D&D 5E Can Someone Assess this Encounter Difficulty

I am finding it difficult to figure out how difficult this fight will be. The encounter is x1 Medusa Template and x4 level 5 Life Domain Clerics. The Clerics are blind, and are essentially the Servants of the Medusa, and during combat they almost universally use their magic to benefit her, not harm others, especially since they can't see. Now they do have Spirit Guardians, and will likely use it if they feel they need to. As for the Medusa, she will stay back with the Clerics and use her bow for as long as she can while using her petrifying gaze when someone tries to close the gap with her. The encounter room is essentially a 90x40 ruined throne room, with the primary entrance at the other side of the room, and the Medusa at the throne with her cleric servants. Essentially, I do not know how much more difficult the Medusa should be assumed to be since she will be getting a great deal of healing and buffs. Does anyone have an idea as to how to calculate this?

Hiya!

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: Still kinda no. I've said my 2 coppers on this many a time; the whole "CR" system makes too many assumptions to be useful in any thing other than the perfect situation it was designed to work in. If the party has a lot of "ranged damage potential", then those blind life clerics will be almost useless. If the party has virtually no range-type attacks, then it will be extremely hard. If they have certain magic items, or spells, or equipment, or abilities, or any number of other things...it will throw the 'balance' out of whack. If, however, there are four PCs, a Human, Dwarf, Elf and Halfling, and they are Cleric, Fighter, Wizard and Thief, and they have all built the characters with no options (so no feats, no MC, etc), and they have very little in the way of magic items...and they are all of the appropriate level to face the baddies...then it should be "fair to slightly difficult" fight.

I'm guessing the party does NOT consist of that perfect blend.

So that puts you back to square one; how tough is it going to be? The final answer is...who knows? You know your group. You know your players and their PC's, and their PC's capabilities. You should do some thought experiments by running the PC's through scenarios...if this encounter is important enough. What if the PC's loose initiative? What if they win? What if they gather info and know about the baddies before the baddies know about them? What if the PC's all try and "alpha strike"? What if they all play it safe for a round or two? What if they spread out to attack? What if they all concentrate on the clerics first? Or the Medusa first?

Seriously, the CR system (since its inception, imho) has been all but useless to me. I know I never used it when I DM'ed Pathfinder way back when. I also know our "3.x DM" tried to use it all the time...and it made zero sense as far as predicting outcome. We'd walk over encounters that were three, four or five CR's above us...and we'd get our butts handed to us by encounters that were the same number but below us. It all depended on tactics, choice of spells, and dice rolls. (PS: that 3.x DM gave up using it after about six to eight months of play).

Sorry if it's not what you wanted to hear...but this is my experience with the CR system. Maybe others have had more use, and hopefully they can give you more 'tips'. That said, I still believe it will come down to a vague "maybe they'll win...maybe they'll loose". My gut tells me that it will be slightly harder than expected, but only if the players decide to focus on the medusa for the first few rounds; if they start focus-fire on the clerics after the second round, I think it will be 'average'.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

The fact that you’re using NPCs built like PCs instead of monsters makes the encounter difficulty very difficult to estimate, since the encounter building system is already really rough to begin with, and it’s built around the assumption that the enemies are built as monsters. If those Clerics are straight-up 5th level (N)PCs, they should each be roughly equivalent to 1/4 of a CR5 monster. So, like, CR 1.25 ish each. A Medusa is CR6. So, you’ve got a total of 11 CR worth of monsters. with 5 monsters you’ve got a x2.5 Effective XP modifier for determining difficulty, putting you at a total of 8000 xp worth of difficulty.

But, like... That really gives no useful indication of actual difficulty.

So I would assume the following spells will be on the Medusa at the minimum.

Bless
Beacon of hope
Warding bond

If your going for the pure focus on the Medusa, then apply those buffs to the cr stats and then assume her hp is like x10 higher than normal, maybe x20.

The main problem with an all defense little offense fight like that, is it very boring, so you probably won’t some offense to spice it up

Also, better check spell descriptions. I am pretty sure Spirit Guardians can only exempt those you can SEE. So it sounds like EVERYONE is going to be soaking that damage, since none of the clerics can see to exempt anyone.

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KahlessNestor said:

Also, better check spell descriptions. I am pretty sure Spirit Guardians can only exempt those you can SEE. So it sounds like EVERYONE is going to be soaking that damage, since none of the clerics can see to exempt anyone.

Sent from my SM-G900P using EN World mobile app

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The sight thing will effect a number of possible spells, as you need line of sight to do much spell targetting. Cure wounds is touch, but at the same time if you have all of the clerics bunched up around the medusa they are area effect bait. That said, consideirng the incredible healing they have, that actually may not be a bad thing to give your area bombers some time to shine.

wintericedrop said:

I am finding it difficult to figure out how difficult this fight will be. The encounter is x1 Medusa Template and x4 level 5 Life Domain Clerics. The Clerics are blind, and are essentially the Servants of the Medusa, and during combat they almost universally use their magic to benefit her, not harm others, especially since they can't see. Now they do have Spirit Guardians, and will likely use it if they feel they need to. As for the Medusa, she will stay back with the Clerics and use her bow for as long as she can while using her petrifying gaze when someone tries to close the gap with her. The encounter room is essentially a 90x40 ruined throne room, with the primary entrance at the other side of the room, and the Medusa at the throne with her cleric servants. Essentially, I do not know how much more difficult the Medusa should be assumed to be since she will be getting a great deal of healing and buffs. Does anyone have an idea as to how to calculate this?

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First off, welcome to EnWorld!

As for the encounter, the NPC clerics are basically the Priest entry at the back of the MM, so those are CR 2. However, if you make them blind, that severely restricts what they can do. As has been mentioned, most of their spells will be useless in such a situation. I'd suggest giving them 10' blindsight (some sort of divine sight?), as that will at least allow them to target each other and the medusa.

The medusa is CR 6, but a lot of that is the gaze attack. Since that only goes out to 30', a smart party will just stay at range and trade shots with the medusa. It will only get two longbow shots for an average of 6 points of damage per shot vs. multiple attacks from the party. In other words, with this setup, the medusa is toast with minimal risk to the party.

Now the blind priests helping the medusa is a cool idea. In practice, however, they'll be limited to casting cure wounds on the medusa, which will just drag out the fight. Bottom line, a 6th level party with area effect spells and decent ranged attacks will have little trouble with this encounter. It will use up some resources, so call it 2,500 - 3,000 XP total.

What you need are additional environmental effects. Here are some possibilities:

Make sure the characters have to enter the room to attack the medusa/priests. Have the floor in the room covered with ornate symbols and diagrams. Anyone standing on the diagrams must verbally chant something from the priests' religion or be hit with 1d8 necrotic damage. Meanwhile, hidden on the floor are a handful (not too many) of glyphs of warding with hold person, blindness, or guiding bolt). These should be placed such that a quick rush of the medusa is a bit risky, but possible.

With something like this, the characters can battle at range, but it becomes a race to take down the medusa before the necrotic damage takes them down. If they rush the medusa, as soon as one character triggers a glyph, they'll be worried about more (which is why you don't need too many - the idea is to worry the party, not wipe them out). And once close to the medusa, the gaze comes into play, as does spiritual guardians. All of this should force a quick, tense fight, rather than a somewhat tedious ranged, attritional fight.

With additional environmental effects, I'd bump the encounter difficulty into the 4,000 - 6,000 XP range, depending on just how tough the effects.

wintericedrop said:

I am finding it difficult to figure out how difficult this fight will be. The encounter is x1 Medusa Template and x4 level 5 Life Domain Clerics. The Clerics are blind, and are essentially the Servants of the Medusa, and during combat they almost universally use their magic to benefit her, not harm others, especially since they can't see. Now they do have Spirit Guardians, and will likely use it if they feel they need to. As for the Medusa, she will stay back with the Clerics and use her bow for as long as she can while using her petrifying gaze when someone tries to close the gap with her. The encounter room is essentially a 90x40 ruined throne room, with the primary entrance at the other side of the room, and the Medusa at the throne with her cleric servants. Essentially, I do not know how much more difficult the Medusa should be assumed to be since she will be getting a great deal of healing and buffs. Does anyone have an idea as to how to calculate this?

Click to expand...

As a baseline, one CR 6 Medusa + four CR 2 priests = Adjusted XP: 8,200 (Deadly*) for a party of five PCs.

*acc. to DMG "Deadly" means there's the possibility of a PC dying.

However, CR calculations are a very very rough starting point. You need to consider your party's size, level, composition, and "freshness." If it's likely to be the only fight of the day, you'll want to look at the Adventuring Day XP guidelines.

What you've created is a situation begging for a fireball (unless there's story reasons for PCs *not* targeting priests). Since the priests need to be close to the medusa for cure wounds (a touch spell), warding bond (w/in 60-feet), or including her within spirit guardians (15-feet), most area effect spells are going to be devastating on the clustered monsters. So, in addition to looking at the usual – encounter difficulty calculations, adventuring day XP, how fresh the party is, etc. – you'll want to consider the party's composition. Do they have a blaster spellcaster with area effect spells? That'll be a huge advantage.

The thing with the medusa is that you're having her fight at range primarily...which really isn't optimal for a medusa. There's very little incentive for PCs to engage in melee, given your scenario as it stands. "The medusa shoots her bow at me twice, from a range where I don't have to worry about getting petrified? I'll stay right here and grab some cover, thank you very much!"

So unless you have a very hack-n-slash oriented party, you need reasons why the PCs feel pressured to close into melee, or else the PCs are likely to arm up with their own ranged attacks and decimate the 127 hit point medusa. [MENTION=35019]Croesus[/MENTION] offers great advice in this regard!

I also agree with [MENTION=5889]Stalker0[/MENTION] that the scenario runs the risk of being a bit boring as the PCs try to deal enough damage to surpass the medusa's HP boosted-by-healing. It has the potential of drawing out the combat...and whenever that happens you want interesting developments you can introduce in the fight to keep things fresh.

[MENTION=20323]Quickleaf[/MENTION] [MENTION=6926788]wintericedrop[/MENTION]
Do we know the party level? I am kind of totally missing from the OP.

Also, party numbers, composition and builds (even a brief description) will help greatly. A lot depends on the party.

This looks like a boss fight, so environment definitely deserves some work. If I had 4 5-level Clerics to fortify my throne room, I would definitely use that asset. Glyphs, Clairvoyance are the most obvious roads to go, but you can get more creative. Also, giving Clerics level 6 will let them heal themselves while healing others, which can be a small but nice boost.

Thank you all for your assistance in this, it has given me much to think about. Regarding spellcasting when blind, I am permitting them to target the Medusa regardless of that fact, but only when they are near her. I really appreciate the idea of improving the environment, and I am debating between traps, spells, or perhaps broods of snakes or some other logical monster. As for party makeup and level, the level is unknown, I am trying to make this a hard, not deadly, encounter, and thus, I am trying to figure out what level that would be best at. There are five party members: an archery focused ranger, a bard who has just decided to pick up a bow due to the number of ranged enemies they have fought, thus far, a sorcerer, a melee oriented rogue, and a healing druid that rarely fights.