I think that this also touches on a different way to think of encounter balance that makes it more immersive. Don't balance at all, just come up with what would actually exist, and leave the problem solving to the players.
I agree if you go out into the wild you might meet something you can't defeat and its okay to run away for another day. I don't intentionally attack with a Dragon but they still exist even at lower levels!!! You just made a bad choice to go into the wrong cave you can always run.
That’s very true. I feel “balancing” efforts are best spent best in properly fitting what exists in the world into the system. In other words, balancing should be the work of fitting your ideas within the context of the greater game, so that your homebrew giant polar bear isn’t biting for 10d12 in the same world where a dragon’s fire breath is 8d6.
this is something I've been saying for years! the game is about the story. the idea that combat should be fair or balanced has nothing to do with the story. it's the characters decisions to engage or stay away, that's how each encounter should unfold.
I love seeing great D&D creators referencing each other. You need to take inspiration and lessons from a variety of people in order to get a solid understanding of a topic, and seeing them building off each other helps a lot
Great insight and a real eye opener! If you think of the fight against the scouts, the fight against the door guards, the fight against the goblins in the first room, and the fight against the goblins in the last room each as their own individual encounter to balance and try to make each one memorably on its own - which I did until now - it's easy to get lost in detail, to become inflexible if players think out of the box. To miss the forest for the trees. But thinking of the goblin clan as a single encounter that is devided into smaller groups suddenly brings everything into perspective and opens up so much potential for interesting narrative, environmental worldbulding, sudden twists, and opportunities for on-the-spot adjustments for the sake of the player's fun. Oh, the party is struggling? I better delay the reinforcements one more round.
I just use the Giffyglyph Monster Maker and everything feels very balanced as is because it takes a more mathematical approach from the ground up like 4e had.
@@Gibbons3457 oh I just have premade templates on Foundry for creatures that I copy so that all the HP and stats are figured up. All I gotta do is make abilities and choose how to allocate ability scores and saves. Then again, I thoroughly enjoy just finding art and making up abilities for said art, coming up with cheesy like video game style names for all the abilities, etc. so making the monsters never feels tedious to me lol
@@gameraven13 Regarding Foundry templates: are you using any particular modules to make this easier? Like drag-drop a thing onto an actor to change its stats. Or do you have like a mostly-empty "5th-level striker" actor with just stats, then duplicate the actor and add abilities when making a specific monster you found some nice art for? Or something else entirely? 😅 I _love_ Foundry, but it can definitely take a lot of time to get things into there.
@@CodeBeanutPutter There is a module literally named Giffyglyph's 5E Monster Maker. But I think it hasn't been updated in like 3 months, not sure if it works with v10.
Level is not the only factor in determining a balanced encounter. You can't figure out balance until you become familiar with how your players are gong to play their characters (which includes you being familiar with their abilities and gear). You also need to weigh in action economy. If the party can focus fire on one target, it can make a deadly encounter trivial. Likewise, an "easy" combat is not so easy when the party is outnumbered three to one, even if the monsters drop in one hit. You also need to consider the ambush. Whichever side is getting ambushed is going to have a harder time winning the fight. Likewise, favorable terrain can also swing a balanced encounter to heavily favor one side. The last factor that I think is rather important is how smart (tactical) you play the monsters.
Great video! A great thing about the 1E tables is that the encounters are tuned to be challenging. There's an incredible amount of thought and mathematics that went into 1E generally that gets overlooked due to the High Gygaxian nature of the text (which I appreciate as part of its charm).
There are some great ideas in this video; the greatest takeaway for me is defining "encounter," making waves of enemies instead of everyone starting at one time. Only thing I'll add to this concept is you can combine enemies and traps in a single encounter, making triggers release enemies in a dungeon that get to the party eventually. Examples: water trap that eventually releases swarms of piranhas, or a crushing trap that also releases gelatinous cubes to clean up the mess. With that, balancing encounters in 5e is hard because it totally depends on the player characters, especially with the min/maxing character builds. A roleplaying/drama focused party behave and survive differently than an optimized min maxing party. As a DM, you may find you get the hang of it with a party you are managing only to have to relearn the balancing after a new party is made. Final words, to paraphrase Professor Dungeon Master, I actually do not think that "balancing" an encounter is such a huge priority, as the role of the die has a lot to do with it. A simple encounter can become deadly and deadly become simple based on random numbers. Make a situation, see how players deal with it, and remember that as a DM it is not your job to annihilate the PCs. Whenever you make an encounter, always predetermine what will happen next if the party is defeated and it should not always "they all die." Maybe just one or two that don't make their death saves :D
I don't worry about balance too much. I just decide if its a mild inconvenience or decent threat like a mini-boss and tweak whatever range in between If its too hard/easy I let them work it out. It's their problem to solve. Flight is always an option
This is one of your best videos. The AD&D context/explanation of "encounter" is something I've never considered but explains so much about the tables and CR system.
OD&D wasn't just about delving into dungeons, it also had strong roots in wargaming. The PCs were meant to have an army of hirelings (which it was paid with treasure found in dungeon). The Wildernes had encounters such as 20-200 Bandits or 40-400 Goblins (with rules for how many leaders the army had, if they had magic items or special powers). Another difference is the use of Morale, large groups could be dismanteled by killing the leader or using a spell like fireball which would cut a significant number of troops and would make the survivors flee. There was also a Reaction Roll which determined the intentions towards the PCs, so even a large group of orcs could be friendly (at least friendly for an orc). I'm not sure what edition has a different number for monsters encountered on a dungeon and encountered in the wilderness (in the wilderness the distance you spot the enemies is so big that you have more ways to evade large groups). But if you look at games like Old School Essentials they have different numbers (also different numbers for treasures depending where you encounter the monsters)
I run Pathfinder 1E and it wasn't until deep into the third arc a campaign that I ever looked up the EXP budget rules, and only did so then because I was running a large-scale encounter and needed some guidance. And so far that is the only time I've used the rules. Thank you for this explanation of Encounters though, it's very helpful in introducing a different way of looking at how to populate dungeons.
There will always be a range on challenge based on behaviour too. Enemies may be at a certain challenge rating based on them fighting at their most efficient on flat terrain, but that would be a strange engagement. Most enemies, intelligent or not, will only choose to fight if the odds are in their favour or if they have no choice. A lot of things will also fight inefficiently until desperation kicks in unless trained. Most terrain will offer advantages to whoever positions themselves first. Some enemies will fight to the death while others run after one failed attack. Likewise some will fight to kill while others just want to intimidate you or stop you attacking them. The truth of balancing encounters is that, so long as you are not going to extremes, challenge rating is highly adjustable by play style. I did like this video (just in case it seems like I'm deriding it). It is useful to see balance in the variable long play (between rests) sense rather than as an all at once encounter. Just stating that any encounter balance system used is a start, but a significant part will be discovery of how you as DM play, how your players play, and whether the players or the enemy are the attackers.
Awesome stuff! I'm gonna use this to populate my void crawls in my upcoming liminal horror game for backrooms style exploration, as well for urban exploration, and other encounters. I'm thinking the first would resemble a more classic encounter table, while the other two will have more "mundane" non-monsters, like cop-callers, or nosy criminals, and maybe a single monster, depending on the scenario, so make the real life stuff all gel
"and then run away" if you dont know your group so well NEVER assume that they will run away. maybe prepare a emergency deus ex machina (f.e. some NPC appears pulling up a magic wall and screaming at the player to run a way while they still can)
This will work so much nicer for my randomized campaign, than the random encounter tables I have been using. Of course, I'm also randomizing the levels of the encounters, so my locations are crazy.
I heard Abria Iengar talk about how she will sometimes use a stat block from a suggested encounter and just flavor it differently based on setting and tone. I think having an encounter table readily available regardless of DM or player plans is probably a good idea, and instead of sticking to exactly what any given monster is, just say it’s something else that fits.
4e had enemy roles, like brute and artillery. And they had encounter groups in the monster manual. And in the dmg they had encounter templates based on roles and cr. It was good stuff
I got distracted by the training wheels analogy, so now I have to watch it again. I'll bet that was by design and that you know that a balance bike is a lot better way to learn to ride a bike.
I get the analogy to training wheels but ironically training wheels have been found to delay learning how to ride properly. That’s why kids are recommended balance bikes these days instead of training wheels
Restoring the dungeon's place helps other aspects of the game come back online. The narrative arc can still be there, with the resources extracted from dungeons giving the party the money to get established and have grand adventures outside of the dungeon. The AD&D 1e Dungeon Masters Guide is the single greatest resource for the creation of player driven, sandbox campaigns.
I highly enjoy the different approach you've taken here, but I would also like to point something out. 5e's Challenge Rating system assumes a party of four, and doesn't take into account any sort of variance - Spells, feats, magic items. It comes down to what's vaguely appropriate from a hit points vs. DPR perspective, and even then, it's not very useful, especially when you have a party of an odd size. Challenge rating should be based not on a four-person party, but on a per-character basis - With additional points for each Extra Attack present in the party, and each spellcaster (Based on the levels of spells they can cast. I would do it like this: -The party's CR is equal to their collective number of Hit Dice, and gains modifiers as following: ---For each Extra attack possessed by a character, they gain a +1 to their individual CR. So a level 20 Fighter, with Extra Attack 3, would have a CR of 23. ---For each spellcaster in the party, they gain a bonus to their CR equal to one-half (Rounded up) of the highest-level spell they can cast without magic items: 1-2 (+1), 3-4 (+2), 5-6 (+3), 7-8 (+4), or 9 (+5). ---For each magic item in the party's possession, they gain a bonus based on its rarity - Common (0), Uncommon (+1), Rare (+2), Very Rare (+3), or Legendary (+4). These values increase by 1 for any item that requires attunement - This system is far from perfect, but adds some value. So, we have an 11th-level party of 3 - A Fighter, a Ranger, and a Sorcerer. The Fighter has a Sun Blade (Rare, attunement), the Sorcerer has a Wand of Paralysis (Rare, attunement), and the Ranger has a Cloak of Elvenkind (Uncommon, attunement) and an Oathbow (Very Rare, attunement). The Fighter would have a CR of 16 (11 HD, +2 Extra Attack, +3 magic items), the Ranger's CR would be 20 (11 HD, +1 Extra Attack, +2 Spells [3rd], +6 magic items), and the Sorcerer's CR would be 17 (11 HD, +3 Spells [6th], +3 magic items) This gives the party a total CR of 53. And applying the same system to monsters, you could throw a total CR of 53 at the party to challenge them, in theory. I have yet to write out and fully define this system, but it's very interesting and at least more functional than the published system.
Anyone seeing this: challenge rating ignores environment. Back Alley? Chase? Wide open field? Thick forest. A beautiful road, with thick forest on both sides? A cramped dungeon hallway? Also, link is dead now :-(
Henchmen, hirelings, bodyguards, torchbearers, loot carriers, mercenaries, meat shields, whatever you want to call them, players were expected to spend loot and hire npcs so definitely you could engage with a single encounter of 12 bandits. Monsters had number of appearance both outside and inside their lair, the latter being the case you described but with bigger numbers.
If you want to go REALLY Old School in terms of "Balancing Encounters" you might like to take a look at Don Turnbull's early White Dwarf series of articles covering the Monstermark System. Lots of maths, and quite a bit of handwavery, in there! It was, essentially, a way in which you could roughly work out how much damage each side could dish out, and absorb, and you could then compare them. You could also award XP based on the MM which was it's original purpose. It also had a way of awarding XP for non-combat things too. I'm not sure that people really interpreted those encounter tables as you're saying. 1e didn't have the concept of a "Long Rest" so, depending on how many clerics they had around, a party could still be pretty banged up the next day - healing was slow. In 1e a lot of encounters (especially non-dungeon, wilderness ones) were either avoided, or were resolved through peaceful negotiation rather than deadly conflict. That band of bandits were to be parleyed with, or perhaps deceived into situations where they could be picked off piecemeal.
This video should be an hour or longer Baron. 😃 There's so much more that we can touch on. How bout revisiting this (a yr later) & compare & contrast each stage: e.g. 1st to 4th, 4th to 8th & so on?
0:29 This is a somewhat ironic example since children actually tend to lear how to ride a bike better without training wheels, and learn best using specialised training bikes that instead lack pedals. Training wheels tend to teach bad habits and lead to overreliance, making them comparable to CR or XP budget.
I run a lot of solo and one-on-one games so balance has been a neat little puzzle for me to play with. I'm looking forward to seeing if your tables can give me insight. Thanks.
I think when balancing its often a good idea to just consider how many hits this will take to put down. Not turns, hits. When throwing a lot of enemies at players at once which you want your players to mow through, youll want them to go down in roughly 1-2.5 hits. If your fighter averages 10 damage every time they hit, monsters should have 10, 25 health. Bigger enemies take 3-5 hits, harder to hit enemies might take less hits but have higher AC. Basically if players are hitting their shots you as a DM should want these to go down fast, and when players dont make their rolls theyre going to wish they did.
The 1st Ed AD&D DMG was published in '79, not '77. I know this because I was in gradeschool when I read it. Looked it up to make sure... okay, back to the video... 😀
I’m planning a session 1 specifically introducing 3 new players to DND two are currently playing their first ever campaign with another group (at level 4) and one has NEVER touched DND before. This is supposed to be a tutorial session walking the newest player through character creation before having a quick “tutorial” encounter in the form of a Wild West style train heist my main issue is how many guards would be appropriate for 3 1st level players, (guns exist and the players are filling the role of outlaws working for a roving gang of conmen, thieves, and gunslingers)
That's a failure on your part to understand what balance means in this context. Balance here refers to predictablility, in that a GM can reliably judge the expected threat of a given scenario mathematically.
Problem is two folds. 5e players can't die. 5e players and 5e is focused on combat not dungeon survival. 5e is only narrative in that players NEVER die and have +5 plot armor.
Aye. I mod it for that reason 🤣 No Adding CON to HP on creation or level up (for monsters too) Cantrips can only be cast 5 times a day No healing word No darkvision Rests cost rations, and a suitable sleeping solution Hex crawl and dungeon crawl rules apply
You can kill 5e character pretty easy. Any monster with multiattack does the job pretty handily. All you gotta do is stop pulling punches. Have monsters hit that extra time to seal the deal.
@@remyb6854 the issue that I have seen many "boots on the ground" DMs have is getting characters to 0hp in the first place when they have so many ways to not get hit or tank damage. And the game is built on damage being the meta thing to do, so no damage = never getting to the moment you can make the choice to stab a fallen enemy
@@talscorner3696 however many tools players have, dms have more. There is zero reason a dm cant get a PC to 0 hp if they actually aimed to do so. I'm a little concerned that is their explicit goal... But doing it is straightforward.
Those tips and the supplement are great, thank you so much. The only question I have is how many players the supplements assumes. I would guess around five?
The ten AD&D bandits for a relatively large 1st-level PC Party, is easily do-able; it's perfectly balanced, not a too hard combat. Even for a party of 4, it's still do-able --- and actually easy if there is a PC Wizard. Those charts are for *random* encounters only. They are not intended to be used as a guide for understanding challenge in combat. (The numbers also change depending on whether the monster is located in its lair). The (5e) DMG, already has appropriate random encounter charts. It's not true that modern players focus more on narrative than in the past.
Don't worry, those tables never made sense to us old grognards either! 😆 As far as I know, no one ever used them. People mostly ran modules back then with a few notable exceptions. Most of the modules had encounters spelled out in them. Nice picture of a tower ruin @3:44. Looks like Germany. Is it?
Something about 5e makes a lot of people over estimate how complicated CR really is. The rules for building encounters (DMG pg 81-84) really only truly take up 2 pages due to large art. They break down difficulty definitions, explain CR in detail, and give good advice on party size and making encounters fun. This system is much more approachable than anything I've run, people just need to stop only trusting online voices and just read the damn books.
Part of the problem is that officially published monsters don’t follow their own CR rules. Goblins are rated CR 1/4, but with their Nimble Escape ability, they should be CR 1. There are lots of other exceptions…
@@avengingblowfish9653 There are some notable exceptions if you take them at their maximum potential (Shadows being another good example). But often HP is king, and many of these creatures that have significant ability at low level to cause havoc come with very little in the way of surviving. I agree that the Monster Creation rules are in shambles, but the CR system still works much more often than it fails.
Yeah, it works well enough, until it doesn't, but in those cases its not a bit off but a disaster that everyone at the table will remember and likely talk to other people about.
@@Crushanator1 I think CR works well as long as you tweak the monster stats to match your party. For example, if everyone has high AC, bump up the monster’s +hit by one or two points, but lower the damage, HP, or AC to compensate to keep the CR the same. I feel monsters should have at least a 30% chance to hit the highest AC character to keep the fight threatening and probably closer to 35% if they all have high AC. It’s low enough that the player who invests in high AC doesn’t feel cheated, but high enough that the high AC player doesn’t feel invincible.
Best balance is to don't balance. First rule: explaine to players that the nature of the game is that they can die at any time and the fight if not always the best solution to choose. You can try to sneak past enemies, barter or run away from an encounter. They need to learn how to self assess dangers and discover monster abilities is part of the fun. No one knowns that a troll regenerate and they can't find out how to stop its healing? Why would they want to keep fighting if that would be a real situation? Once discovered that your gun is useless against a tank, would you stay there keeping shooting at it until you are squashed, drilled by the machine gun or splatted by a cannon shell?
I'm curious how you use the 6-8 encounters per day advice in this scenario. I think if you have enough bandits rolled, you can smeer those out to the 6-8 encounters. But the single encounters might get very thin? So that's where CR and XP budget comes in? In my oppinion those 6-8 encounters are what make the encounter design go bad in the games. If your players can nova the single encounter and then take a long rest, the XP budget and CR will be skewed for sure.
you are too focused on the game mechanics. an encounter doesn't mean combat. it is any situation that could end with a reward, penalty or neutral. thus, 6-8 encounters would be very different depending on the location. such as a town, a city, a port, a wilderness or a crypt/dungeon (etc). it's always the decisions made by the players and how the characters interact that determine success or failure of any situation.
@@bruced648 that’s certainly true. An encounter is something that potentially uses party resources. In my experience tho, combat is the type of encounter you’d want the most to drain resources. It’s because of those resources a lot of dm’s planned encounters don’t play out like they planned. Social encounters rarely use spells and abilities. Traps and puzzles are a nice addition to encounters.
I think the 6-8 encounters per day is not good advice, too restrictive. Have as many "Encounters" that make sense for your scenario. I think what this video helps elaborate on is if you can take multiple encounters and connect them, there is major risk for the party to nuke the first battle, long rest, only to find that the remaining bandits don't just sit around. The bandits will not stupidly wait around like in a video game wondering why Phil never came back from scouting duty. They could setup an ambush and attack the party while long resting (does your fighter sleep in their platemail on and shield strapped on arm?), or, the bandits could pack up all their loot and LEAVE, the rested party now showing up to an empty bandit lair devoid of treasure and possibly failing their mission. Also remember that a party can only benefit from one long rest per day, which means that if they take 2, they need a minimum of 32 hours. My personal favorite involves a dungeon crawl: create a party of strong NPCs adventurers (make them nice so it's kinda evil to just kill them), but they are here to loot the dungeon too. If the party long rests, they loot a few rooms while the PCs are resting. Create urgency. If you strike the right chords, the party won't be constantly making long rests. And for other comments, I know long rest doesn't equal sleep... :p
@@happy911 I agree about this video is “better” at teaching the world moves and reacts to the players. The 6-8 encounters however is not my advice however. It’s how wotc balanced everything. If you find that your encounter design is not working out (your players smash through everything), most of the times you give your players to few encounters per long rest. Thanks why I think the video is not addressing the problem about cr and encounters.
@@JanHoos oh, sorry if i was misunderstood: i knew it wasn't your advice, however, i did assume the advice was from other dungeon masters, not WoTC. Thanks for the info.
Don’t balance your encounters. Just don’t Research or imagine how many enemies might guard a location about what enemies they most commonly face How will those guards form a group that gets the most strength and value for the least cost and number of soldiers? Think about how your encounters form a system. There is no way CR 10 beasts are just roaming the forests so commonly that a single days travel would result in some Consider that most monsters, weak and strong might spot the party but have no interest to engage
Although AD&D 1E does have these tables for assisting with random encounters in Dungeon environments, they were not really intended to be guides on how to stock non-random encounters. The misinterpretation of 'game balance' to mean, "a balance between monster power and party power," goes back further and has led us to where we are today. The actual described meaning of game balance given in D&D Basic (Moldvay) on Pg. B60 under Dungeon Mastering as a Fine Art is, "The treasures should be balanced by the dangers." Somewhen over 40+ years that has been misconstrued to mean all encounters must be winnable and fair. To those who expect this I say, if you want a fair fight in a war - you're gonna die.
@@ruolbu I understand. I'll let you in on a secret though...the greater the challenge overcome, the greater the fun. An unbalanced encounter is most likely more challenging...so QED - more fun! :) Nobody has to play this way, but plenty do.
EDIT: Actually, the following was meant as a reply to a different post and probably makes more sense in context. With this approach to "balancing", information management and especially expectation management become the factors that decide whether the game is fun or not. If players go into every fight in with the expectation that they can win, and you suddenly spring a dragon on them without warning, then you are probably in for quite some frustration. If you plant enough information that the dragon is out there and what is is capable of, and the players take the risk anyway, fully aware that a TPK is on the table, that is when legends are born!
@@olafmeiner4496 Unfortunately some players have developed the nasty habit that every fight is a fight they can win. I was running a published adventure and the party came across someone half naked in the snow that stood there without shivering and freely admitted they were a wanted murder who would give themselves up. They believed that 50 gold for killing them was worth more than just turning the criminal in and giving them what they wanted and it was 6 vs 1. After the wizard rolled initiative and attacked first, they were cut in half with a single attack doing 12 dmg after running into melee with no armor or shield spell. This caused the rest of the party to feel committed to avenge their friend and the thought of running away never came up. We talked after the TPK (2 players of the 6 were still alive but gave up and said they didnt wanna play anymore) they came to the conclusion that I put an unfair encounter before them that they should not have encountered till lvl 3 (This conclusion came from the wizard who owned the adventure to pull out their copy and read the adventure). Despite clear warnings, dangers and the oddity of the situation they believed the challenge was fair.
Unfortunately, you didn't mention what the DM needs to do to balance encounters. You gave a chart and we just need to take you at your word that your new chart is balanced. In the future it would be helpful to give new DMs a system more focused than just... "you'll develop a sixth sense" for balancing encounters. Sly Flourish has something like this: If the total CR is more than a 1/4 of the total party level (below 5th level) the encounter is most likely deadly. That increases to 1/2 above 5th level. I've been using this system now for 2 years and it seems to be working very well. ruclips.net/video/05VWofhNMHI/видео.html&ab_channel=SlyFlourish%E2%80%93TheLazyDungeonMaster Just my 2 cents.
The simplest answer is that you don't have to balance encounters in a TTRPG. CR is a wildly imperfect system and ends up becoming a crutch. Instead, as the video suggests, a more immersive TTRPG experience comes about when players are presented with an unbalanced scenario and are challenged to solve it. Let's take this simple example: A 2nd-level party of four PCs comes across a mercenary band of 2d6 (8) ogres who have been hired to guard a mountain pass. By CR, this is a wildly deadly encounter. If your players resort to fighting (a decision that the GM should telegraph or openly state is a bad idea) that is on them and, in my humble opinion, should suffer the consequences. Instead, this encounter presents opportunities for slipping past the ogres, or it could be tackled as a social encounter. The players could try to bypass the ogres through intimidation, diplomacy or bribery. The ogres are mercenaries after all. I have found my game sessions have become wildly more varied and interesting when I stopped trying to "balance" the game and just let the fantasy world live on its own.
@@Typhos6 Seems limited in it's application imo. Look, I've ran encounters like you've mentioned before and yes they can become varied in how the players interact with it. But in my experience the players just opt to retreat most of the time and search for NPCs to help them. I don't think it's a bad approach, I just think the advice is too vague to be remotely useful, ESPECIALLY for new DMs. My point still stands... video is a little bait and switch for me.
Often I do the 'unleveled' approach, and let the players decide what to fight. But when I do balance a boss fight or the like, I don't use CR. I do some math to estimate how many rounds it would take for the party to wipe out the encounter, and how many rounds it would take for the encounter to wipe out the party, both with average damage, and if everythign hits and rolls max damage. Generally I make a spreadsheet to do the math, but it doesn't take too long. Someone more invested than me could definitely make a tool to calculate it faster though.
As someone who's actually used these tables, this is a hard no. These were random encounters in a dungeon. If you rolled 10 bandits, then there were 10 bandits. You might space them out a bit, but it would be a single encounter no different than a 5e encounter.
I know I'm not "Dungeon Masterpiece," but I will say what I do: In 5e, action economy is one of the major variables to look at when balancing encounters to a party. "Whichever team does more during an encounter usually wins." If your party is small, stagger an encounter so that enemies' action economy doesn't overwhelm a party, and vice versa. With a bigger group, this concept gets more complicated as this will involve you adding a lot of enemies and if the party rolls bad initiative and the enemies roll good and they all go first, an easy or balanced battle suddenly becomes a TPK. "Dungeon Masterpiece" kinda talks about it during his video with his bandit scenario. One way to avoid this is roll individual imitative for each monster. Now I know this option will be met by some with fierce opposition as most will say it will slow down the game with all that dice rolling, however, this can be fixed by PRE-ROLLING all initiative for the enemies before the session (just don't cheat if you roll bad). I've done this for over a year and it does not slow down the game. If anything, it keeps the PCs stay more engaged in the battle because the PCs to go more frequently instead of waiting for all your enemies to go on the same turn. Good luck, hope this helps.
I had 6 level 5 PCs defeat my 5 vampire spawn. I start with deadly everytime and scale back/pull punches as needed. I have no confidence in challenge rating anymore.
For how many players are these tables good for? 5E uses action economy and the more players you have in the party, the more damage and healing can be delivered per round. It would have been more useful to provide a table and specifying that it's for 4-5 characters and every 1-2 additional characters, add 1-2 of the mobs...
What is this page??? It looks like page 133 of the 1e Monster Manual II, but you have it listed as page 267 of the Dungeon Master's Guide, Appendix J? What secret version of the 1e DMG is this? (Good video, BTW)
What's wrong with a party of 1st level characters running into a dozen or more bandits at one time? Not every encounter needs to be a fight. Maybe the players have to sneak by them, possibly trying to steal their loot or free a prisoner in the process. Maybe they have to parley with the bandits and end up bribing them. Or maybe they have to run away? What about if the players strategize to divide and conquer the opponents. IMO there's too much focus on balancing everything. Set up encounters, give the players ample warning when they're facing a really dangerous situation, and see how it plays out.
One thing I think this really emphasizes is that the difficulty has a lot to do with how smart players play. Rush in like idiots, and a tpk is almost a guarantee. Carefully peel solo opponents away from the main force, and even weak PCs will probably do fine. I think it also emphasizes how player approach is stronger than any class feature. No, Leroy Jenkins is not a viable playstyle. It's funny when you win. But let LJ cause a tpk, and no love for the idiot.
One of my players said after the last Session in which we only played out 1 combat: "We cant know how dangerous the monsters are, so we blast out our strongest spells immediately." How would a great game master answer that?
While I like the concept, I am not sure this table would work for a non veteran table. A hydra at lvl 4 and an adult black dragon at lvl 6 are threats that could easily result in a tpk.
You're not supposed to try to kill everything with this sort of setup, that's just what you encounter. Set traps, lure the hydra away, and steal its stuff and then run. Or avoid it.
Trainng wheels are bad. They teach a false security and reliance on a safynet. My kids learned wiht out training wheels. Just had to get that straight my godfahter had a bicircle shop and two of my best friends ( and players at my table ) work in the bycircle industry and all said the same.
Just downloaded it and it looks mostly good, but I really don't like the fields that just have "1" as the number encountered. That doesn't follow your example in the video at all and it's unclear how to make that interesting and balanced. Populating a watch tower with 2d6+3 bandits is great in the example you gave since there are different areas you could use, but populating a dungeon with a single wight at level 2? I'd love to have examples on how to make that balanced. Are you saying that a single floor of the dungeon would just have that one wight on it? This also makes the higher tables pretty much useless. Why is a solar the most commonly encountered thing at 10th level? At that point the appendix is basically saying "from this point on, you're on your own, so here are some joke entries that are all impossible to beat at 10th level."
Encounters should not be split up like that, an "encounter" should be what you challenge the players before giving them a break.. not a rest, just time to do out of combat healing and move to exploration. The total number of encounters in a Day is what you want to use before players need a long rest, and then you must decide how many opportunities for short rests are spread throughout a day. And there are multiple types of encounters, most encounters are just there to whittle down player resources, as they get low then things start getting dangerous. This is a typical dungeon crawl. it allows for short rests and maybe even a long rest if it is more of a wildneress big exploration type dungeon where the monsters would not team up to fight players but are acting on their own. Then their is the the single big fight in a day where players are pushed to their limits with all their resources on hand, this kind of encounter needs to feel threatening enough to die in or it's no fun. and should only be used for epic moments. If you do this as your 1 encounter a day traveling through the woods ten it will make your other bandit type or dungeon crawl encounters lack luster, because it takes alot to threaten a party at full strength. Just traveling along level 5 party... and you find 2 bullettes... now that is very dangerous to a group of level 5's but when they re in a dungeon there are finding small groups of bugbears to challenge them or a force of a dozen goblins... this wont feel anything like the bullettes but enough of those encounters will drain the party.
"A single encounter in this old school Gygaxian understanding describes how many monsters should be interacted with before [...] a long rest." I'm sorry, but this makes little sense. There is no Gygaxian understanding of what 5E coins a "long rest".
It's such a shame that 5e jumped straight to challenge ratings and xp budgets for encounter design with no sort of easy to parse, common-sense way to build encounters. Compare that to 4e, the edition everyone loves to hate, in which xp budgets are a thing but also includes numerous boilerplate templates for encounters that you can just slap some monsters on and run. Each entry in the monster manual also comes with a ready-to-run suggested encounter! 5e could never!
The 1e tables had nothing to do with long rest. That concept did not exist, at least in the 5e sense. A single spell would come back after 4 hours of rest per spell level, Hit points returned at a rate of 1 per day of rest. The way you described is nothing like anyone I know played 1st edition. Every DM I played with looked at those tables as the number you encountered at a single time.
What he's saying is that an encounter on the old edition tables would represent a challenge that would require a 5th ed party to use/risk a long rest after defeating. He was not suggesting that 1st ed was played with long rests in mind. Though you are absolutely correct in your point about breaking the numbers up - in older editions, if you rolled 12 bandits for an encounter, all 12 were in the fight at the same time.
I only disagree with the usage of the word "encounter" when you actually mean "session", "dungeon", "adventure", etc. I'm hard pressed to find encounter defined as "all monsters at a dungeon or location", even in the old days; instead, what you're conveying was what the "number of appearance" could be used for (you could have, as you explained in the video, dozens of orcs at an orc encampment, but they wouldn't all be at the same place at the same time). As you said yourself, modern dungeons can be stocked with monsters just like old days, but in a more narrative way. That's why encounter design has been established in recent years as a piece of narrative that mostly involves NPCs, monsters, traps etc organized in an engaging way. An encounter can involve any type of relationship, including a battle, even an unbalanced one. But a dungeon or location can have dozens of encounters. You can say that, to balance a number of encounters in a single location, you should keep the sum of all threatening creatures within the desired level's number of appearance for those creatures (of course the wording needs some work, but what I mean is, this would separate encounter and number of appearance). By mixing up encounter with number of appearance, you're making it more confusing to understand than you would have separating things.
Finding which definition of encounter to follow, really, at the end of the day boils down to where your brain is on the neuro-divergent spectrum (and also how your brain deals with semantics xD) For example, my brain sees the relations between things before it sees the things themselves, so for me Barron's definition of encounter makes as much sense as "encounter = room", but your mileage varies because your brain probably sees things in a different organization ^^
I think that this also touches on a different way to think of encounter balance that makes it more immersive. Don't balance at all, just come up with what would actually exist, and leave the problem solving to the players.
I agree if you go out into the wild you might meet something you can't defeat and its okay to run away for another day. I don't intentionally attack with a Dragon but they still exist even at lower levels!!! You just made a bad choice to go into the wrong cave you can always run.
Correct.
That’s very true. I feel “balancing” efforts are best spent best in properly fitting what exists in the world into the system. In other words, balancing should be the work of fitting your ideas within the context of the greater game, so that your homebrew giant polar bear isn’t biting for 10d12 in the same world where a dragon’s fire breath is 8d6.
this is something I've been saying for years! the game is about the story. the idea that combat should be fair or balanced has nothing to do with the story. it's the characters decisions to engage or stay away, that's how each encounter should unfold.
This is how to do it. The world is all about you, it cares not for your 'level'...watch out!!
I love seeing great D&D creators referencing each other.
You need to take inspiration and lessons from a variety of people in order to get a solid understanding of a topic, and seeing them building off each other helps a lot
Great insight and a real eye opener! If you think of the fight against the scouts, the fight against the door guards, the fight against the goblins in the first room, and the fight against the goblins in the last room each as their own individual encounter to balance and try to make each one memorably on its own - which I did until now - it's easy to get lost in detail, to become inflexible if players think out of the box. To miss the forest for the trees. But thinking of the goblin clan as a single encounter that is devided into smaller groups suddenly brings everything into perspective and opens up so much potential for interesting narrative, environmental worldbulding, sudden twists, and opportunities for on-the-spot adjustments for the sake of the player's fun. Oh, the party is struggling? I better delay the reinforcements one more round.
I just use the Giffyglyph Monster Maker and everything feels very balanced as is because it takes a more mathematical approach from the ground up like 4e had.
Man that tool has saved me so much in the lats 3 years but having to make ALL my monsters from scratch is a bit tedious.
@@Gibbons3457 oh I just have premade templates on Foundry for creatures that I copy so that all the HP and stats are figured up. All I gotta do is make abilities and choose how to allocate ability scores and saves.
Then again, I thoroughly enjoy just finding art and making up abilities for said art, coming up with cheesy like video game style names for all the abilities, etc. so making the monsters never feels tedious to me lol
@@gameraven13 Regarding Foundry templates: are you using any particular modules to make this easier? Like drag-drop a thing onto an actor to change its stats. Or do you have like a mostly-empty "5th-level striker" actor with just stats, then duplicate the actor and add abilities when making a specific monster you found some nice art for? Or something else entirely? 😅 I _love_ Foundry, but it can definitely take a lot of time to get things into there.
@@CodeBeanutPutter There is a module literally named Giffyglyph's 5E Monster Maker. But I think it hasn't been updated in like 3 months, not sure if it works with v10.
Level is not the only factor in determining a balanced encounter. You can't figure out balance until you become familiar with how your players are gong to play their characters (which includes you being familiar with their abilities and gear). You also need to weigh in action economy. If the party can focus fire on one target, it can make a deadly encounter trivial. Likewise, an "easy" combat is not so easy when the party is outnumbered three to one, even if the monsters drop in one hit. You also need to consider the ambush. Whichever side is getting ambushed is going to have a harder time winning the fight. Likewise, favorable terrain can also swing a balanced encounter to heavily favor one side. The last factor that I think is rather important is how smart (tactical) you play the monsters.
Great video! A great thing about the 1E tables is that the encounters are tuned to be challenging. There's an incredible amount of thought and mathematics that went into 1E generally that gets overlooked due to the High Gygaxian nature of the text (which I appreciate as part of its charm).
There are some great ideas in this video; the greatest takeaway for me is defining "encounter," making waves of enemies instead of everyone starting at one time. Only thing I'll add to this concept is you can combine enemies and traps in a single encounter, making triggers release enemies in a dungeon that get to the party eventually. Examples: water trap that eventually releases swarms of piranhas, or a crushing trap that also releases gelatinous cubes to clean up the mess.
With that, balancing encounters in 5e is hard because it totally depends on the player characters, especially with the min/maxing character builds. A roleplaying/drama focused party behave and survive differently than an optimized min maxing party. As a DM, you may find you get the hang of it with a party you are managing only to have to relearn the balancing after a new party is made.
Final words, to paraphrase Professor Dungeon Master, I actually do not think that "balancing" an encounter is such a huge priority, as the role of the die has a lot to do with it. A simple encounter can become deadly and deadly become simple based on random numbers. Make a situation, see how players deal with it, and remember that as a DM it is not your job to annihilate the PCs. Whenever you make an encounter, always predetermine what will happen next if the party is defeated and it should not always "they all die." Maybe just one or two that don't make their death saves :D
As a new DM, thank you for this video! Extremely thorough and helpful!
This dude can pack so much useful shit into six minutes that it blows my mind.
I don't worry about balance too much.
I just decide if its a mild inconvenience or decent threat like a mini-boss and tweak whatever range in between
If its too hard/easy I let them work it out. It's their problem to solve.
Flight is always an option
This is one of your best videos. The AD&D context/explanation of "encounter" is something I've never considered but explains so much about the tables and CR system.
Great stuff, and updating the chart for 5E? You, sir, are becoming a river to your people!
OD&D wasn't just about delving into dungeons, it also had strong roots in wargaming. The PCs were meant to have an army of hirelings (which it was paid with treasure found in dungeon). The Wildernes had encounters such as 20-200 Bandits or 40-400 Goblins (with rules for how many leaders the army had, if they had magic items or special powers).
Another difference is the use of Morale, large groups could be dismanteled by killing the leader or using a spell like fireball which would cut a significant number of troops and would make the survivors flee.
There was also a Reaction Roll which determined the intentions towards the PCs, so even a large group of orcs could be friendly (at least friendly for an orc).
I'm not sure what edition has a different number for monsters encountered on a dungeon and encountered in the wilderness (in the wilderness the distance you spot the enemies is so big that you have more ways to evade large groups). But if you look at games like Old School Essentials they have different numbers (also different numbers for treasures depending where you encounter the monsters)
I run Pathfinder 1E and it wasn't until deep into the third arc a campaign that I ever looked up the EXP budget rules, and only did so then because I was running a large-scale encounter and needed some guidance. And so far that is the only time I've used the rules. Thank you for this explanation of Encounters though, it's very helpful in introducing a different way of looking at how to populate dungeons.
Im convinced this is Legal Eagle’s secret second channel.
as a new DM, this will be a great asset when trying to put together my own encounters to supplement the existing adventure, thank you!
There will always be a range on challenge based on behaviour too. Enemies may be at a certain challenge rating based on them fighting at their most efficient on flat terrain, but that would be a strange engagement. Most enemies, intelligent or not, will only choose to fight if the odds are in their favour or if they have no choice. A lot of things will also fight inefficiently until desperation kicks in unless trained. Most terrain will offer advantages to whoever positions themselves first. Some enemies will fight to the death while others run after one failed attack. Likewise some will fight to kill while others just want to intimidate you or stop you attacking them. The truth of balancing encounters is that, so long as you are not going to extremes, challenge rating is highly adjustable by play style.
I did like this video (just in case it seems like I'm deriding it). It is useful to see balance in the variable long play (between rests) sense rather than as an all at once encounter. Just stating that any encounter balance system used is a start, but a significant part will be discovery of how you as DM play, how your players play, and whether the players or the enemy are the attackers.
What a great philosophy. I like this approach so much more than trying to mathematically construct the perfect combat every time.
Awesome stuff! I'm gonna use this to populate my void crawls in my upcoming liminal horror game for backrooms style exploration, as well for urban exploration, and other encounters. I'm thinking the first would resemble a more classic encounter table, while the other two will have more "mundane" non-monsters, like cop-callers, or nosy criminals, and maybe a single monster, depending on the scenario, so make the real life stuff all gel
"and then run away"
if you dont know your group so well NEVER assume that they will run away. maybe prepare a emergency deus ex machina (f.e. some NPC appears pulling up a magic wall and screaming at the player to run a way while they still can)
Thanks for your videos! Hope you feel better!!
Thank you so much for the great work you do and for the knowledge and resources you share with us!
This will work so much nicer for my randomized campaign, than the random encounter tables I have been using. Of course, I'm also randomizing the levels of the encounters, so my locations are crazy.
Excellent, thanks! Definitely worth a few coppers. (at today's metals rates....)
Incredibly excited to try out the tables in my next session coming up tonight.
DnD4E has example encounters for every monster. And that feels Amazing.
One thing that 4e did kinda right that sadly didn't get brought over to 5e was suggested encounter groups in the Monster Manual.
I love finding new ways of developing encounters, especially ones inspired by Gygax's 1e
I heard Abria Iengar talk about how she will sometimes use a stat block from a suggested encounter and just flavor it differently based on setting and tone. I think having an encounter table readily available regardless of DM or player plans is probably a good idea, and instead of sticking to exactly what any given monster is, just say it’s something else that fits.
4e had enemy roles, like brute and artillery. And they had encounter groups in the monster manual. And in the dmg they had encounter templates based on roles and cr. It was good stuff
4:55 You're awesome
This was incredibly useful, thank you!
I got distracted by the training wheels analogy, so now I have to watch it again. I'll bet that was by design and that you know that a balance bike is a lot better way to learn to ride a bike.
I get the analogy to training wheels but ironically training wheels have been found to delay learning how to ride properly. That’s why kids are recommended balance bikes these days instead of training wheels
Thanks, I was about to post the exact same comment. Balance bikes are perfect. The transition to normal bikes then only takes 15 minutes.
And here I was weighing minis on a mechanical scale.
Restoring the dungeon's place helps other aspects of the game come back online. The narrative arc can still be there, with the resources extracted from dungeons giving the party the money to get established and have grand adventures outside of the dungeon. The AD&D 1e Dungeon Masters Guide is the single greatest resource for the creation of player driven, sandbox campaigns.
Thank you for sharing this resource!
Gygaxian ... what an amazing word!
It's nearly as old as the game itself. Low and behold you have learned the lore.
@@michaelfoye1135 Lo* and Behold
@@CooperAATE Autocorrect says otherwise. Drat.
I highly enjoy the different approach you've taken here, but I would also like to point something out.
5e's Challenge Rating system assumes a party of four, and doesn't take into account any sort of variance - Spells, feats, magic items. It comes down to what's vaguely appropriate from a hit points vs. DPR perspective, and even then, it's not very useful, especially when you have a party of an odd size.
Challenge rating should be based not on a four-person party, but on a per-character basis - With additional points for each Extra Attack present in the party, and each spellcaster (Based on the levels of spells they can cast.
I would do it like this:
-The party's CR is equal to their collective number of Hit Dice, and gains modifiers as following:
---For each Extra attack possessed by a character, they gain a +1 to their individual CR. So a level 20 Fighter, with Extra Attack 3, would have a CR of 23.
---For each spellcaster in the party, they gain a bonus to their CR equal to one-half (Rounded up) of the highest-level spell they can cast without magic items: 1-2 (+1), 3-4 (+2), 5-6 (+3), 7-8 (+4), or 9 (+5).
---For each magic item in the party's possession, they gain a bonus based on its rarity - Common (0), Uncommon (+1), Rare (+2), Very Rare (+3), or Legendary (+4). These values increase by 1 for any item that requires attunement - This system is far from perfect, but adds some value.
So, we have an 11th-level party of 3 - A Fighter, a Ranger, and a Sorcerer. The Fighter has a Sun Blade (Rare, attunement), the Sorcerer has a Wand of Paralysis (Rare, attunement), and the Ranger has a Cloak of Elvenkind (Uncommon, attunement) and an Oathbow (Very Rare, attunement). The Fighter would have a CR of 16 (11 HD, +2 Extra Attack, +3 magic items), the Ranger's CR would be 20 (11 HD, +1 Extra Attack, +2 Spells [3rd], +6 magic items), and the Sorcerer's CR would be 17 (11 HD, +3 Spells [6th], +3 magic items)
This gives the party a total CR of 53. And applying the same system to monsters, you could throw a total CR of 53 at the party to challenge them, in theory.
I have yet to write out and fully define this system, but it's very interesting and at least more functional than the published system.
Anyone seeing this: challenge rating ignores environment. Back Alley? Chase? Wide open field? Thick forest. A beautiful road, with thick forest on both sides? A cramped dungeon hallway? Also, link is dead now :-(
Henchmen, hirelings, bodyguards, torchbearers, loot carriers, mercenaries, meat shields, whatever you want to call them, players were expected to spend loot and hire npcs so definitely you could engage with a single encounter of 12 bandits. Monsters had number of appearance both outside and inside their lair, the latter being the case you described but with bigger numbers.
If you want to go REALLY Old School in terms of "Balancing Encounters" you might like to take a look at Don Turnbull's early White Dwarf series of articles covering the Monstermark System. Lots of maths, and quite a bit of handwavery, in there! It was, essentially, a way in which you could roughly work out how much damage each side could dish out, and absorb, and you could then compare them. You could also award XP based on the MM which was it's original purpose. It also had a way of awarding XP for non-combat things too.
I'm not sure that people really interpreted those encounter tables as you're saying. 1e didn't have the concept of a "Long Rest" so, depending on how many clerics they had around, a party could still be pretty banged up the next day - healing was slow. In 1e a lot of encounters (especially non-dungeon, wilderness ones) were either avoided, or were resolved through peaceful negotiation rather than deadly conflict. That band of bandits were to be parleyed with, or perhaps deceived into situations where they could be picked off piecemeal.
Glad I stumbled on your videos. Would move to compare notes
This video should be an hour or longer Baron. 😃 There's so much more that we can touch on. How bout revisiting this (a yr later) & compare & contrast each stage: e.g. 1st to 4th, 4th to 8th & so on?
0:29 This is a somewhat ironic example since children actually tend to lear how to ride a bike better without training wheels, and learn best using specialised training bikes that instead lack pedals. Training wheels tend to teach bad habits and lead to overreliance, making them comparable to CR or XP budget.
I run a lot of solo and one-on-one games so balance has been a neat little puzzle for me to play with. I'm looking forward to seeing if your tables can give me insight. Thanks.
Excellent video
I think when balancing its often a good idea to just consider how many hits this will take to put down. Not turns, hits. When throwing a lot of enemies at players at once which you want your players to mow through, youll want them to go down in roughly 1-2.5 hits.
If your fighter averages 10 damage every time they hit, monsters should have 10, 25 health. Bigger enemies take 3-5 hits, harder to hit enemies might take less hits but have higher AC. Basically if players are hitting their shots you as a DM should want these to go down fast, and when players dont make their rolls theyre going to wish they did.
The 1st Ed AD&D DMG was published in '79, not '77. I know this because I was in gradeschool when I read it. Looked it up to make sure... okay, back to the video... 😀
nice, i didnt know this difference in encounters
This is how I have ran my campaigns for the last 20 years, but I started with ADnD
I’m planning a session 1 specifically introducing 3 new players to DND two are currently playing their first ever campaign with another group (at level 4) and one has NEVER touched DND before. This is supposed to be a tutorial session walking the newest player through character creation before having a quick “tutorial” encounter in the form of a Wild West style train heist my main issue is how many guards would be appropriate for 3 1st level players, (guns exist and the players are filling the role of outlaws working for a roving gang of conmen, thieves, and gunslingers)
Balance is an illusion.
sometimes kobold wipes the party, sometimes the red dragon is done in the first turn.
Everything is in RNGesus hands.
That's a failure on your part to understand what balance means in this context. Balance here refers to predictablility, in that a GM can reliably judge the expected threat of a given scenario mathematically.
I know the CR system works because I use it all the time, but seeing new takes is always interesting. Appreciate the effort.
Problem is two folds. 5e players can't die. 5e players and 5e is focused on combat not dungeon survival. 5e is only narrative in that players NEVER die and have +5 plot armor.
sounds like a superhero game ;)
Aye. I mod it for that reason 🤣
No Adding CON to HP on creation or level up (for monsters too)
Cantrips can only be cast 5 times a day
No healing word
No darkvision
Rests cost rations, and a suitable sleeping solution
Hex crawl and dungeon crawl rules apply
You can kill 5e character pretty easy. Any monster with multiattack does the job pretty handily. All you gotta do is stop pulling punches. Have monsters hit that extra time to seal the deal.
@@remyb6854 the issue that I have seen many "boots on the ground" DMs have is getting characters to 0hp in the first place when they have so many ways to not get hit or tank damage.
And the game is built on damage being the meta thing to do, so no damage = never getting to the moment you can make the choice to stab a fallen enemy
@@talscorner3696 however many tools players have, dms have more. There is zero reason a dm cant get a PC to 0 hp if they actually aimed to do so.
I'm a little concerned that is their explicit goal...
But doing it is straightforward.
Thanks for the help
Balance is not desirable. Let them learn to flee.
So True
Those tips and the supplement are great, thank you so much. The only question I have is how many players the supplements assumes. I would guess around five?
Thanks for sharing. 🥳
The casual basement tarrasque
The ten AD&D bandits for a relatively large 1st-level PC Party, is easily do-able; it's perfectly balanced, not a too hard combat. Even for a party of 4, it's still do-able --- and actually easy if there is a PC Wizard.
Those charts are for *random* encounters only. They are not intended to be used as a guide for understanding challenge in combat. (The numbers also change depending on whether the monster is located in its lair).
The (5e) DMG, already has appropriate random encounter charts.
It's not true that modern players focus more on narrative than in the past.
I just ran a survival mode siege campaign no balance 5e rules with 3.5 monster stats my players loved it.
Runaway..... probably the best thing to do. Dont touch unless you have to
Don't worry, those tables never made sense to us old grognards either! 😆
As far as I know, no one ever used them.
People mostly ran modules back then with a few notable exceptions. Most of the modules had encounters spelled out in them.
Nice picture of a tower ruin @3:44. Looks like Germany. Is it?
Time to put this to good use
Very cool!
Something about 5e makes a lot of people over estimate how complicated CR really is. The rules for building encounters (DMG pg 81-84) really only truly take up 2 pages due to large art. They break down difficulty definitions, explain CR in detail, and give good advice on party size and making encounters fun.
This system is much more approachable than anything I've run, people just need to stop only trusting online voices and just read the damn books.
Part of the problem is that officially published monsters don’t follow their own CR rules. Goblins are rated CR 1/4, but with their Nimble Escape ability, they should be CR 1. There are lots of other exceptions…
@@avengingblowfish9653 There are some notable exceptions if you take them at their maximum potential (Shadows being another good example). But often HP is king, and many of these creatures that have significant ability at low level to cause havoc come with very little in the way of surviving. I agree that the Monster Creation rules are in shambles, but the CR system still works much more often than it fails.
Yeah, it works well enough, until it doesn't, but in those cases its not a bit off but a disaster that everyone at the table will remember and likely talk to other people about.
@@Crushanator1 I think CR works well as long as you tweak the monster stats to match your party. For example, if everyone has high AC, bump up the monster’s +hit by one or two points, but lower the damage, HP, or AC to compensate to keep the CR the same. I feel monsters should have at least a 30% chance to hit the highest AC character to keep the fight threatening and probably closer to 35% if they all have high AC.
It’s low enough that the player who invests in high AC doesn’t feel cheated, but high enough that the high AC player doesn’t feel invincible.
@@avengingblowfish9653 I too think CR works well enough if you change everything and just homebrew your own solution.
Good video. But I have a different approach: dispense with the very notion of the "balanced encounter". There, life is now much easier. Lol
That sounds like you aren't using the rules of the game to determine who wins.
@@sleepinggiant4062 Lol
Isn't this 5e's adventuring day mechanic?
Best balance is to don't balance. First rule: explaine to players that the nature of the game is that they can die at any time and the fight if not always the best solution to choose. You can try to sneak past enemies, barter or run away from an encounter. They need to learn how to self assess dangers and discover monster abilities is part of the fun.
No one knowns that a troll regenerate and they can't find out how to stop its healing? Why would they want to keep fighting if that would be a real situation? Once discovered that your gun is useless against a tank, would you stay there keeping shooting at it until you are squashed, drilled by the machine gun or splatted by a cannon shell?
Awesome!
Dude bravo dude
I'm curious how you use the 6-8 encounters per day advice in this scenario. I think if you have enough bandits rolled, you can smeer those out to the 6-8 encounters. But the single encounters might get very thin? So that's where CR and XP budget comes in?
In my oppinion those 6-8 encounters are what make the encounter design go bad in the games. If your players can nova the single encounter and then take a long rest, the XP budget and CR will be skewed for sure.
you are too focused on the game mechanics. an encounter doesn't mean combat. it is any situation that could end with a reward, penalty or neutral. thus, 6-8 encounters would be very different depending on the location. such as a town, a city, a port, a wilderness or a crypt/dungeon (etc).
it's always the decisions made by the players and how the characters interact that determine success or failure of any situation.
@@bruced648 that’s certainly true. An encounter is something that potentially uses party resources. In my experience tho, combat is the type of encounter you’d want the most to drain resources. It’s because of those resources a lot of dm’s planned encounters don’t play out like they planned. Social encounters rarely use spells and abilities. Traps and puzzles are a nice addition to encounters.
I think the 6-8 encounters per day is not good advice, too restrictive. Have as many "Encounters" that make sense for your scenario. I think what this video helps elaborate on is if you can take multiple encounters and connect them, there is major risk for the party to nuke the first battle, long rest, only to find that the remaining bandits don't just sit around. The bandits will not stupidly wait around like in a video game wondering why Phil never came back from scouting duty. They could setup an ambush and attack the party while long resting (does your fighter sleep in their platemail on and shield strapped on arm?), or, the bandits could pack up all their loot and LEAVE, the rested party now showing up to an empty bandit lair devoid of treasure and possibly failing their mission. Also remember that a party can only benefit from one long rest per day, which means that if they take 2, they need a minimum of 32 hours.
My personal favorite involves a dungeon crawl: create a party of strong NPCs adventurers (make them nice so it's kinda evil to just kill them), but they are here to loot the dungeon too. If the party long rests, they loot a few rooms while the PCs are resting. Create urgency. If you strike the right chords, the party won't be constantly making long rests.
And for other comments, I know long rest doesn't equal sleep... :p
@@happy911 I agree about this video is “better” at teaching the world moves and reacts to the players. The 6-8 encounters however is not my advice however. It’s how wotc balanced everything. If you find that your encounter design is not working out (your players smash through everything), most of the times you give your players to few encounters per long rest. Thanks why I think the video is not addressing the problem about cr and encounters.
@@JanHoos oh, sorry if i was misunderstood: i knew it wasn't your advice, however, i did assume the advice was from other dungeon masters, not WoTC. Thanks for the info.
Don’t balance your encounters.
Just don’t
Research or imagine how many enemies might guard a location about what enemies they most commonly face
How will those guards form a group that gets the most strength and value for the least cost and number of soldiers?
Think about how your encounters form a system. There is no way CR 10 beasts are just roaming the forests so commonly that a single days travel would result in some
Consider that most monsters, weak and strong might spot the party but have no interest to engage
Although AD&D 1E does have these tables for assisting with random encounters in Dungeon environments, they were not really intended to be guides on how to stock non-random encounters. The misinterpretation of 'game balance' to mean, "a balance between monster power and party power," goes back further and has led us to where we are today. The actual described meaning of game balance given in D&D Basic (Moldvay) on Pg. B60 under Dungeon Mastering as a Fine Art is, "The treasures should be balanced by the dangers." Somewhen over 40+ years that has been misconstrued to mean all encounters must be winnable and fair. To those who expect this I say, if you want a fair fight in a war - you're gonna die.
yeah but that's just what some people like to play and or to DM. a series of hurdles that can be overcome, because overcoming them is fun.
@@ruolbu I understand. I'll let you in on a secret though...the greater the challenge overcome, the greater the fun. An unbalanced encounter is most likely more challenging...so QED - more fun! :)
Nobody has to play this way, but plenty do.
@@TheK5K with a potential hydra at lvl 4 and an adult black dragon as option at lvl 6 the tables seem to agree with your risk asessement ;)
EDIT: Actually, the following was meant as a reply to a different post and probably makes more sense in context.
With this approach to "balancing", information management and especially expectation management become the factors that decide whether the game is fun or not.
If players go into every fight in with the expectation that they can win, and you suddenly spring a dragon on them without warning, then you are probably in for quite some frustration.
If you plant enough information that the dragon is out there and what is is capable of, and the players take the risk anyway, fully aware that a TPK is on the table, that is when legends are born!
@@olafmeiner4496 Unfortunately some players have developed the nasty habit that every fight is a fight they can win. I was running a published adventure and the party came across someone half naked in the snow that stood there without shivering and freely admitted they were a wanted murder who would give themselves up. They believed that 50 gold for killing them was worth more than just turning the criminal in and giving them what they wanted and it was 6 vs 1.
After the wizard rolled initiative and attacked first, they were cut in half with a single attack doing 12 dmg after running into melee with no armor or shield spell. This caused the rest of the party to feel committed to avenge their friend and the thought of running away never came up. We talked after the TPK (2 players of the 6 were still alive but gave up and said they didnt wanna play anymore) they came to the conclusion that I put an unfair encounter before them that they should not have encountered till lvl 3 (This conclusion came from the wizard who owned the adventure to pull out their copy and read the adventure). Despite clear warnings, dangers and the oddity of the situation they believed the challenge was fair.
Unfortunately, you didn't mention what the DM needs to do to balance encounters. You gave a chart and we just need to take you at your word that your new chart is balanced. In the future it would be helpful to give new DMs a system more focused than just... "you'll develop a sixth sense" for balancing encounters.
Sly Flourish has something like this:
If the total CR is more than a 1/4 of the total party level (below 5th level) the encounter is most likely deadly. That increases to 1/2 above 5th level. I've been using this system now for 2 years and it seems to be working very well.
ruclips.net/video/05VWofhNMHI/видео.html&ab_channel=SlyFlourish%E2%80%93TheLazyDungeonMaster
Just my 2 cents.
The simplest answer is that you don't have to balance encounters in a TTRPG. CR is a wildly imperfect system and ends up becoming a crutch. Instead, as the video suggests, a more immersive TTRPG experience comes about when players are presented with an unbalanced scenario and are challenged to solve it.
Let's take this simple example: A 2nd-level party of four PCs comes across a mercenary band of 2d6 (8) ogres who have been hired to guard a mountain pass. By CR, this is a wildly deadly encounter. If your players resort to fighting (a decision that the GM should telegraph or openly state is a bad idea) that is on them and, in my humble opinion, should suffer the consequences. Instead, this encounter presents opportunities for slipping past the ogres, or it could be tackled as a social encounter. The players could try to bypass the ogres through intimidation, diplomacy or bribery. The ogres are mercenaries after all.
I have found my game sessions have become wildly more varied and interesting when I stopped trying to "balance" the game and just let the fantasy world live on its own.
@@Typhos6 Seems limited in it's application imo. Look, I've ran encounters like you've mentioned before and yes they can become varied in how the players interact with it. But in my experience the players just opt to retreat most of the time and search for NPCs to help them.
I don't think it's a bad approach, I just think the advice is too vague to be remotely useful, ESPECIALLY for new DMs.
My point still stands... video is a little bait and switch for me.
Often I do the 'unleveled' approach, and let the players decide what to fight.
But when I do balance a boss fight or the like, I don't use CR. I do some math to estimate how many rounds it would take for the party to wipe out the encounter, and how many rounds it would take for the encounter to wipe out the party, both with average damage, and if everythign hits and rolls max damage. Generally I make a spreadsheet to do the math, but it doesn't take too long.
Someone more invested than me could definitely make a tool to calculate it faster though.
I will take your entire stock!
As someone who's actually used these tables, this is a hard no. These were random encounters in a dungeon. If you rolled 10 bandits, then there were 10 bandits. You might space them out a bit, but it would be a single encounter no different than a 5e encounter.
Does your table assume 4 party members? How should we adjust the numbers for smaller or greater groups?
I know I'm not "Dungeon Masterpiece," but I will say what I do: In 5e, action economy is one of the major variables to look at when balancing encounters to a party. "Whichever team does more during an encounter usually wins." If your party is small, stagger an encounter so that enemies' action economy doesn't overwhelm a party, and vice versa. With a bigger group, this concept gets more complicated as this will involve you adding a lot of enemies and if the party rolls bad initiative and the enemies roll good and they all go first, an easy or balanced battle suddenly becomes a TPK. "Dungeon Masterpiece" kinda talks about it during his video with his bandit scenario.
One way to avoid this is roll individual imitative for each monster. Now I know this option will be met by some with fierce opposition as most will say it will slow down the game with all that dice rolling, however, this can be fixed by PRE-ROLLING all initiative for the enemies before the session (just don't cheat if you roll bad). I've done this for over a year and it does not slow down the game. If anything, it keeps the PCs stay more engaged in the battle because the PCs to go more frequently instead of waiting for all your enemies to go on the same turn.
Good luck, hope this helps.
I had 6 level 5 PCs defeat my 5 vampire spawn. I start with deadly everytime and scale back/pull punches as needed. I have no confidence in challenge rating anymore.
For how many players are these tables good for? 5E uses action economy and the more players you have in the party, the more damage and healing can be delivered per round. It would have been more useful to provide a table and specifying that it's for 4-5 characters and every 1-2 additional characters, add 1-2 of the mobs...
What is this page??? It looks like page 133 of the 1e Monster Manual II, but you have it listed as page 267 of the Dungeon Master's Guide, Appendix J? What secret version of the 1e DMG is this? (Good video, BTW)
What's wrong with a party of 1st level characters running into a dozen or more bandits at one time? Not every encounter needs to be a fight. Maybe the players have to sneak by them, possibly trying to steal their loot or free a prisoner in the process. Maybe they have to parley with the bandits and end up bribing them. Or maybe they have to run away? What about if the players strategize to divide and conquer the opponents. IMO there's too much focus on balancing everything. Set up encounters, give the players ample warning when they're facing a really dangerous situation, and see how it plays out.
One thing I think this really emphasizes is that the difficulty has a lot to do with how smart players play. Rush in like idiots, and a tpk is almost a guarantee. Carefully peel solo opponents away from the main force, and even weak PCs will probably do fine.
I think it also emphasizes how player approach is stronger than any class feature. No, Leroy Jenkins is not a viable playstyle. It's funny when you win. But let LJ cause a tpk, and no love for the idiot.
How to read the table ? What is 2d6 and what is no app ? Im sorry I very new on DnD
Balance is an ilusion
One of my players said after the last Session in which we only played out 1 combat: "We cant know how dangerous the monsters are, so we blast out our strongest spells immediately."
How would a great game master answer that?
While I like the concept, I am not sure this table would work for a non veteran table. A hydra at lvl 4 and an adult black dragon at lvl 6 are threats that could easily result in a tpk.
You're not supposed to try to kill everything with this sort of setup, that's just what you encounter. Set traps, lure the hydra away, and steal its stuff and then run. Or avoid it.
Idiocy begets death, as they say xD
I mean... Prewritten adventures provide this.
Trainng wheels are bad. They teach a false security and reliance on a safynet. My kids learned wiht out training wheels. Just had to get that straight my godfahter had a bicircle shop and two of my best friends ( and players at my table ) work in the bycircle industry and all said the same.
Just downloaded it and it looks mostly good, but I really don't like the fields that just have "1" as the number encountered. That doesn't follow your example in the video at all and it's unclear how to make that interesting and balanced. Populating a watch tower with 2d6+3 bandits is great in the example you gave since there are different areas you could use, but populating a dungeon with a single wight at level 2? I'd love to have examples on how to make that balanced. Are you saying that a single floor of the dungeon would just have that one wight on it?
This also makes the higher tables pretty much useless. Why is a solar the most commonly encountered thing at 10th level? At that point the appendix is basically saying "from this point on, you're on your own, so here are some joke entries that are all impossible to beat at 10th level."
Get better! Hope it's just the normal flu
Encounters should not be split up like that, an "encounter" should be what you challenge the players before giving them a break.. not a rest, just time to do out of combat healing and move to exploration. The total number of encounters in a Day is what you want to use before players need a long rest, and then you must decide how many opportunities for short rests are spread throughout a day.
And there are multiple types of encounters, most encounters are just there to whittle down player resources, as they get low then things start getting dangerous. This is a typical dungeon crawl. it allows for short rests and maybe even a long rest if it is more of a wildneress big exploration type dungeon where the monsters would not team up to fight players but are acting on their own.
Then their is the the single big fight in a day where players are pushed to their limits with all their resources on hand, this kind of encounter needs to feel threatening enough to die in or it's no fun. and should only be used for epic moments. If you do this as your 1 encounter a day traveling through the woods ten it will make your other bandit type or dungeon crawl encounters lack luster, because it takes alot to threaten a party at full strength. Just traveling along level 5 party... and you find 2 bullettes... now that is very dangerous to a group of level 5's but when they re in a dungeon there are finding small groups of bugbears to challenge them or a force of a dozen goblins... this wont feel anything like the bullettes but enough of those encounters will drain the party.
"A single encounter in this old school Gygaxian understanding describes how many monsters should be interacted with before [...] a long rest."
I'm sorry, but this makes little sense. There is no Gygaxian understanding of what 5E coins a "long rest".
But there is, when you sleep after a day your spells (including healing spells) come back.
@@Crushanator1 And how many hit points?
i love you ok !
interesting
It's such a shame that 5e jumped straight to challenge ratings and xp budgets for encounter design with no sort of easy to parse, common-sense way to build encounters. Compare that to 4e, the edition everyone loves to hate, in which xp budgets are a thing but also includes numerous boilerplate templates for encounters that you can just slap some monsters on and run. Each entry in the monster manual also comes with a ready-to-run suggested encounter! 5e could never!
The 1e tables had nothing to do with long rest. That concept did not exist, at least in the 5e sense. A single spell would come back after 4 hours of rest per spell level, Hit points returned at a rate of 1 per day of rest. The way you described is nothing like anyone I know played 1st edition. Every DM I played with looked at those tables as the number you encountered at a single time.
What he's saying is that an encounter on the old edition tables would represent a challenge that would require a 5th ed party to use/risk a long rest after defeating. He was not suggesting that 1st ed was played with long rests in mind. Though you are absolutely correct in your point about breaking the numbers up - in older editions, if you rolled 12 bandits for an encounter, all 12 were in the fight at the same time.
I only disagree with the usage of the word "encounter" when you actually mean "session", "dungeon", "adventure", etc. I'm hard pressed to find encounter defined as "all monsters at a dungeon or location", even in the old days; instead, what you're conveying was what the "number of appearance" could be used for (you could have, as you explained in the video, dozens of orcs at an orc encampment, but they wouldn't all be at the same place at the same time).
As you said yourself, modern dungeons can be stocked with monsters just like old days, but in a more narrative way. That's why encounter design has been established in recent years as a piece of narrative that mostly involves NPCs, monsters, traps etc organized in an engaging way. An encounter can involve any type of relationship, including a battle, even an unbalanced one. But a dungeon or location can have dozens of encounters. You can say that, to balance a number of encounters in a single location, you should keep the sum of all threatening creatures within the desired level's number of appearance for those creatures (of course the wording needs some work, but what I mean is, this would separate encounter and number of appearance).
By mixing up encounter with number of appearance, you're making it more confusing to understand than you would have separating things.
Finding which definition of encounter to follow, really, at the end of the day boils down to where your brain is on the neuro-divergent spectrum (and also how your brain deals with semantics xD)
For example, my brain sees the relations between things before it sees the things themselves, so for me Barron's definition of encounter makes as much sense as "encounter = room", but your mileage varies because your brain probably sees things in a different organization ^^
Balance? What's balance? Throw cool things at players and see what they do about em