D&D 5E Large Parties - How to Run Encounters

[TRD23]

I have recently started a new campaign and have been (un)fortunate to have 7 players.

For those of you that have similar sized parties in 5e (or other editions) any specific tips for creating and running encounters?

I am not talking about all the basic things to speed up fights (pre rolling etc etc) I am more talking about the encounters themselves in terms of number of opponents etc.

 

[sgtscott658]

Personally I prefer to run between 4 to 5 players, anymore and the game could get boring as the plaryers await their turn to either roleplay or do combat.

Anywho, here my suggestions on running a large party:

Index cards, I can not stress just how important they are in keeping the DM's area organized, they can have NPC's names, they can have quick stats or they can be used to book mark pages in the MM for quick reference.

Dont have random encounters, if you have to have encounters, note down what you want the players to encounter before hand, saves time flipping through the MM looking for that one monster.

Go around the table asking what each player plans to do, keeping each turn with the players as concise as possible but giving them a chance to role play and what not. Also have the players nominate one of the players to be the party leader in combat situations.

Scott

I have recently started a new campaign and have been (un)fortunate to have 7 players.

For those of you that have similar sized parties in 5e (or other editions) any specific tips for creating and running encounters?

I am not talking about all the basic things to speed up fights (pre rolling etc etc) I am more talking about the encounters themselves in terms of number of opponents etc.

 

[Tormyr]

Some of the thoughts in here may help.
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?364364-Encounter-Building-with-a-7-player-party

Short version of my thoughts as someone who has a 7-player campaign.

• Use the Encounter Building guidelines in the Basic DMG.
• Try to avoid Solo Monster encounters. They will get chewed up. Include a few minions.
• Increase the number of monsters according to the guidelines to increase the XP cost of the encounter.
• Increase the number of hit dice by about 2 to up the CR of a monster by 1. (Based of changing Dragonclaw to Dragonwing in Hoard of the Dragon Queen)

 

[Joddy37]

I also have 7 players in my campaign. Using encounter building guidelines in the dmg do really help a lot. Record the party's easy, medium and hard encounter thresholds in terms of xp value. Then try to build medium encounters. Note the party performance. If it is mediocre challenge, then your encounter worked as intended. If it was hard, tune down the next one, or just opposite if easy.

 

[TRD23]

Is it hard to keep encounters fun? I think the thing that is worrying me is that one of the things I love about 5E is how quick combat is versus 4G but with 7 players it's hard to have quick fights (from my admittedly very little sample size)

 

[SilentBoba]

Seems like it might be helpful to do simple group initiative if your players work well together. Let them make a battle plan as a group and then figure out their own order each turn, which is a bit more engaging than waiting for their number at the crowded deli line. Likewise this makes the monsters' turns go faster so the action gets back to the players.

 

[Tormyr]

I also have 7 players in my campaign. Using encounter building guidelines in the dmg do really help a lot. Record the party's easy, medium and hard encounter thresholds in terms of xp value. Then try to build medium encounters. Note the party performance. If it is mediocre challenge, then your encounter worked as intended. If it was hard, tune down the next one, or just opposite if easy.

While I would agree that the encounter building guidelines are really useful for eyeballing how difficult the encounter should be, I disagree that you should always be shooting for medium encounters. Some should be easy; some should be hard; and some should be deadly. Variety is going to make things much more interesting for the players, and even an easy encounter with interesting special stuff like a trap or a confined space for a fireball can be a lot of fun. In the adventure path we are running, there are encounter level guidelines for each encounter. I use those to gauge how difficult the encounter should be.

As an example, The party was level 5. The cap for a moderate encounter for a 7-person 5th-level party is 3500XP. They were supposed to have an EL8 encounter (this is a 3.5 conversion). The cap for a moderate encounter for a 7-person 8th-level party is 6300XP. So this would potentially be a deadly encounter for the party. After that there was an EL4 encounter (1750XP) which was an easy encounter for the party.

Is it hard to keep encounters fun? I think the thing that is worrying me is that one of the things I love about 5E is how quick combat is versus 4G but with 7 players it's hard to have quick fights (from my admittedly very little sample size)

Encounters are still quite fun. Combat still goes faster than 4e partially because everyone is not stuck fighting for combat advantage and adding up a bunch of numbers. But 7 players will take about twice as long as 4 players. Instead of 6 encounters in a session you might get 2. The desire to speed things up may help your players to think about ways of avoiding combat as well. The bottom line is, if the encounter is fun, the players will have fun. This generally means that you are mixing things up so that each encounter is not a repeat of the next. Each encounter (even random encounters) should fit into the story or ecology of the campaign or be a potential plot hook of its own.

Seems like it might be helpful to do simple group initiative if your players work well together. Let them make a battle plan as a group and then figure out their own order each turn, which is a bit more engaging than waiting for their number at the crowded deli line. Likewise this makes the monsters' turns go faster so the action gets back to the players.

We have a small whiteboard with dry erase magnets on it that we use to keep track of initiative. Each player has a magnet, and there are some blank magnets for writing names of monsters. I have one of the players at the other end of the table take the initiative at the beginning of an encounter. He writes down everyone's initiative on their magnet and rearranges the magnets in order. Everyone can then see when their turn is coming up.

Aside from that lots of the usual means of saving time apply. Roll damage with the attack roll. Have a cheat sheet for your spells so you don't have to look them up. Let the player who is "on deck" know they are up next.

 

[Joddy37]

[MENTION=6776887]Tormyr[/MENTION]
Of course there should be encounters in varying difficulties in a campaign. I just wanted to tell how to tune up and down to find the right medium setting for a given party. Starting from that base point, it will very easy to build easy or hard or even deadly encounters.

 

[Tormyr]

@Tormyr
Of course there should be encounters in varying difficulties in a campaign. I just wanted to tell how to tune up and down to find the right medium setting for a given party. Starting from that base point, it will very easy to build easy or hard or even deadly encounters.

Sorry, I had misinterpreted what you were saying.