D&D 5E DMG's definition of "Deadly" is much less deadly than mine: Data Aggregation?

[GMforPowergamers]

I was pcing a 5th level character (3 eldritch knight 2 wizard) on a really hard day we had 5 encounters with no short rest (there were 5 of us) I went into last encounter with no second wind no action surge and only cantrips left. I had some minor damage but the hARD WAS OUT of healing...we fought 3 zombie samari (ogre zombie stats but slash not sludge damage) and a necromancer..and it was a cake walk.... The next week fully refreshed and on the next adventur 5 kobolds and a hobgoblin tpked us....the DM wanted to pull his hair out

 

[Tia Nadiezja]

The group XP multipliers really only work when the enemy has a lot of mobility and/or ranged attacks - a group of orcs with bows under bounded accuracy are an actual add to the difficulty of a fight with a Challenge 5 fiend, but a group of bandits with clubs really isn't because they can't bring themselves into the fight every round. Layout of the enemy also matters - if there's anyone with a decent blast spell (and there will be) in the party and the orcs with bows are all bunched together in the spell's blast radius, they'll cost the party whatever damage they do before the wizard/sorcerer/warlock's first turn and a spell slot, which isn't nothing but it's also not the same add to difficulty as if they're in defensive positions scattered through the encounter area.

Even then, those multipliers might be too high once PCs reach about level 5.

 

[ExploderWizard]

The group XP multipliers really only work when the enemy has a lot of mobility and/or ranged attacks - a group of orcs with bows under bounded accuracy are an actual add to the difficulty of a fight with a Challenge 5 fiend, but a group of bandits with clubs really isn't because they can't bring themselves into the fight every round. Layout of the enemy also matters - if there's anyone with a decent blast spell (and there will be) in the party and the orcs with bows are all bunched together in the spell's blast radius, they'll cost the party whatever damage they do before the wizard/sorcerer/warlock's first turn and a spell slot, which isn't nothing but it's also not the same add to difficulty as if they're in defensive positions scattered through the encounter area.

Even then, those multipliers might be too high once PCs reach about level 5.

Yep. Once the party has good AOE damage, the addition of a good number of mook monsters doesn't appreciably increase the deadliness of the encounter. The guidelines do actually say to discount monsters that are significantly weaker than the other monsters in the encounter.

The increased numbers are supposed to account for the force multiplier in the action economy. If the majority of the extra troops will die without getting actions then they are effectively meaningless to the deadliness of the encounter.

Some of the most challenging combats I have found are against a decent sized group (perhaps 2-4 more monsters than PCs) of monsters that were not individually super powerful, but were not chumps either. They could take some punishment and dish it out. Larger groups are next to useless if they do not individually have the hit points to stick around longer than a round or two.

 

[Wik]

My experience is that the more PCs you have, even when you adjust for the number, the easier the fights become. the reasoning is that PCs have more partners to pair with (in a six player party you, you have fewer partners to pair with than in a 7 player party), and so abilities are more likely to fire off accurately.

I've done some "deadly" fights and watched them become a cakewalk. In my sandboxy 5e game, we're currently running a Dungeon Crawl Classics adventure, "People of the Pit". The party (half elf lore bard, half orc bear barbarian, tiefling battlemaster warlordy build, human trickery cleric NPC, gnome arcane trickster, eladrin diviner, and now a human monk, all 2nd or 3rd level) walked into a room while at about 75% strength, and got attacked by a buttload of shadows - one for each PC. This is a deadly encounter.... and they curb-stomped it. Only one PC even got hurt... and this was after the cleric's turn undead failed abysmally due to terrible rolls.

The only PC death that has occurred so far was when the tiefling solved a puzzle early, and teleported into a huge fight by himself... and rather than stall for time for his friends to back him up, he charged into the fight. And when he fell, the clerics flubbed on their medicine rolls to stabilize him.

In short, deadly fights CAN be, but for a group of experienced players, they're probably just "hard".

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I just ran a party of six 2nd level PCs thru a fight with three carrion crawlers. No magic items.

PCs had one minor fight before this one that day (with troglodytes in sunlight). They had to blow a lot of spell and class feature resources. One PC was paralyzed (and got better). One PC dropped (and was healed up).

In short, they stomped the crawlers.

According to the DMG this was a "deadly" fight. In play it was more like "hard."

So... from your experience with 5e what does it take to have an ACTUALLY DEADLY fight?


EDIT: I'd love it if people posted simple details about their group when sharing what's worked for them, such as party size, level, and relative degree of min-maxing. If enough folks respond, I can start aggregating this into data that we could all benefit from.

EDIT: I don't ask because I'm some tyrant who wants to slaughter PCs. I ask because sometimes their foolhardy actions call for a truly DEADLY encounter, while sometimes the narrative/foreshadowing calls for a truly DEADLY encounter. To not follow thru on that "promise" is IMHO to do a disservice to the players by invalidating their choices just as much as if I'd foreshadowed an amazing dragon's hoard and there only be a sizable pouch/chest of gold at the end.

In my experience, the point of actual 50%-chance-of-death-in-the-absence-of-really-smart-tactical-play comes when there are an equal number of N level PCs and CR N monsters, which works out at approximately 4x the official Deadly threshold. That's just at the raw mechanical level and there are a number of factors that can tilt the balance toward either side to make Deadly come sooner (e.g. exploit 120' drow darkvision and poison against a melee-centric party) or to make 10x Deadly encounters survivable (Necromancer undead skeleton archers), but as a general guideline I find that Quadruple-Deadly fights make you have to think hard about how you'll survive while anything less is a straightforward "kill the enemy and take their stuff."

My data comes from party sizes of two to four PCs, and occasional NPCs, rarely exceeding six total (N)PCs on a side because managing a bunch of NPCs on both sides of the combat is way too much hassle for my brain--but I have played with Necromancers a fair bit (both as DM and as a player) and of course they blow the lid off this calculation. (With Necromancers the main constraint is RP: "how big of an army do I feel like I need right now?" Necromancers IME tend to self-limit their total number of skeletons to only a fraction of what they're capable of.) When I say "CR = level" is a good guideline, that comes from experience with bardlocks, necrolocks who are leaving their skeletons home, tanky paladin/sorcerers, shadow monks, moon druids, barbarians, and sharpshooter fighters--these are the main classes which have seen play at my table.

I use spell points and AD&D-style initiative (Speed Factor without the speed factors), with the additional rule that smarter creatures think faster and have smaller OODA loops, so actions must be declared in order of intelligence from lowest to highest, which means in practice that anyone with a high intelligence can always ask a lower intelligence (N)PC/monster what its action is. "Oh, you're Dodging? I ignore you and attack the wizard then." This makes Intelligence quite valuable for warriors.

I do roleplay monsters, including morale, but morale shouldn't affect the "what is Deadly?" calculation because any monsters who have reason to initiate a conflict also won't flee until the battle has turned against them. However, the fact that I roleplay instead of metagaming monsters does mean that you can assume that monsters aren't being played in tactically optimal ways (goblin conga line, ignoring the tank, etc.) unless they are military veterans (hobgoblins, drow) or individual highly-intelligent monsters (like beholders--who are played optimally as individuals, but coordinate poorly with other beholders unless a hive mother or overlord is in charge).

This means that if you stick a tank out there in front of the party and have three ranged PCs providing covering fire from 50' to 150' back, the monsters are quite likely to attack the tank, especially if the tank is in a chokepoint which they would have to Overrun with Athletics/Evade with Acrobatics in order to get through. (One reason Necromancers are valuable is that they can provide a backup line of meat shields with a dozen opportunity attacks which makes it unattractive to ignore the tank. With only four PCs and no skeletons, ignoring the tank and going after the squishies is quite an attractive option to optimally-played melee monsters.)

Cover is a thing in my games but when it exists it usually works to the PCs' advantage, because Sharpshooter and Spell Sniper are common. Exploiting range and mobility is also common, but since killing things to death is at long range is boring I typically skip over fights where there isn't at least some risk of death ("okay, you kill the Slaad"), so while pure kiting strategies exist, they don't see a lot of play time at my table--most combats will feature a tank in melee with the monsters so that at least the monsters can do something on their turns.

Because I use morale rules, withdrawing is also a thing. E.g. if your four 8th level PCs are facing four Banshees, who wailed and took down two PCs but you revived both PCs and killed one Banshee while reducing another to half HP... the three surviving Banshees are not-unlikely to withdraw through the wall/ceiling/floor. That doesn't mean you've won, in fact it means that you probably can't rest lest they surprise you with a renewed attack (only an Alert character can rest while still expecting a threat, so a round-zero attack during a rest = surprise as long as the Banshees make their Stealth rolls, even if you knew the Banshees were out there) and you also have to worry about them joining in to attack from an unexpected angle when you're busy fighting something else.

Summoning spells are kind of a thing at my table too, though not always. The players (well, PCs) have survived several deadly combats gone wrong by pulling out Chogorath (their Horn of Valhalla), dousing it in blood from their own wounds (required to activate it), and then blowing it to summon a riptide of berserkers. In the other party, the lore bardlock will conjure animals under roughly the same conditions that a necromancer would deploy skeletons: e.g. when the (level 11) bardlock and the shadow monk are scouting ahead alone (under Pass Without Trace) and spot three frost giants, they are comfortable taking on the giants without the rest of the party around even though that is a quadruple-Deadly threat, but the bardlock will definitely Conjure Animals (aiming for king cobras/Giant Poisonous Snakes) while the Shadow Monk drops Darkness, and then the bardlock will support with Eldritch Blast from behind cover while the monk and cobras take the fight to the giants. (Then once the giants are down, they will bandage their wounds/stabilize them and generally be way too merciful.)

So anyway, my experience with double-Deadly fights is that, with most monsters, you can deal with them straightforwardly even at low levels by simply having the tank go defensive (still threatening opportunity attacks but not necessarily attacking, often Dodging) while everybody else fills the monsters with arrows. Once fights get up to the Quadruple-Deadly level, things get dicier and you start doing things like manipulating lighting and laying caltrops to survive. Also, at first level you are very fragile so you're likely to approach every single fight like it's Quadruple-Deadly, and manipulate the environment for all you've got. Winning a 10x Deadly fight typically requires you to seek even larger advantages like recruiting members of the town guard to act as your backup, or dropping rocks from a spelljamming ship very high up, or exploiting Conjure Animals and Animate Dead for all they're worth.

 

[michaeljpatrick]

I've had really uneven results with CR in this edition. I find that the biggest challenge is several monsters that each have a CR slightly under the party's average level with maybe one or two that are at or above it.

Bucket o' HP monsters fare the worst. A group of 4-5 PCs can whittle down a giant/ogre/ettin even when they are way below the recommended level.

Lately the monk in my party has been tricky because she gets several chances to incapacitate even much more powerful foes. I've had to have the monsters be much more clever lately to keep up with that. Ambushes, traps, and bottlenecks are helpful.

Even when you use tactics sometimes the battle ends too soon and you find yourself thinking, "If only I'd sent in ONE more Mind Flayer."

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I think it depends partly on how minmaxed your group is. But for my group, which i would say is fairly minmaxed, I use double deadly XP for a proper hard fight.

I agree that "hard" by DMG descriptors seems to come at approximately the double-Deadly mark on the encounter-building chart. ("Hard. A hard encounter could go badly for the adventurers. Weaker characters might get taken out of the fight, and there’s a slim chance that one or more characters might die.")

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I tend to reverse the estimates in the DMG. Instead of an Easy encounter being the Easy XP threshold or below, I set it as an Easy encounter is anything between Easy and Medium thresholds. Anything below easy is simply trivial.

Those are the DMG guidelines, Uller. I think the Basic Rules version 0.1 used Easy as a ceiling, but by the time the DMG came out it was a floor.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

1) The party assault (and win!) against an entire small fortress, killing about thirty enemies. Later that day, they end up hiding from two trolls inside a tiny hut because they're feeling the pain and decide not to risk facing them. Because of this, the trolls eat their horses and throw the party's plans into disarray (This, by the way, is a big weakness of Leonmund's Tiny Hut: You can't fit horses into it. If you think it's too powerful, give the party a difficult choice!)

I like the way you think, but there are issues: you actually can fit 2 or 3 horses in it (it's 20' in diameter after all) if somewhat uncomfortably. Furthermore, if you have horses, trolls aren't much of a threat to you anyway--they're not fast enough.

But your basic point is still sound, and I'm a big proponent in killing the horses while the PCs are huddled in their tiny hut, because even though you can fit horses inside if you need to, you almost never will unless you know you are in danger or you like the smell of horse.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

The group XP multipliers really only work when the enemy has a lot of mobility and/or ranged attacks - a group of orcs with bows under bounded accuracy are an actual add to the difficulty of a fight with a Challenge 5 fiend, but a group of bandits with clubs really isn't because they can't bring themselves into the fight every round. Layout of the enemy also matters - if there's anyone with a decent blast spell (and there will be) in the party and the orcs with bows are all bunched together in the spell's blast radius, they'll cost the party whatever damage they do before the wizard/sorcerer/warlock's first turn and a spell slot, which isn't nothing but it's also not the same add to difficulty as if they're in defensive positions scattered through the encounter area.

Even then, those multipliers might be too high once PCs reach about level 5.

One of the best things about bows is that you don't have to clump up to be in mutual support radius. SOP for militaristic races IMG, including hobgoblins and drow, is to spread out in small squads of three or four. This not only helps protect not just against AoEs (which are rare) but also allows you to use better tactics, e.g. "squad A Dodge while squads B and C fill the enemy (PCs) with arrows at Martial Advantage."