose a couple of magic items as part of that lesson, but they would survive. Our Tabaxi rogue...thinking that the wizard was just going to kill them all anyway made a desperate sacrifice in some mad hope to save her friends or something, lunged at the wizard with her clawed hand and scratched his face. He scoffed and tried to hit her with a vampiric touch to finish her off in a flashy way, but he missed. She attacked again, and missed, but the wizard could see that her comrades were getting to their feet and rushing at him, he decided to back up to get some room to finish them all off with a last fireball. He wasn't worried about her little scratchy opportunity attack. She rolled a Crit. She rolled for affect and she got the one result I think that she needed out of all the possible results. "Target has their eyes ruined and is blinded permanently". I was gobsmacked. I was reluctantly willing to TPK my group because they just wouldn't give up, but they completely turned it around. I described how her claws ripped across the wizards face, cutting deeply and ripping his eyes out, tearing his nose off to one side and leaving his face in gory ruin. He staggered back roughly in the direction he was heading, but did a tight half circle before dropping to his knees screaming like they had never heard before. The tank rushed up. The Ranger shot him in the side with an arrow. Our hero, the tabaxi rogue, she limped up to him and casually slid her rapier through the back of his neck, through his spinal cord, and out through the front of his throat. He could barely turn his head because of the blade, but he twisted slightly, his gory face dripping meat and blood, and formed a sort of gurgling snarl of defiance. She slipped her blade out and he toppled to his side on the ground, blood pooling beneath his fresh corpse. The whole group was erupting in excitement and congratulations! We lost the next twenty minutes to adrenaline as everyone talked over each other, so excited about what had just happened. I was right there with them as well. It's those moments that make this game so amazing. Our group will be talking about that amazing turn of events for years to come. That was her "Laura Bailey - Cupcake Moment!" I was so proud of her at that moment. SOrry it was so long. I'm still so stoked about it.
Yes I’ve been doing unbalanced encounters for awhile now. They have fun with a tough battle. Giants with levels in classes was their last tough battle, it was fun all around. Good video
I usually run most monsters/bosses with dips in classes. It gives the players that feeling of oh shit, this is something my class can do. 'Cause as a DM you kinda get to power build whatever you really want provided it adds to the story :P
Heh, I had an opposite. I was a 4th level ranger doing a solo session in a larger game, so what happened was DM made an encounter with 10 cr 1/2 thugs, each had a health pool equivalent to my own. It was a meet on a pier, so I was "trapped" the hilarious bit was I used jump to get 1 pier over and booked it, blowing my whistle the whole way. I knew it was a trap. My character knew it was a trap, but he knew he needed probable cause. Took out four thugs along the way. The rest were taken out by a volley from the Church's Inquisition. Now I got the Church seeking out a criminal organization, with the head set up as another. I got lucky as I lied to the head of the Inquisitors twice to set things up. I needed the other "criminal boss" to be full in adherence to my needs. His influence goes outside the city and he is an excellent artificer.
As far as factions go theres the church, the gheistejäger guild, chimeara cult, drakon, nicholai, highlander mercenary forces, the occupying Commonwealth military, and city guard. So far I have been neutral overall with negatives in Drakon. The church holds some positive s and I have their ear, the city guard has received council and a slight positive outlook, common wealth is still overall neutral. Highlanders are neutral although a member of the organization is part of the party, nicholai has favor as I have works jobs for him and am framing drakon for the bounty on his head. May have to kill him for half the full bounty. The guild and I don't get on too well they see my profession as an affront to their own as they are organized and mine is a family tradition dating back to before the Roman Empire. Hereditary ability. As for the cult, i was hired by the church to find them and that was backed up by nicholai, church may get credit with some thanks to my contribution. Head of Inquisition may be promoted to Bishop, he is ambitious.
An important note: the damage output of a monster is not always analogous to the number of attacks it can make, but rather how many pcs it can hurt in a round. AOE attacks hurt a lot of pcs, and effects like a Salamanders heated body hurt anyone that attacks them in melee. I'd say definitely check out the Remoraze (I think I spelled that wrong) if you want a good example of a monster that hurts a lot if pcs while only having one attack.
Damage resistances and immunities should be considered along with number of attacks. For example, a fireball is no good against fire giants and magmins
As a DM I took your suggestion to give the party a Rod of Immortality. It was a super blast, I sent them into a prison that held a menagerie of magnificent monsters from all different backgrounds. They loved it. They expended all charges by the 5th of 8 prisons.
I liked the tip from another youtuber to give the players an artifact with a 1 time use of aid, for that fight, because he hits like a truck. Somehow we killed him with 2 players (paladin and cleric) but the cleric went down in 1 hit.
my players absolutely DESTROYED klarg man. they went to his room by the hole in the floor and used a charm spell so that they could get prepared before(they abuse A LOT the prepare action) and finished his fight in like two or three rounds
A ranger and a wizard duo for my example Probably one of the best combats Ive had was a series of encounters. It featured the ice cold room where you die if you dont find the wall (that bit was admitedly not too fun), shortly afterwards we fight a flameskull, The dm tohught this would be the end of us, we had taken a lot of damage from the cold room. He activated fireball, and I cast counterspell. We won, then we went into another room (trying to find shelter from the flameskull which would come back in an hour), we found ourselfelves a ghost encounter, we used salt to seperate us from the ghosts to take minimal damage, but our hp was dire. However shortly after this the skull was back online, The DM had him call out looking for us as we left him in the cold room (not knowing he was immune to cold damage). However we hid and finally we got our rest...... It was scary but one of the best sessions ever had, heart pumping for 3 hrs
I lost an uncle to cancer, it's rough to watch someone go through, but don't give up hope, he's gonna need you, i wish him a quick and full recovery and obligatory thoughts and prayers buddy, stay strong
@@_b1ack0ut4 I once had a GM who ran that and had the nerve to say "This is a mostly non-combat campaign" so I made a skill-monkey type Rogue/Bard. Needless to say, that was a party wipe.
@@_b1ack0ut4 did death house recently...resorted to my 4 person party [monk, barb, cleric and paladin] group being nearly tpked by the shadows...as the monk i had to be the tank, damage dealer [because i was a high elf and had the acid splash cantrip which turned out to be the only relyable way to hurt them] and the "healer" as i was the only one that bought healer kits from the previous town...but it was a total slog and ended up with 3 people rolling death saves and me having to alternate between heal checks and attack checks till the fight was over...then getting bitched at for "stealing everyone elses thunder"
Thanks Cody, you're awesome as always. Huge fan! Long time DM here (running now on Fantasy Grounds--GO FG!!) and I've never thought to play to their strengths in an overbalanced encounter like that. Great tip! Usually I play to their strengths in a "let the players do their cool stuff" encounter, but never one I think they'd have trouble with. I generally like to unbalance encounters when my party has a strong NPC either as a guide or someone they picked up (mercenary maybe?). My groups are not always on their A-game and sometimes the odds just aren't ever in their favor. The 'uber-npc' is there not to win the fight for them, but to help pick up the slack in these cases. I recently ran a dungeon of light/dark with light switches and portals. The portals only activated in the dark, light switches far away they have to find, and undead arise in the dark to attack - kind of thing. Beefy war-cleric leader of the local town (Helm's Hold) joined the party to help them route the evil. His abilities pretty much ranged from Flamestrike to just cantrips, depending on the enounter. Players felt challenged as there were lots of undead (skeleton hoards, etc), but were often (somehow) able to make it through. I"ve found in these cases, I've been more comfortable overbalancing encounters with more freedom to throw what I want at them, but now I'm going to try playing to their strengths and see what that yields. Great video!
With the waves concept, I like to reward the party foe getting the drop on the first group and fighting smartly. Maybe have the party make perception and/or tactics checks to notice only one enemy has a horn to call for back up, or maybe an enemy point to the rope going into the rafters and exclaims "sound the alarm" giving the players a chance til recognize that the rope to ring the bells and sound alarm is in one corner of the room, so if the party can control the plot device, they can delay thew reinforcement wave. Our maybe instead of the full garrison, thew reinforcements are just the few guards who were on their coffee break the next room over
You make a lot of good points in this video. You break down something that I've been doing for a while without really noticing: pushing players to their limits by using their strengths in "unbalanced" encounters. That's super satisfying for them to overcome a big challenge, rather that firing up their arses by abusing their weaknesses. Thanks for the vid!
I ran a campaign for a group of friends and they had been taking quests to clear out goblin, orc, and kobold camps/nests around the region. To their credit, they were doing really good at planning out their strategies and being tactical about the encounters. which was good because even at level 6 they were nearly TPK'd by a crafty group of goblins. So, while clearing a kobold nest, I dropped a hint that this nest was dug out much bigger than any they had encountered before. No big deal, they push on. I then tell them about large heat vents that are scattered throughout the cavern as they explore. "Neat." they say as they continue. I describe a low, guttural thrum that is coming from down the hallway, accompanied by soft chanting. "That must be the kobolds!" they collectively agreed. Nope. It was a sleeping Adult Red Dragon that was being worshiped by the kobolds with a soft, draconic lullaby. Or, at least it was until one of the kobolds cried out at the intruders who just kicked down their door (so to speak). With one breath attack the dragon KO'd one of the five players on the spot and seriously injured the rest before it called for its minions to pelt them with spears. The party only survived because they were able to retreat to cover and destroy a set of load bearing columns and collapse the entire chamber over the course of two rounds with a combination of cleaver spells and excellent ranged attack rolls. They still, 2 years later, talk about the time they killed that "Smug A** Dragon" who laughed at them as they "missed" every shot at him. Good times.
@9:43 my party knows. The rogue tried to sneak into Klarg’s room and hide in a barrel. Klarg rolled a Crit to hit him, crushing both the barrel and the rogue’s skull.
I ran a party through the original Tomb of Horrors about 20 years back. The entire party fell for the trap that sent them to the entrance without their equipment. What did they do? They grabbed some rocks and a burnt out torch, and went back in for their stuff. They managed to complete the adventure three hours, a bunch a dead snake hides, and some giant skeleton bones later. It was one hell of a game.
First time player/DM running a Lost Mine. We've made it to everything but Tresendar, Thundertree, and Wave Echo, so I've clearly not gained a ton of experiences, but thought I'd share the fun we had with the chain pull method you were discussing. The party stealthed up and began a clearing of the western edge of Cragmaw Castle when they triggered the collapsing trap in the hall. What followed was one of the most enjoyable encounters to date. The banquet hall emptied towards us, the shaman crew rounded from the north, a group they had tricked into going out to investigate returned, a fleeing goblin rigged a path for the owl bear to come directly to them, and the hobgoblins from the eastern edge rushed over. These were all done in sequence with the group arriving near or momentarily after a group was downed. The party had a blast. I was going out of my mind tracking all the movement throughout the castle, but nearly the whole place was pulled after their trap triggering, making for a ridiculous XP payout once it was done.
I'm a new DM, and I'm starting with a homebrew campaign because i just love writing. I've found my players love fighting things that should technically be deadly... but I usally try to give them a way to almost clinch the win with a spell or item they have, if they're smart about it. If they don't figure it out, someones gonna die. Two of them already have, once against a young white dragon, and another against a Sea Hag and some minions at lvl 5 and 6. If you want laughs, throw a few lvl 5+ PCs against swarms of bugs, bats etc.. they're not gonna die, but inevitably when the rolls turn bad, the Role Playing opportunities are gold. One of my PCs is now deathly afraid of spiders, the other now constantly carries honey as an offering to bees hahaha. I LOVE THIS GAME
So far; most extreme and enjoyable combat was when our party accidentally went up against an Ancient White Dragon in its lair and actually managed to kill it after a long dungeon crawl that burned a lot of spell slots (a cleric, a wizard, a paladin, and a rogue were the only party members.)
Honestly, Out of the Abyss's Karazikar was the single hardest D&D foe I've ever fought as a player. Not only is he challenging by default as a beholder, but his lair (coupled with the tweaks to said lair made by our DM) is built to totally screw the PCs over, especially when he opens up by disintegrating the rope bridge they're standing on. It felt like playing against Blue Black control.
I'm playing through Mines of Phandelver for the first time with a group of friends and the mention of Clarg gave me a good chuckle. Our Kenku Rogue went full bird-mode and scuttled in towards a shiny object in the room and got Clarg'd for double his max health, giving him a true instantaneous death. The DM described it as the Kenku scuttling across the room excitedly and being instantly turned into a cloud of feathers from an unseen blow.
Fighting a fire giant in SKT with a party of three at fourth level was awesome! We ended up finding a giant plate of adamantine and rescuing the goblin slaves which led to a rabbit hole of its own.
Hello, new subscriber, love your content I've been DMing for about 4 years and we play 3.5 still. I think some of the most memorable overpowered encounters were 1. An undead campaign where the Party would rely heavily on fire damage to kill undead. I then threw up a Blightborn encounter that negated their biggest strength. They had to really think hard on how to overcome this enemy. 2. In another more homebrew campagn, The party was in an open field facing down a T-Rex. The T-Rex had to charge at the party for 5 rounds. The entire party had the ability to cast long range damage spells ( based on the homebrew )...they didn't do anything and waited for this overwhelming encounter to get to them. 2 of them ended up dying. The 2 that died ended up getting a bit upset at the encounter, and at me. After I explained that they had 5 rounds to cast fireballs at the beast they realized their mistake.
My group fought Venomfang in LMoP except that our DM thought it would be fun to turn him into an adult green dragon, we convinced approx 25 members of the Lionshield Coster to join us in the battle after being told by the townsfolk that we would surely be destroyed. All but 5 of the NPCs died (minion rules and attacking as groups at low damage output) and the Druid who resides in Thundertree was killed. I took a poison breath to the face while attempting to get our forces set up (I was the bait, as the cleric...?) and dropped to 2 hp in the dragons acquired surprise round. Luckily I survived and had the diamonds to revivify the Druid and our party walked away even though most of of our hired help didn’t. The town wasn’t as appreciative of us defeating a dragon as we had initially intended. All in all probably the hardest fight with this set of characters we’ve had yet. (Level 4 at the time as well)
I DM for a group that hit level 20 a couple months ago and still want to play their level 20 characters. They are also Warhammer fans so they agreed to the idea of taking their Spelljammer ship into the Warhammer Fantasy end times to purge demons, undead, dark elves and Skaven. They like this idea because I can give them large apocalyptic battles without breaking the entire Sword Coast. Also with the official monster stat blocks we have an idea of what lesser gods look like and how many HP they have so it makes me feel weird to have a 2,000 hp monster on Faerun after they did 850 damage to Demogorgon in one round. But on a different world I feel completely fine giving N’Kari 2000 HP, or giving a greater demon of Tzeentch the ability to meta game by switching their stats around so the barbarian with 29 strength and 10 intelligence is going to have 10 strength and 29 intelligence for the next 6d6 rounds. And a spell that takes off their armor and causes 2 arms to grow out of their shoulder blades that attempt to strangle the player to death. They can win a contested strength roll against themself if they drop they weapon or attempt to cut off the arms that are magically enchanted to feel even more pain then a normal arm and to make a con save to not pass out. If they pass out the arms keep strangling them. It’s an 8 character party so someone else can help with cutting off the arms, it’s an 8 person party their action economy will be reduced but fine overall.
as a beginner DM i can say i've done this and succeded and it was really fucking great .....until i tried it again and TPKed the party instantly...... there is no deep analisys or metaphor here.... just saying
Use it when the goal is NOT to slay the monster. Like if they need to retrieve an item from its lair or if they need to rescue someone. In 1st edition D&D, monsters gave so little XP but treasure gave tons, because the monsters were threats to the goal rather than the goal itself. But also, yeah I'd definitely wait a while to try it lol. My players straight up DONT die or even get close, atleast until I started unbalancing. If your players feel that its challenging as is, or if they just kinda wanna win, dont worry too much about it.
It's advanced because it's something you don't have to do, not something that's very hard to do. Just try it out and have some fun with cool encounters. Give the party a few fancy tools like bridges, cliffs, doors or just simply a bag of caltrops and you can pit them against pretty much any small group of high CR enemies. Just try to avoid any surprise damage like super high damage attacks or spells that put backline characters in the direct line of fire. Also enemies that have more mobility than the party or spells or abilities that slow the party down. Or, if you feel particularly evil you can do the exact opposite and have the party fight a bunch of Orcs & Wolves with an Orc Eye of Gruumsh and watch as the Wizard runs into a group of enemies, gets knocked prone and beaten to death in a single round, then chase the party down using the Aggressive trait and Prone condition.
Cody, as always, your advice knocked it out of the park! Thank you for the work you do so we ALL can enjoy this wonderful game that brings us all together.
You lost me at "basketball"...but got me back at "remorhaz"...only to lose me again with more basketball...to finally bring me back again with "combat patterns." It was a rollercoaster of emotion.
"You turn your players sole strategy INTO their weakness!" Oh NO. That's EXACTLY what i did. 🤣😨 I'm a new DM, but i'm DMing for players that i previously played with AS a player. So i know them. And their strategies. Really well. And was scratching my head at why MY encounters were so much harder than our previous DM's encounters. And you just explained EVERYTHING i was doing subconsciously! X,D God have mercy on my players souls, because i don't think i'll consciously remember. X,D Guess i need to go look up Balancing Encounters videos, lmao
this happened just yesterday, it might be a long one so bear with me, my group and i had just been telepoted out of a town that desimated by a litch, may or may not have been our fault, he turned the entire kingdom into undead and made a 30ft tall flesh golem, we saw that just before we got shooed away, we then look for a place to lie low and just in the the horizon we see the mighty goliath kingdom, perfect, my chat is a goliath and a noble, we find ourselves a boat to cross a large body of water into the goliath land, after a while we see a massive shadow beneath the boat with a rope tied to it going above water, its the flash golem pulling the litch, we enter combat, our gunslinger and warlock both with 20 dex run down and take cannon duty, i take control of the boat and the bard and sorcerer take care of the small zombies being spawned near the boat and climbing into it, we deat over 400dmg into that thing with the 5d12 cannons, it brough our boat down to 1hp, when the dm rolled a crit he said, if this is above 40, you're sinking, adds up, 39dmg, the entire party screams, earlier the bard had halted an action and the dm stated that that would either give the player a opportunity attack if they get the change or roll a attack with advantage, with that last crit swip he golem dealt on us the bard got a opportunity attack, hits, frost band rapier, near max dmg, everyone goes silence DM: "how do you wanna do this?" we all scream, after 15 or so rounds of combat where i was literally shaking, the gunslinger and warlock had unload over 400dmg worth with the cannons and its the clumsy stab of the bard that kills that thing, and now we are left to deal with the litch stranded on the water since he doesnt know how to operate the boat and the thing pulling him is dead and frozen underwater, and thats where we stopped, next tuesday we'll resume it and i could not be more hyped ps: pardon any mistakes on my grammar, im brazilian so, yeah.
Another way I unintentionally unbalanced my encounter: unique abilities. In a Pathfinder game I ran, my players had an encounter in a "quiz" room, where failing knowledge rolls meant encounters would spawn. Well, one of the encounters was a pair of moles that dug in the ground (cr >1), with some other enemies. The other enemies died fairly quickly, but the party just couldn't hit the moles. They would dig to avoid attack of opportunity, had moderately decent AC due to size, and there were turns they were just unattackable. They cut the party's health in half. Luckily, they rolled well for the rest of the questions. So having maneuvers or abilities out of the ordinary, even unique to that game, makes the players have to change strategy. I'm not suggesting giving an entire encounter True Invisibility, but occasionally give your encounters something to surprise the players.
My father beat cancer two years ago, I'm most thankful he did. The feeling of helplessness is miserable. I wish you the strength to support him and the best of luck to you and your familiy. Thank you for putting out helpful content, as a brand new DM I'm still anxious if I will be able to do a good enough job, but listening to your tips helps reduce that greatly :)
As a DM running a pirate themed game, the party survived entering the den of a green dragon after i flagged it as dangerous and they saw it as an opportunity for loot. They got caught, tried to bargain with it, it gave them to the count of 5 to run. Back on the shore, fighter captain almost died. Ship was heavily damaged. Combination of cannonfire + genasi necromancer won the day.
I think one of the best ways that a GM of mine gave us the option of a hyper-deadly encounter. Was giving us a chance to fight an adult Magma dragon (Pathfinder) At level 7. our party after individual online character creation sessions with the DM showed up to table with FOUR Dwarves among the 5 of us.. So when the opportunity to divert from the 'main' objective to liberate a dwarven mountain fortress from the beast, of course we took it. happily quoting our favorite Tolkien poems the whole way. To this day we still talk about that Sea Side mountain stronghold and the One outsider (our Human Paladin) Who's heroic intervention earned a statue in the now freed stronghold's Hall of Heroes.
A few years ago I ran the first dnd game me and my friends played, and decided to homebrew my systems and content. Near the end of the campaign after escaping a labyrinth they had been forced to enter they had come out in the treasure hold of this big fortress. Two of the three players wanted to explore the fortress as they knew the big bad who owned it was currently destroying their home nation. The other player (who was a large barbarian like character with a bonded dragon) decided he didn't care and he wanted to find his dragon again now that he was finally above ground. This lead into a super long combat encounter with all the pcs as they fled from the city, with pursuers and enemies along the way, climaxing at the wall of the city with a powerful caster and the walls defenses. It ended with the potion creator using 2 of his unique 6 super potions he had a total of like 20 in the 15 session game we played (many more were gained near the end as his character got stronger) to become tiny and escape the battlefield and then to turn a bug into a massive creature that distracted the archers on the wall. This bought time for the other player's dragon (who was finally a proper sized dragon) to arrive and clean up the remainder of the fight. The players all had many moments to stand out and feel in danger, and I definitely consider it one of my best encounters. Lots of great tips in the vid!
my most memorable: My dm did all the things you said NOT to do here... I DESPISED that encounter. It made me NEVER want to do the same idiotic stuff he did. THANK YOU for making this video. I'm about to run my first campaign. My first time I've ever really truly legitimately DM'd anything. I once ran a halfcocked throw together for my step-brothers for a few days when I was visiting my Dad's house once with 3.5... it was fun, but we had NO idea what we were doing. But this will be my first LEGIT DM'ing experience... and I've already homebrewed a world and a sort of mishmashed together a pantheon... and I'm taking Lost Mine of Phandolen for the first 5 levels, and rolling that strait into Storm King's Thunder. I know it's advised to skip section 1 of Storm King's, but I'm going to run them through it anyway as it works thematically and will be a nice warmup/break for my party to ease into Storm King's Thunder's meaty underbelly. :-P I'm also having to COMPLETELY reskin Lost Mines of Phandolen though, as the guy who DM'd that disaster I described at the top of this post... he's still my friend and he's one of my oarty members... and he ran US through Lost Mines of Phandolen. So me simply telling him and his Wife, who has attention issues and tends to check out of every game after about any half hour of lessened activity, to simply ignore the fact that we're running the same module... would bore the heck out of them and make them BOTH want to check out. So, I'm renaming and reskinning EVERYTHING in the module. I'm leaving the structure alone, but changing the setting, the town names, the names of the NPC's (both monsters and passive mobs) the name of the region its in... heck I'm even changing the terrain and climate conditions!!! And all through it though... I'm never going to ell them or let on what the name of the town is, until they are leaving it... and then, they'll learn the name of the town is Phandolen. :-P Of course, I'm ALSO running them through my own version of Ravnica after all that... and it's set a good while in the future, where the world has seen some nasty episodes of violence and Ravnica is not quite the massive globe spanning jewel it used to be. ;-)
Most memorable is what my group just recently went through! I actually rolled a 100 on a magic beans item. We had to end the session there and the DM took us to a pocket dimension where a seemingly benevolent angel with his THREE... BLACK HAIRED.... WOMEN... *can't believe we didn't realize this* disciples had taken up the role of continuing Zariel's attack on Avernus. The chapel was huge and some of us were staying there and having nightmares and not getting long rests... yes... how didn't we realize this. Ends up they were a coven of night hags of course and he was a DEATHPACT angel. We were level 7. And we were getting cocky with our encounters. We had to end up running from them after I called out Nakir - the angel - on his ignorance and realizing he wasn't actually ignorant. Escaped into Avernus to hide, fighting red caps and other crazy creatures while exhausted, waiting to ambush the night hags. Took care of them since the DM realized how to properly unbalance the encounter and he sent them after us instead of following. Almost died when having the drop on them even, but we kept one alive so I could sign a deal for her to lead us back out of the dimension after all this ended. Then went back the next day and took him on. He had a very rare crazy scythe that did even more necrotic damage with his attacks, he flies super fast, doesn't provoke opportunity attacks, etc... We should have died. But he was cocky and stayed down by one of us after hitting over 30 damage in one swipe, the tavern brawler high strength fighter saw the opportunity, somehow created his character to make athletic/grapple checks on par with giants, and got a hold of him and held him down with buff spells and silence spells, and we spent 10 whole rounds beating down on him with him somehow unable to break the grapple. His final words were "You'll all make great champions of Zariel" as he smiled and turned to dust. So that's how we got a super cool cursed scythe and a really powerful angel plotting to enslave us.
This video is honestly super helpful! I was trying to find a way to challenge my players without just hitting them in their weak points! Now I have some ways to reshuffle and challenge my players!
Cody, thanks for this video. Had an unbalanced encounter a few months ago. Level 2 Pathfinder 2e party versus a necromancer and a small contingent of enemies (I think it was 4 zombies, 1 brute, and the boss) and I played the boss as arrogant sending his minions in waves. One of the players attacked him directly and so he came into the fight with all of his minions. This resulted in a TPK that unfortunately killed the campaign because the players got really salty about it. No friendships ruined thankfully, but we haven't played Pathfinder 2e since as I'm the only one that knows the system well enough to DM it. Long story short, your description here matches everything I did to unbalance that encounter in a fair way and makes me feel less guilty about them TPKing after trying to go HAM on an encounter designed to be taken slow. Keep up the solid content. Loving all of it.
it's awesome that i just came across this video in particular. One player wasn't able to make the session while the party went off to run security for a noble soiree. While this was happening they had a prisoner in the basement they had to leave behind. They'd already fought off a rescue party so thought he was safe. After okaying it with the missing player i ran a one on one session in which he had to fight off a second raid. He's level 6 Storm Cleric and went against a knight and 3 guards. No big deal. As he starts dropping them however their heads split open "alien style" to reveal the intellect devourers hidden within and he winds up in a caster's run-and-gun trying to fight off these hideous spider brains. But he manages to shrug off the devour intellect abilities and sets them up for a wonderful thunderwave at the end in a space too small for the area and blows out his own eardrums. Series of horrifying moments followed by one of complete satisfaction.
Myself and a group of five other people we're going up against a Hill giant way before we were ready, at least that's what I thought until our cleric that uses a slingshot, well he slingshots a bottle of his own piss at the Giant and actually killed it. The whole group erupted in a huge cloud of laughter!
Once upon a time, when I didn't know how action economy worked, I stacked up a bunch of Scarecrows and 2 Will'o'Wisps to challenge my level 6 party. Not only that: I asked the players out of character to opt into this fight bc it was a special Halloween-encounter and I like halloween a lot. 3/6 PCs died that day. I have learned my lesson the hard way. '^^
I think this is a very valuable perspective to have. I played my first ever game of D&D 5e late last year, and while it was a lot of fun, I did sometimes have the suspicion that the DM was picking on our melee-focused party. I was playing a dual-wield Battle Master fighter whose RP flavor was that he preferred to outclass enemies with superior techniques and training. We also had a barbarian and a monk, both focusing exclusively on melee, with only our warlock standing away. So naturally, the first real fight was against a tribe of goblins who would drink a special potion that caused them to explode when killed, dealing hefty damage (a cool idea, in fairness), and then later, a black pudding, whose acid blood would hurt us and permanently damage my swords. While I had some cool moments of creativity in both encounters, I mostly ended up running around throwing knives that came with my starting equipment. My DEX was high enough that it worked out fine, but I just kept thinking "I did not make this character to run around throwing knives that I only have because the PHB says I do." I would have much preferred the DM attacking my strength, so I can test my mettle against a big troll, or even just an exceptionally skilled swords-creature. I've just begun DMing myself, so I will keep this in mind.
My group just on Sunday managed to survived a CR15 encounter, they polymorphed the boss into a shark and threw him out the window of the airship they were on. I had advantage on the roll, and rolled 2's for both. Made for an interesting encounter hahaha.
The wizard in my group does similar things. He polymorphed an aboleth into a sea slug while we were in his lair. We put it in a bottle, get all the guards in town together. Then unleash all the arrows, javelins and spells at it. Another time he polymorphed a fire giant queen into a slug. Brought it to the airship, and tossed her off the ship once we were a few hundred feet up.
I was brand new to Dungeons and Dragons, and our DM was putting us through Lost Mines of Phandelver. I think it was our second session when we finally explored the cave/dungeon, acquired a few cursed items (thanks to our over-zealous DM) and rescued Sildar after immediately taking out the goblins guarding him. Having never played, my imagination ran wild! Reaching Klarg, I recognized this as a boss fight that had been alluded to by our goblin companion and asked the DM if I could use one of the flasks of oil, a bit of rope, and a tinderbox to create an incendiary "grenade"/bomb. "Sure, you're not proficient in tinkering, but sure". Luckily, another member of the party offered to aid me, and we collectively rolled a NAT 20. I created the incendiary, lobbed it into the room, and effectively one-shotted Klarg!
I once ran a game in another system that pitted a group of 4 players against a much larger enemy with physical attributes greater than any two of my players combined and a massive, armored carapace that made brawling with it near-suicidal while I set the encounter in a rather confined space underground with just one narrow exit point. I had created the encounter with two things in mind. First, if the players ran, the monster would pursue them relentlessly with the home field advantage of knowing the underground network. It could "outwit" them by taking shortcuts, if it wasn't able to catch them outright. Second, its flanks were quite vulnerable and only exposed while it was moving or incapacitated. Incapacitating it was nearly impossible, but hammering it with force until it was stunned? Very doable, if handled properly. My group had the option to fight hit-and-run in the narrow passages (which the players decided to try straight away rather than fight head-on), striking while it moved through intersections to take advantage of its limited ability to move in tight confines, but there was also the option to defeat it in its own lair by baiting it into charging support pillars and then either striking while it was stunned or fleeing once the pillars were destroyed and a cave-in began. What could have been a TPK in an open space with no hope for even a Pyrrhic victory was transformed into a deadly game of cat and mouse that resulted in a cave-in with a daring last-second escape from the lair. My players are STILL talking about it a decade later.
I did exactly that in one of my encounters: one big guy for the players to focus on, several smaller ones to distract from the two casters in the back. When the enemies were dwindling, one of the casters shot off a "flare" that signaled that more of their allies could be on their way. When the party heard the rushing of new enemies incoming, I provided a chance for them to continue to fight the new enemies, or a fast escape route in case they felt like they needed a rest. It was a tough fight but they felt satisfied with the result and got some sweet swag out of it.
Another tip I'd like to add: Use non-lethal damage, there's nothing strange in having an intelligent enemy taking the intruding adventurers alive for questioning. Not every battle has to be to the death
Thank you for your amazing videos and I wish the best for your father and your family ! Thank you so much for improving our experience of RPGs all over the world (French dude here) through your advice. Your the best !
I saw Blightsteel Colossus in the thumbnail, and I'm convinced that it could be an AMAZING boss fight. An enormous magical robot that just marches forward, completely desecrating the land around it with it's ability to Infect. Good lord. 🥴
I recently ran a encounter that on paper, was like 2 times beyond deadly. There was a Frost giant, 6 winter wolves, 12 skeletons and a water elemental all against 4 level 9 PC's, (Some of the enemies came their because it was their fault), in the end, they all got taken down to 12 - 15 HP and nearly died, and it was a epic encounter.
Years ago in a 3e D&D game me and the rest of the party were tasked with eliminating a goblin hoard of over 100 goblins. I think we were level 2 or 3. We knew what we were up against and I think the DM thought we'd go about this by taking them on one small group at a time. This is not what we did. What we did was spy on them to discover their camp in the woods, we arranged for some small catapults to fire into their camp to convince them that a Kingdom army had come to wipe them out. When they came to meet the 'army' and only saw us 6 they laughed and charged us as we had planned. They fell into our pit traps before they could reach us. Behind them we lit a wall of fire so there was no escape. Only a few made it over their impaled comrades and actually attempted to attack us and they were cut down with ease. Soon enough they were all dead. None of us took any damage in that encounter :)
I participated in an encounter once where our party’s level 5 barbarian killed an entire beholder with only the help of another level 5 NPC. He even got disintegrated at the beginning of the encounter and barely survived on 1 health. Admittedly, he used some of the most creative flavortext iv’e ever heard to get the beholder down. By exploiting some non-written weaknesses, he was able to essentially cripple the beholder and pick away at its massive health pool.
One of my most memorable encounters came in 2nd Edition at the typical tavern start of a campaign. 7 or 8 level 1 players were looking for quests to undertake, and I offered options organically (not considering their level as a matter of course). One of those options - of course the one the party latched onto - was a great wyrm red dragon taking over a dwarven hold. I had to place the encounter a continent away to allow them some time to level en route, and they spent most of the time researching their foe and getting the necessary magic to best him. They were averaging level 7 when they got there, but all of them were under the effects of a scroll of protection against fire, and had learned how to use the dragon's rage against him. We lost about half of the party, but they emerged victorious!
One of my favorite tricks is for the players to stumble upon enemies that are quarreling with each other. Then, if the players are smart (which mine thankfully are), they can change one massive encounter into two or three smaller ones, but they still feel like they took down one massive challenge.
I've had a fun one in my home brew game where they faced a Bugbear Ancestral Barbarian who whenever they kill him, he takes over the body of one of his followers, originally a get to level 5 encounter, now a reoccurring enemy
DALLAS MAVERICKS Championship Pic was surreptitiously flashed after the Popovich rant - GENIUS!! It was shades of Fight Club up in here, you proud Matroplexian... :-)
I started DMing a homebrewed hex-crawl a little over a year ago. In one of the regions the players were exploring, the entire forest was dying. Through a successful arcana check, they learned that the forest was being subjected to negative energy. Which, in 5e, isn't a normal damage type like in Pathfinder or other fantasy rpgs. So through investigation they found where the negative plane had been accessed. Then, I described a creature of pure darkness standing above the dead tree-line about a mile away (they had a scout in the trees keeping an eye out). Even from the distance they were at, they were starting to take a couple necrotic damage every minute or so as it approached. They knew this thing was more powerful than anything they had seen before (they were level 5 and this was a nightwalker, CR 20) But even with the knowledge that the creature had killed this entire forest and it was hurting them from a mile away, they decided to stand and fight. Not a smart idea, but I wasn't about to deus ex machina them, they made the decision. Anyway, they lure it back into the mausoleum where the negative plane entrance was. It was legit almost one-shotting the druid through his wild-shape, but the rogue had the idea to lasso its arm and throw the other end of the rope into the portal into the negative plane. Now, in the book, the Nightwalker is immune to being grappled so I guess I bent the rules here kind of, but I ruled that the rope would start to pull it slowly towards the portal because the negative plane wants the creature back. I was making strength saves for the creature to not move, and it was still attacking. After the entire party lassoed different parts of the creature, it was pulled indefinitely towards the portal and was reabsorbed. They had dealt a total of 12 un-mitigated damage to it, but they still defeat it. 2 party members died and one had their max hp permanently reduced by 20, but they did it. Really awesome to run for that group. Don't know if they still think about it, but it was one of my favorite dm memories.
I did this once by accident. The party was level 1 and their first quest was to talk a Manticore (CR2) into leaving an area alone. Instead the party rolled amazing stealth checks, tackled and grappled the Manticore and then ranged it to death. I was super impressed. At level 3 I did it again on purpose. I put them up against a Invisible Stalker (CR6), it was going to be a repeat fight as the Stalker would disengage after a couple of rounds. They found what the Stalker was after, put it in a cave full of smoke, and surrounded the outside of the cave in flour and all held attacks. As soon as there was a footprint in the flour they exploded damage on it, trapped it in the cave (the smoke moved around the Invisible Stalker making it visible) and just unloaded on it. I've never seen them so satisfied from a session
The most insane combat I've fought in is against the BBEG who had a massive mechanical dragon, had three legendary actions *per round* AND a liar action that hit everything each round.
But of course it was 4 kobolds in a cave that killed 2 of our players.
Hope everything goes well with your family 🙏❣️🙏
Kobolds in the CR number of your party are a nuisance only if you have AOE spells.
Otherwise they are always dangerous.
@@WexMajor82 It is a good thing they only live for 11 days.
My party at the moment is crazy powerful and morally dubious, they killed two ancient silver dragons and an adult gold, they had some help but honestly, they did most of the work. The next session everyone apart from the rogue got dropped by a single beholder alone in a medium-sized room.
@@drewthornley6863 I'm gonna take stab at it and say that the anti-magic eye DID WORK.
That's my experience with beholders anyway.
Unbalancing an encounter correctly gives the party a ton of confidence and sense of accomplishment. I've done it a bunch over the years
My players already got that when I make encounters normally, I feel like I'm not doing it right =. (
There are times when it should be unbalanced in the other way, like if a level 5 party needs to interact with an adult dragon. Combat-wise, they'd be screwed, but a social character could possibly dominate the encounter by handling it in a different way.
@@RJ-1580 you can absolutely get a huge sense of accomplishment from a well balanced encounter, do not get me wrong! If your players are enjoying and getting that from an even encounter then you're killing it.
You could also through 8 goblins against a level 5 party of 4 to give them an easy encounter to highlight the more difficult ones
@@deanholderde5959 Absolutely, throwing an encounter that used to be a challenge a few levels ago at a higher level party really helps demonstrate how far they've come with their abilities when they steam-roll it.
My wife just started DMing and did this to us at our last session. We are level 6 and she had us fight 7 redcaps. Thats a CR 21 encounter! She did alot of these suggestions as we could have run away, didnt, they scattered into the forest then came back in waves. We ended up using every spell slot and power we had but no one died and we defeated them. That will certianly be a memorable session. I just hope we get to rest or the next encounter with angry squirrels will kill us.
Important question; do you play with experience? Because that's a LOT of experience.
That's actually a CR 14 encounter for a 4 player party, CR12 for a 6 Player group. You don't multiply the CR you multiply the XP based on the Number of Monsters Multiplier. 1 Monster is x1 while 2 is only 1.5, 7 is 2.5. So you have 7 Redcaps at 700XP each which is 4,900 multiplied by 2.5, which gives you 12,250XP which falls between Challenge rating 14 and 15 assuming 4 player party. A 21 CR would be 33,000XP to 40,999XP Or 14 Redcaps... and one goblin. 15 Redcaps would take it over to 22 and without the goblin it doesn't reach 21 by a small amount.
Also- Sorry for being that guy! Your comment is still totally relevant and a good thing to read, Just wanted to make sure people knew that CR is a bit more complicated than multiplying CRs, it also matters if you are doing XP over Milestones for levels.
@@SageSaga25 Good to know! I've been DMing for a long time and have not been doing that correctly in my head. Though I generally run published campaigns and always thought the CR system was a bit broken. My wife on the other hand stepped out big, this is her first time DMing and she wrote a from scratch campaign set in Farun. I'm pretty proud of her if you cant tell. I'll have to apologize for the slight freak out I had about the CR21 I thought it was, LOL I mean CR 14 is still pretty high though but still LOL.
@@clc02f it would also help us to specify how many players there are.
That's far off a CR 21 and I'd dare say that I throw worse stuff at my players. The problem with that encounter is that once players hit lvl 6 they have big AOE spells like Spirit guardians, fireballs etc and if those CR3 bags of 45 HP group up for even the slightest bit they just pop to 3/4 big lvl 3 spells
"That allows them to use their character in the way they envisioned when they created them." This is amazing advice. Many times have I played D&D and felt like the abjuration wizard I made never had a good chance to stick glyphs on something, or my ranger always got stuck in melee range. As a DM, my current party likes to kill circle everything at melee range, so the thought of throwing a troll at them seems like a great way to make things interesting. I'll definitely start making encounters with your advice.
I played a druid many years ago, and I could finally transform into a man eating tree but we never had encounters with man size humanoids for me to use that wild shape ability. So I asked my DM for one.
Give that troll a potion of fire or ice breathing and have a caster cast haste on it. That surround and pound will change a little bit I think lol oh and a casting of grease on the high Dex characters might spice things up as well. Lol
Definitely gotta talk to your DM in those times. I personally put in a LOT of effort into building content for players that want to play a certain role (both inside and outside combat). I really see that as a big part of being a DM in the first place.
I'm reminded of the fight with Cyanwrath at the very beginning of my current Hoard of the Dragon Queen campaign. Our fighter decided to accept his challenge and duel him, despite all of us knowing it probably wouldn't go well. Our DM allowed the rest of us to make attempts to interfere in the fight in ways that wouldn't get the hostages killed, including a lot of taunts and insults aimed at Cyanwrath. With these things getting under his skin and distracting him, he ended up with disadvantage on some key rolls. This led to more taunting for his lack of coordination, and he basically spent the entire fight with disadvantage. He ended up getting tripped, disarmed, and, due to a timely crit, having his entire jaw chopped off. He ended up retreating with single digit HP remaining.
The DM allowing that creative problem solving turned the unbalanced fight into one of the most memorable moments of the campaign so far.
As someone who has DMd a good portion of this module, the entire start of the book is super unbalanced for a party of level ones. It gives such a terrible time crunch right off the bat (giving no chance for a long rest unless the party wants to leave the town to the raiders all night) and even a short rest eats up precious time. And there are like 4-6 encounters your expected to throw at a level 1 group (cultists, Kobolds and the occasional guard drake) all in one in game night, ending with this fight you spoke of, which is the only part the book handled well, suggesting there is little chance to win but giving ways to insure whoever fights hims survival.
Needless to say, make sure you thank your DM for running that game, its a hard one to run, theres alot of altering going on behind that screen to make sure you guys get a fair game instead of the suicide mission it is written as. Sounds like you made it past the worst part tho!
We had something similar in our run of HotDQ, the Dwarf Fighter was sent alone and we were somewhat worried, especially given his player had not managed to hit anything for all 6 or so encounters leading up to that point. Player wasn't present for the session in question, though, and I rolled 2 crits in a row and consistently hit enough to nearly kill Cyanwrath. Was mostly memorable as the most useful Ugni had been the entire campaign.
I was in a Dragon Queen party and our Barbarian ended up just murdering him because of The Dice
@@buttmunchmcnugget328 You're absolutely right about the issues at the start of the campaign. The only change our DM told us he made was putting some ballistas on the castle walls so we could actually do something when the dragon showed up, but it wouldn't surprise me if he made other tweaks for balance as well.
When my group played HOTDQ (my first dnd game ever :D), I barely survived running away from a mass of enemies like maybe 10-12 cultists at the sanctuary place. But I did get to lvl 3, chose champion subclass, and so I decided to go against the half dragon dude and (apparently he was supposed to be a recurring character, sry DM) killed him. Action surge plus 2 crits to finish him off. :) never been that lucky since but it was really cool. Made sure to tell the DM i beheaded the dude because I was always scared enemies coming back to life
9:40 “[CR] definitely skews up, meaning most listed CRs are probably higher than they are. Not counting Klarg the Bugbear, who has probably killed more player characters than any NPC in the history of D&D. You Phandelver DMs know EXACTLY what I’m talking about!”
Having just played Phandelver for the first time this past Sunday where two of the four players (myself included) dropped to Klarg, followed by - no exaggeration - 12 rolls under 10 (two players rolling death saves and the other two rolling Medicine to stabilize) leading to two player deaths, I felt this.
The first time I went through this encounter in a party of 5 only one PC lived to tell the tale, and only due to two separate crits on death saves which held me and one of the other PC's long enough to finish the monster.
(Lost Mines spoilers ahead!)
I dont know what I'm doing wrong (maybe not using the pre-defined characters) but Klarg never killed a single person. Theres usually always a Tank that avoids getting hit by him because his +hit is a bit underwhelming for a "boss".
However, in 3 out of 4 sessions he ended up killing the dwarf. All of the groups allerted him so he had the dwarf hostage, and all of them ignored his threat to drop their weapons or the dwarf is going to die. I might need to add that I specifically say and rule that if the dwards throat is slit, its an insta death. It feels odd to have him cut the dwarves throat just to then have someone healing-word him up a few seconds later.
@@Gegi1992 That's a good ruling, the only thing they should be able to do at that point would be Revivify
What? Klarg is a total pussycat, if you hit him with a charm spell, right Taako.
i wish that happened but my players split the party before they just crit nat 20 on all there first attacks rolled higher than average damage and killed him round 2 of combat after they guerilla war style attacked the cave and killed a few goblins before retreating repeatedly, I doubled the number of goblins inside the cave and they still managed to kill them all.
Cody, I have been playing since 79'. One of the greatest weaknesses I have found with 5e is the notion of balanced encounters. They can really suck the life out of the game, making it feel safe and risk free. There is nothing like the cycle a player goes through in an unbalanced encounter, from the despair of realizing that you probably aren't going to make it out of this one alive, to the determination to die well and take as many with you as you can, to that glimmer of hope that begins to form when you start to think that maybe, just maybe, you might make it out of this alive, to the exhilaration of actually surviving the encounter by the skin of your teeth.
The best way I know to create unbalanced encounters for the players, is to stop designing the encounters with the PC's in mind. Design the encounters with your world in mind, make them make sense for the world first and foremost. That eliminates most of the problems of balanced encounters because D&D isn't World of Warcraft, the world isn't necessarily level appropriate. There are going to be things out there that your PC's only choice is going to be to flee from. If they choose to fight they will die, and that is okay. Part of being a good player is knowing when you have to get the hell out of Dodge, and knowing when you can stay and fight.
In a campaign I was soloing in last week (2e AD&D based), I ended up in a running fight with nine NPC's because I wandered into a part of a sewer system that wasn't where I was "supposed" to go. Fortunately for me, the DM allowed me to do it, and didn't pull his punches and even though I lost two weapons and accomplished nothing I went in there to do, it was by far the best encounter I have had in the five different campaigns I have played in recently. The encounter was there because it made sense in the overall concept of the city I was in, not because I happened to be playing in the city. It made the city seem far more real. It made it seem alive. And it made it seem like it existed outside of whatever it was I was doing.
There is a reason in 1e AD&D that the first segments of every combat round were: Avoid engagement, Attempt to parley, Await action by other party. It was something that used to be engrained in the game itself, and something WotC lost over time, that sense that you should consider your options every round instead of just continuing to swing a sword over and over again, and the concept that the world existed for itself, not for the PC's.
I am very glad to see you giving folks advice about this because it will make their games much, much better when they stop balancing every encounter to the party, and start allowing the party to encounter things that are seemingly way beyond their ability to survive.
All of this, though, only works if you are actually willing to kill PC's. If you pull your punches doing this, the encounter will be the most phony feeling thing in your game.
Thanks for the video!
I've been doing this from 2e through 5e, and now in a5e. However, I do include warning signs. Indications of serious danger. So the players can choose to go into risky areas, not just stumble upon them.
My father at 65 JUST beat that same cancer...had the most radiation they allow a human being to be treated with. We are big 280 guys about 5'10 in height. He is now 170 pounds and cancer free for three months. The big thing that helps is fat stores cause eating is very very hard on the throat and ensure...lots of ensure, the extra nutrients goes a long way. But the number 1 rule is not to treat him that differently. Talk to him about the good in life and enjoy every moment you have. Good luck to your family.
Highlighting certain character's strength in combat is actually ingenious. I'll definitely be practicing this for our next session.
Two survival stories come to mind. The first was when my group were playing a Warcraft-based campaign. Three out of four of us were on the floor, with only a low-level goblin priest standing against four kobolds slinging rocks at us from a distance. The priest shoved one off of the narrow bridge we were on and healed our troll berserker back to barely standing. After dodging three stones, he managed to throw an axe at one, killing it. The next turn, the kobolds missed both their attacks on the troll, resulting in another dead kobold. The last kobold managed to land a critical on our priest, knocking her unconscious. The berserker then moved to the last remaining kobold and roared menacingly at the little rodent, forcing him into submission. We then kept the kobold and named him Larry. A couple sessions later, he fell off a ledge into a boiling lake of lava because he saw his own shadow.
The second was when my character, a former ship captain who was now in shackles applied by his own shipmates, struck a game-changing deal with Helya (Warcraft's version of the Viking Goddess Hel) to retake his ship in turn for his eternal servitude. My character's power grew immense very rapidly. He burst out of his manacles, ripped the door from the fixtures, grabbed an iron shard that flew off of the door and viciously killed all that were in his path. Upon coming face to face with his unfaithful first mate, my character wore a wicked grin, the blood of his ex-shipmates dripping from his hands. The first mate began to speak when my character drove the iron shard through the center of his left eye and out the back of his skull, reclaiming the ship once more. Helya summoned a crew of dead sailors for her new ship captain and they sailed off, leaving the rest of the party (They were off, buying supplies from a nearby town). After all this happened, the dm and I agreed to make a new character, as the captain was now going to be the main villain of the campaign.
6:57 - Back in 2.5 or maybe it was 3.0, I had a Lasher who was all about whip+trip, whip+trip, whip+trip. Our DM responded by ensuring every mob we encountered in combat was a floating undead or had 4+ legs. If you want to really take the wind out of someone's sails, well, that's how to do it. =P
My first campaign with high school friends was The dragon of ice spire peak, the next was a war setting campaign, and when it was my turn to DM I wanted to focus more on the role playing and less of the fighting so majority of my encounters are difficult but that’s to emphasize the stealth and persuading your way out of combat. Last session I threw 3 air elementals at a lvl 4 party of 2 rogues, a monk, a bard, and a barbarian. By the end of it the air genasi bard had convinced the air elementals to wrestle him and everyone was having a great time while the rogues stole everything not bolted down or on fire. Long story short I think unbalanced encounters are useful when you want to try and direct the party away from being murder hobos all the time.
Non-combat options are only worth as much as the potential losses from taking on a tough combat encounter. If the fight isn't tough, why bother avoiding it? Knowing you probably couldn't take on a fight without major losses makes avoiding it worthwhile.
I've loved unbalanced encounters since a party of 3rd level adventurers got trapped in a lift with a clay golem.
Please explain this. It sounds hilarious
The year was 2008. Barack Obama was still a senator, earnestly campaigning against Clinton in the primary, and I was a young PoliSci undergrad. We had a party of five, a druid, barbarian, cleric, warlock, and my humble scout. Two of our number were missing due to midterms. The barbarian, druid and I forged ahead without our comrades - more the fool us, we were shipwrecked and stranded on a deserted island. Interpid in the face of the unknown, we strode forth into the wilderness, heading for the volcanic cone of the island's mountain. There, we discovered the ruins of a dwarven city, full of faded splendor and the hope of treasure. We found a lift to the bottom and smirked at our good fortune. As we entered, the doors sealed behind us and a mild, magically automated voice asked us for a passcode.
Two rounds later, the golem is hostile and engaged in melee with the barbarian, our only party member with a chance of overcoming the golem's DR. The druid panicked and set floor aflame, preventing her from getting to the barbarian to provide heals, and I'm using my rope and grapple in a crude imitation of the Battle of Hoth. Eventually, we bring the servitor down, realizing too late that the barbarian is only up due to temp HP and as his rage ends, so too does his life. I, and our druid are stuck alone in a small stone box, the lingering flames consuming the last of our oxygen...
@@unfortunatesun, *cries a single manly tear* that barbarian was a true Bro. May the Halls of Valhalla welcome him with bottomless booze and battle...
That was well-narrated.
> Subtle trick to unbalance encounters
> Blightsteel Colossus in the thumbnail
stopped me right on my tracks when I saw that. brb going to homebrew something real fast.
That is the Blightsteel Colossus. Probably even more terrifying.
Blightsteel Colossus:
Infinite HP
AC30, but that's irrelevant
"Well bois, I hope you have your banishment spells ready to send this fella back to New Phyrexia!"
"But man, we're level 6!"
🤷♂️
@@Niksorus more like DC 15 con save or have failed a death saving throw
@@Niksorus *immune to all damage
As someone who is trying to set up a new phyrexia campaign I really wanna throw this guy in there as a big boss monster
Sorry to hear that about ur dad, hope he gets better soon.
Wishing the best for your dad -- please feel free to keep us updated on how he's doing / his recovery!
My players (and sometimes not even my players, a DM who hears about the encounters) constantly whine about my encounters being "deadly" because they think the CR system is good. Whenever I say "guys, I'm literally putting you up against enemies that I've reviewed for your level, making sure these encounters aren't TPKs" they don't seem to take notice. So I'm gonna show them how bad CR is calculated, so I made a character with immunity to blindness and deafness, most senses, legendary resistance and spellcasting. His CR is 8.
Yep, CR calculation really doesn't count for some important stuff. I watched a sage advice once and Jeremy Crawford said that they create official monsters using a sheet with a lot more data on it. The CR calculation shown on DMG and XGtE are rough simplifications of the original sheet.
Like almost everyone else, I also tend to tweak what I get from the CR results but I really don't understand why people think of it so badly. I mean, it is not perfect but it is a starting point and I NEVER seen anyone presenting a better option that is not a poor variation of the same calculation done there (usually based on potential total damage or HP of the monsters). And if you spare 2 min thinking about how the real calculation should be, you'd soon realize we need a big spreadsheet with scores and modifiers for a lot of things, including terrain features, relative starting locations, dynamic features, etc. My bet is that if we had something like it available, we would not use it until it was programmed in way that would probably become a detriment to the imaginative part of the game.
You say you reviewed your encounter just to make sure it is not a TPK and for sure I believe that although I didn't see any data. But forcing a monster creation using the weak points everyone knows from CR calculation just to prove your point is a little bit concerning. I mean, you should think about it instead of implementing this as a punishment.
I made recently a mini boss that on paper he is cr 6 but he has an ability that can give a lot of disadvantages on the party, broken bones to be more exact and I spoke with one of my DM friend and he said that this thing is just good for a TPK
Just make an Easy encounter for their level, consisting only from Shadows and Intellect Devourers. Works best at higher levels. After inevitable TPK show them CR calculations and the literal pages of MM.
Edit: that more fair and obvious, because that demonstrates a mistake everyone can and regularly do make with CR - found out the hard way. Six 1/2 CR Shadows looked like a nice encounter for mid-level party, all numbers lined up. You know what happened.
OK, some misconceptions, I have backup plans for if they get bad rolls. THIS IS NOT MEANT TO TPK. It's only to show them how dumb CR can be, some deadly encounters can be easy if they're weak to the character's strengths and some medium encounters are very challenging, my players will be fine.
@@agustdgames3120 You won't prove anything about the CR system unfortunately, you'll only show what happens when your group (and other DMs, it seems) give you honest and meaningful feedback that may hurt your ego. Seriously, maybe they are tired of your "backup plans" by now. When a lot of people are saying the same thing about your style, you should take that into consideration. Now, I already agreed that the CR system is problematic but I disagree that it is dumb. As I asked earlier, do you have a better way to prepare your encounters difficulty that is not an indirect approach of the current method from the book? If you do, please share with us mortals.
Your players may be fine by the end, but I find your approach a detriment to the game as it will only create a bad experience and probably spread the wrong conclusions.
As a final note, I'll say that most of the things you say are dumb about the calculation have special instructions in the DMG about the care you should take when using it and how it may lead to unexpected results. So having this "by the book" approach but ignoring the parts that actually force you to use reasoning and critical thinking is a cheap shot. As I said, you are not proving anything.
My tip: As the players often build the party to compensate each other weaknesses, especially min/maxers, do the same.
Put on a tanky monster with a strong ranged one, 1 or 2 spellcasters and some way to heal them. Low CR encounters or equal CR becomes really hard, and they dont feel cheated this way because they are doin exactly that already
In Deadlands, at least, they say the deadliest enemy is another well balanced Deadlands posse.
In this corner, six level 8 characters! And FIGHTING out of the red corner, a bone claw, a troll, a stone golem, a necromancer, and 1,300 of his undead horde!
Yeah, our cleric was a busy man.
1 time I almost did a tpk was when one of my players decided to say to a chain up, adult ancient black dragon “guess what idiot we’re gonna kill you later”. I look the party in they eyes and whisper, roll initiative. Truly one of my favourite things to happen in a DnD game. (The escaped through a portal btw)
We were playing Lost Mines of Phandelver, and at lvl 4 we found Venomfang away from his lair. At some point it wanted to bail, but we tried to deceive it, offering it some gold and allowing it to plan killing me off since I certainly stood no chance of survival if I went to deliver the gold. Or so it thought.
The dragon stood close enough, I (the rogue) readied my action to throw a dagger at it when I saw it open its mouth to use its breath weapon on me, and at the same time so did the rest of the party: the barbarian yeeted a javelin at it, the 2 druids used their most powerful spells on it, and the beast fell.
I played this and killed the dragon at level 3, we managed to escape the breath by hiding in the side room. Luckily we had a scroll of fireball.
Your DM played a cunning and crafty dragon like a goblin lol
@@kyleweir689 I may have been describing it a bit weird, but we deceived it that it had the upper hand and that we were taking a trade we thought was better for us but looked unfavorable
@@JohnSmith-dr5zn also, the breath weapon should have happened first, then all your readied attacks. I have a hard time believing 2 druids, a barbarian throwing a javelin and a rogue throwing a knife (no sneak attack, likely) would deal over 130 damage at Level 4, too.
@@kyleweir689 My group of level 3 killed 3 frost giants in 2 rounds, (their total health combined was 362) it's not that unbelievable if you get some lucky roles and have minmaxers.
I’m sorry to hear about your dad. Best wishes to him!! I hope his treatment goes well.
**SPOILERS** Oh man. I'll try to keep this short. We had the most amazing, harrowing and unexpected encounter last week. I am DMing The Lost Mine of Phandelver for my group and they have had a few close calls so far (Stonehill Inn being burned to the ground by the remaining Redbrands as they ambushed the PCs while they slept) and a couple of others. But the best was at the Old Owl Well. I had set the wizard at lvl 7, not expecting the PCs to get in a battle with him, but for him to be powerful enough to make them think twice. It was supposed to be an interesting parleying encounter. They were fighting the zombies and he came out of his tent demanding to know what was going on. He even paused his zombies' attacks for a turn so they could talk about it, but the PCs were like..."nope - Undead must be destroyed!" so they kept attacking. He warned them to stop. They didn't. He blasted off some magic missiles to get their attention. They moved to attack him, but he backs off and drops a fireball, taking down 2 PCs and severely wounding the others. The downed PCs are revived and a couple of the PCs are chasing the mage as he continues to back off. He hits them with ANOTHER fireball, dropping most of them again, except for the ones who arrive late who just got healed from the last fireball. He taunts them and calls for their surrender. They surrender. The wizard casts detect magic and demands their magic items and weapons be put down in front of him. He takes the magic sword and shield and begins burning their weapons with magic fire. To me, I was thinking that they had learned their lesson and they would have to lose a couple of magic items as part of that lesson, but they would survive.
Our Tabaxi rogue...thinking that the wizard was just going to kill them all anyway made a desperate sacrifice in some mad hope to save her friends or something, lunged at the wizard with her clawed hand and scratched his face. He scoffed and tried to hit her with a vampiric touch to finish her off in a flashy way, but he missed. She attacked again, and missed, but the wizard could see that her comrades were getting to their feet and rushing at him, he decided to back up to get some room to finish them all off with a last fireball. He wasn't worried about her little scratchy opportunity attack. She rolled a Crit. She rolled for affect and she got the one result I think that she needed out of all the possible results. "Target has their eyes ruined and is blinded permanently". I was gobsmacked. I was reluctantly willing to TPK my group because they just wouldn't give up, but they completely turned it around. I described how her claws ripped across the wizards face, cutting deeply and ripping his eyes out, tearing his nose off to one side and leaving his face in gory ruin. He staggered back roughly in the direction he was heading, but did a tight half circle before dropping to his knees screaming like they had never heard before. The tank rushed up. The Ranger shot him in the side with an arrow. Our hero, the tabaxi rogue, she limped up to him and casually slid her rapier through the back of his neck, through his spinal cord, and out through the front of his throat. He could barely turn his head because of the blade, but he twisted slightly, his gory face dripping meat and blood, and formed a sort of gurgling snarl of defiance. She slipped her blade out and he toppled to his side on the ground, blood pooling beneath his fresh corpse.
The whole group was erupting in excitement and congratulations! We lost the next twenty minutes to adrenaline as everyone talked over each other, so excited about what had just happened. I was right there with them as well. It's those moments that make this game so amazing. Our group will be talking about that amazing turn of events for years to come. That was her "Laura Bailey - Cupcake Moment!" I was so proud of her at that moment. SOrry it was so long. I'm still so stoked about it.
Yes I’ve been doing unbalanced encounters for awhile now. They have fun with a tough battle. Giants with levels in classes was their last tough battle, it was fun all around.
Good video
I usually run most monsters/bosses with dips in classes. It gives the players that feeling of oh shit, this is something my class can do. 'Cause as a DM you kinda get to power build whatever you really want provided it adds to the story :P
Did they have either levels in fighter or in Cleric of Annam?
Evan Nibbe fighter yes
Heh, I had an opposite. I was a 4th level ranger doing a solo session in a larger game, so what happened was DM made an encounter with 10 cr 1/2 thugs, each had a health pool equivalent to my own. It was a meet on a pier, so I was "trapped" the hilarious bit was I used jump to get 1 pier over and booked it, blowing my whistle the whole way. I knew it was a trap. My character knew it was a trap, but he knew he needed probable cause. Took out four thugs along the way. The rest were taken out by a volley from the Church's Inquisition. Now I got the Church seeking out a criminal organization, with the head set up as another. I got lucky as I lied to the head of the Inquisitors twice to set things up. I needed the other "criminal boss" to be full in adherence to my needs. His influence goes outside the city and he is an excellent artificer.
As far as factions go theres the church, the gheistejäger guild, chimeara cult, drakon, nicholai, highlander mercenary forces, the occupying Commonwealth military, and city guard. So far I have been neutral overall with negatives in Drakon. The church holds some positive s and I have their ear, the city guard has received council and a slight positive outlook, common wealth is still overall neutral. Highlanders are neutral although a member of the organization is part of the party, nicholai has favor as I have works jobs for him and am framing drakon for the bounty on his head. May have to kill him for half the full bounty. The guild and I don't get on too well they see my profession as an affront to their own as they are organized and mine is a family tradition dating back to before the Roman Empire. Hereditary ability. As for the cult, i was hired by the church to find them and that was backed up by nicholai, church may get credit with some thanks to my contribution. Head of Inquisition may be promoted to Bishop, he is ambitious.
An important note: the damage output of a monster is not always analogous to the number of attacks it can make, but rather how many pcs it can hurt in a round. AOE attacks hurt a lot of pcs, and effects like a Salamanders heated body hurt anyone that attacks them in melee. I'd say definitely check out the Remoraze (I think I spelled that wrong) if you want a good example of a monster that hurts a lot if pcs while only having one attack.
Damage resistances and immunities should be considered along with number of attacks. For example, a fireball is no good against fire giants and magmins
Klarg the Bugbear: I tripled his difficulty; my players still absolutely obliterated him. He was killed by a dwarf landing on him. I miss Klarg.
As a DM I took your suggestion to give the party a Rod of Immortality. It was a super blast, I sent them into a prison that held a menagerie of magnificent monsters from all different backgrounds. They loved it. They expended all charges by the 5th of 8 prisons.
Just ran Phandelver, and yes, Klarg absolutely DESTROYED one of my players! Nothing like a player death on first session!
I liked the tip from another youtuber to give the players an artifact with a 1 time use of aid, for that fight, because he hits like a truck. Somehow we killed him with 2 players (paladin and cleric) but the cleric went down in 1 hit.
I played that fight twice, no players even went down, Just because the high ac pc dodged the entire fight
my players absolutely DESTROYED klarg man. they went to his room by the hole in the floor and used a charm spell so that they could get prepared before(they abuse A LOT the prepare action) and finished his fight in like two or three rounds
My first time as D&D DM I critted with Klarg. It was brutal...
My party took out klarg in like, two rounds. Admittedly the party was just three barbarians but still, the bugbear was a pushover by our standards.
A ranger and a wizard duo for my example
Probably one of the best combats Ive had was a series of encounters. It featured the ice cold room where you die if you dont find the wall (that bit was admitedly not too fun), shortly afterwards we fight a flameskull, The dm tohught this would be the end of us, we had taken a lot of damage from the cold room. He activated fireball, and I cast counterspell. We won, then we went into another room (trying to find shelter from the flameskull which would come back in an hour), we found ourselfelves a ghost encounter, we used salt to seperate us from the ghosts to take minimal damage, but our hp was dire. However shortly after this the skull was back online, The DM had him call out looking for us as we left him in the cold room (not knowing he was immune to cold damage). However we hid and finally we got our rest......
It was scary but one of the best sessions ever had, heart pumping for 3 hrs
I lost an uncle to cancer, it's rough to watch someone go through, but don't give up hope, he's gonna need you, i wish him a quick and full recovery and obligatory thoughts and prayers buddy, stay strong
Does playing Tomb of Horrors count as being subtle?
I ask the same thing for Death "Lets make a lvl 2 party fight loads of shadows, a grick and a shambling mound" House
Yup. Sounds subtle to me
@@_b1ack0ut4 I once had a GM who ran that and had the nerve to say "This is a mostly non-combat campaign" so I made a skill-monkey type Rogue/Bard. Needless to say, that was a party wipe.
@@_b1ack0ut4 did death house recently...resorted to my 4 person party [monk, barb, cleric and paladin] group being nearly tpked by the shadows...as the monk i had to be the tank, damage dealer [because i was a high elf and had the acid splash cantrip which turned out to be the only relyable way to hurt them] and the "healer" as i was the only one that bought healer kits from the previous town...but it was a total slog and ended up with 3 people rolling death saves and me having to alternate between heal checks and attack checks till the fight was over...then getting bitched at for "stealing everyone elses thunder"
Yes
Thanks Cody, you're awesome as always. Huge fan! Long time DM here (running now on Fantasy Grounds--GO FG!!) and I've never thought to play to their strengths in an overbalanced encounter like that. Great tip! Usually I play to their strengths in a "let the players do their cool stuff" encounter, but never one I think they'd have trouble with.
I generally like to unbalance encounters when my party has a strong NPC either as a guide or someone they picked up (mercenary maybe?). My groups are not always on their A-game and sometimes the odds just aren't ever in their favor. The 'uber-npc' is there not to win the fight for them, but to help pick up the slack in these cases.
I recently ran a dungeon of light/dark with light switches and portals. The portals only activated in the dark, light switches far away they have to find, and undead arise in the dark to attack - kind of thing. Beefy war-cleric leader of the local town (Helm's Hold) joined the party to help them route the evil. His abilities pretty much ranged from Flamestrike to just cantrips, depending on the enounter. Players felt challenged as there were lots of undead (skeleton hoards, etc), but were often (somehow) able to make it through.
I"ve found in these cases, I've been more comfortable overbalancing encounters with more freedom to throw what I want at them, but now I'm going to try playing to their strengths and see what that yields. Great video!
With the waves concept, I like to reward the party foe getting the drop on the first group and fighting smartly. Maybe have the party make perception and/or tactics checks to notice only one enemy has a horn to call for back up, or maybe an enemy point to the rope going into the rafters and exclaims "sound the alarm" giving the players a chance til recognize that the rope to ring the bells and sound alarm is in one corner of the room, so if the party can control the plot device, they can delay thew reinforcement wave. Our maybe instead of the full garrison, thew reinforcements are just the few guards who were on their coffee break the next room over
You make a lot of good points in this video. You break down something that I've been doing for a while without really noticing: pushing players to their limits by using their strengths in "unbalanced" encounters. That's super satisfying for them to overcome a big challenge, rather that firing up their arses by abusing their weaknesses.
Thanks for the vid!
Watched the announcements just because you were polite enough to include a skip time. Much appreciated.
I ran a campaign for a group of friends and they had been taking quests to clear out goblin, orc, and kobold camps/nests around the region. To their credit, they were doing really good at planning out their strategies and being tactical about the encounters. which was good because even at level 6 they were nearly TPK'd by a crafty group of goblins.
So, while clearing a kobold nest, I dropped a hint that this nest was dug out much bigger than any they had encountered before. No big deal, they push on. I then tell them about large heat vents that are scattered throughout the cavern as they explore. "Neat." they say as they continue. I describe a low, guttural thrum that is coming from down the hallway, accompanied by soft chanting. "That must be the kobolds!" they collectively agreed.
Nope.
It was a sleeping Adult Red Dragon that was being worshiped by the kobolds with a soft, draconic lullaby. Or, at least it was until one of the kobolds cried out at the intruders who just kicked down their door (so to speak).
With one breath attack the dragon KO'd one of the five players on the spot and seriously injured the rest before it called for its minions to pelt them with spears.
The party only survived because they were able to retreat to cover and destroy a set of load bearing columns and collapse the entire chamber over the course of two rounds with a combination of cleaver spells and excellent ranged attack rolls.
They still, 2 years later, talk about the time they killed that "Smug A** Dragon" who laughed at them as they "missed" every shot at him.
Good times.
@9:43 my party knows. The rogue tried to sneak into Klarg’s room and hide in a barrel. Klarg rolled a Crit to hit him, crushing both the barrel and the rogue’s skull.
I ran a party through the original Tomb of Horrors about 20 years back. The entire party fell for the trap that sent them to the entrance without their equipment. What did they do? They grabbed some rocks and a burnt out torch, and went back in for their stuff. They managed to complete the adventure three hours, a bunch a dead snake hides, and some giant skeleton bones later. It was one hell of a game.
First time player/DM running a Lost Mine. We've made it to everything but Tresendar, Thundertree, and Wave Echo, so I've clearly not gained a ton of experiences, but thought I'd share the fun we had with the chain pull method you were discussing.
The party stealthed up and began a clearing of the western edge of Cragmaw Castle when they triggered the collapsing trap in the hall. What followed was one of the most enjoyable encounters to date. The banquet hall emptied towards us, the shaman crew rounded from the north, a group they had tricked into going out to investigate returned, a fleeing goblin rigged a path for the owl bear to come directly to them, and the hobgoblins from the eastern edge rushed over. These were all done in sequence with the group arriving near or momentarily after a group was downed.
The party had a blast. I was going out of my mind tracking all the movement throughout the castle, but nearly the whole place was pulled after their trap triggering, making for a ridiculous XP payout once it was done.
I'm a new DM, and I'm starting with a homebrew campaign because i just love writing. I've found my players love fighting things that should technically be deadly... but I usally try to give them a way to almost clinch the win with a spell or item they have, if they're smart about it. If they don't figure it out, someones gonna die. Two of them already have, once against a young white dragon, and another against a Sea Hag and some minions at lvl 5 and 6.
If you want laughs, throw a few lvl 5+ PCs against swarms of bugs, bats etc.. they're not gonna die, but inevitably when the rolls turn bad, the Role Playing opportunities are gold. One of my PCs is now deathly afraid of spiders, the other now constantly carries honey as an offering to bees hahaha. I LOVE THIS GAME
So far; most extreme and enjoyable combat was when our party accidentally went up against an Ancient White Dragon in its lair and actually managed to kill it after a long dungeon crawl that burned a lot of spell slots (a cleric, a wizard, a paladin, and a rogue were the only party members.)
Honestly, Out of the Abyss's Karazikar was the single hardest D&D foe I've ever fought as a player. Not only is he challenging by default as a beholder, but his lair (coupled with the tweaks to said lair made by our DM) is built to totally screw the PCs over, especially when he opens up by disintegrating the rope bridge they're standing on.
It felt like playing against Blue Black control.
I'm playing through Mines of Phandelver for the first time with a group of friends and the mention of Clarg gave me a good chuckle. Our Kenku Rogue went full bird-mode and scuttled in towards a shiny object in the room and got Clarg'd for double his max health, giving him a true instantaneous death. The DM described it as the Kenku scuttling across the room excitedly and being instantly turned into a cloud of feathers from an unseen blow.
Didn't know about your dad. Sorry to hear that dude. Hope he gets better
Fighting a fire giant in SKT with a party of three at fourth level was awesome! We ended up finding a giant plate of adamantine and rescuing the goblin slaves which led to a rabbit hole of its own.
Hello, new subscriber, love your content I've been DMing for about 4 years and we play 3.5 still. I think some of the most memorable overpowered encounters were
1. An undead campaign where the Party would rely heavily on fire damage to kill undead. I then threw up a Blightborn encounter that negated their biggest strength. They had to really think hard on how to overcome this enemy.
2. In another more homebrew campagn, The party was in an open field facing down a T-Rex. The T-Rex had to charge at the party for 5 rounds. The entire party had the ability to cast long range damage spells ( based on the homebrew )...they didn't do anything and waited for this overwhelming encounter to get to them. 2 of them ended up dying. The 2 that died ended up getting a bit upset at the encounter, and at me. After I explained that they had 5 rounds to cast fireballs at the beast they realized their mistake.
My group fought Venomfang in LMoP except that our DM thought it would be fun to turn him into an adult green dragon, we convinced approx 25 members of the Lionshield Coster to join us in the battle after being told by the townsfolk that we would surely be destroyed. All but 5 of the NPCs died (minion rules and attacking as groups at low damage output) and the Druid who resides in Thundertree was killed. I took a poison breath to the face while attempting to get our forces set up (I was the bait, as the cleric...?) and dropped to 2 hp in the dragons acquired surprise round. Luckily I survived and had the diamonds to revivify the Druid and our party walked away even though most of of our hired help didn’t. The town wasn’t as appreciative of us defeating a dragon as we had initially intended. All in all probably the hardest fight with this set of characters we’ve had yet. (Level 4 at the time as well)
I DM for a group that hit level 20 a couple months ago and still want to play their level 20 characters. They are also Warhammer fans so they agreed to the idea of taking their Spelljammer ship into the Warhammer Fantasy end times to purge demons, undead, dark elves and Skaven. They like this idea because I can give them large apocalyptic battles without breaking the entire Sword Coast. Also with the official monster stat blocks we have an idea of what lesser gods look like and how many HP they have so it makes me feel weird to have a 2,000 hp monster on Faerun after they did 850 damage to Demogorgon in one round.
But on a different world I feel completely fine giving N’Kari 2000 HP, or giving a greater demon of Tzeentch the ability to meta game by switching their stats around so the barbarian with 29 strength and 10 intelligence is going to have 10 strength and 29 intelligence for the next 6d6 rounds. And a spell that takes off their armor and causes 2 arms to grow out of their shoulder blades that attempt to strangle the player to death. They can win a contested strength roll against themself if they drop they weapon or attempt to cut off the arms that are magically enchanted to feel even more pain then a normal arm and to make a con save to not pass out. If they pass out the arms keep strangling them. It’s an 8 character party so someone else can help with cutting off the arms, it’s an 8 person party their action economy will be reduced but fine overall.
Honestly, I'm not at that stage yet. This feels like "advanced tips". Maybe in the future I'll try implementing an unbalanced encounter
One thing at a time, enjoy DMing ;)
as a beginner DM i can say i've done this and succeded and it was really fucking great .....until i tried it again and TPKed the party instantly...... there is no deep analisys or metaphor here.... just saying
Use it when the goal is NOT to slay the monster. Like if they need to retrieve an item from its lair or if they need to rescue someone. In 1st edition D&D, monsters gave so little XP but treasure gave tons, because the monsters were threats to the goal rather than the goal itself.
But also, yeah I'd definitely wait a while to try it lol. My players straight up DONT die or even get close, atleast until I started unbalancing. If your players feel that its challenging as is, or if they just kinda wanna win, dont worry too much about it.
Yay! Welcome to DMing !
It's advanced because it's something you don't have to do, not something that's very hard to do. Just try it out and have some fun with cool encounters. Give the party a few fancy tools like bridges, cliffs, doors or just simply a bag of caltrops and you can pit them against pretty much any small group of high CR enemies.
Just try to avoid any surprise damage like super high damage attacks or spells that put backline characters in the direct line of fire.
Also enemies that have more mobility than the party or spells or abilities that slow the party down.
Or, if you feel particularly evil you can do the exact opposite and have the party fight a bunch of Orcs & Wolves with an Orc Eye of Gruumsh and watch as the Wizard runs into a group of enemies, gets knocked prone and beaten to death in a single round, then chase the party down using the Aggressive trait and Prone condition.
Cody, as always, your advice knocked it out of the park! Thank you for the work you do so we ALL can enjoy this wonderful game that brings us all together.
I love what you said about giving players the chance to highlight skills they want to focus on instead of punishing them for their classes weaknesses
RUclips recommended this to me, and I think it knew my players just blew through an encounter that should’ve creamed them
Yeah, instructions unclear; party member joined bbeg and wiped the rest of party.
You lost me at "basketball"...but got me back at "remorhaz"...only to lose me again with more basketball...to finally bring me back again with "combat patterns." It was a rollercoaster of emotion.
"You turn your players sole strategy INTO their weakness!"
Oh NO. That's EXACTLY what i did. 🤣😨
I'm a new DM, but i'm DMing for players that i previously played with AS a player. So i know them. And their strategies. Really well. And was scratching my head at why MY encounters were so much harder than our previous DM's encounters. And you just explained EVERYTHING i was doing subconsciously! X,D
God have mercy on my players souls, because i don't think i'll consciously remember. X,D Guess i need to go look up Balancing Encounters videos, lmao
this happened just yesterday, it might be a long one so bear with me, my group and i had just been telepoted out of a town that desimated by a litch, may or may not have been our fault, he turned the entire kingdom into undead and made a 30ft tall flesh golem, we saw that just before we got shooed away, we then look for a place to lie low and just in the the horizon we see the mighty goliath kingdom, perfect, my chat is a goliath and a noble, we find ourselves a boat to cross a large body of water into the goliath land, after a while we see a massive shadow beneath the boat with a rope tied to it going above water, its the flash golem pulling the litch, we enter combat, our gunslinger and warlock both with 20 dex run down and take cannon duty, i take control of the boat and the bard and sorcerer take care of the small zombies being spawned near the boat and climbing into it, we deat over 400dmg into that thing with the 5d12 cannons, it brough our boat down to 1hp, when the dm rolled a crit he said, if this is above 40, you're sinking, adds up, 39dmg, the entire party screams, earlier the bard had halted an action and the dm stated that that would either give the player a opportunity attack if they get the change or roll a attack with advantage, with that last crit swip he golem dealt on us the bard got a opportunity attack, hits, frost band rapier, near max dmg, everyone goes silence DM: "how do you wanna do this?" we all scream, after 15 or so rounds of combat where i was literally shaking, the gunslinger and warlock had unload over 400dmg worth with the cannons and its the clumsy stab of the bard that kills that thing, and now we are left to deal with the litch stranded on the water since he doesnt know how to operate the boat and the thing pulling him is dead and frozen underwater, and thats where we stopped, next tuesday we'll resume it and i could not be more hyped
ps: pardon any mistakes on my grammar, im brazilian so, yeah.
8:40 that time when my poor planning made it into a weekly video lol
Another way I unintentionally unbalanced my encounter: unique abilities.
In a Pathfinder game I ran, my players had an encounter in a "quiz" room, where failing knowledge rolls meant encounters would spawn. Well, one of the encounters was a pair of moles that dug in the ground (cr >1), with some other enemies. The other enemies died fairly quickly, but the party just couldn't hit the moles. They would dig to avoid attack of opportunity, had moderately decent AC due to size, and there were turns they were just unattackable. They cut the party's health in half. Luckily, they rolled well for the rest of the questions. So having maneuvers or abilities out of the ordinary, even unique to that game, makes the players have to change strategy. I'm not suggesting giving an entire encounter True Invisibility, but occasionally give your encounters something to surprise the players.
My father beat cancer two years ago, I'm most thankful he did. The feeling of helplessness is miserable.
I wish you the strength to support him and the best of luck to you and your familiy.
Thank you for putting out helpful content, as a brand new DM I'm still anxious if I will be able to do a good enough job, but listening to your tips helps reduce that greatly :)
“I know it’s odd to bring up sports to a D&D audience, but let me put this in terms DMs can understand”. Ouch
Last time I was this early, there were also no dislikes on the video.
As a DM running a pirate themed game, the party survived entering the den of a green dragon after i flagged it as dangerous and they saw it as an opportunity for loot. They got caught, tried to bargain with it, it gave them to the count of 5 to run. Back on the shore, fighter captain almost died. Ship was heavily damaged. Combination of cannonfire + genasi necromancer won the day.
I think one of the best ways that a GM of mine gave us the option of a hyper-deadly encounter. Was giving us a chance to fight an adult Magma dragon (Pathfinder) At level 7. our party after individual online character creation sessions with the DM showed up to table with FOUR Dwarves among the 5 of us.. So when the opportunity to divert from the 'main' objective to liberate a dwarven mountain fortress from the beast, of course we took it. happily quoting our favorite Tolkien poems the whole way. To this day we still talk about that Sea Side mountain stronghold and the One outsider (our Human Paladin) Who's heroic intervention earned a statue in the now freed stronghold's Hall of Heroes.
Me: Yes, this goblin have like 3570 HP
Bumrushing? Bumrushing?!
I'm so offended, unsubbing
Bruh machine broke
A few years ago I ran the first dnd game me and my friends played, and decided to homebrew my systems and content. Near the end of the campaign after escaping a labyrinth they had been forced to enter they had come out in the treasure hold of this big fortress. Two of the three players wanted to explore the fortress as they knew the big bad who owned it was currently destroying their home nation. The other player (who was a large barbarian like character with a bonded dragon) decided he didn't care and he wanted to find his dragon again now that he was finally above ground. This lead into a super long combat encounter with all the pcs as they fled from the city, with pursuers and enemies along the way, climaxing at the wall of the city with a powerful caster and the walls defenses. It ended with the potion creator using 2 of his unique 6 super potions he had a total of like 20 in the 15 session game we played (many more were gained near the end as his character got stronger) to become tiny and escape the battlefield and then to turn a bug into a massive creature that distracted the archers on the wall. This bought time for the other player's dragon (who was finally a proper sized dragon) to arrive and clean up the remainder of the fight. The players all had many moments to stand out and feel in danger, and I definitely consider it one of my best encounters. Lots of great tips in the vid!
my most memorable: My dm did all the things you said NOT to do here... I DESPISED that encounter. It made me NEVER want to do the same idiotic stuff he did.
THANK YOU for making this video. I'm about to run my first campaign. My first time I've ever really truly legitimately DM'd anything.
I once ran a halfcocked throw together for my step-brothers for a few days when I was visiting my Dad's house once with 3.5... it was fun, but we had NO idea what we were doing.
But this will be my first LEGIT DM'ing experience... and I've already homebrewed a world and a sort of mishmashed together a pantheon... and I'm taking Lost Mine of Phandolen for the first 5 levels, and rolling that strait into Storm King's Thunder. I know it's advised to skip section 1 of Storm King's, but I'm going to run them through it anyway as it works thematically and will be a nice warmup/break for my party to ease into Storm King's Thunder's meaty underbelly. :-P
I'm also having to COMPLETELY reskin Lost Mines of Phandolen though, as the guy who DM'd that disaster I described at the top of this post... he's still my friend and he's one of my oarty members... and he ran US through Lost Mines of Phandolen. So me simply telling him and his Wife, who has attention issues and tends to check out of every game after about any half hour of lessened activity, to simply ignore the fact that we're running the same module... would bore the heck out of them and make them BOTH want to check out.
So, I'm renaming and reskinning EVERYTHING in the module. I'm leaving the structure alone, but changing the setting, the town names, the names of the NPC's (both monsters and passive mobs) the name of the region its in... heck I'm even changing the terrain and climate conditions!!! And all through it though... I'm never going to ell them or let on what the name of the town is, until they are leaving it... and then, they'll learn the name of the town is Phandolen. :-P
Of course, I'm ALSO running them through my own version of Ravnica after all that... and it's set a good while in the future, where the world has seen some nasty episodes of violence and Ravnica is not quite the massive globe spanning jewel it used to be. ;-)
Most memorable is what my group just recently went through! I actually rolled a 100 on a magic beans item. We had to end the session there and the DM took us to a pocket dimension where a seemingly benevolent angel with his THREE... BLACK HAIRED.... WOMEN... *can't believe we didn't realize this* disciples had taken up the role of continuing Zariel's attack on Avernus. The chapel was huge and some of us were staying there and having nightmares and not getting long rests... yes... how didn't we realize this. Ends up they were a coven of night hags of course and he was a DEATHPACT angel. We were level 7. And we were getting cocky with our encounters. We had to end up running from them after I called out Nakir - the angel - on his ignorance and realizing he wasn't actually ignorant. Escaped into Avernus to hide, fighting red caps and other crazy creatures while exhausted, waiting to ambush the night hags. Took care of them since the DM realized how to properly unbalance the encounter and he sent them after us instead of following. Almost died when having the drop on them even, but we kept one alive so I could sign a deal for her to lead us back out of the dimension after all this ended. Then went back the next day and took him on. He had a very rare crazy scythe that did even more necrotic damage with his attacks, he flies super fast, doesn't provoke opportunity attacks, etc... We should have died. But he was cocky and stayed down by one of us after hitting over 30 damage in one swipe, the tavern brawler high strength fighter saw the opportunity, somehow created his character to make athletic/grapple checks on par with giants, and got a hold of him and held him down with buff spells and silence spells, and we spent 10 whole rounds beating down on him with him somehow unable to break the grapple. His final words were "You'll all make great champions of Zariel" as he smiled and turned to dust. So that's how we got a super cool cursed scythe and a really powerful angel plotting to enslave us.
This video is honestly super helpful! I was trying to find a way to challenge my players without just hitting them in their weak points! Now I have some ways to reshuffle and challenge my players!
Wow, man. All the best for your Dad. Wish him a fast recovery.
Cody, thanks for this video. Had an unbalanced encounter a few months ago. Level 2 Pathfinder 2e party versus a necromancer and a small contingent of enemies (I think it was 4 zombies, 1 brute, and the boss) and I played the boss as arrogant sending his minions in waves. One of the players attacked him directly and so he came into the fight with all of his minions. This resulted in a TPK that unfortunately killed the campaign because the players got really salty about it. No friendships ruined thankfully, but we haven't played Pathfinder 2e since as I'm the only one that knows the system well enough to DM it. Long story short, your description here matches everything I did to unbalance that encounter in a fair way and makes me feel less guilty about them TPKing after trying to go HAM on an encounter designed to be taken slow. Keep up the solid content. Loving all of it.
it's awesome that i just came across this video in particular. One player wasn't able to make the session while the party went off to run security for a noble soiree. While this was happening they had a prisoner in the basement they had to leave behind. They'd already fought off a rescue party so thought he was safe. After okaying it with the missing player i ran a one on one session in which he had to fight off a second raid. He's level 6 Storm Cleric and went against a knight and 3 guards. No big deal.
As he starts dropping them however their heads split open "alien style" to reveal the intellect devourers hidden within and he winds up in a caster's run-and-gun trying to fight off these hideous spider brains. But he manages to shrug off the devour intellect abilities and sets them up for a wonderful thunderwave at the end in a space too small for the area and blows out his own eardrums. Series of horrifying moments followed by one of complete satisfaction.
Myself and a group of five other people we're going up against a Hill giant way before we were ready, at least that's what I thought until our cleric that uses a slingshot, well he slingshots a bottle of his own piss at the Giant and actually killed it. The whole group erupted in a huge cloud of laughter!
Starting my first campaign soon and just wanted to say your videos have helped me out so much :)
Once upon a time, when I didn't know how action economy worked, I stacked up a bunch of Scarecrows and 2 Will'o'Wisps to challenge my level 6 party. Not only that: I asked the players out of character to opt into this fight bc it was a special Halloween-encounter and I like halloween a lot.
3/6 PCs died that day. I have learned my lesson the hard way. '^^
I think this is a very valuable perspective to have. I played my first ever game of D&D 5e late last year, and while it was a lot of fun, I did sometimes have the suspicion that the DM was picking on our melee-focused party. I was playing a dual-wield Battle Master fighter whose RP flavor was that he preferred to outclass enemies with superior techniques and training. We also had a barbarian and a monk, both focusing exclusively on melee, with only our warlock standing away. So naturally, the first real fight was against a tribe of goblins who would drink a special potion that caused them to explode when killed, dealing hefty damage (a cool idea, in fairness), and then later, a black pudding, whose acid blood would hurt us and permanently damage my swords.
While I had some cool moments of creativity in both encounters, I mostly ended up running around throwing knives that came with my starting equipment. My DEX was high enough that it worked out fine, but I just kept thinking "I did not make this character to run around throwing knives that I only have because the PHB says I do." I would have much preferred the DM attacking my strength, so I can test my mettle against a big troll, or even just an exceptionally skilled swords-creature. I've just begun DMing myself, so I will keep this in mind.
Someone out there is really happy about the random sports references, but it killed it for me.
My group just on Sunday managed to survived a CR15 encounter, they polymorphed the boss into a shark and threw him out the window of the airship they were on. I had advantage on the roll, and rolled 2's for both. Made for an interesting encounter hahaha.
The wizard in my group does similar things. He polymorphed an aboleth into a sea slug while we were in his lair. We put it in a bottle, get all the guards in town together. Then unleash all the arrows, javelins and spells at it.
Another time he polymorphed a fire giant queen into a slug. Brought it to the airship, and tossed her off the ship once we were a few hundred feet up.
I wish you & your dad the best. Stay strong, and let’s all hope this is an easier road than not.
I was brand new to Dungeons and Dragons, and our DM was putting us through Lost Mines of Phandelver. I think it was our second session when we finally explored the cave/dungeon, acquired a few cursed items (thanks to our over-zealous DM) and rescued Sildar after immediately taking out the goblins guarding him. Having never played, my imagination ran wild! Reaching Klarg, I recognized this as a boss fight that had been alluded to by our goblin companion and asked the DM if I could use one of the flasks of oil, a bit of rope, and a tinderbox to create an incendiary "grenade"/bomb. "Sure, you're not proficient in tinkering, but sure". Luckily, another member of the party offered to aid me, and we collectively rolled a NAT 20. I created the incendiary, lobbed it into the room, and effectively one-shotted Klarg!
That’s great news on your dad. Sounds like he caught it in time. Weight going back on is great. Lost my dad to the same type of cancer last October.
I once ran a game in another system that pitted a group of 4 players against a much larger enemy with physical attributes greater than any two of my players combined and a massive, armored carapace that made brawling with it near-suicidal while I set the encounter in a rather confined space underground with just one narrow exit point.
I had created the encounter with two things in mind. First, if the players ran, the monster would pursue them relentlessly with the home field advantage of knowing the underground network. It could "outwit" them by taking shortcuts, if it wasn't able to catch them outright. Second, its flanks were quite vulnerable and only exposed while it was moving or incapacitated. Incapacitating it was nearly impossible, but hammering it with force until it was stunned? Very doable, if handled properly.
My group had the option to fight hit-and-run in the narrow passages (which the players decided to try straight away rather than fight head-on), striking while it moved through intersections to take advantage of its limited ability to move in tight confines, but there was also the option to defeat it in its own lair by baiting it into charging support pillars and then either striking while it was stunned or fleeing once the pillars were destroyed and a cave-in began.
What could have been a TPK in an open space with no hope for even a Pyrrhic victory was transformed into a deadly game of cat and mouse that resulted in a cave-in with a daring last-second escape from the lair.
My players are STILL talking about it a decade later.
I did exactly that in one of my encounters: one big guy for the players to focus on, several smaller ones to distract from the two casters in the back. When the enemies were dwindling, one of the casters shot off a "flare" that signaled that more of their allies could be on their way. When the party heard the rushing of new enemies incoming, I provided a chance for them to continue to fight the new enemies, or a fast escape route in case they felt like they needed a rest. It was a tough fight but they felt satisfied with the result and got some sweet swag out of it.
Another tip I'd like to add: Use non-lethal damage, there's nothing strange in having an intelligent enemy taking the intruding adventurers alive for questioning. Not every battle has to be to the death
Thank you for your amazing videos and I wish the best for your father and your family ! Thank you so much for improving our experience of RPGs all over the world (French dude here) through your advice. Your the best !
Big love to you, your dad and the rest of your family. Glad to hear he's doing as well as can be expected.
I saw Blightsteel Colossus in the thumbnail, and I'm convinced that it could be an AMAZING boss fight. An enormous magical robot that just marches forward, completely desecrating the land around it with it's ability to Infect. Good lord. 🥴
I recently ran a encounter that on paper, was like 2 times beyond deadly. There was a Frost giant, 6 winter wolves, 12 skeletons and a water elemental all against 4 level 9 PC's, (Some of the enemies came their because it was their fault), in the end, they all got taken down to 12 - 15 HP and nearly died, and it was a epic encounter.
Years ago in a 3e D&D game me and the rest of the party were tasked with eliminating a goblin hoard of over 100 goblins. I think we were level 2 or 3.
We knew what we were up against and I think the DM thought we'd go about this by taking them on one small group at a time. This is not what we did. What we did was spy on them to discover their camp in the woods, we arranged for some small catapults to fire into their camp to convince them that a Kingdom army had come to wipe them out. When they came to meet the 'army' and only saw us 6 they laughed and charged us as we had planned. They fell into our pit traps before they could reach us. Behind them we lit a wall of fire so there was no escape. Only a few made it over their impaled comrades and actually attempted to attack us and they were cut down with ease. Soon enough they were all dead.
None of us took any damage in that encounter :)
All the best to you and your dad's family man. May be recover with no complications. In prayers. 💕
I participated in an encounter once where our party’s level 5 barbarian killed an entire beholder with only the help of another level 5 NPC. He even got disintegrated at the beginning of the encounter and barely survived on 1 health. Admittedly, he used some of the most creative flavortext iv’e ever heard to get the beholder down. By exploiting some non-written weaknesses, he was able to essentially cripple the beholder and pick away at its massive health pool.
Best of luck to your dad, and your whole family. I hope he gets better!
One of my most memorable encounters came in 2nd Edition at the typical tavern start of a campaign. 7 or 8 level 1 players were looking for quests to undertake, and I offered options organically (not considering their level as a matter of course). One of those options - of course the one the party latched onto - was a great wyrm red dragon taking over a dwarven hold. I had to place the encounter a continent away to allow them some time to level en route, and they spent most of the time researching their foe and getting the necessary magic to best him.
They were averaging level 7 when they got there, but all of them were under the effects of a scroll of protection against fire, and had learned how to use the dragon's rage against him. We lost about half of the party, but they emerged victorious!
One of my favorite tricks is for the players to stumble upon enemies that are quarreling with each other. Then, if the players are smart (which mine thankfully are), they can change one massive encounter into two or three smaller ones, but they still feel like they took down one massive challenge.
Iv'e been DMing for a little over 25 years and this is an excellent teaching/learning episode. Great vid
I've had a fun one in my home brew game where they faced a Bugbear Ancestral Barbarian who whenever they kill him, he takes over the body of one of his followers, originally a get to level 5 encounter, now a reoccurring enemy
DALLAS MAVERICKS Championship Pic was surreptitiously flashed after the Popovich rant - GENIUS!! It was shades of Fight Club up in here, you proud Matroplexian... :-)
I started DMing a homebrewed hex-crawl a little over a year ago. In one of the regions the players were exploring, the entire forest was dying. Through a successful arcana check, they learned that the forest was being subjected to negative energy. Which, in 5e, isn't a normal damage type like in Pathfinder or other fantasy rpgs. So through investigation they found where the negative plane had been accessed. Then, I described a creature of pure darkness standing above the dead tree-line about a mile away (they had a scout in the trees keeping an eye out). Even from the distance they were at, they were starting to take a couple necrotic damage every minute or so as it approached. They knew this thing was more powerful than anything they had seen before (they were level 5 and this was a nightwalker, CR 20) But even with the knowledge that the creature had killed this entire forest and it was hurting them from a mile away, they decided to stand and fight. Not a smart idea, but I wasn't about to deus ex machina them, they made the decision. Anyway, they lure it back into the mausoleum where the negative plane entrance was. It was legit almost one-shotting the druid through his wild-shape, but the rogue had the idea to lasso its arm and throw the other end of the rope into the portal into the negative plane. Now, in the book, the Nightwalker is immune to being grappled so I guess I bent the rules here kind of, but I ruled that the rope would start to pull it slowly towards the portal because the negative plane wants the creature back. I was making strength saves for the creature to not move, and it was still attacking. After the entire party lassoed different parts of the creature, it was pulled indefinitely towards the portal and was reabsorbed. They had dealt a total of 12 un-mitigated damage to it, but they still defeat it. 2 party members died and one had their max hp permanently reduced by 20, but they did it. Really awesome to run for that group. Don't know if they still think about it, but it was one of my favorite dm memories.
I did this once by accident. The party was level 1 and their first quest was to talk a Manticore (CR2) into leaving an area alone. Instead the party rolled amazing stealth checks, tackled and grappled the Manticore and then ranged it to death. I was super impressed.
At level 3 I did it again on purpose. I put them up against a Invisible Stalker (CR6), it was going to be a repeat fight as the Stalker would disengage after a couple of rounds. They found what the Stalker was after, put it in a cave full of smoke, and surrounded the outside of the cave in flour and all held attacks. As soon as there was a footprint in the flour they exploded damage on it, trapped it in the cave (the smoke moved around the Invisible Stalker making it visible) and just unloaded on it. I've never seen them so satisfied from a session