cmad1977
Hero
I just ran a party of six 2nd level PCs thru a fight with three carrion crawlers. No magic items.
The dmg guidelines are for 4 PCs I think. So... Yeah of course they stomped it
I just ran a party of six 2nd level PCs thru a fight with three carrion crawlers. No magic items.
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."
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.
One reason things were tough for my party is the monsters in that deadly encounter ALL got to go first, they dropped the cleric with a crit before he could even act so that left the party scrambling to get him a healing potion to get back in the fight. Had the PCs managed to get the drop on the monsters, it likely would not have been much of a challenge (a well rested 7th level party has A LOT of firepower...fireballs, stunning strikes, smites and polymorphs...they can cut through a hard or deadly encounter like butter)
Ok, so going by that reasoning, if my party of six 2nd level characters run into a encounter early in their adventuring day that's supposed to be DEADLY it should be worth 3,600 adjusted XP?
The adjusted XP of the 3 carrion crawler encounter I threw at them was adjusted XP 2,700.
According to your suggestion, what I should have done for "desired" Deadly result is 4 carrion crawlers with adjusted XP 3,600.
Is that right?
Yeah. If a group of low-tier monsters are all clumped together, you might as well remove their XP from the encounter and instead figure out what the XP value of Fireball is, because that's all it's going to take to get rid of them. If they're spread out throughout a decent-sized encounter area, though, they'll be able to keep peppering the PCs with arrows - and, since ACs basically cap at 21 before magic, they'll be able to get in at least a few hits even on high-level teams.
Not adjusted XP total, just total XP earned (the daily XP totals don't care about adjusted XP).
Basic0.3_page57 said:This provides a rough estimate of the adjusted XP value for encounters the party can handle before the characters will need to take a long rest.
I'm sometimes surprised that Pass Without Trace doesn't get talked about more. Even if you don't think you can get a surprise round on the bad guys every time, the simple reduction in the number of times you get surprised by them is worth a lot. Similarly, I can't stand to build a professional soldier PC who doesn't have Stealth and Perception. There's a reason why real-world soldiers wear camouflage instead of brightly-colored uniforms.
Encounters at my table are sometimes contests to see who will fail a Stealth roll first and get ganked without warning. (Or nobody fails one and both sides just never notice each other.) Other times, most of the party hides while one guy plays the stalking horse to flush out opposition. (Yay for Disguise Self! And I should use Major Illusion VI more actually.)
I sometimes think Pass Without Trace might be the single most powerful low-level spell in the game.
The counterplay of course is for PCs to hunker down behind cover at +5 to AC and pick the hobgoblins off using Sharpshooter/Spell Sniper, which the hobgoblins don't have. (Which is why any party I build always has at least one Sharpshooter or Spell Sniper in it by level 5 or so.)
Any encounter where the PCs have to engage in counterplay is a good, fun encounter IMO. The boring ones are where the straightforward approach just works.