"No, wait, challenge rating is fine! Just make sure you have 6-8 combat encounters per adventuring day!" Yeah, that's the topic for the "other video" we alluded to in this one.
. . . Except not all encounters are combats, and the DMG just suggests 6-8 encounters with no specification on whether they are combats, puzzles, or negotiations.
i like the idea of a few quarter turn fights and i say quarter turn fights in that one of the charaters can easily dispatch the enemy be it a low lvl quick easy kill gives the party a sense of danger and waking into a dungeon but also not a big empty room with 10 enemies and 4 of those are at the end i would say push the number up to 30 or 40 and throw them at the party more with pacing and maybe give them the feeling of walking into a place of danger with enemies so i would have most of my fights at 0% chance of death with the big fight being closer to 45%. if i wanted to warn the party do not continue throw 10% chance at them and push it up faster before they get themselves in to deep they actually leave
I feel the biggest problem with a "system" is that level progression is bonkers. CR as a guide is a TPK machine in the first few levels and it's a joke after level 7-8. The squishiness of first levels makes every fight an adrenaline rush. I ran LMoP once for a suboptimal, unlucky party and 2 PCs DIED on the first encounter. Without focus firing or any smart move by me. Just non-extreme luck. I agree that it's an illusion. To me, fights should be easy and look hard and that's all on how the DM presents the fight.
@@tomraineofmagigor3499 monk is the weakest class straight up, it cannot keep up with damage at any level even constantly using flurry of blows, go watch treanttemple monks video about it and it explains in no uncertain terms just how bad the monk is (The answer is that the monk is basically a useless class)
I feel like it's important to remember that a "Medium difficulty encounter" is one that doesn't have much chance of downing a party member and basically no chance of actually killing one. It's an encounter in which one or two party members MIGHT need to use healing resources.
The best part about "balancing" encounters will always be when you prepare an easy fight and your party gets their butts kicked for no apparent reason. It's almost the same with "easy" puzzles lol
I had a DM who ran an adventure back in 3.5 that involved a singular opponent, a rune hound across a bridge of ice or crystal. A party of 5, all decent players......and only the squishy wizard survived by the end (myself). Would've had to retreat too, but a pair of back-to-back crits right before fleeing with a pair of Icy Burst arrows finished the hound off, and I was able to stabilize two of the dying players. TLDR, some fights can be surprisingly challenging 😛
Yeah, I had a group of like 8 lvl 3 players fight against an animated carpet and I had multiple players go down before they killed this one CR ½ monster. That one combat that should have been a joke lasted over an hour.
I threw a roper against the party. The simple act of making it a stalactite 30 feet in the air lowers its effective range from 50 to 40 feet, but instead makes it so where when party members break free, they take fall damage. A single CR5 monster devastated my level 7 party of 6, and it didn’t even have minions.
Lol. We've undoubtedly had nights like this : This should be an easy encounter. I rolled a 1. Uh, ok. And I rolled a 1. Um, ok. So I rolled a 3. Wow... so I rolled a nat 20...
I think it's interesting to hear Monty say this, because I've always assumed that Monty had some alternative way of calculating battle difficulty, as I've always thought he is strangely good and bringing battles to a razor's edge without actually killing characters.
I think a lot of that comes from experience as a DM and knowing his players. Like he said his players for Drakkenheim know the game well and he probably plans for that. If you put those encounters to brand new players they would probably die.
@@Xecryo I play a lot with players with different skills and level of knowledge. I often use a lot of tricks like second waves, low health emergency buttons for NPC captains. Things the players can't see until I use them, so I can judge whether or not to use them, and they can make something feel dangerous, because then they're guessing "are there more, can he do it again?"
What I’ve learned from watching Monty in Drakkenheim is that a good DM does not kill the party they just consistently almost kill the party. They keep it tense both narratively and in combat.
I believe the trick to that is having a deep knowledge of tactics, and then making tactical mistakes when predicting that the players are going to fail.
This is the Search For the Holy Grail right here. I’ve got experienced players, so I have to work to keep them guessing and challenged, they always out-perform the curve. I like mine to go a 4th round, to give them that unexpected sense of “They’re STILL up?!” In my mind, I have three types of combat encounters. There’s one where the combat isn’t the point of the encounter., it’s just there to spice up an investigation/exploration part of the campaign. It’s the MacGuffin/book/ clue they need to survive the encounter to find to get them (back?) onto the trail of the next plot point. I want to scuff them up a little bit, maybe knock off about a quarter of their HP. They can’t get their next clue without a little bit of a scuffle, right? Then there’s the “It’s time for a fight for a fight’s sake!” This one’s gotta be a scrap. I want the party to be down to half HP, and down a bunch of resources, but I don’t want it to get deadly, unless the dice totally overrule me. Then there’s a boss fight. I want them out of resources and down to about a quarter-HP by the end of it, with the chance we could lose somebody if they make a tactical error, or the dice decree it. I always think about how an encounter affects the player-characters. They’re the ones playing the game. The monsters themselves are means to that end. Again, I’ve got experienced players. They know when they’ve actually accomplished something by playing well and beating a tough challenge. I’m trying to give them that feeling.
Love your style on this! Sometimes the planned scuffles go hard and sometimes the boss goes easy, but this attitude seems like it would be very rewarding for your players 😮
@@HandsomeDanVacationRentals I don’t even know about that, my friend. I’m the LEAST experienced at my table, and the one with no prior 5e DM experience. I just fell into it as the one with the most time to invest into it, thinking about it, etc. I try to keep it fun, and I’m lucky to have a table with good table dynamics, similar aesthetics, ideas about what’s “fun,” like that.
@@robcaboose510 Thanks, like I replied to the other comment, I’m the least experienced in our group at running 5e (I’d been away since 2e). But I have the time to invest. I have two weeks to prep a 2-1/2 hour session. I want my friends to win, & have fun, but I HAVE to referee a fair game, too. I always roll out in the open, never behind the screen. So, if I’ve driven myself appropriately crazy during the two weeks leading up to the session, I’ll hit the sweet spot on the encounter balance, and if the dice tell them “Tonite ain’t your night,” then that’s how it goes. 🤷🏼♂️
I just ran a very casual "Intro to D&D" 2-part one-shot for some coworkers, and I have to say, doing it your way is something I should have erred on rather than going too easy on them (which I absolutely did). An attitude like yours is something I will strive for in the future, and discussions like this video are a means to doing that with higher understanding.
I really like the way one of you put it when you said it's more about drama than anything else. Fights that feel like you did something awesome to get through them alive, even though in reality it was almost guaranteed you'd walk away unscathed. That gives longevity necessary to the campaign while also making things interesting moment to moment.
Unfortunately the encounters from official modules are generally really poor…I’ve had to rewrite pretty much every encounter for Curse of Strahd. The math here is what I’ve used. Give monsters and players a 55-65% chance to hit or save (looking at AC or saving throw numbers). Give enough effective hit points and damage to last a few rounds (between 2 and 4 depending. Using %chance to hit and such). And then don’t rely on the numbers to make it interesting. Use neat abilities, terrain, puzzles, weaknesses, narrative beats, alternative goals (not just kill them all), and enemy morale to make the encounter interesting. Make sure your monsters have a similar number of actions per round as your party. Make sure you don’t have a monster that can kill a party member in one hit (unless you specifically choose that to be part of it)…yeah. There’s a lot of art to it more than science.
Yeah like the video I do not usually go by CR rating when balancing encounter, I use the DPS of the party vs the Health and DPS of the enemies consider how many attacks it will take to kill on or the other, special abilities included in offense and defense and determine it like that. I think CR is broken because just plopping a monster into the game with no thought of how they will interact with the party is quite useless for so many reasons
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said we want drama in combats. That’s what we’re really after. My mind is now veering off to design encounters that are dramatic but don’t necessarily threaten the party (threats to others they care about, destruction of important things, even fighting a friend that is mind-controlled etc). It’s the possibility of failure that makes a great encounter, but failure can mean more than just the death of party members.
My personal DM experience is that the encounters that get the biggest reactions have moments that LOOK dangerous or dramatic even if they aren't mechanically that difficult. A monster that shrugs off an attack without flinching because it has good defenses comes off as more intimidating than one that hits harder but is easier to hit. An ogre that grapples and picks up a PC is more terrifying than one that does the more optimal trick of just swinging a club. The second monster that breaks invisibility to punch the Wizard from behind. The additional wave of minions that comes in from the flank after a round of fighting. The fact that the entire place is on fire, or the fight is on a very narrow ledge. In these cases, it doesn't matter if the thing's probably going down in a round - the players don't FEEL like everything is under control.
Challenge rating doesn't mean it's a difficult encounter for a party of 4 of the same level. On page 82 of the DMG, there's a table that's a part of a section on how much experience an adventurer can handle at different difficulties. Using 1 monster of a CR of the party level tends to get between a medium and hard encounter. Since I don't run 6-8 encounters a day (the recommendation comes from this section in the book), I tend to run exclusively hard to deadly encounters, which seems to balance out the campaign nicely. The combat obviously requires a little tweaking from just dropping monsters straight from the MM onto an open field, but overall I think the balance is fine.
the real formula is the Daily budget xp, you just can run 2 deadly+ encounters per day... but ppl dont do this, they dont even make 50% of total budget before a long rest and say "oh, 5e it is too easy".
@@claytoncardoso4538 Then maybe the expectations of THAT MANY encounters is unrealistic for the average DnD game. Either way, it means the CR system needs a redesign
@@shawnwolf5961 I don’t think 3-4 encounters (deadly difficulty) is a lot for an adventuring day. They don’t have to be combat, just scenarios that require the PCs to use 1/3 to 1/4 of their resources (or more) to resolve.
@@shawnwolf5961 average d&d game? bro, you can't fix something that people play wrong. The normal thing, since 2e, is to do the whole dungeon with only 1 day's resources. If you play tabletop dnd like it's a baldurs gate pre-patch where you press rest at every corner... the problem is with you, not the system.
@@jefR6875 But the rules aren't 3-4 a day, it's 6-8. Most tables just don't have that much combat in one session. I think WotC assumed people would have a lot more combat (and maybe they did back when 5e first came out, idk). But for OneDND they need to rework their CR system, and I don't think there's any room to objectively disagree on that tbh.
I think "deadly" should mean a decent chance of a TPK. Deadly encounters should be something that the party should try and avoid. Many players have the mindset that every encounter is beatable which easily leads to parties of murderhobos. The world of D&D should be a place that feels like it's a living, breathing world where pissing off the wrong person could get you killed.
Peasant: "Beware, adventurers! The cave on your path hides a terrible fire spitting monster!" Lvl1 Monk: "I enter the cave" DM: "As you approach the cave, a wave of fire coming from the darkness flows through you. You're now a dead pile of ashes, don't bother throwing dice"
@@irenewhitcomb1813 I do partly think it's an issue that 5th edition doesn't really provide many satisfying things outside of combat. Especially if you were playing a martial class like 99% of the time their class features are purely combat focused. Granted you could say that's where the sort of diversity of the party is supposed to come in but a lot of those classes that also have utility skills for things outside of combat are also really good in combat because most of their class features are combat oriented as well.
Deadly in the game just means there's a chance one or more characters might get knocked down to 0 (assuming a party with full resources). If you only want to do a single challenging encounter in a day, you might to do a double-Deadly or maybe even triple-Deadly encounter depending on the party's level and magic items. But if you follow the adventuring day mechanic and put a regular Deadly encounter at the end of the adventure when the party is down on their resources and health, that usually works out just fine.
The problem is, those 'deadly' encounters you want them avoiding are typically the boss encounters they need to defeat to complete their quest. So... if they avoid the deadly encounters, they are avoiding any of the hero questing they are playing the game for. The fights that should be avoided are the ones that nickle and dime the party so they aren't entirely ready for the deadly boss encounter. However, how do you avoid those fights if they stand between you and the boss? My group likes to try to avoid them, but those attempt typically fail due to one person or another in heavy armor. Eh, maybe the quest is to retrieve something or plant something, so it makes sense to avoid the fight. But, if the quest is 'stop this guy before he obliterates the city'... well, the party is going to have to face that fight. What makes sense : "We just saw a dragon fly by. Let's not go poke that." What doesn't make sense : "The dragon just promised to torch every village within 3 days flight before hitting the city... well, we'll we might lose one or two if we face the dragon so let him scorch this kingdom to the ground." If your part seeks out battles outside those required for the quest, throw around some deadly ones for them to wander into. If your players turn murderhobo (solution to everything is combat), then yes give them the opportunity to punish themselves. I mean, if they are attacking citizens in a town then a sting might be made by the city to try and catch the group. On the other hand, if your party is ignoring the quests and wandering off in search of monsters to hunt. Maybe a 'heroes campaign' isn't the right style for the group, and they should just be monster hunters clearing the area around the city. Or if they are attacking civilians, then it should become a villains campaign where they are eventually attacked on sight for approaching a city. (And in that case, part of the problem is that NPCs perish instantly if a PC sneezes on them.) By all means, make a living world where there are deadly encounters everywhere... but the moment those deadly encounters become a threat to a city, it becomes a quest option, and thus the heroes are expected to deal with it. Unless, you have upfront told your players that a lot of things will happen and they aren't expected to resolve much, if any of them. They aren't the heroes saving the world, they're just above average citizens trying to survive their day to day lives. But you also need to be ready for the consequences of having a dragon siege Neverwinter for a year, since no one is able to fight it... what with there being no heroes. And also be ready for them never venturing far from the city since they'll probably lose one or two people just traveling to one of the villages... if the villages are still even there.
It would be a good idea to read the definition of CR from the DMG for context. I was surprised when I read it. CR means it is easy for a well-rested party of the corresponding level.
Great watching this after chatting to you guys at PAX Unplugged! Fantastic stuff, definitely want to do something like this for my group as we have 5 players, 18th level characters, major magic items AND a dedicated healer who can output a LOT of healing. Very much proves a lot of theories and gut feelings I've had over many years of DMing. VERY good video! Thanks guys! Edit: Also, interesting how this related to the info from the core rules that assumes a party is fighting 8-10 encounters PER LONG REST. I know streamed games are different (3 hours, can't have 6 sessions in a row of combat it's too dull) but I don't think I've ever played in private games that have 8-10 encounters per long rest (and yeah I know encounters doesn't always mean combat encounter, but encounter = loss of resources/threat to the party).
Damn and I thought getting the players to do 4-5 in one day was hard. Getting them to do more than 5 encounters before a long rest seems very difficult.
@@TheJerbol It's very hard to tell from the rules if the assumed 10 encounters per long rest is 2 combats and 8 traps/social/puzzle encounters or 5 combats and 5 other encounters, or mainly combat encounters
This would be an amazing tool if it was a spreadsheet with all the MM monsters data in it. Where you could fill out HP, and damage output and it would spit out a list of monsters that met the parameters within a margin of error.
It’s been really fun to see how after they made a book they started to think a lot more critically about game design. It’s been fun to watch! Writing that book really taught them a lot! It’s hard to know where your knowledge gaps are until you’ve had outside input like you would get creating a book.
Nah. It is well presented, but I assume anyone giving the PHB and DMG a casual read will realise this. I know everyone in my group did. We consider CR a joke. But then most of the people I play with have a background in maths and physics, so maybe if you have a group of theatre trained actors, they will not.
@@rogerwilco2 yeah, so do I. What’s your point about math backgrounds? It still takes time to do all the math to present this. It’s not a 4 minute process. Of course we all already knew the challenge rating system was garbage. The community has been bitching about it for awhile. But it was nice to see some actual numbers that most of us simply have no time for, presented well, and demonstrating just how bad off it actually is.
@@johnsmith-fy8jo 1d4 + spell casting isn't that meaningful. So much so that healing word is used only to bring dead people back to the combat, but it isn't used as a mean of reseting the party hp between fights
It doesn't help that most of the monsters themselves don't follow the rules of challenge rating. Take the ballgura my favorit punching bag for Cr and the guy has the same hit points as a Cr one creature. Without his reckless attack he also wouldn't ever hit the broadside of a barn. Yet he is Cr 5 which is higher than a banshee, and a few other monsters. He is less stronger than a Cr 2 sea hag or Cr 3 green hag. His resistance helps against spells except his saving throws and stats are so bad they are near garenteed to succeed anyway while counting his magic resistance. Dude is less intelligent than dumb brute monsters like ogres. He showcases a bunch if interesting in isolation mechanics but fails on every front while being an easy showcase of why Cr makes no sense.
I don't think it's the core of the issue, but it does add to the problem a lot. I think the core of the CR problem is that a lot of encounters are not decided by doing hit point damage, so DPR, AC and hit points should not be the focus of CR calculations.
When played optional, assuming a wisdom of is enough understanding for utilizing basic tactics, a Barlgura cr comes from being effective with its ambush tactics. 5e description is horrible at describing their tactics, having two spells that let them walk towards the party, another to create diversions, and another to prevent movement in a area. They get deadly in Corrdinated groups or surprise one-on-multiples of one. If not playing this way a Barlgura false onto a squishy cr 3. Do find demons damage resistant ably earns is money against blaster spellcasters that don’t understand the concept of diversity spell damage.
The important thing you completely missed, is that with multiple bad guys in an encounter to beef up the enemy hit points, they will deal less damage to the players as combat rounds pass due to monster death. So if they're doing 70 damage, but a third of the monsters are killed at the end of the first round, now they're doing closer to 46 damage. The third round the monsters might only do another 23 damage.
One thing to account with the CR is that a lot of the assumptions made are based on a 6 encounter advanturing day. I've never met a table that plays 6 encounter per adventuring day.
I don't think it's the core of the issue, but it does add to the problem a lot. I think the core of the CR problem is that a lot of encounters are not decided by doing hit point damage, so DPR, AC and hit points should not be the focus of CR calculations.
In a large dungeon or something, my table could easily have six encounters. But that’s the exception, where it’s not feasible in-character for them to stop and find a safe place to rest once they start getting worn down. For general run of the mill playing, it’s unusual for them to have more than two in an adventuring day, because they’re running around the city or traveling through the wilderness, and their characters know their limits and have the freedom to head back to the inn or pitch camp at any time. So once any one character starts approaching the red line, the entire party is likely to ease off on the adventuring until they’ve completed a long rest.
I would love to see these theories put into playtesting - and putting that encounter into video format - and put it side by side with an encounter built in one of the popular CR calcs (like Kobolds fight club)
This was the best D&D video I watched in a while. Love you guys. Yeah, its really tough. I'm currently running an homebrew Theros-Setting and want the Characters to feel like heroes of greek myth. But heroics only come with danger. I almost gave up on challenge rating & just slap things there that fit the theme and are not OVERLY deadly. Adjust things during the combat as I go, thats what the DM screen is for. It aint easy.
As highlighted, encounters are an art. Static balance/CR is a bit of an illusion at worst, starting point at best. Dice swing, and that's what makes it fun. In lieu of static pre-designs, I started thinking of encounters as KITS to give DMs flex. I aim for players to last 3 rounds, then tune encounters as-needed at/for the table. Monsters can call in backup.
Hi. Interesting discussion. With 30 years of DnD on my back I think one important point was missed out: It is most relevant how smart your Monsters are. Players usually identify the most critical opponent first and focus/boost their attacks accordingly. In return many encounters feature monsters that just dish out to next possible targets, thus spreading their damage and being less threatening. However, if the DM has his monsters act smart, concentrate on what is most dangerous for them (e.g. cleric in case of Undead), then a fight may be much more difficult without changing any resources. Cheers from Germany....
An additional point to consider, methinks: That table in the D&D Master book is meant to help when there is a less experienced player base on average. There is a huge difference in efficiency when it comes to using combat capabilities between very experienced players and a group of beginners. An experienced group knows exactly when to cast what, how to ensure getting advantage on attacks etc. while a less experienced group may not. In consequence a specific monster may be more or less challenging without changing its stats. To give an example: We are a long established team, about 4-5 players on a regular base. Some time ago one of the players got a new girlfriend and she decided to check out what that hobby is he is "wasting" his time one. In addition, my wife also decided to join in. So we had two additional players adding power to the group which was compensated by our DM of course. But while our ladies combat moves were interesting, surprising and even funny, so adding to a nice experience, they made the group less efficient in general and some fights became intensive that would otherwise just have been a warm-up.
I have personally found in my campaigns that the second I surprise my players with anything, the combat gets significantly harder. Fighting insurmountable forces? They go seal team six on the baddies. Regular old zombies come up from the ground around the players? Nearly lose 2 of them. So personally, I would recommend finding ways to add a twist to the combat to force players to think on their feet a bit more. Definitely haven't checked the CR of anything I've used in a while though.
I agree. Encounters become considerably more difficult when you add other factors into the mix. Things like terrain, natural hazards (spike pits, lava, fast moving water, uneven terrain, etc), wandering monsters, surprise rounds and more. Monster tactics help a lot too. Multiple encounters across a single adventuring day is also important. If you don't wear down your party's resources, how do you expect them to find anything difficult?
Enemy waves is the best thing I've ever done as a DM, especially for deadly encounters. Start with the same amount of enemies as are in the party. So if you have 5 PC's, put 5 enemies in the combat. Unless every single character in the party is capable of instantly wiping out each enemy on their turns - you should have 1 or 2 remaining. Next round, add a couple more at the beginning of the initiative order - kind of like a lair action. Third round, add another 2-3 but make one of them a stronger enemy. Round 4, add a couple more weak ones, and by the fifth (they most assuredly wouldn't be able to kill all of them, by the end of every round) you bring out a boss or "boss" and with the remaining forces and a somewhat drained party - it becomes a very intense encounter. I have never done this were it wasn't nail biting and the best part is that it was only one combat encounter, but felt like 4-5. And if you feel the party is becoming overwhelmed - just don't bring in the next wave, and give it another round or 2. The first one I did was with a bunch of Sahuagains and 5 Level 5 characters. Round 1: 4 Sahuagins + 2 Sahuagin Champions Round 2: 4 more Sahuagins show up Round 3: 2 more Sahuagins show up. Round 4: 1 more Champion shows up Round 5: They were getting overwhelmed, so I didn't bring any this round and they were able to take out a few more. Round 6: 1 Sahuagin Blademaster shows up, along with 2 more Sahuagins show Then the next few rounds are them versus the Blademaster and the remaining enemies. It works incredibly well, especially when Sahuagins are getting advantage on hurt enemies. The time crunch, the spell management, the chaos, the numbers - it works incredibly well IMO, and works way better than just having 13 Sahuagin, 3 Sahuagin champions and 1 Blademaster all standing the same room and having to fight them all at once (which they would have lost).
One side being collectively surprised is a huge swing in balance. I recently did what I expected to be a moderate to easy encounter, but the enemies killed it on their stealth rolls to set up an ambush and suddenly with a surprised party they were in a fight for their lives. Another one recently I surprised the party and an assassin-style NPC downed the tank in one turn. Conversely, if the party gets a surprise on the enemy, it usually becomes a cakewalk. One round of mostly unmitigated damage from one side has a massive effect in a math game like this.
When I want an encounter to look and feel harder than it is, I break out the hourglass. You get 30 seconds or suffer from panic, I roll on the confusion table. The phones go down, and everyone suddenly remembers what's on their spell list and in their inventories. I will sometimes do this for traps as well but that actually can be quite deadly so it's usually a very obvious trap or dangerous situation that gets it, like a burning building or something.
Personally I always increase a monsters HP and run "deadly" encounters. Sometimes they last more than a few rounds but my players always feel like they are on the razor's edge. I always get comments about how much fun they have and how they felt like they were close to losing. Personally I don't worry about any of my players dying because death saves in 5E are so forgiving, even when a PC goes down there is a pretty good chance the Cleric will have a healing word to save them before they actually die. Unfortunately it's not a science just more of an intuition and reading the table.
I think this is how a lot of DMs play. This totally changes the value of a bunch of classes in the game and most of the combat magic items, and entirely changes the intentions of every mob in the game. If the cleric has 10 healing spells and one fight … they can burn through spells like it’s nothing. Sure! Now give them 6-8 fights in the day. Instead of 10 spell slots in that one fight they have less than one spell slot in each fight. Is the cleric going to heal someone? Will the cleric spend a spell slot out of combat knowing that’s one fewer spell to deal damage or heal with? It becomes a different game. This other game? That’s the game they created. You’ve been playing something else with a book that looks similar. A once per day magic item … and you do combat once per day. Yeah, neat. When you’re doing half a dozen combats per day using that magic item is a big deal! Changes the value of it entirely. Also changes the value of anything that recharges on rest … ki points, warlock spell slots, superiority dice, action surge ….
I may have missed it, but I think a key thing to factor in as well is action economy, I always find it feels much more deadly having an enemy that hits 3/4/5 times than an enemy that maybe hits once or twice!
I know you guys are looking for a mathematical equation for this, but I typically like to have more creatures to add to the encounter on standby in case it's too easy and have something that my creatures would do to waste an action or 2 if the encounter is too hard. Example I had a party face three stone Giants. If the encounter was too easy I was going to have more Giants come out of the nearby cave. If the encounter was too hard (Richard ended up being) I had one or two of the Giants waste their action vomiting because in this story they were addicted to eating acid from a nearby acid pool.
This has definitely changed the way I will think about combat encounters and I think it will lead to being able to create encounters that are balanced in whatever way I want them to be.
To even complicate things further, another variable is the skill of the people playing in the game. I'm a newer DM that plays with a group of friends that have finished one campaign total, and their builds, use of abilities and strategy will not rival what your group of dedicated players and students of the game will achieve. Great video. We are just starting Dragon Heist tomorrow and I've been binging you guys looking for tips, ideas and ways to make it awesome!
So, funny thing right: Paizo, for both Pathfinder first & second edition, & for Starfinder, actually remedy this issue. Instead of balancing CR to a party of 4, they created a chart that shows how CR should, roughly, be adjusted to your party size. The creatures in question are balanced under this CR gradient. It also helps that in PF2E & Starfinder they've removed the RNG from health so that it's just a flat increase per level, which gives the GM more to work with on dealing damage to the players.
Ahh...a fellow path player. I just started 5e this month and just picked up lvl 2. I love the simplicity of 5e however the challenge rating is bonkers hahaha. The bandit captain as CR 2 is crazy lol.
I dunno man, I DM'd for Pathfinder 1E years ago, and their CR system is pretty busted too. Didn't matter how I adjusted the encounters according to their charts, my party usually just steam-rolled most encounters even when I deliberately made them all deadly according to the CR charts. I even beefed up some of them with appropriate player class levels that, according to their charts, should have made the enemies way more dangerous - and it really didn't do much. My party put out so much damage, fights tended to rarely last more than a few rounds and they were rarely ever in actual danger - not the least of which because of the party Paladin.
@@Draeckon Rolls can still have a factor in it, & they did iron out a lot of issues from first to second edition. I think the guideline gives a better idea of what to bounce off of, instead of a vague balance around a party of 4. It's not perfect; but it's better.
I think you need a mix of combat types. Sometimes, your party needs to feel OP! Give them a low level encounter where the wizard AOE's an entire swarm, leaving the leader there to interrogate. Other combats need to have unique elements that are intended to counter the party's standard strategies. At the end, I always try to play my BBEG by-the-book, so when they die they know it was a fair fight *evil smile*
@@ZetaMoolah ok, for clarity, I usually run a monthly one-shot. It will have an easy and hard encounter, or a deadly encounter. I like to have a mix of monsters and then the characters level up for the next month.
I think this is a great start to make something more mathematically accurate. You would also need to consider the type of monster vs the types of characters. For example, you might have a high CR monster with great HP and DPR capabilities but if it is all dependent on being in melee and your players can create unfair ranged opportunities then that CR essentially turns into a CR 0. But if you have a monster that can fly or teleport or even turn invisible, that becomes a completely different challenge level.
You attack your players with an underpowered group of enemies, but then story tell your way into making the encounter appropriately hard to give the feeling of that razor's edge to your players. Have the enemies get a reinforcement; have something explode; have the environment suddenly intervene to impair your players. There are enough ways to buff the enemies during the encounter to make it feel consequential.
Reinforcements are always a great tool, and allows you to bring more powerful enemies into play. I also utilise a couple of simple tactics for intelligent monsters. If I have a bunch of archers then I will have one with a leadership role which can organise the archers to fire in synchronised volleys (becomes an aoe with a saving throw), this also speeds up the combat for the amount of creatures but also increases the damage output of those creatures. I also have shield walls (gives cover to those in it when attacked from the front) and pike lines (gains polearm master reaction if attacked from the front).
This. I think CR is just a guideline. DM has a number of ways to make it harder or easier when required. Like throwing something at a strong party to soften them up before the actual encounter. Doing these calculations like you would do for a PC RPG scripted encounter to determine if the difficulty is appropriate is kind of meaningless.
At CR 13, use the deadliest creature in D&D: the skeleton horde. For Cr 13, that's 50 skeletons. The most threatening encounters I've ever run involve lots of skeletons, and have been tense and savage and the players really felt in danger. The point being, action economy is king!
For a one-shot, I had an opening that started in media res with the BBEG already having won and his skeleton army already overrunning the city, and the party just needed to escape. These were regular skeletons-just for every one defeated, another took its place. It was incredibly dicey; almost lost a couple PCs in the very first scene. There's definitely something to be said for quantity over quality, provided you can run the scene smoothly without getting bogged down.
Great until your DM uses too small of a map and tidal wave go brrrrrt. Oopsie my level 6 wizard just did 300+ damage in one turn because your horde clumped a little too much (real story).
This... This explains, why my last two big encounters (homebrewed, but based on close to cr constructs) made good encounters. The players felt the message and had some level of drama, while also feeling the needs to come up with solutions, with actions of desperations. I talk a lot with them regarding their change or if they see their chars change or develop in a direction, and I try to help them with that.
From Xanathar's we can see that the intended challenge rating of a solo monster for 3 x 13 lvl party is CR 15 legendary creature, not 13 normal. Adult Bronze/Green dragon doesn't have as much HP but it can fly, has legendary resistances and breaths stuff from afar. It is also a monster that most likely should have a lair to back it up. Not that it would be deadly in most cases, but I would say it would be a moderate challenge. This is also not considering the rather crazy off curve artifact weapon or other magical items that the party most likely has.
Another fun way to see the wonk of monsters CR is adding sidekick levels to them, some of these 1/2 CR creatures are not like the others and with only slight changes become lopsided easily.
Oh yeah, if a Shadow gets Sidekick levels it becomes an absolute UNIT. And Shadows by themselves are already more powerful than other CR 1/2 Monsters!!
The solution I use is having monsters with scalable attributes. You can justify it with the notion that same monsters are not clones, one maybe older, another maybe in the best shape, another is the dumb brother :) So the HPs, the AC and every other attribute go from a range of X to a range of Y, and "coincidentally" the group is going to face the one that is not OP and also not a joke, according to what the DM finds appropriate. Other than that, there is also the old trick of adding last minute minions who serve and help the boss.
i'm pretty new to DM'ing, but i'm a sucker for liar actions even with one of the first quests they did at LV 1 the monster had a liar action, giving them a sort of clock and diverting their attention making them think "do we clear the minions first, rush the boss, how fast do new minions come and in what ways?"
Well thought out topic, thanks for the upload. I think one factor to consider in a quick calculation is the idea of the action economy in the game. A single strong enemy, in general, is at a sizable disadvantage to the party in terms of the action economy. Perhaps the monster's CR minus .5 per character in the party would give a more accurate value for the threat to the group. Or just an adjustment based on how outnumbered the group is comparatively, either monster or pc.
I think the other thing you might be not factoring in is how often you are encountering battles. Long rest -> Storm giant -> long rest is fine and a piece of cake. A storm giant in the middle of a blizzard with more encounters on the way....that is gonna be an issue. I think the CR ratings were built with a specific number of encounters in mind. I typically like one big battle per rest instead of 5 stupid easy ones that drag out my session times, so yeah I can see why a CR13 wouldn't be sufficient. But if you are throwing 5 encounters per day, that action surge shouldn't even really be factored in, spell slots dwindle...etc...
There's no way to factor in resting, so no they don't consider it. Players are overpowered. There's only a select few of monsters that are overpowered, mainly with save or die abilities. They also never found a way to match the power of magic with melee damage, melee damage is a complete joke.
An extremely important point. The game itself factored in more encounters per day than the average table actually has. I think they counted on 4-5? Something like that. Typical table is 2-3
The DMG states an adventuring day is 6-8 rests and 2 short rests. That’s what the game is balanced for. Then people don’t do that … then people are concerned with the game not being balanced …. 🤣 Every D&D channel has a video like this. “How come when I play the game exactly the way I want to instead of how I was told to do it the game isn’t as hard as I’d like it to be?” Game design and balance is a complex topic. There are variables you can change that will wildly impact the output.
@@wingedhussar2909 Eh, melee is generally not resource intensive and has more magic items that can combo off of it. A flametongue longsword averages 16 damage per hit at 20 STR, which puts it at 48 per round on a level 11 Fighter. And that’s completely unlimited and before you work in any additional damage bonuses. As a rule caster magic items have finite per day uses and don’t give anything like that kind of bonus damage
@@wingedhussar2909 Overpowered compared to what? DnD isn't a symmetrical game, such as a miniatures wargame where both sides have equal amont of troops at their disposal. The DM can always challenge the players by increasing the difficulty or number of enemies in an encounter. In fact, having an endless supply of monsters available to the DM is what *I'd* call overpowered 😄
Just to say, one of the most important things that my longtime gm did when we were playing 3.5 was to let us all engage in a "non - canon" white room combat scenario for about 2 hours every 2-3 levels. He would place a monster that he felt should be relatively challenging to the party and we would see how our party could handle it (this was partly to see if our characters work the way we wanted after a the recent level up, so this was a window of opportunity to "take back" some of our decisions if it wasn't working as we wanted), this really gave everyone a really good understanding of just how everyone really worked, and how we could all try and set each other up for success in the combat. Once he felt he had a good understanding of the parties current capabilities we would then engage in a bit of free for all pvp, seeing how our characters held up vs each other for a bit of fun. Edit: That group was very much into following the rules, and having Death be a very real and likely scenario. It has been very interesting trying to play with other groups ever since, because going so hard into it for several years, it made things so dramatic and meaningful. Doing courageous things mattered so much, as you were really risking your character to do them. It also really made you realize that a character dying was really just a chance for you to make new characters with other stories. But most groups I've found just, don't want to engage in such a cut throat playstyle, they are there to relax and have cool moments, they don't want to know what failing the roll to jump across the broken bridge will do, they just want it to succeed. Or to have a crossbow bolt crit succeed vs the rogue while they are disarming it, suddenly making things very dire as he also failed the poison DC check........ instead I often find DM's and players just kind of telling each other what happens, with rolls only mattering insofar as what numbers have they managed to crank out of their hits. Not saying that they don't miss or things like that, but if it is an important roll and it failed? Very few DMs will let it go beyond failing the quest, and most won't even allow that.
Love this content. I would also try to include a factor for how intelligent the creatures are. Enemy tactics as controlled by the DM can seriously swing encounter difficulty.
Something that I did recently was I did a 7 hour session by myself and took control of my PC's and simulated a swarm of enemies with multiple waves, and then also a "boss" fight with a higher CR creature and a few minions. It took absolutely forever but it helped me know how things were going to go. Once I ran the boss fight however it went worse than I thought quickly because I rolled a few crits, but that's besides the point
Guys, but did you check the chapter on calculating encounter difficulty? I dont believe 5e is CR od a monster is calculated for a party of 4. The CR is an abstract value you use to calculate the difficulty of the encounter, taking into account all monsters and all PC levels
It is based on 4. A CR 5 monster is supposed to be a medium encounter for a 5th level party of 4. There's a section on calculating it for larger or smaller groups, which may be what you are thinking of
@@ADT1995 And the definition of a "medium encounter" is basically that a party might use some resources. Medium isn't "evenly matched" - medium is victory, with no casualties, and a character might be missing some hp. A 50/50 encounter (IE, evenly matched) - way past deadly
@@rich63113 that's why I said "medium encounter" not "balanced encounter" Despite the name medium means that the party will kick the monsters teeth in unless they are really low on resources Thanks for bringing this up, I should have included it in my original comment Personally my combats range from hard to >5x the deadly threshold just to keep players from obliterating everything.
@@ADT1995 Same. Anything below deadly is just a speedbump. At my table the party usually faces two or maybe three combat encounters between long rests, so I start from double deadly and go up from there.
Dudes I just spent the last 2.5 hours not knowing what to do and not wanting to go to sleep. Thank you guys so much for being so awesome and giving me thirty of peace before bed
I'd be curious to see what the numbers look like if you balanced around Hard / Deadly encounters. By design, Deadly encounters are advertised as only having a chance of character death. The ones before then are undoubtedly going to be much lower risk then.
The “hard” and “deadly” encounters assume 6-8 encounters that day. That’s 5-7 other opportunities to diminish party resources … plus out of combat instances. No one should be surprised that when you completely change class resources and magic resources that the expected challenge of a fight or a monster isn’t the same. It’s like …. If I give you have as much salary as you have now and then talk to you about your disposable income … things will seem harder, right? But, if suddenly you have twice as much money as you make today you’ll have more disposable income. The same things won’t be as hard to buy. Imagine you have 10 spells per day. And you have 1 fight per day. Now imagine you have 10 spells per day and you have to get through 8 fights and also maybe have spells for non combat encounters ….. How excited is your cleric going to be to heal you when they have 3 fights left to go and have 2 spell slots left for all healing and also all offensive spells and also for any out of combat stuff? Sounds like a different game, right? And, you can rest early … but we’re just gonna have to increase the odds of your rest being interrupted.
@@zero11010 I don't disagree. Though I think what they want out of Medium encounters sounds like what falls under the category of Deadly encounters according to WOTC at least. I normally do about the standard encounters per rest, but even when I don't using Deadly encounters generally seems to still be a challenge.
This way of thinking with combat encounters feeling like they are more dangerous than they actually are, is exactly how i make my encounters. I personally take the idea of my boss should be able to kill a single party member in 1 and a half rounds with a single target attack. It makes the enemy feel more dangerous but against a party they are weaker because even though they can almost kill one member in a single round they are blocked by others members and make the team feel like they need to work together or else someone will die. And having effects that incapacitate a single party member for a round with a mechanic that is more involved than you're just stunned and you've got a memorable fight.
3.5 was wild. You could have a character who existed as two different entities take levels in rogue, take knives that hit twice for every attack, and add hair knives for extra hits whilst the fighter does two attacks with the wizard playing rocket tag in the background, nuking everything xD challenge rating stood no chance haha
Also, it was a nightmare to calculate challenge rating for more than one creature or for a number of players different from four. As a DM, balancing encounters in 3.5 was almost impossible.
Not to mention that in 3.5, attack bonus vs monster AC made no sense at higher levels. If you wanted to give even a small kind of miss chance to the party fighter you had to artificially inflate AC, otherwise there was almost no point rolling the dice. But then this could push AC out of the reach of any rogues or monks who tended to have a much lower attack by that time. Plus, this meant if you wanted to challenge the party with humanoid you were basically forced to give the enemy mad magic items like +5 weapons and armour to even begin to make a challenge. Which of course the party would insist on looting, resulting in ridiculous situations like the party hauling dozens of +5 weapons and suits of plate mail around a dungeon! And this doesn't even touch on the imbalance of high level spellcaster PCs!
@@PJRZ1 That mostly depend on the incredibly stupid way the "wealth" was managed and the fact that AC didn't go up with levels as attack did. If you take as granted that a character would have a certain amount of wealth at a certain level, that says nothing about what kind of bonuses he would get from its items. Also, if you grant the players to always be able to buy what they could not find in loot, you will soon lose control over the amount of personalized bonuses each character would accumulate. Another wrong assumption on the part of the developers was that buffer type characters would use their powers and spells mostly to buff their better suited companions, while reality has shown us that they will more gladly buff themselves so they can rob the job of the other players. One last wrong assumption is that items will get consumed, destroyed, lost, stolen and, at some point, replaced by different ones. That's why the sunder, disarm and grappling maneuvers were in the game. That's why badly failing a save should have damaged the equipment too. That's why most of the magic items found during adventures should have been consumables. Treasure tables in 2nd edition and earlier versions of the game were built so that permanent magic items were incredibly rare, and there was no market for them either. But obviously, not many DMs actually went to the length of destroying or stealing the equipment of their players (the common excuse was that it is too much a hassle to apply all the rules). And the really bad habit to start a campaign above first level added to the problem, since each character basically started already with a perfectly customized and highly efficient set of magic and mundane items, throwing the balance in the bin. All this without even starting to address single items or effects which were highly exploitable in many situations.
Another thing to consider is that there are an alarming number of monsters that are way deadlier than their CR would have you believe. The RUclips channel D&D Logs has released a series of videos where they discuss this very topic and list specific examples, as well as why they’re way too deadly for their CR. For instance there’s this low level swarm of mites capable of inflicting the Poisoned condition on pc’s. They also leave behind mites whenever they attack, which burrow into their victims. If you don’t get them out of your system in time these mites will burrow into your heart (dealing a ton of damage along the way) and instantly kill you. All the while the main swarm will continue to attack you and implant more mites with each attack, and they’re resistant to most kinds of attacks. Remember, these are low CR creatures.
For me, the hardest thing to consider is all the different abilities some monsters have that don't relate directly to damage, but can make encounters harder
The tricky thing is that encounters are designed to whittle the characters down. That is, you are comparing one encounter when the characters are "full." But there should be several encounters per rest. Take your same encounter example and apply it to the characters three or four times to signify how many encounters they'll have between short rests...or six to eight times before a long rest.
Great Video. A little on Probability math. All things being equal, with a 5% chance of dying, this is a 95% survival rate. Should you survive the first combat, you have 95% survival on the second. So the survival rate of 2 combats together is 90.25% (.95*.95) Three combats is 85.7375% etc. Following this math down, the survival rate of 100 combats is 0.5921%
Nice Vid, guys. In my Excel sheet, I calculate Party Total HP and also AVG HP (to answer the question of who might go down if focussed). I then calculate their Avg DPR, and their Burst DPR (for 1 round). Once I have those numbers, I then go to the monster side. I calculate amount of HP monsters require to last 1 round (aka "trash mobs"), 2 rounds (avg mobs), 3 rounds ("lieutenants") and 4 or more rounds (bosses) vs the party's avg DPR, and amount needed to survive their Burst DPR. Then I calculate monster damage by taking the Avg HP of the party and assigning DPR to the monsters as 0.1 x the Party Avg HP (for trash mobs), 0.2 (for avg monsters), 0.25 (for LT's) and 0.3 (for bosses). What I get is trash monsters who will only live a round and only deal 10% of a PC's health, or avg monsters which live 2 rounds and deal 20%x2 or 40% total, or LT's who live 3 rounds but deal 25%x3=75%, or bosses who live 4 rounds and who could deal 30%x4=120% of the Avg HP of the PCs (meaning, 1 goes down, or else 2 get really beat up). I then tweak the numbers up or down if I add special abilities to the monsters (flight, spellcasting, resistances, etc.) I can also use either the normal HP or Burst HP for the monster depending on if the PCs get there at the beginning of the day or end of the day (when their resources are depleted.)
I calculate CR as a whole across mutliple fights and will use a few encounters along the way to balance the party for the CR by making you use up or gain key resources
Thank you! I can imagine that it is not simple, balancing schedules and all. But they are a joy to watch in your campaign and I truly feel that they will add to your content, which is already excellent.
"The player characters feel threatened, but maybe actually aren't." This is how I set up monsters (and their minions) in Monster of the Week. Part of the reason I moved away from 5e and towards MotW is that, when I do have combat, I don't need to work through a pile of expected damage outputs on the fly.
Aside from the issue from that day on Twitch, I saw this thread live and I completely agree with everything you said. Also, ready-made adventures have encounters that are generally pretty weak in the "drama" point.
I tend to gauge the relative challenge level of an encounter more on the portion of the players' resources that it consumes, rather than hit point damage. I'm mostly talking about spell slots/class feature ability uses, as well as magic item charges/uses. I find this to be a better measure of an encounter's impact on the players than just HP.
This has genuinely been my journey as a dm for the past 17 years of running D&D and Pathfinder. Safe to say, it is a very delicate line to ride finding that medium and can very much agree a lot of the times not only calculating your party's capabilities Stat wise but also the extent of their abilities can stretch those numbers to make the challenge less viable than it would to take a cookie cutter example through the reference chart. At one point I tested this out between multiple different groups I was running: similar compositions in party makeup, 5 members to each group, level 5 party, Town Square with 1 major raised platform, multiple assassins [3 ranged, 6 close range] 2 basilisks. Group 1 struggled to subdue the party, took 5-6 rounds, 2 casters dealt back and forth with the archers, martials did their best to defend them from the close range enemies until the party could come back together to deal with the basilisk problem, cleaned up the stragglers that tried getting away.... Party 2, same comp...... 2 rounds, the only real difference being the fighter of the party being a centaur instead of human, and defense style, flipped the entire counter on its head. So with that in mind yes, I'd say even with it meaning extra prep time especially if you're looking to meet a certain urgency, it'd help you as a dm in leaps and bounds to take your party and possibly run the characters though scenarios yourself with even perhaps the strategies your familiar with the party using and throw in best/worst/and average possible outcomes to get a good idea on how the encounter may wear on the party's capabilities to see where things may lead.
I think a decent way to identify the difficulty of an encounter is through how much of the party’s resources (mainly HP, but also spells and abilities) are depleted, specifically in quarters. This keeps the Easy (25%), Medium (50%), Hard (75%), and Deadly (100%) system, while also leaving room for the break downs the Dudes talked about. As far as how much of that is spread out or targeted at one player, that would be up to DM discretion, and may be a part of balance (and rp - this monster tries to kill things one at a time, or has a particular dislike for *this* kind of character, etc.) they have to keep in mind.
One thing I have done to make combats last a bit longer, which also effects difficulty due to monsters being able to take one or two more turns before they die, is have my players and monsters all use their maximum hit points possible. I will also frequently give HP boosts to monsters. Adding a ton more monsters is occasionally a decent approach, but I find it draws out the time each round takes, with less player actions overall. Taking the hit point approach doesn't increase round time, but prolongs the battle beyond 1-2 turns. I also do things like phased boss fights, where something triggers at HP thresholds or event based thresholds to trigger the next phase of the fight, instead of just putting players in the room with the bad guy and hoping they don't wipe him out in one round. It isn't fun for them to have an anti-climatic final encounter. Doing things like having a magical item encapsulate and rejuvenate the bad guy when he drops to 0 hp to begin a new phase of the fight is fun. While video games are not always a good inspiration for DnD, sometimes they are. "Scripted" fights aren't always bad, as long as you still leave room for player agency throughout the fight. Re: perma death. If my party TPKed, something would occur where they could be restored. Perhaps they take on the role of NPCs for a session who go and clear out that darn dungeon those adventurers failed to clear, their bodies are recovered, and raised, and now they owe a debt.
Something I like to think about when building encounters is to shift it from the players perspective to the monsters perspective. Any encounter with the party is a potentially deadly encounter for almost any monster. Thus they should prepare and react accordingly. Players should almost always be outnumbered, use minions to inflate the numbers, use traps and/or a dynamic battlefield to add drama to the fight. How many rounds a combat lasts is superlative as long as the rounds themselves are quick and exciting.
To my mind, the part about building drama is the key to building a great encounter. That means so much more than just the single encounter, too; in a chase, do you save your resources on the minions who are essentially just trying to slow you down, since they're too weak for you, or do you cast your big spells, wasting resources but catching up to the main villain? On the flip side, stakes are so much higher for the players. Sure, 15 orcs might not end in a TPK, but one of the weaker players might die. A friend of mine threw a seriously deadly encounter our way a few years ago, which I said was scaled somewhat off. I mean, yeah, we won, but two player characters (out of four), died. That encounter didn't fill me with urgency the same way an earlier encounter did, where some Nothics were doing their damnedest to kill one of the players. The fight with the Nothics felt harrowing in a very different way, because we were made very aware of just how vulnerable we were, separately. As a group, where we just focus fire and pick things off one by one? Meh, cake walk. When the monsters focus fire *us*? Now THAT'S scary.
I feel like there's ultimately no way to fully prep something like this. As you guys said, there's a level of randomness that you can't account for (if all monsters hit one PC, if multiple PCs get stunned, if PCs decide to pop off, etc). I just adjust my encounters on the fly. Throw x enemies at them and if they obliterate the first two, triple the HP of one and call it a "King" random monster. Or if I can't even hit them because their AC is too high for the monster, give them advantage on certain attacks. You can make any encounter feel tough with small tweaks like this throughout
I LOVE this video. I run a game with 3 players and often do one shots with varying party members. I use the general guidelines but for sure magic items and player experience really affect how I’m setting it up. Free admission, behind the screen I will muck with hit points to make it fun and tense. Initiative matters so much too.
after reducing the +3 sword to a +1 sword, i got that the party's average dmg is more like 110-120 dpr. this means that the monster in the DMG can last into the 3rd round, and dish out 2/3 of the party's hp during the combat. also it'll probably have things such as legendary resistances and actions which means it's a pretty tough encounter. also considering the dmg is probably not distributed equally, a character might be knocked out and then it can't contribute to the battle which makes the encounter even more challenging.
I have felt the same thing with a fifth level campaign I am running. I use DnD Beyond to calculate my encounters and the party always kicks ass even though the system rates it as a deadly encounter. I end up chucking in a few more monsters.
Also there's another factor to consider: the time Bell's Hells almost TPK'ed to the echo knight. They suffered several bad roles, didn't agree on a strategy and it almost took them out with (I think ) several characters needing to be healed back to consciousness. How does that factor in? I'd love to hear your analysis.
I note that we have powerful enough computers now that you could make a bootstrap analysis app; run the encounter on autopilot 100 times, and note how many times the party wins and how many times they lose. Especially easy if you keep track of your players' stats with an app in the first place. From a perspective of balancing the upcoming 6E, one solution for tense-but-safe encounters is having the monsters be more or less predictable, while the players aren't. If the monsters do predictable damage, players can easily estimate "We have four rounds until Deathville, population: us." And then if things look to go in that direction, they can pull out their limited-use powers, or perhaps retreat. Then you'd have the monsters be strong stats-wise, so players would 60% lose the fight without using limited-use resources or clever use of environment - but WITH their strategies and trump cards, they really have a 99% chance of winning. On the other hand, when the monsters have their own trump cards to play, things are inherently riskier. This is good for sapient opponents, because it makes negotiations more desirable - as well as tactics like demoralizing or distracting the opponent. So, basically, I propose calculating TWO challenge ratings - one for if nobody uses resources, one for if both sides go all out.
I think that the DMG encounter building guide was created before the community did a lot of work on theorycrafting and optimization. I am currently running two campaigns with players who are relatively new to 5e, and thus did not do a lot of optimization. (E.g., no multiclassing, and nobody has taken GWM, Polearm Master, or Crossbow Expert, although I do have one Sharpshooter.) I also run it as a fairly low-magic world in terms of the items they find. As a result, I'm finding the DMG recommendations to be pretty much spot-on, even into the upper levels. One of my groups is currently at level 18 and the other is level 20, and they both are still challenged by encounters that I balanced using the official CR guidelines. That said, some things that I've noticed: - I think that the scaling of the recommendations is more flawed by number of opponents than by CR. Your single CR 13 opponent is going to be in a worse spot than if you had set up a multiple-opponent encounter with the same difficulty rating. - Battlefield control is huge. Giving the monsters non-damaging abilities to stun, separate, counterspell, or otherwise neutralize PCs does an awful lot to make the players feel like they were in a lot more danger than they truly were in. - Tactical/terrain advantages can serve a similar purpose as battlefield control. Putting the enemies behind arrow slits, or giving them flight, or any kind of asymmetric vision limitation helps tremendously, and forces the players to think more creatively on how to win the encounter.
On the question of balancing combat encounters, a method I have been using recently to some notable success is just rolling randomly. If there is a random encounter I have planned(or I'm pre-planning a future encounter), I roll a d20, and that's the CR I pick or find a monster from. I have also been playing with rolling the d20 twice, a taking the result closer to the party's ECL. What this does is force the party to deal with encounters too tough for them, and well as giving them some relaxing fights they can take it easy on. And once I roll for the encounter, I can even adjust the situation to make the encounter more exciting, by giving the weak monsters a terrain advantage and surprise. Or by giving the party those same things against a powerful monster. The party starts to sometimes decide that running away and hiding are better options. Or sometimes they need to roleplay to get past the dragon guarding the bridge. And with options for resurrection, battlefield control, etc... many other classes get a chance to shine in various and unusual ways, ways that I couldn't even plan. In other words, the CR system is so broken that rolling randomly provides a more exciting gameplay experience.
Great work, Dudes! Interestingly enough, I came to a similar approach though I don't dig as deep as you do. I keep track of my party's "alpha strike" damage (when they burn all their most powerful abilities and spells) and "sustained damage" that they can deal for prolonged periods (but not infinitely). And I calculate separately single target numbers and AoE numbers (which are almost twice as high). I don't care about the HP :) I use these numbers to make sure that my monsters can survive for at least a couple of rounds. What I usually account for, is the terrain layout of the planned encounter (my party has a Paladin and a Rogue, who need to get close to their opponents) and most powerful control abilities that monsters will have (like Beholder's Anti-Magic Cone), since these factors can reduce damage in first one or two rounds. What I do is easier and is enough for me since I already developed a "sense" for how my party performs, but I think your approach is better for general case and definitely provides more metrics to fine-tune the encounter even if at the cost of more calculations.
It’s almost like the 60 damage from the monster, 6-8 times a day, is roughly 450 damage total, which is the party hp+ the half hit dice they would be able to use to recover daily. Like almost exactly the right amount damage out to in… so the 6-8 encounters would be just right.
A major factor missing from this equation is the fact that the game is designed to have 6-8 encounters in the course of an adventuring day. If you are doing one to two instead, the PCs are more likely to have their strongest abilities at their disposal every round of combat and more likely to be starting every combat close to or at full health. If you were to multiply CR rating by 6-8 and then divide it by the number of encounters you run a day, you either have one really hard combat or a couple with more risk.
I think another thing to consider is that the party should be having 4-6 encounters per day. Not each encounter has to be combat but I think part of the balance is also "how much of the party's resources are depleted per encounter?" It's why boss encounters are so tough to balance in 5e.
I scrapped the CR system long ago, starting back in 3.5e and started approaching things in different ways, depending on the intent I had for the encounters. Was I draining resources from the party to give them more reason to continue adventuring? Was the encounter planned or something that happened as a result of player action? Was the encounter meant to help add information to flesh out a plot hook, requiring more drama or danger? Was the party complacent and needing to be reminded that the world was dangerous? With these in mind, I would also remind myself that intelligent enemies use tactics that should catch players off guard, but those same intelligent enemies should also care about their own survival in most cases. In the end, I realized that not everything should be balanced to the party, and sometimes it was necessary to make modifications at the table to make sure everyone got to feel like they did something cool/meaningful.
One thing that makes it even harder to measure encounter difficulty in a single value like challenge rating are resistances and immunities. For example an opponent with mostly fire-based attacks becomes much less dangerous if half the party has fire resistance. On the other hand in the fight against the Atropal in Tomb of Annihilation we quickly figured out that it was vulnerable to radiant damage and luckily we had several ways to deal radiant damage, so that thing went down rather quickly despite it's impressive challenge rating of 13 against a level 9 group. On the other hand I think it's fine when sometimes you get this feeling that you just had the right tool for the job. There will be other encounters where you best spell or your favourite attack would be rather useless, So I think it's also ok when you sometimes get this heroic feeling, when you just obliterate a superior opponent, because you could exploit his weak spot.
I loved the video! I will take some of these tips and put them to use when I am designing my next combat encounter! I would like to proffer a different point of view when it comes to how fifth edition CR is supposed to work. According to the DMG, a normal adventuring day should have 6 to 8 combat encounters. So if we take that point and combine it with your math, after encountering 8 CR 13 creatures your party should be down 160% of their health. That would be an intense adventuring day which would require the party to take at least one short rest and use some if not all of their hit dice to survive. I think that the problem lies in the fact that nobody actually runs their games this way. Well almost nobody 😉
I run my own homebrew game and if monsters need a boost, I boost them on the fly. Add legendary actions, make them temporarily immune to certain damage, add environmental hazards, give them nasty and surprising abilities. Matt Colville had a good video recently about giving the players an objective rather than just team desthmatch. Runehammer has tons of content on how to boost "encounters" (a word he hates lol.). I found out almost immediately when my players were low level how bad the balance mechanic in 5e was after they kept trouncing everything.
The biggest mistake everyone makes with CR and encounter building is misinterpreting what constitutes a "medium" or "deadly" encounter. You talk about using a CR13 creature as a boss monster, but a "medium" encounter is more like a speed bump. One of many encounters during an adventuring day. It's designed to whittle away some resources (which it succeeds in doing so), not threaten the PC's lives. A "deadly" encounter is one which has a POSSIBILITY of ONE character dying. Everything below that is assumed to NOT have ANY possibility of character death (of course anything's possible, but still). D&D combat is fundamentally about resource management. If the party spends all their high level spells and action surges etc, then the encounter has done its job. Actually dealing damage to the party is a bonus. Another thing is that the rules assume NO magic items. Yes, most characters will have magic items, but that just means YOU need to account for those items (usually by increasing the party's effective level). I'm not saying the rules are perfect (people make these mistakes because they are complex and obtuse), but they are considerably more accurate than everyone gives them credit for.
The most obvious issues with CR are that it assumes both a party size and a number of encounters per rest. There may be other issues (I don't think those numbers are properly calculated, but just "guessed" by the content authors, even more when using 3rd party materials), but those two are the obvious ones. I run a PF campaign with many house-rules (in theory different balance, but in practice many of the concepts are the same across the whole d20 family). One of the biggest deviations from the default rules in my campaign is that most slots and abilities are "per encounter" instead of "per day" (with the GM's discretion defining when an encounter is actually over, of course) (btw, games without "Dungeons" in their title often have "Game Masters" rather than "Dungeon Masters"). This allows me to design encounters assuming that both the party and their foes will go all out to either defeat the other side or to just survive (yes, I do have encounters where a "player victory" means barely getting away alive, but I try to make those rather uncommon). At that point, I can also ignore CR itself, and build my monsters following *mostly* the same rules as for characters (I'll often use custom races and/or classes that wouldn't make sense for player characters in terms of lore, but shouldn't be perfectly fine in terms of balance). Then we get to balancing group sizes (ie: # of monsters vs. party size): how many CR 1 goblin dogs would it take to overwhelm a level 6 character? Is 5 level 3 enemies balanced for a party of 3 level 5 characters? There is no simple answer to these questions, and dozens of spreadsheets and algorithms later I am confident enough to say that CR as a single number isn't enough, adding CR's for multiple monsters doesn't do it either, and the best math will only get you a reasonable approximation that a streak of unusually good or unusually bad rolls will quickly topple anyway. But that can be a good starting point, and a good GM should be able to dynamically account and adjust for dice-induced variance in a way that keeps things interesting without invalidating the players' (good or bad) luck. I could share some of my formulas, but I don't expect what works for my campaign to work for others. So here is just a suggestion: if just adding up levels or CR's doesn't do it, consider taking the square root of the sum of the squares (like when using the Pythagorean theorem), or some other power instead of the square. It's rather tedious to do it by hand, but if you are reading this you most probably have access to some kind of spreadhseet utility / application that can do the math for you and help you compare different values. In the end, math (and spreadsheets, and scripting for those of us who are comfortable with coding) is just one more tool in the GM's toolbox to use in our quest to create memorable playing sessions, enjoyable adventures, and thrilling stories around the gaming table.
I think a better thing to look at is spell slots. "How many spells will this encounter take?" If it takes 25% of party spells maybe it's a hard encounter? This accounts for DC dependent abilities like possession, bestow curse, and hold person.
While watching your video, I got a thought process on that. Take the lowest character defense versus monsters attack so the character doesn’t get one shot. Dan take your highest damage dealer average damage per round multiplied by Amount of party members, then multiply three or four for rounds, and that’s the hit point of the monster. Quicker math not sure if that will work though.
I find that the easiest "shoot from the hip" encounter balance for a difficult encounter involves just overestimating your party's capabilities and from there picking creatures with interesting special abilities that they haven't encountered before. PCs have a lot of resources; they'll figure it out. Great breakdown; too much math for my brain to attempt myself. 😂
The amount of resources used is an interesting component of combat difficulty. For example, there are times when the party may get to half health after getting hit by an aoe, but they proceed to win the encounter with only one spell slot expended. Using hit dice to heal after. Was that a difficult encounter? It's curious how little the players damage taken can sometimes impact the experience. By contrast, the talk for the next few sessions could be about the time the party used all its high level spell slots to obliterate enemies they PERCEIVED to be strong (but may in fact have been an "easy" rated encounter). The players may feel like they outsmarted a hard encounter because the horde you threw at them seemed deadly after the lucky crit one of the enemies got in the opening round. To this, I think your point about desiring DRAMA is spot on. It's about feeling like the combat was difficult. The math behind it isnt always as important to the experience. As a new dm, i'm amazed at how much the perceived "difficulty" of a combat comes down to factors other than raw damage output.
I usually handle combat encounters in two ways: - Simple encounters: The "easy" and "medium" difficulty stuff that I expect my PCs to deal without too much effort, usually acting as setpieces, mood building or world building. For these I normally do some quick math on how much DPR my players do on average and how much punishment they can take. More often than not I tend to go towards having a number of enemies that take the full DPR of one character before dying and ensuring they have enough damage to maybe drop a squishy caster in one round if they gang up on them. If the encounter needs a bit more meat then I add either an environmental situation, something that ensures if the PCs go first they won't instantly delete the encounter with AOE spells or the like (sometimes simple smart positioning is enough, other times having some effect that can mess with spell casters or movement can be fun), or an elite bad guy who is designed to be able to go toe to toe with the party's main beefhouse in one on one combat. - For bosses I have a much, much more grueling system. Usually I start by taking the monster's total hit points and ensuring it at least survives double the party's DPR. This ensures that even if they go nova, they cannot take down the boss in one round. Second, I plan the boss' DPR to be capable of taking down one character in one round, usually by lowering their HP to a dangerous point first and then dropping them with a Legendary Action. The reasoning behind this is that the players get the fear of having this creature be a TPK while quickly forcing them to the defensive and healing. Turns spent recovering and debuffing the boss are turns not spent in damage, which means the encounter lasts longer. However, as this is usually super dangerous in leaving the possibility for the boss to just kill the party quickly, usually the ability to drop them like that is a recharge (dragon's breath, mind blast, etc), so the party has time to quickly try to recover before being more careful and not going full nova. Due to all of these variables I usually test the boss in mock fights with the characters about 2 or 3 times and check their chances. Depending on how climatic the fight is, I am usually satisfied when I consistently kill one player character, meaning the party will need to outthink me (as I do not play their characters as well as they do) to ensure everyone survives. The theory behind this is that encounters with a lot of resources and a lot of burst damage on a recharge succeed at creating drama. Usually I try for a boss to live long enough to have two uses for their recharge, so about 4-5 rounds in average, plus that amount of rounds is in my opinion good enough to set up the proper ebb and flow of the combat's narrative: Players are terrified by the monster almost dropping or dropping one character > Players recover and spend a turn healing an raising their chances for survival > Players put a dent on the boss and have some banter with it > Boss deals massive damage again, but this time the players see it coming > Players best the boss. With this in mind, I try to keep my monsters having between three to four times the DPR of the party. I usually don't need to raise it to five times or take into account burst damage from them, because I assume they won't be able to go full nova when one of their party members drops or is in the process of dropping during the combat. In general, I assume that if the DPR is enough to drop a PC in one round, or if the monster has some way of CC the party effectively, I can get away with them having a bit less HP. Regardless, with all of this considered, against my Level 16 five man party most my grand end of arc bosses have long since reached the 700 HP threshold with DPR a bit above a hundred.
IMO balancing around "deadly" encounters is probably better than using straight CR. That is, your level 13 party of 3 should be fighting a CR 17 monster. The exception is at low level. An owl bear against a level 1 party of 6 has a realistic chance to become a TPK.
"No, wait, challenge rating is fine! Just make sure you have 6-8 combat encounters per adventuring day!"
Yeah, that's the topic for the "other video" we alluded to in this one.
. . . Except not all encounters are combats, and the DMG just suggests 6-8 encounters with no specification on whether they are combats, puzzles, or negotiations.
@@sonofdeleniel007 Negotiations and puzzles are extremely unlikely to drain the same amount of resources as combat, or even any resources at all.
You cannot throw out how the game is balanced and then be upset that when you ignore how the game is balanced it doesn’t feel balanced.
@@Apfeljunge666, see my sessions last about 3-4 hours. I can get two combat encounters and the rest are social or exploration.
might as well drop on short rest taking vs. long rest taking in most groups too...
You guys hit the nail right in the head when you said you want an encounter with less than 5% chance of killing a character but feels like a 50/50.
Well that happens if the party is drained of resources. The issue with CR is the same reason most people agree Monk is the weakest class
i like the idea of a few quarter turn fights and i say quarter turn fights in that one of the charaters can easily dispatch the enemy be it a low lvl quick easy kill gives the party a sense of danger and waking into a dungeon but also not a big empty room with 10 enemies and 4 of those are at the end i would say push the number up to 30 or 40 and throw them at the party more with pacing and maybe give them the feeling of walking into a place of danger with enemies so i would have most of my fights at 0% chance of death with the big fight being closer to 45%. if i wanted to warn the party do not continue throw 10% chance at them and push it up faster before they get themselves in to deep they actually leave
I feel the biggest problem with a "system" is that level progression is bonkers. CR as a guide is a TPK machine in the first few levels and it's a joke after level 7-8.
The squishiness of first levels makes every fight an adrenaline rush. I ran LMoP once for a suboptimal, unlucky party and 2 PCs DIED on the first encounter. Without focus firing or any smart move by me. Just non-extreme luck.
I agree that it's an illusion. To me, fights should be easy and look hard and that's all on how the DM presents the fight.
@@lulospawn does that module really follow CR guidelines though?
@@tomraineofmagigor3499 monk is the weakest class straight up, it cannot keep up with damage at any level even constantly using flurry of blows, go watch treanttemple monks video about it and it explains in no uncertain terms just how bad the monk is
(The answer is that the monk is basically a useless class)
I feel like it's important to remember that a "Medium difficulty encounter" is one that doesn't have much chance of downing a party member and basically no chance of actually killing one. It's an encounter in which one or two party members MIGHT need to use healing resources.
See- this is why I watched this entire video saying “well, no shit?” the entire time.
The best part about "balancing" encounters will always be when you prepare an easy fight and your party gets their butts kicked for no apparent reason. It's almost the same with "easy" puzzles lol
I had a DM who ran an adventure back in 3.5 that involved a singular opponent, a rune hound across a bridge of ice or crystal. A party of 5, all decent players......and only the squishy wizard survived by the end (myself). Would've had to retreat too, but a pair of back-to-back crits right before fleeing with a pair of Icy Burst arrows finished the hound off, and I was able to stabilize two of the dying players. TLDR, some fights can be surprisingly challenging 😛
Yeah, I had a group of like 8 lvl 3 players fight against an animated carpet and I had multiple players go down before they killed this one CR ½ monster. That one combat that should have been a joke lasted over an hour.
Lol, yeah, sometimes
I threw a roper against the party. The simple act of making it a stalactite 30 feet in the air lowers its effective range from 50 to 40 feet, but instead makes it so where when party members break free, they take fall damage. A single CR5 monster devastated my level 7 party of 6, and it didn’t even have minions.
Lol. We've undoubtedly had nights like this : This should be an easy encounter. I rolled a 1. Uh, ok. And I rolled a 1. Um, ok. So I rolled a 3. Wow... so I rolled a nat 20...
I think it's interesting to hear Monty say this, because I've always assumed that Monty had some alternative way of calculating battle difficulty, as I've always thought he is strangely good and bringing battles to a razor's edge without actually killing characters.
I think a lot of that comes from experience as a DM and knowing his players. Like he said his players for Drakkenheim know the game well and he probably plans for that. If you put those encounters to brand new players they would probably die.
@@Xecryo I play a lot with players with different skills and level of knowledge.
I often use a lot of tricks like second waves, low health emergency buttons for NPC captains. Things the players can't see until I use them, so I can judge whether or not to use them, and they can make something feel dangerous, because then they're guessing "are there more, can he do it again?"
That’s experience and behind the scenes fudge. You’re a storyteller in that position, not a computer.
What I’ve learned from watching Monty in Drakkenheim is that a good DM does not kill the party they just consistently almost kill the party. They keep it tense both narratively and in combat.
I believe the trick to that is having a deep knowledge of tactics, and then making tactical mistakes when predicting that the players are going to fail.
This is the Search For the Holy Grail right here.
I’ve got experienced players, so I have to work to keep them guessing and challenged, they always out-perform the curve. I like mine to go a 4th round, to give them that unexpected sense of “They’re STILL up?!”
In my mind, I have three types of combat encounters.
There’s one where the combat isn’t the point of the encounter., it’s just there to spice up an investigation/exploration part of the campaign. It’s the MacGuffin/book/ clue they need to survive the encounter to find to get them (back?) onto the trail of the next plot point. I want to scuff them up a little bit, maybe knock off about a quarter of their HP. They can’t get their next clue without a little bit of a scuffle, right?
Then there’s the “It’s time for a fight for a fight’s sake!” This one’s gotta be a scrap. I want the party to be down to half HP, and down a bunch of resources, but I don’t want it to get deadly, unless the dice totally overrule me.
Then there’s a boss fight. I want them out of resources and down to about a quarter-HP by the end of it, with the chance we could lose somebody if they make a tactical error, or the dice decree it.
I always think about how an encounter affects the player-characters. They’re the ones playing the game. The monsters themselves are means to that end.
Again, I’ve got experienced players. They know when they’ve actually accomplished something by playing well and beating a tough challenge. I’m trying to give them that feeling.
Knowing nothing else…you sir, are a good dm with the correct attitude.
Love your style on this! Sometimes the planned scuffles go hard and sometimes the boss goes easy, but this attitude seems like it would be very rewarding for your players 😮
@@HandsomeDanVacationRentals I don’t even know about that, my friend. I’m the LEAST experienced at my table, and the one with no prior 5e DM experience. I just fell into it as the one with the most time to invest into it, thinking about it, etc. I try to keep it fun, and I’m lucky to have a table with good table dynamics, similar aesthetics, ideas about what’s “fun,” like that.
@@robcaboose510 Thanks, like I replied to the other comment, I’m the least experienced in our group at running 5e (I’d been away since 2e). But I have the time to invest. I have two weeks to prep a 2-1/2 hour session. I want my friends to win, & have fun, but I HAVE to referee a fair game, too. I always roll out in the open, never behind the screen. So, if I’ve driven myself appropriately crazy during the two weeks leading up to the session, I’ll hit the sweet spot on the encounter balance, and if the dice tell them “Tonite ain’t your night,” then that’s how it goes. 🤷🏼♂️
I just ran a very casual "Intro to D&D" 2-part one-shot for some coworkers, and I have to say, doing it your way is something I should have erred on rather than going too easy on them (which I absolutely did). An attitude like yours is something I will strive for in the future, and discussions like this video are a means to doing that with higher understanding.
I really like the way one of you put it when you said it's more about drama than anything else. Fights that feel like you did something awesome to get through them alive, even though in reality it was almost guaranteed you'd walk away unscathed. That gives longevity necessary to the campaign while also making things interesting moment to moment.
As a new dm, encounter balancing is the hardest part for me, even from official modules.
Unfortunately the encounters from official modules are generally really poor…I’ve had to rewrite pretty much every encounter for Curse of Strahd. The math here is what I’ve used. Give monsters and players a 55-65% chance to hit or save (looking at AC or saving throw numbers). Give enough effective hit points and damage to last a few rounds (between 2 and 4 depending. Using %chance to hit and such). And then don’t rely on the numbers to make it interesting. Use neat abilities, terrain, puzzles, weaknesses, narrative beats, alternative goals (not just kill them all), and enemy morale to make the encounter interesting.
Make sure your monsters have a similar number of actions per round as your party. Make sure you don’t have a monster that can kill a party member in one hit (unless you specifically choose that to be part of it)…yeah. There’s a lot of art to it more than science.
Yeah like the video I do not usually go by CR rating when balancing encounter, I use the DPS of the party vs the Health and DPS of the enemies consider how many attacks it will take to kill on or the other, special abilities included in offense and defense and determine it like that. I think CR is broken because just plopping a monster into the game with no thought of how they will interact with the party is quite useless for so many reasons
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said we want drama in combats. That’s what we’re really after. My mind is now veering off to design encounters that are dramatic but don’t necessarily threaten the party (threats to others they care about, destruction of important things, even fighting a friend that is mind-controlled etc). It’s the possibility of failure that makes a great encounter, but failure can mean more than just the death of party members.
My personal DM experience is that the encounters that get the biggest reactions have moments that LOOK dangerous or dramatic even if they aren't mechanically that difficult. A monster that shrugs off an attack without flinching because it has good defenses comes off as more intimidating than one that hits harder but is easier to hit. An ogre that grapples and picks up a PC is more terrifying than one that does the more optimal trick of just swinging a club. The second monster that breaks invisibility to punch the Wizard from behind. The additional wave of minions that comes in from the flank after a round of fighting. The fact that the entire place is on fire, or the fight is on a very narrow ledge. In these cases, it doesn't matter if the thing's probably going down in a round - the players don't FEEL like everything is under control.
100% right
Challenge rating doesn't mean it's a difficult encounter for a party of 4 of the same level. On page 82 of the DMG, there's a table that's a part of a section on how much experience an adventurer can handle at different difficulties. Using 1 monster of a CR of the party level tends to get between a medium and hard encounter. Since I don't run 6-8 encounters a day (the recommendation comes from this section in the book), I tend to run exclusively hard to deadly encounters, which seems to balance out the campaign nicely. The combat obviously requires a little tweaking from just dropping monsters straight from the MM onto an open field, but overall I think the balance is fine.
the real formula is the Daily budget xp, you just can run 2 deadly+ encounters per day... but ppl dont do this, they dont even make 50% of total budget before a long rest and say "oh, 5e it is too easy".
@@claytoncardoso4538 Then maybe the expectations of THAT MANY encounters is unrealistic for the average DnD game. Either way, it means the CR system needs a redesign
@@shawnwolf5961 I don’t think 3-4 encounters (deadly difficulty) is a lot for an adventuring day. They don’t have to be combat, just scenarios that require the PCs to use 1/3 to 1/4 of their resources (or more) to resolve.
@@shawnwolf5961 average d&d game? bro, you can't fix something that people play wrong. The normal thing, since 2e, is to do the whole dungeon with only 1 day's resources.
If you play tabletop dnd like it's a baldurs gate pre-patch where you press rest at every corner... the problem is with you, not the system.
@@jefR6875 But the rules aren't 3-4 a day, it's 6-8. Most tables just don't have that much combat in one session. I think WotC assumed people would have a lot more combat (and maybe they did back when 5e first came out, idk). But for OneDND they need to rework their CR system, and I don't think there's any room to objectively disagree on that tbh.
I think "deadly" should mean a decent chance of a TPK. Deadly encounters should be something that the party should try and avoid. Many players have the mindset that every encounter is beatable which easily leads to parties of murderhobos. The world of D&D should be a place that feels like it's a living, breathing world where pissing off the wrong person could get you killed.
Peasant: "Beware, adventurers! The cave on your path hides a terrible fire spitting monster!"
Lvl1 Monk: "I enter the cave"
DM: "As you approach the cave, a wave of fire coming from the darkness flows through you. You're now a dead pile of ashes, don't bother throwing dice"
Although I agree with your statement I fear many DM's fail to convey this in Session 0 or provide alternatives to combat.
@@irenewhitcomb1813 I do partly think it's an issue that 5th edition doesn't really provide many satisfying things outside of combat. Especially if you were playing a martial class like 99% of the time their class features are purely combat focused. Granted you could say that's where the sort of diversity of the party is supposed to come in but a lot of those classes that also have utility skills for things outside of combat are also really good in combat because most of their class features are combat oriented as well.
Deadly in the game just means there's a chance one or more characters might get knocked down to 0 (assuming a party with full resources). If you only want to do a single challenging encounter in a day, you might to do a double-Deadly or maybe even triple-Deadly encounter depending on the party's level and magic items. But if you follow the adventuring day mechanic and put a regular Deadly encounter at the end of the adventure when the party is down on their resources and health, that usually works out just fine.
The problem is, those 'deadly' encounters you want them avoiding are typically the boss encounters they need to defeat to complete their quest. So... if they avoid the deadly encounters, they are avoiding any of the hero questing they are playing the game for.
The fights that should be avoided are the ones that nickle and dime the party so they aren't entirely ready for the deadly boss encounter. However, how do you avoid those fights if they stand between you and the boss? My group likes to try to avoid them, but those attempt typically fail due to one person or another in heavy armor.
Eh, maybe the quest is to retrieve something or plant something, so it makes sense to avoid the fight. But, if the quest is 'stop this guy before he obliterates the city'... well, the party is going to have to face that fight.
What makes sense : "We just saw a dragon fly by. Let's not go poke that."
What doesn't make sense : "The dragon just promised to torch every village within 3 days flight before hitting the city... well, we'll we might lose one or two if we face the dragon so let him scorch this kingdom to the ground."
If your part seeks out battles outside those required for the quest, throw around some deadly ones for them to wander into. If your players turn murderhobo (solution to everything is combat), then yes give them the opportunity to punish themselves. I mean, if they are attacking citizens in a town then a sting might be made by the city to try and catch the group.
On the other hand, if your party is ignoring the quests and wandering off in search of monsters to hunt. Maybe a 'heroes campaign' isn't the right style for the group, and they should just be monster hunters clearing the area around the city. Or if they are attacking civilians, then it should become a villains campaign where they are eventually attacked on sight for approaching a city. (And in that case, part of the problem is that NPCs perish instantly if a PC sneezes on them.)
By all means, make a living world where there are deadly encounters everywhere... but the moment those deadly encounters become a threat to a city, it becomes a quest option, and thus the heroes are expected to deal with it. Unless, you have upfront told your players that a lot of things will happen and they aren't expected to resolve much, if any of them. They aren't the heroes saving the world, they're just above average citizens trying to survive their day to day lives. But you also need to be ready for the consequences of having a dragon siege Neverwinter for a year, since no one is able to fight it... what with there being no heroes. And also be ready for them never venturing far from the city since they'll probably lose one or two people just traveling to one of the villages... if the villages are still even there.
It would be a good idea to read the definition of CR from the DMG for context. I was surprised when I read it. CR means it is easy for a well-rested party of the corresponding level.
Great watching this after chatting to you guys at PAX Unplugged! Fantastic stuff, definitely want to do something like this for my group as we have 5 players, 18th level characters, major magic items AND a dedicated healer who can output a LOT of healing.
Very much proves a lot of theories and gut feelings I've had over many years of DMing. VERY good video! Thanks guys!
Edit: Also, interesting how this related to the info from the core rules that assumes a party is fighting 8-10 encounters PER LONG REST. I know streamed games are different (3 hours, can't have 6 sessions in a row of combat it's too dull) but I don't think I've ever played in private games that have 8-10 encounters per long rest (and yeah I know encounters doesn't always mean combat encounter, but encounter = loss of resources/threat to the party).
Thanks Mark!
yeah 8-10 per long rest is legitimately insane even in the most intense dungeon crawl let alone anything less
Damn and I thought getting the players to do 4-5 in one day was hard. Getting them to do more than 5 encounters before a long rest seems very difficult.
@@TheJerbol It's very hard to tell from the rules if the assumed 10 encounters per long rest is 2 combats and 8 traps/social/puzzle encounters or 5 combats and 5 other encounters, or mainly combat encounters
This would be an amazing tool if it was a spreadsheet with all the MM monsters data in it. Where you could fill out HP, and damage output and it would spit out a list of monsters that met the parameters within a margin of error.
The amount of time and work this must have taken is no joke. Much respect for doing it for all of us
It’s been really fun to see how after they made a book they started to think a lot more critically about game design. It’s been fun to watch!
Writing that book really taught them a lot! It’s hard to know where your knowledge gaps are until you’ve had outside input like you would get creating a book.
Nah. It is well presented, but I assume anyone giving the PHB and DMG a casual read will realise this.
I know everyone in my group did.
We consider CR a joke.
But then most of the people I play with have a background in maths and physics, so maybe if you have a group of theatre trained actors, they will not.
@@rogerwilco2 yeah, so do I. What’s your point about math backgrounds? It still takes time to do all the math to present this. It’s not a 4 minute process. Of course we all already knew the challenge rating system was garbage. The community has been bitching about it for awhile. But it was nice to see some actual numbers that most of us simply have no time for, presented well, and demonstrating just how bad off it actually is.
When calculating your party's survivability, don't forget to add their Healing abilities.
To heal in any meaningful way you spend your action, so your dpr falls and then it compromises the math
@@joaosolreis3004 healing word has entered the chat.
@@johnsmith-fy8jo a Twilight cleric enters the chat, takes the microphone and shouts over everyone.
And rests
@@johnsmith-fy8jo 1d4 + spell casting isn't that meaningful. So much so that healing word is used only to bring dead people back to the combat, but it isn't used as a mean of reseting the party hp between fights
CR was balanced into 6-8 encounters a day. But that’s not how most tables play. I think this is the core of the issue
This is part of the problem, but even with 6-8 encounters a day CR is still not accurate.
It doesn't help that most of the monsters themselves don't follow the rules of challenge rating. Take the ballgura my favorit punching bag for Cr and the guy has the same hit points as a Cr one creature. Without his reckless attack he also wouldn't ever hit the broadside of a barn. Yet he is Cr 5 which is higher than a banshee, and a few other monsters. He is less stronger than a Cr 2 sea hag or Cr 3 green hag. His resistance helps against spells except his saving throws and stats are so bad they are near garenteed to succeed anyway while counting his magic resistance. Dude is less intelligent than dumb brute monsters like ogres. He showcases a bunch if interesting in isolation mechanics but fails on every front while being an easy showcase of why Cr makes no sense.
I don't think it's the core of the issue, but it does add to the problem a lot.
I think the core of the CR problem is that a lot of encounters are not decided by doing hit point damage, so DPR, AC and hit points should not be the focus of CR calculations.
When played optional, assuming a wisdom of is enough understanding for utilizing basic tactics, a Barlgura cr comes from being effective with its ambush tactics. 5e description is horrible at describing their tactics, having two spells that let them walk towards the party, another to create diversions, and another to prevent movement in a area. They get deadly in Corrdinated groups or surprise one-on-multiples of one.
If not playing this way a Barlgura false onto a squishy cr 3. Do find demons damage resistant ably earns is money against blaster spellcasters that don’t understand the concept of diversity spell damage.
@@DungeonDudes It's not meant to be accurate, it's meant to be a guideline to work with in accordance with you.
The important thing you completely missed, is that with multiple bad guys in an encounter to beef up the enemy hit points, they will deal less damage to the players as combat rounds pass due to monster death. So if they're doing 70 damage, but a third of the monsters are killed at the end of the first round, now they're doing closer to 46 damage. The third round the monsters might only do another 23 damage.
One thing to account with the CR is that a lot of the assumptions made are based on a 6 encounter advanturing day. I've never met a table that plays 6 encounter per adventuring day.
I don't think it's the core of the issue, but it does add to the problem a lot.
I think the core of the CR problem is that a lot of encounters are not decided by doing hit point damage, so DPR, AC and hit points should not be the focus of CR calculations.
@@rogerwilco2 The CR system has so many flaws. We could list them all day
In a large dungeon or something, my table could easily have six encounters. But that’s the exception, where it’s not feasible in-character for them to stop and find a safe place to rest once they start getting worn down. For general run of the mill playing, it’s unusual for them to have more than two in an adventuring day, because they’re running around the city or traveling through the wilderness, and their characters know their limits and have the freedom to head back to the inn or pitch camp at any time. So once any one character starts approaching the red line, the entire party is likely to ease off on the adventuring until they’ve completed a long rest.
I would love to see these theories put into playtesting - and putting that encounter into video format - and put it side by side with an encounter built in one of the popular CR calcs (like Kobolds fight club)
5% chance of death per encounter, over 100 encounters, gives each character starting at level 1 a 0.6% chance of seeing level 11.
So your average Curse of Strahd game
And thus in a 5 player game about 3% one of the characters at level 1 makes it to level 11.
This was the best D&D video I watched in a while. Love you guys. Yeah, its really tough. I'm currently running an homebrew Theros-Setting and want the Characters to feel like heroes of greek myth. But heroics only come with danger. I almost gave up on challenge rating & just slap things there that fit the theme and are not OVERLY deadly. Adjust things during the combat as I go, thats what the DM screen is for. It aint easy.
As highlighted, encounters are an art. Static balance/CR is a bit of an illusion at worst, starting point at best. Dice swing, and that's what makes it fun. In lieu of static pre-designs, I started thinking of encounters as KITS to give DMs flex. I aim for players to last 3 rounds, then tune encounters as-needed at/for the table. Monsters can call in backup.
Hi. Interesting discussion.
With 30 years of DnD on my back I think one important point was missed out: It is most relevant how smart your Monsters are.
Players usually identify the most critical opponent first and focus/boost their attacks accordingly. In return many encounters feature monsters that just dish out to next possible targets, thus spreading their damage and being less threatening.
However, if the DM has his monsters act smart, concentrate on what is most dangerous for them (e.g. cleric in case of Undead), then a fight may be much more difficult without changing any resources.
Cheers from Germany....
An additional point to consider, methinks: That table in the D&D Master book is meant to help when there is a less experienced player base on average.
There is a huge difference in efficiency when it comes to using combat capabilities between very experienced players and a group of beginners.
An experienced group knows exactly when to cast what, how to ensure getting advantage on attacks etc. while a less experienced group may not.
In consequence a specific monster may be more or less challenging without changing its stats.
To give an example: We are a long established team, about 4-5 players on a regular base. Some time ago one of the players got a new girlfriend and she decided to check out what that hobby is he is "wasting" his time one. In addition, my wife also decided to join in.
So we had two additional players adding power to the group which was compensated by our DM of course. But while our ladies combat moves were interesting, surprising and even funny, so adding to a nice experience, they made the group less efficient in general and some fights became intensive that would otherwise just have been a warm-up.
I have personally found in my campaigns that the second I surprise my players with anything, the combat gets significantly harder. Fighting insurmountable forces? They go seal team six on the baddies. Regular old zombies come up from the ground around the players? Nearly lose 2 of them. So personally, I would recommend finding ways to add a twist to the combat to force players to think on their feet a bit more. Definitely haven't checked the CR of anything I've used in a while though.
I agree. Encounters become considerably more difficult when you add other factors into the mix. Things like terrain, natural hazards (spike pits, lava, fast moving water, uneven terrain, etc), wandering monsters, surprise rounds and more. Monster tactics help a lot too. Multiple encounters across a single adventuring day is also important. If you don't wear down your party's resources, how do you expect them to find anything difficult?
Enemy waves is the best thing I've ever done as a DM, especially for deadly encounters. Start with the same amount of enemies as are in the party. So if you have 5 PC's, put 5 enemies in the combat. Unless every single character in the party is capable of instantly wiping out each enemy on their turns - you should have 1 or 2 remaining. Next round, add a couple more at the beginning of the initiative order - kind of like a lair action. Third round, add another 2-3 but make one of them a stronger enemy. Round 4, add a couple more weak ones, and by the fifth (they most assuredly wouldn't be able to kill all of them, by the end of every round) you bring out a boss or "boss" and with the remaining forces and a somewhat drained party - it becomes a very intense encounter. I have never done this were it wasn't nail biting and the best part is that it was only one combat encounter, but felt like 4-5. And if you feel the party is becoming overwhelmed - just don't bring in the next wave, and give it another round or 2.
The first one I did was with a bunch of Sahuagains and 5 Level 5 characters.
Round 1: 4 Sahuagins + 2 Sahuagin Champions
Round 2: 4 more Sahuagins show up
Round 3: 2 more Sahuagins show up.
Round 4: 1 more Champion shows up
Round 5: They were getting overwhelmed, so I didn't bring any this round and they were able to take out a few more.
Round 6: 1 Sahuagin Blademaster shows up, along with 2 more Sahuagins show
Then the next few rounds are them versus the Blademaster and the remaining enemies.
It works incredibly well, especially when Sahuagins are getting advantage on hurt enemies.
The time crunch, the spell management, the chaos, the numbers - it works incredibly well IMO, and works way better than just having 13 Sahuagin, 3 Sahuagin champions and 1 Blademaster all standing the same room and having to fight them all at once (which they would have lost).
All of this is gold and inspiring to newbie DMs. Thank you kindly!!
One side being collectively surprised is a huge swing in balance. I recently did what I expected to be a moderate to easy encounter, but the enemies killed it on their stealth rolls to set up an ambush and suddenly with a surprised party they were in a fight for their lives. Another one recently I surprised the party and an assassin-style NPC downed the tank in one turn. Conversely, if the party gets a surprise on the enemy, it usually becomes a cakewalk. One round of mostly unmitigated damage from one side has a massive effect in a math game like this.
When I want an encounter to look and feel harder than it is, I break out the hourglass. You get 30 seconds or suffer from panic, I roll on the confusion table. The phones go down, and everyone suddenly remembers what's on their spell list and in their inventories. I will sometimes do this for traps as well but that actually can be quite deadly so it's usually a very obvious trap or dangerous situation that gets it, like a burning building or something.
Personally I always increase a monsters HP and run "deadly" encounters. Sometimes they last more than a few rounds but my players always feel like they are on the razor's edge. I always get comments about how much fun they have and how they felt like they were close to losing. Personally I don't worry about any of my players dying because death saves in 5E are so forgiving, even when a PC goes down there is a pretty good chance the Cleric will have a healing word to save them before they actually die. Unfortunately it's not a science just more of an intuition and reading the table.
I think this is how a lot of DMs play. This totally changes the value of a bunch of classes in the game and most of the combat magic items, and entirely changes the intentions of every mob in the game.
If the cleric has 10 healing spells and one fight … they can burn through spells like it’s nothing. Sure!
Now give them 6-8 fights in the day. Instead of 10 spell slots in that one fight they have less than one spell slot in each fight. Is the cleric going to heal someone? Will the cleric spend a spell slot out of combat knowing that’s one fewer spell to deal damage or heal with?
It becomes a different game. This other game? That’s the game they created. You’ve been playing something else with a book that looks similar.
A once per day magic item … and you do combat once per day. Yeah, neat. When you’re doing half a dozen combats per day using that magic item is a big deal! Changes the value of it entirely.
Also changes the value of anything that recharges on rest … ki points, warlock spell slots, superiority dice, action surge ….
I do it the same way.
I may have missed it, but I think a key thing to factor in as well is action economy, I always find it feels much more deadly having an enemy that hits 3/4/5 times than an enemy that maybe hits once or twice!
I know you guys are looking for a mathematical equation for this, but I typically like to have more creatures to add to the encounter on standby in case it's too easy and have something that my creatures would do to waste an action or 2 if the encounter is too hard. Example
I had a party face three stone Giants. If the encounter was too easy I was going to have more Giants come out of the nearby cave. If the encounter was too hard (Richard ended up being) I had one or two of the Giants waste their action vomiting because in this story they were addicted to eating acid from a nearby acid pool.
Fucking Richard, always getting in the way :'D
This has definitely changed the way I will think about combat encounters and I think it will lead to being able to create encounters that are balanced in whatever way I want them to be.
To even complicate things further, another variable is the skill of the people playing in the game. I'm a newer DM that plays with a group of friends that have finished one campaign total, and their builds, use of abilities and strategy will not rival what your group of dedicated players and students of the game will achieve.
Great video. We are just starting Dragon Heist tomorrow and I've been binging you guys looking for tips, ideas and ways to make it awesome!
That's what I was about to say. The Devs rate the monsters according to what new DMs need to help them with new players.
The thing I hate the most about the Challenge Rating is that there is no CR 29 creature.
CR29 is the friends we made along the way
Scheduling a regular game is CR 29
@@GeldarionTFS 😆 this guy knows what's up
So, funny thing right: Paizo, for both Pathfinder first & second edition, & for Starfinder, actually remedy this issue. Instead of balancing CR to a party of 4, they created a chart that shows how CR should, roughly, be adjusted to your party size. The creatures in question are balanced under this CR gradient.
It also helps that in PF2E & Starfinder they've removed the RNG from health so that it's just a flat increase per level, which gives the GM more to work with on dealing damage to the players.
Just might have to take a look at how they manage monsters and combat. Somewhat familiar with character creation
Ahh...a fellow path player. I just started 5e this month and just picked up lvl 2. I love the simplicity of 5e however the challenge rating is bonkers hahaha. The bandit captain as CR 2 is crazy lol.
I dunno man, I DM'd for Pathfinder 1E years ago, and their CR system is pretty busted too. Didn't matter how I adjusted the encounters according to their charts, my party usually just steam-rolled most encounters even when I deliberately made them all deadly according to the CR charts. I even beefed up some of them with appropriate player class levels that, according to their charts, should have made the enemies way more dangerous - and it really didn't do much. My party put out so much damage, fights tended to rarely last more than a few rounds and they were rarely ever in actual danger - not the least of which because of the party Paladin.
@@Draeckon Rolls can still have a factor in it, & they did iron out a lot of issues from first to second edition.
I think the guideline gives a better idea of what to bounce off of, instead of a vague balance around a party of 4. It's not perfect; but it's better.
I think you need a mix of combat types. Sometimes, your party needs to feel OP! Give them a low level encounter where the wizard AOE's an entire swarm, leaving the leader there to interrogate. Other combats need to have unique elements that are intended to counter the party's standard strategies. At the end, I always try to play my BBEG by-the-book, so when they die they know it was a fair fight *evil smile*
Pathfinder 2e literally has encounter budgets for varying difficulties.
I usually feel if one or two characters are making death saves during a medium to deadly encounter, it went right.
@@Ti_Fire my monsters will focus fire.
@@jonathanhaynes9914that sounds like a literal meat grinder
@@ZetaMoolah ok, for clarity, I usually run a monthly one-shot. It will have an easy and hard encounter, or a deadly encounter. I like to have a mix of monsters and then the characters level up for the next month.
@@jonathanhaynes9914 I’m impressed you’ve found players who enjoy making death saves during medium encounters
@@lebeaumuni6247 it makes the combat feel threatening, I think and based on the feedback (anecdotes to be sure).
I think this is a great start to make something more mathematically accurate. You would also need to consider the type of monster vs the types of characters. For example, you might have a high CR monster with great HP and DPR capabilities but if it is all dependent on being in melee and your players can create unfair ranged opportunities then that CR essentially turns into a CR 0. But if you have a monster that can fly or teleport or even turn invisible, that becomes a completely different challenge level.
You attack your players with an underpowered group of enemies, but then story tell your way into making the encounter appropriately hard to give the feeling of that razor's edge to your players. Have the enemies get a reinforcement; have something explode; have the environment suddenly intervene to impair your players. There are enough ways to buff the enemies during the encounter to make it feel consequential.
Subtle cast animate objects before your wizard can cast it.
Reinforcements are always a great tool, and allows you to bring more powerful enemies into play.
I also utilise a couple of simple tactics for intelligent monsters. If I have a bunch of archers then I will have one with a leadership role which can organise the archers to fire in synchronised volleys (becomes an aoe with a saving throw), this also speeds up the combat for the amount of creatures but also increases the damage output of those creatures.
I also have shield walls (gives cover to those in it when attacked from the front) and pike lines (gains polearm master reaction if attacked from the front).
^this
This. I think CR is just a guideline. DM has a number of ways to make it harder or easier when required. Like throwing something at a strong party to soften them up before the actual encounter. Doing these calculations like you would do for a PC RPG scripted encounter to determine if the difficulty is appropriate is kind of meaningless.
At CR 13, use the deadliest creature in D&D: the skeleton horde. For Cr 13, that's 50 skeletons. The most threatening encounters I've ever run involve lots of skeletons, and have been tense and savage and the players really felt in danger. The point being, action economy is king!
Hear, hear!
For a one-shot, I had an opening that started in media res with the BBEG already having won and his skeleton army already overrunning the city, and the party just needed to escape. These were regular skeletons-just for every one defeated, another took its place. It was incredibly dicey; almost lost a couple PCs in the very first scene. There's definitely something to be said for quantity over quality, provided you can run the scene smoothly without getting bogged down.
Great until your DM uses too small of a map and tidal wave go brrrrrt. Oopsie my level 6 wizard just did 300+ damage in one turn because your horde clumped a little too much (real story).
This... This explains, why my last two big encounters (homebrewed, but based on close to cr constructs) made good encounters. The players felt the message and had some level of drama, while also feeling the needs to come up with solutions, with actions of desperations. I talk a lot with them regarding their change or if they see their chars change or develop in a direction, and I try to help them with that.
From Xanathar's we can see that the intended challenge rating of a solo monster for 3 x 13 lvl party is CR 15 legendary creature, not 13 normal. Adult Bronze/Green dragon doesn't have as much HP but it can fly, has legendary resistances and breaths stuff from afar. It is also a monster that most likely should have a lair to back it up. Not that it would be deadly in most cases, but I would say it would be a moderate challenge. This is also not considering the rather crazy off curve artifact weapon or other magical items that the party most likely has.
Another fun way to see the wonk of monsters CR is adding sidekick levels to them, some of these 1/2 CR creatures are not like the others and with only slight changes become lopsided easily.
Oh yeah, if a Shadow gets Sidekick levels it becomes an absolute UNIT. And Shadows by themselves are already more powerful than other CR 1/2 Monsters!!
The solution I use is having monsters with scalable attributes.
You can justify it with the notion that same monsters are not clones, one maybe older, another maybe in the best shape, another is the dumb brother :)
So the HPs, the AC and every other attribute go from a range of X to a range of Y, and "coincidentally" the group is going to face the one that is not OP and also not a joke, according to what the DM finds appropriate.
Other than that, there is also the old trick of adding last minute minions who serve and help the boss.
i'm pretty new to DM'ing, but i'm a sucker for liar actions
even with one of the first quests they did at LV 1 the monster had a liar action, giving them a sort of clock and diverting their attention making them think "do we clear the minions first, rush the boss, how fast do new minions come and in what ways?"
Lying monsters are the worst!
@@harmless6813 insight check please.
lair actions* 🙃
Well thought out topic, thanks for the upload. I think one factor to consider in a quick calculation is the idea of the action economy in the game. A single strong enemy, in general, is at a sizable disadvantage to the party in terms of the action economy. Perhaps the monster's CR minus .5 per character in the party would give a more accurate value for the threat to the group. Or just an adjustment based on how outnumbered the group is comparatively, either monster or pc.
I think the other thing you might be not factoring in is how often you are encountering battles. Long rest -> Storm giant -> long rest is fine and a piece of cake. A storm giant in the middle of a blizzard with more encounters on the way....that is gonna be an issue. I think the CR ratings were built with a specific number of encounters in mind.
I typically like one big battle per rest instead of 5 stupid easy ones that drag out my session times, so yeah I can see why a CR13 wouldn't be sufficient. But if you are throwing 5 encounters per day, that action surge shouldn't even really be factored in, spell slots dwindle...etc...
There's no way to factor in resting, so no they don't consider it. Players are overpowered. There's only a select few of monsters that are overpowered, mainly with save or die abilities. They also never found a way to match the power of magic with melee damage, melee damage is a complete joke.
An extremely important point. The game itself factored in more encounters per day than the average table actually has. I think they counted on 4-5? Something like that. Typical table is 2-3
The DMG states an adventuring day is 6-8 rests and 2 short rests. That’s what the game is balanced for. Then people don’t do that … then people are concerned with the game not being balanced …. 🤣
Every D&D channel has a video like this.
“How come when I play the game exactly the way I want to instead of how I was told to do it the game isn’t as hard as I’d like it to be?”
Game design and balance is a complex topic.
There are variables you can change that will wildly impact the output.
@@wingedhussar2909 Eh, melee is generally not resource intensive and has more magic items that can combo off of it. A flametongue longsword averages 16 damage per hit at 20 STR, which puts it at 48 per round on a level 11 Fighter. And that’s completely unlimited and before you work in any additional damage bonuses. As a rule caster magic items have finite per day uses and don’t give anything like that kind of bonus damage
@@wingedhussar2909 Overpowered compared to what? DnD isn't a symmetrical game, such as a miniatures wargame where both sides have equal amont of troops at their disposal. The DM can always challenge the players by increasing the difficulty or number of enemies in an encounter. In fact, having an endless supply of monsters available to the DM is what *I'd* call overpowered 😄
Just to say, one of the most important things that my longtime gm did when we were playing 3.5 was to let us all engage in a "non - canon" white room combat scenario for about 2 hours every 2-3 levels. He would place a monster that he felt should be relatively challenging to the party and we would see how our party could handle it (this was partly to see if our characters work the way we wanted after a the recent level up, so this was a window of opportunity to "take back" some of our decisions if it wasn't working as we wanted), this really gave everyone a really good understanding of just how everyone really worked, and how we could all try and set each other up for success in the combat. Once he felt he had a good understanding of the parties current capabilities we would then engage in a bit of free for all pvp, seeing how our characters held up vs each other for a bit of fun.
Edit: That group was very much into following the rules, and having Death be a very real and likely scenario. It has been very interesting trying to play with other groups ever since, because going so hard into it for several years, it made things so dramatic and meaningful. Doing courageous things mattered so much, as you were really risking your character to do them. It also really made you realize that a character dying was really just a chance for you to make new characters with other stories. But most groups I've found just, don't want to engage in such a cut throat playstyle, they are there to relax and have cool moments, they don't want to know what failing the roll to jump across the broken bridge will do, they just want it to succeed. Or to have a crossbow bolt crit succeed vs the rogue while they are disarming it, suddenly making things very dire as he also failed the poison DC check........ instead I often find DM's and players just kind of telling each other what happens, with rolls only mattering insofar as what numbers have they managed to crank out of their hits. Not saying that they don't miss or things like that, but if it is an important roll and it failed? Very few DMs will let it go beyond failing the quest, and most won't even allow that.
Love this content. I would also try to include a factor for how intelligent the creatures are. Enemy tactics as controlled by the DM can seriously swing encounter difficulty.
Yea, a dozen kobolds in a cave with traps and good tactics can TPK nearly any party.
Something that I did recently was I did a 7 hour session by myself and took control of my PC's and simulated a swarm of enemies with multiple waves, and then also a "boss" fight with a higher CR creature and a few minions. It took absolutely forever but it helped me know how things were going to go. Once I ran the boss fight however it went worse than I thought quickly because I rolled a few crits, but that's besides the point
Guys, but did you check the chapter on calculating encounter difficulty? I dont believe 5e is CR od a monster is calculated for a party of 4. The CR is an abstract value you use to calculate the difficulty of the encounter, taking into account all monsters and all PC levels
It is based on 4.
A CR 5 monster is supposed to be a medium encounter for a 5th level party of 4. There's a section on calculating it for larger or smaller groups, which may be what you are thinking of
@@ADT1995 And the definition of a "medium encounter" is basically that a party might use some resources. Medium isn't "evenly matched" - medium is victory, with no casualties, and a character might be missing some hp.
A 50/50 encounter (IE, evenly matched) - way past deadly
@@rich63113 that's why I said "medium encounter" not "balanced encounter"
Despite the name medium means that the party will kick the monsters teeth in unless they are really low on resources
Thanks for bringing this up, I should have included it in my original comment
Personally my combats range from hard to >5x the deadly threshold just to keep players from obliterating everything.
@@ADT1995 Same. Anything below deadly is just a speedbump. At my table the party usually faces two or maybe three combat encounters between long rests, so I start from double deadly and go up from there.
Dudes I just spent the last 2.5 hours not knowing what to do and not wanting to go to sleep.
Thank you guys so much for being so awesome and giving me thirty of peace before bed
I'd be curious to see what the numbers look like if you balanced around Hard / Deadly encounters. By design, Deadly encounters are advertised as only having a chance of character death. The ones before then are undoubtedly going to be much lower risk then.
Honestly after level 10-14, every encounter needs to be deadly to make it worth the fight.
The “hard” and “deadly” encounters assume 6-8 encounters that day. That’s 5-7 other opportunities to diminish party resources … plus out of combat instances.
No one should be surprised that when you completely change class resources and magic resources that the expected challenge of a fight or a monster isn’t the same.
It’s like …. If I give you have as much salary as you have now and then talk to you about your disposable income … things will seem harder, right? But, if suddenly you have twice as much money as you make today you’ll have more disposable income. The same things won’t be as hard to buy.
Imagine you have 10 spells per day. And you have 1 fight per day.
Now imagine you have 10 spells per day and you have to get through 8 fights and also maybe have spells for non combat encounters …..
How excited is your cleric going to be to heal you when they have 3 fights left to go and have 2 spell slots left for all healing and also all offensive spells and also for any out of combat stuff?
Sounds like a different game, right? And, you can rest early … but we’re just gonna have to increase the odds of your rest being interrupted.
@@zero11010 I don't disagree. Though I think what they want out of Medium encounters sounds like what falls under the category of Deadly encounters according to WOTC at least. I normally do about the standard encounters per rest, but even when I don't using Deadly encounters generally seems to still be a challenge.
This way of thinking with combat encounters feeling like they are more dangerous than they actually are, is exactly how i make my encounters. I personally take the idea of my boss should be able to kill a single party member in 1 and a half rounds with a single target attack. It makes the enemy feel more dangerous but against a party they are weaker because even though they can almost kill one member in a single round they are blocked by others members and make the team feel like they need to work together or else someone will die. And having effects that incapacitate a single party member for a round with a mechanic that is more involved than you're just stunned and you've got a memorable fight.
Is that a ‘Dr.’ I see in front of Monty’s name? Congratulations! 🎉 What was your thesis on?
Did you find a solution ? If so, is there a video ? Thanks for what you do for the community ❤️
3.5 was wild. You could have a character who existed as two different entities take levels in rogue, take knives that hit twice for every attack, and add hair knives for extra hits whilst the fighter does two attacks with the wizard playing rocket tag in the background, nuking everything xD challenge rating stood no chance haha
Also, it was a nightmare to calculate challenge rating for more than one creature or for a number of players different from four. As a DM, balancing encounters in 3.5 was almost impossible.
Not to mention that in 3.5, attack bonus vs monster AC made no sense at higher levels. If you wanted to give even a small kind of miss chance to the party fighter you had to artificially inflate AC, otherwise there was almost no point rolling the dice.
But then this could push AC out of the reach of any rogues or monks who tended to have a much lower attack by that time.
Plus, this meant if you wanted to challenge the party with humanoid you were basically forced to give the enemy mad magic items like +5 weapons and armour to even begin to make a challenge. Which of course the party would insist on looting, resulting in ridiculous situations like the party hauling dozens of +5 weapons and suits of plate mail around a dungeon!
And this doesn't even touch on the imbalance of high level spellcaster PCs!
@@PJRZ1 That mostly depend on the incredibly stupid way the "wealth" was managed and the fact that AC didn't go up with levels as attack did.
If you take as granted that a character would have a certain amount of wealth at a certain level, that says nothing about what kind of bonuses he would get from its items. Also, if you grant the players to always be able to buy what they could not find in loot, you will soon lose control over the amount of personalized bonuses each character would accumulate.
Another wrong assumption on the part of the developers was that buffer type characters would use their powers and spells mostly to buff their better suited companions, while reality has shown us that they will more gladly buff themselves so they can rob the job of the other players.
One last wrong assumption is that items will get consumed, destroyed, lost, stolen and, at some point, replaced by different ones. That's why the sunder, disarm and grappling maneuvers were in the game. That's why badly failing a save should have damaged the equipment too. That's why most of the magic items found during adventures should have been consumables.
Treasure tables in 2nd edition and earlier versions of the game were built so that permanent magic items were incredibly rare, and there was no market for them either.
But obviously, not many DMs actually went to the length of destroying or stealing the equipment of their players (the common excuse was that it is too much a hassle to apply all the rules).
And the really bad habit to start a campaign above first level added to the problem, since each character basically started already with a perfectly customized and highly efficient set of magic and mundane items, throwing the balance in the bin.
All this without even starting to address single items or effects which were highly exploitable in many situations.
Another thing to consider is that there are an alarming number of monsters that are way deadlier than their CR would have you believe. The RUclips channel D&D Logs has released a series of videos where they discuss this very topic and list specific examples, as well as why they’re way too deadly for their CR. For instance there’s this low level swarm of mites capable of inflicting the Poisoned condition on pc’s. They also leave behind mites whenever they attack, which burrow into their victims. If you don’t get them out of your system in time these mites will burrow into your heart (dealing a ton of damage along the way) and instantly kill you. All the while the main swarm will continue to attack you and implant more mites with each attack, and they’re resistant to most kinds of attacks. Remember, these are low CR creatures.
For me, the hardest thing to consider is all the different abilities some monsters have that don't relate directly to damage, but can make encounters harder
The tricky thing is that encounters are designed to whittle the characters down. That is, you are comparing one encounter when the characters are "full." But there should be several encounters per rest. Take your same encounter example and apply it to the characters three or four times to signify how many encounters they'll have between short rests...or six to eight times before a long rest.
Don't forget building terrain that allows the players to use strategy to survive & win.
Great Video. A little on Probability math. All things being equal, with a 5% chance of dying, this is a 95% survival rate.
Should you survive the first combat, you have 95% survival on the second. So the survival rate of 2 combats together is 90.25% (.95*.95)
Three combats is 85.7375% etc.
Following this math down, the survival rate of 100 combats is 0.5921%
Nice Vid, guys. In my Excel sheet, I calculate Party Total HP and also AVG HP (to answer the question of who might go down if focussed). I then calculate their Avg DPR, and their Burst DPR (for 1 round). Once I have those numbers, I then go to the monster side. I calculate amount of HP monsters require to last 1 round (aka "trash mobs"), 2 rounds (avg mobs), 3 rounds ("lieutenants") and 4 or more rounds (bosses) vs the party's avg DPR, and amount needed to survive their Burst DPR. Then I calculate monster damage by taking the Avg HP of the party and assigning DPR to the monsters as 0.1 x the Party Avg HP (for trash mobs), 0.2 (for avg monsters), 0.25 (for LT's) and 0.3 (for bosses). What I get is trash monsters who will only live a round and only deal 10% of a PC's health, or avg monsters which live 2 rounds and deal 20%x2 or 40% total, or LT's who live 3 rounds but deal 25%x3=75%, or bosses who live 4 rounds and who could deal 30%x4=120% of the Avg HP of the PCs (meaning, 1 goes down, or else 2 get really beat up). I then tweak the numbers up or down if I add special abilities to the monsters (flight, spellcasting, resistances, etc.) I can also use either the normal HP or Burst HP for the monster depending on if the PCs get there at the beginning of the day or end of the day (when their resources are depleted.)
I calculate CR as a whole across mutliple fights and will use a few encounters along the way to balance the party for the CR by making you use up or gain key resources
You should really include Jill and Joe more often. I love you guys but I think your videos could us their input as well.
We hope to in the future.
Thank you! I can imagine that it is not simple, balancing schedules and all. But they are a joy to watch in your campaign and I truly feel that they will add to your content, which is already excellent.
"The player characters feel threatened, but maybe actually aren't." This is how I set up monsters (and their minions) in Monster of the Week. Part of the reason I moved away from 5e and towards MotW is that, when I do have combat, I don't need to work through a pile of expected damage outputs on the fly.
Aside from the issue from that day on Twitch, I saw this thread live and I completely agree with everything you said. Also, ready-made adventures have encounters that are generally pretty weak in the "drama" point.
I tend to gauge the relative challenge level of an encounter more on the portion of the players' resources that it consumes, rather than hit point damage. I'm mostly talking about spell slots/class feature ability uses, as well as magic item charges/uses. I find this to be a better measure of an encounter's impact on the players than just HP.
This has genuinely been my journey as a dm for the past 17 years of running D&D and Pathfinder. Safe to say, it is a very delicate line to ride finding that medium and can very much agree a lot of the times not only calculating your party's capabilities Stat wise but also the extent of their abilities can stretch those numbers to make the challenge less viable than it would to take a cookie cutter example through the reference chart.
At one point I tested this out between multiple different groups I was running: similar compositions in party makeup, 5 members to each group, level 5 party, Town Square with 1 major raised platform, multiple assassins [3 ranged, 6 close range] 2 basilisks. Group 1 struggled to subdue the party, took 5-6 rounds, 2 casters dealt back and forth with the archers, martials did their best to defend them from the close range enemies until the party could come back together to deal with the basilisk problem, cleaned up the stragglers that tried getting away.... Party 2, same comp...... 2 rounds, the only real difference being the fighter of the party being a centaur instead of human, and defense style, flipped the entire counter on its head.
So with that in mind yes, I'd say even with it meaning extra prep time especially if you're looking to meet a certain urgency, it'd help you as a dm in leaps and bounds to take your party and possibly run the characters though scenarios yourself with even perhaps the strategies your familiar with the party using and throw in best/worst/and average possible outcomes to get a good idea on how the encounter may wear on the party's capabilities to see where things may lead.
I think a decent way to identify the difficulty of an encounter is through how much of the party’s resources (mainly HP, but also spells and abilities) are depleted, specifically in quarters. This keeps the Easy (25%), Medium (50%), Hard (75%), and Deadly (100%) system, while also leaving room for the break downs the Dudes talked about. As far as how much of that is spread out or targeted at one player, that would be up to DM discretion, and may be a part of balance (and rp - this monster tries to kill things one at a time, or has a particular dislike for *this* kind of character, etc.) they have to keep in mind.
One thing I have done to make combats last a bit longer, which also effects difficulty due to monsters being able to take one or two more turns before they die, is have my players and monsters all use their maximum hit points possible. I will also frequently give HP boosts to monsters. Adding a ton more monsters is occasionally a decent approach, but I find it draws out the time each round takes, with less player actions overall. Taking the hit point approach doesn't increase round time, but prolongs the battle beyond 1-2 turns.
I also do things like phased boss fights, where something triggers at HP thresholds or event based thresholds to trigger the next phase of the fight, instead of just putting players in the room with the bad guy and hoping they don't wipe him out in one round. It isn't fun for them to have an anti-climatic final encounter. Doing things like having a magical item encapsulate and rejuvenate the bad guy when he drops to 0 hp to begin a new phase of the fight is fun.
While video games are not always a good inspiration for DnD, sometimes they are. "Scripted" fights aren't always bad, as long as you still leave room for player agency throughout the fight.
Re: perma death. If my party TPKed, something would occur where they could be restored. Perhaps they take on the role of NPCs for a session who go and clear out that darn dungeon those adventurers failed to clear, their bodies are recovered, and raised, and now they owe a debt.
Something I like to think about when building encounters is to shift it from the players perspective to the monsters perspective. Any encounter with the party is a potentially deadly encounter for almost any monster. Thus they should prepare and react accordingly. Players should almost always be outnumbered, use minions to inflate the numbers, use traps and/or a dynamic battlefield to add drama to the fight. How many rounds a combat lasts is superlative as long as the rounds themselves are quick and exciting.
To my mind, the part about building drama is the key to building a great encounter. That means so much more than just the single encounter, too; in a chase, do you save your resources on the minions who are essentially just trying to slow you down, since they're too weak for you, or do you cast your big spells, wasting resources but catching up to the main villain?
On the flip side, stakes are so much higher for the players. Sure, 15 orcs might not end in a TPK, but one of the weaker players might die. A friend of mine threw a seriously deadly encounter our way a few years ago, which I said was scaled somewhat off. I mean, yeah, we won, but two player characters (out of four), died. That encounter didn't fill me with urgency the same way an earlier encounter did, where some Nothics were doing their damnedest to kill one of the players. The fight with the Nothics felt harrowing in a very different way, because we were made very aware of just how vulnerable we were, separately. As a group, where we just focus fire and pick things off one by one? Meh, cake walk. When the monsters focus fire *us*? Now THAT'S scary.
I feel like there's ultimately no way to fully prep something like this. As you guys said, there's a level of randomness that you can't account for (if all monsters hit one PC, if multiple PCs get stunned, if PCs decide to pop off, etc). I just adjust my encounters on the fly. Throw x enemies at them and if they obliterate the first two, triple the HP of one and call it a "King" random monster. Or if I can't even hit them because their AC is too high for the monster, give them advantage on certain attacks. You can make any encounter feel tough with small tweaks like this throughout
I have found that the "Goldilocks zone" tends to be where at least one character drops each fight.
I LOVE this video. I run a game with 3 players and often do one shots with varying party members. I use the general guidelines but for sure magic items and player experience really affect how I’m setting it up. Free admission, behind the screen I will muck with hit points to make it fun and tense.
Initiative matters so much too.
I'd imagine the initiative bonus of the monster should probably have a big impact on challenge rating.
A very slow opponent may not even act.
after reducing the +3 sword to a +1 sword, i got that the party's average dmg is more like 110-120 dpr. this means that the monster in the DMG can last into the 3rd round, and dish out 2/3 of the party's hp during the combat. also it'll probably have things such as legendary resistances and actions which means it's a pretty tough encounter. also considering the dmg is probably not distributed equally, a character might be knocked out and then it can't contribute to the battle which makes the encounter even more challenging.
I have felt the same thing with a fifth level campaign I am running. I use DnD Beyond to calculate my encounters and the party always kicks ass even though the system rates it as a deadly encounter. I end up chucking in a few more monsters.
Also there's another factor to consider: the time Bell's Hells almost TPK'ed to the echo knight. They suffered several bad roles, didn't agree on a strategy and it almost took them out with (I think ) several characters needing to be healed back to consciousness. How does that factor in? I'd love to hear your analysis.
Great video, I completely agree. As a dm I am not worried about character death unless they cannot be raised.
I note that we have powerful enough computers now that you could make a bootstrap analysis app; run the encounter on autopilot 100 times, and note how many times the party wins and how many times they lose. Especially easy if you keep track of your players' stats with an app in the first place.
From a perspective of balancing the upcoming 6E, one solution for tense-but-safe encounters is having the monsters be more or less predictable, while the players aren't. If the monsters do predictable damage, players can easily estimate "We have four rounds until Deathville, population: us." And then if things look to go in that direction, they can pull out their limited-use powers, or perhaps retreat.
Then you'd have the monsters be strong stats-wise, so players would 60% lose the fight without using limited-use resources or clever use of environment - but WITH their strategies and trump cards, they really have a 99% chance of winning.
On the other hand, when the monsters have their own trump cards to play, things are inherently riskier. This is good for sapient opponents, because it makes negotiations more desirable - as well as tactics like demoralizing or distracting the opponent.
So, basically, I propose calculating TWO challenge ratings - one for if nobody uses resources, one for if both sides go all out.
I think that the DMG encounter building guide was created before the community did a lot of work on theorycrafting and optimization. I am currently running two campaigns with players who are relatively new to 5e, and thus did not do a lot of optimization. (E.g., no multiclassing, and nobody has taken GWM, Polearm Master, or Crossbow Expert, although I do have one Sharpshooter.) I also run it as a fairly low-magic world in terms of the items they find. As a result, I'm finding the DMG recommendations to be pretty much spot-on, even into the upper levels. One of my groups is currently at level 18 and the other is level 20, and they both are still challenged by encounters that I balanced using the official CR guidelines.
That said, some things that I've noticed:
- I think that the scaling of the recommendations is more flawed by number of opponents than by CR. Your single CR 13 opponent is going to be in a worse spot than if you had set up a multiple-opponent encounter with the same difficulty rating.
- Battlefield control is huge. Giving the monsters non-damaging abilities to stun, separate, counterspell, or otherwise neutralize PCs does an awful lot to make the players feel like they were in a lot more danger than they truly were in.
- Tactical/terrain advantages can serve a similar purpose as battlefield control. Putting the enemies behind arrow slits, or giving them flight, or any kind of asymmetric vision limitation helps tremendously, and forces the players to think more creatively on how to win the encounter.
Great video, I completely agree. As a dm I am not worried about character death unless they cannot be raised.
On the question of balancing combat encounters, a method I have been using recently to some notable success is just rolling randomly. If there is a random encounter I have planned(or I'm pre-planning a future encounter), I roll a d20, and that's the CR I pick or find a monster from.
I have also been playing with rolling the d20 twice, a taking the result closer to the party's ECL.
What this does is force the party to deal with encounters too tough for them, and well as giving them some relaxing fights they can take it easy on. And once I roll for the encounter, I can even adjust the situation to make the encounter more exciting, by giving the weak monsters a terrain advantage and surprise. Or by giving the party those same things against a powerful monster.
The party starts to sometimes decide that running away and hiding are better options. Or sometimes they need to roleplay to get past the dragon guarding the bridge. And with options for resurrection, battlefield control, etc... many other classes get a chance to shine in various and unusual ways, ways that I couldn't even plan.
In other words, the CR system is so broken that rolling randomly provides a more exciting gameplay experience.
Great work, Dudes! Interestingly enough, I came to a similar approach though I don't dig as deep as you do. I keep track of my party's "alpha strike" damage (when they burn all their most powerful abilities and spells) and "sustained damage" that they can deal for prolonged periods (but not infinitely). And I calculate separately single target numbers and AoE numbers (which are almost twice as high). I don't care about the HP :) I use these numbers to make sure that my monsters can survive for at least a couple of rounds. What I usually account for, is the terrain layout of the planned encounter (my party has a Paladin and a Rogue, who need to get close to their opponents) and most powerful control abilities that monsters will have (like Beholder's Anti-Magic Cone), since these factors can reduce damage in first one or two rounds. What I do is easier and is enough for me since I already developed a "sense" for how my party performs, but I think your approach is better for general case and definitely provides more metrics to fine-tune the encounter even if at the cost of more calculations.
It’s almost like the 60 damage from the monster, 6-8 times a day, is roughly 450 damage total, which is the party hp+ the half hit dice they would be able to use to recover daily. Like almost exactly the right amount damage out to in… so the 6-8 encounters would be just right.
A major factor missing from this equation is the fact that the game is designed to have 6-8 encounters in the course of an adventuring day. If you are doing one to two instead, the PCs are more likely to have their strongest abilities at their disposal every round of combat and more likely to be starting every combat close to or at full health. If you were to multiply CR rating by 6-8 and then divide it by the number of encounters you run a day, you either have one really hard combat or a couple with more risk.
I think another thing to consider is that the party should be having 4-6 encounters per day. Not each encounter has to be combat but I think part of the balance is also "how much of the party's resources are depleted per encounter?" It's why boss encounters are so tough to balance in 5e.
I scrapped the CR system long ago, starting back in 3.5e and started approaching things in different ways, depending on the intent I had for the encounters. Was I draining resources from the party to give them more reason to continue adventuring? Was the encounter planned or something that happened as a result of player action? Was the encounter meant to help add information to flesh out a plot hook, requiring more drama or danger? Was the party complacent and needing to be reminded that the world was dangerous? With these in mind, I would also remind myself that intelligent enemies use tactics that should catch players off guard, but those same intelligent enemies should also care about their own survival in most cases. In the end, I realized that not everything should be balanced to the party, and sometimes it was necessary to make modifications at the table to make sure everyone got to feel like they did something cool/meaningful.
One thing that makes it even harder to measure encounter difficulty in a single value like challenge rating are resistances and immunities.
For example an opponent with mostly fire-based attacks becomes much less dangerous if half the party has fire resistance. On the other hand in the fight against the Atropal in Tomb of Annihilation we quickly figured out that it was vulnerable to radiant damage and luckily we had several ways to deal radiant damage, so that thing went down rather quickly despite it's impressive challenge rating of 13 against a level 9 group.
On the other hand I think it's fine when sometimes you get this feeling that you just had the right tool for the job. There will be other encounters where you best spell or your favourite attack would be rather useless, So I think it's also ok when you sometimes get this heroic feeling, when you just obliterate a superior opponent, because you could exploit his weak spot.
If the monster main attack is fire based and the majority of the group has fire resistance... you replace the monster :)
An enemy encounter of equal CR is intended to be defeated without significant trouble. Just up the difficulty (CR) by one or two.
I loved the video! I will take some of these tips and put them to use when I am designing my next combat encounter!
I would like to proffer a different point of view when it comes to how fifth edition CR is supposed to work. According to the DMG, a normal adventuring day should have 6 to 8 combat encounters. So if we take that point and combine it with your math, after encountering 8 CR 13 creatures your party should be down 160% of their health. That would be an intense adventuring day which would require the party to take at least one short rest and use some if not all of their hit dice to survive.
I think that the problem lies in the fact that nobody actually runs their games this way. Well almost nobody 😉
I run my own homebrew game and if monsters need a boost, I boost them on the fly. Add legendary actions, make them temporarily immune to certain damage, add environmental hazards, give them nasty and surprising abilities. Matt Colville had a good video recently about giving the players an objective rather than just team desthmatch. Runehammer has tons of content on how to boost "encounters" (a word he hates lol.). I found out almost immediately when my players were low level how bad the balance mechanic in 5e was after they kept trouncing everything.
The biggest mistake everyone makes with CR and encounter building is misinterpreting what constitutes a "medium" or "deadly" encounter.
You talk about using a CR13 creature as a boss monster, but a "medium" encounter is more like a speed bump. One of many encounters during an adventuring day. It's designed to whittle away some resources (which it succeeds in doing so), not threaten the PC's lives.
A "deadly" encounter is one which has a POSSIBILITY of ONE character dying. Everything below that is assumed to NOT have ANY possibility of character death (of course anything's possible, but still).
D&D combat is fundamentally about resource management. If the party spends all their high level spells and action surges etc, then the encounter has done its job. Actually dealing damage to the party is a bonus.
Another thing is that the rules assume NO magic items.
Yes, most characters will have magic items, but that just means YOU need to account for those items (usually by increasing the party's effective level).
I'm not saying the rules are perfect (people make these mistakes because they are complex and obtuse), but they are considerably more accurate than everyone gives them credit for.
The most obvious issues with CR are that it assumes both a party size and a number of encounters per rest. There may be other issues (I don't think those numbers are properly calculated, but just "guessed" by the content authors, even more when using 3rd party materials), but those two are the obvious ones. I run a PF campaign with many house-rules (in theory different balance, but in practice many of the concepts are the same across the whole d20 family). One of the biggest deviations from the default rules in my campaign is that most slots and abilities are "per encounter" instead of "per day" (with the GM's discretion defining when an encounter is actually over, of course) (btw, games without "Dungeons" in their title often have "Game Masters" rather than "Dungeon Masters"). This allows me to design encounters assuming that both the party and their foes will go all out to either defeat the other side or to just survive (yes, I do have encounters where a "player victory" means barely getting away alive, but I try to make those rather uncommon). At that point, I can also ignore CR itself, and build my monsters following *mostly* the same rules as for characters (I'll often use custom races and/or classes that wouldn't make sense for player characters in terms of lore, but shouldn't be perfectly fine in terms of balance). Then we get to balancing group sizes (ie: # of monsters vs. party size): how many CR 1 goblin dogs would it take to overwhelm a level 6 character? Is 5 level 3 enemies balanced for a party of 3 level 5 characters? There is no simple answer to these questions, and dozens of spreadsheets and algorithms later I am confident enough to say that CR as a single number isn't enough, adding CR's for multiple monsters doesn't do it either, and the best math will only get you a reasonable approximation that a streak of unusually good or unusually bad rolls will quickly topple anyway. But that can be a good starting point, and a good GM should be able to dynamically account and adjust for dice-induced variance in a way that keeps things interesting without invalidating the players' (good or bad) luck. I could share some of my formulas, but I don't expect what works for my campaign to work for others. So here is just a suggestion: if just adding up levels or CR's doesn't do it, consider taking the square root of the sum of the squares (like when using the Pythagorean theorem), or some other power instead of the square. It's rather tedious to do it by hand, but if you are reading this you most probably have access to some kind of spreadhseet utility / application that can do the math for you and help you compare different values. In the end, math (and spreadsheets, and scripting for those of us who are comfortable with coding) is just one more tool in the GM's toolbox to use in our quest to create memorable playing sessions, enjoyable adventures, and thrilling stories around the gaming table.
I think a better thing to look at is spell slots. "How many spells will this encounter take?" If it takes 25% of party spells maybe it's a hard encounter? This accounts for DC dependent abilities like possession, bestow curse, and hold person.
While watching your video, I got a thought process on that. Take the lowest character defense versus monsters attack so the character doesn’t get one shot. Dan take your highest damage dealer average damage per round multiplied by
Amount of party members, then multiply three or four for rounds, and that’s the hit point of the monster. Quicker math not sure if that will work though.
That way also in an AOE encounter your highest damage dealer will be your Wizard or sorcerer.
I find that the easiest "shoot from the hip" encounter balance for a difficult encounter involves just overestimating your party's capabilities and from there picking creatures with interesting special abilities that they haven't encountered before. PCs have a lot of resources; they'll figure it out. Great breakdown; too much math for my brain to attempt myself. 😂
The amount of resources used is an interesting component of combat difficulty. For example, there are times when the party may get to half health after getting hit by an aoe, but they proceed to win the encounter with only one spell slot expended. Using hit dice to heal after. Was that a difficult encounter? It's curious how little the players damage taken can sometimes impact the experience. By contrast, the talk for the next few sessions could be about the time the party used all its high level spell slots to obliterate enemies they PERCEIVED to be strong (but may in fact have been an "easy" rated encounter). The players may feel like they outsmarted a hard encounter because the horde you threw at them seemed deadly after the lucky crit one of the enemies got in the opening round.
To this, I think your point about desiring DRAMA is spot on. It's about feeling like the combat was difficult. The math behind it isnt always as important to the experience. As a new dm, i'm amazed at how much the perceived "difficulty" of a combat comes down to factors other than raw damage output.
I usually handle combat encounters in two ways:
- Simple encounters: The "easy" and "medium" difficulty stuff that I expect my PCs to deal without too much effort, usually acting as setpieces, mood building or world building. For these I normally do some quick math on how much DPR my players do on average and how much punishment they can take. More often than not I tend to go towards having a number of enemies that take the full DPR of one character before dying and ensuring they have enough damage to maybe drop a squishy caster in one round if they gang up on them. If the encounter needs a bit more meat then I add either an environmental situation, something that ensures if the PCs go first they won't instantly delete the encounter with AOE spells or the like (sometimes simple smart positioning is enough, other times having some effect that can mess with spell casters or movement can be fun), or an elite bad guy who is designed to be able to go toe to toe with the party's main beefhouse in one on one combat.
- For bosses I have a much, much more grueling system. Usually I start by taking the monster's total hit points and ensuring it at least survives double the party's DPR. This ensures that even if they go nova, they cannot take down the boss in one round. Second, I plan the boss' DPR to be capable of taking down one character in one round, usually by lowering their HP to a dangerous point first and then dropping them with a Legendary Action. The reasoning behind this is that the players get the fear of having this creature be a TPK while quickly forcing them to the defensive and healing. Turns spent recovering and debuffing the boss are turns not spent in damage, which means the encounter lasts longer. However, as this is usually super dangerous in leaving the possibility for the boss to just kill the party quickly, usually the ability to drop them like that is a recharge (dragon's breath, mind blast, etc), so the party has time to quickly try to recover before being more careful and not going full nova. Due to all of these variables I usually test the boss in mock fights with the characters about 2 or 3 times and check their chances. Depending on how climatic the fight is, I am usually satisfied when I consistently kill one player character, meaning the party will need to outthink me (as I do not play their characters as well as they do) to ensure everyone survives.
The theory behind this is that encounters with a lot of resources and a lot of burst damage on a recharge succeed at creating drama. Usually I try for a boss to live long enough to have two uses for their recharge, so about 4-5 rounds in average, plus that amount of rounds is in my opinion good enough to set up the proper ebb and flow of the combat's narrative: Players are terrified by the monster almost dropping or dropping one character > Players recover and spend a turn healing an raising their chances for survival > Players put a dent on the boss and have some banter with it > Boss deals massive damage again, but this time the players see it coming > Players best the boss.
With this in mind, I try to keep my monsters having between three to four times the DPR of the party. I usually don't need to raise it to five times or take into account burst damage from them, because I assume they won't be able to go full nova when one of their party members drops or is in the process of dropping during the combat. In general, I assume that if the DPR is enough to drop a PC in one round, or if the monster has some way of CC the party effectively, I can get away with them having a bit less HP.
Regardless, with all of this considered, against my Level 16 five man party most my grand end of arc bosses have long since reached the 700 HP threshold with DPR a bit above a hundred.
IMO balancing around "deadly" encounters is probably better than using straight CR. That is, your level 13 party of 3 should be fighting a CR 17 monster. The exception is at low level. An owl bear against a level 1 party of 6 has a realistic chance to become a TPK.