Needs Encounter Building Tips

[NoahW]

Some amigos and I are starting a 3rd edition DnD game soon and it looks like I'm going to be DM-ing, I don't have a lot of experience but I've pretty much got it down except when it comes to encounter building.

I've run a couple small campaigns before but I pretty much fudged the whole party monster pairing and got lucky, and the Challenge rating system is still a bit confusing to me. So does anyone have any tips for encounter building or know any good tables I can check out? I'll appreciate whatever help I can get.

 

[Dice4Hire]

Welcome to Enworld!!!

I played a lot of 3.5 and yes, the CR system and making encounters can be tough.

I had a few general rules, but there are a lot of different encounters.

I generally did not go too high above the party's level with CRs, usually only 2-3, sometimes a bit more (at higher level you have more leeway). I also tried not to have too many creatures, usually only 2 or so per character. If some of them were very weak, then the numbers could be added to.

But really what it is is eyeballing the encounter and knowing your player's abilities and capabilities. What is your party good at dealing with?

If you have a lot of fighters with high armor, then more weaker creatures are a lot of fun, like humanoids.

If mages and ranged guys, then put in more fliers or monsters that move a lot.

Individual monsters are the hardest for me in 3.5. They usually only get one attack a round, so a party of 5-6 characters can really stomp them quickly. Individual bosses need either terrain or other monsters to keep the PCs from focussing on them too easily.

Reading this all again, it sounds very vague. The quickest advice I have is to make your earlier combats 2-3 waves. If the party does not so well or too easily, send in another wave. If the combat is going well or easily debate sending in a further wave. That should halp you learn while not TPKing your players

 

[Gilladian]

I find monster CR to be nearly useless as a guideline.

What I do is know more or less how high my fighters can roll on a crit. Then I judge a monster's suitability by AC, by comparing HP to the fighter's HP, and spell abilities to the other PCs strengths and weaknesses.

Dice4hire is right in his suggestion of "waves" of attacks. For example, in a 1st encounter, you might pit a group of 4 PCs against 2 dire rats and 4 normal rats. If they kill the dire rats at once, then have 2 more charge out of the shadows to join them. Or just one more, if one PC is wounded badly. Or if the rats are just barely losing, have the eyes gleaming on the outside shadows turn out to be a pair more regular rats, hardly worthy of a threat.

It is a fine balancing act, and you'll take some time figuring it out. don't be ashamed if you overwhelm your party a time or two. You can always just admit it and delete some attackers if things get overwhelming, or fudge by adding a few extra HP to a foe who goes down too fast.

 

[Whisper72]

Very true advice. The CR system is a nice try to give a starting DM some feeling of the power of the encounter, but at least half of the equation depends upon the specific makeup and resourcefulness of the characters and the players themselves. So. It begins with knowing your players.

Fudging a bit to make encounters more fun is a good idea, but try not to make it too commonplace. It can give the players the idea that their actions barely matter anymore, each encounter is 'tailor made' and they will win all the time.

Make it clear that they sometimes encounter foes they just cannot win from, they should run away, also throw the odd 'mook' encounter their way, to boost confidence and allow them to show how powerful they have become.

In the end, it is more important to see what the abilities (both in terms of classes, but also in terms of magic items and types of spells) the PC's have at their disposal and the creativity with which the players themselves manage to 'leverage' these powers, to decide which encounters pose a real threat/challenge. So unfortunately, there is no simple way to decide which encounters are suitable for your specific group.

 

[NewJeffCT]

Some amigos and I are starting a 3rd edition DnD game soon and it looks like I'm going to be DM-ing, I don't have a lot of experience but I've pretty much got it down except when it comes to encounter building.

I've run a couple small campaigns before but I pretty much fudged the whole party monster pairing and got lucky, and the Challenge rating system is still a bit confusing to me. So does anyone have any tips for encounter building or know any good tables I can check out? I'll appreciate whatever help I can get.

Encounter building in any edition is really just as much art as it is science. It really helps to know the group and your players, though.

In 3.5E, a group without a cleric and/or a paladin is going to be more vulnerable to undead than a group with a cleric and a paladin in it. However, a group with a cleric and paladin in it may be more vulnerable to other types of encounters (quick, ranged attackers/skirmishers)

It also depends on what you want in an encounter - my last group where I had a 2 1/2 year long 3.5E campaign was a big group (7-8 players) that met every other week. Since our time was limited, most of the encounters tended to be BIG! IMPORTANT! CLIMACTIC! So, most of the encounters would be somewhere on the border of very challenging and overpowering on the encounter builder chart in terms of CR. Since my group was big, they had a huge range of options in terms of offensive firepower from range and in melee, as well as strong defensive abilities, so a normal encounter of their CR level would be a piece of cake a lot of the time. After they cleared level 10/11 or so, there was only one "solo" encounter after that, against a blue dragon in the desert, and they focused so much firepower on it in the first round that they burned through 75% of its hit points. And, once the players cleared that level 10/11 range, a lot of encounters became very long and very complex, taking a full session. And, the final two encounters both took two full overtime sessions to complete.

However, if you have the time to run 2-3 encounters per session, then you don't want to overwhelm the PCs with big encounters every time out.

If they still have online encounter builders for 3.5, I would use those as a starting point and then tweak them based on your group and what you want out of the encounter. In the beginning, I might recommend you have a DM ex machina in reserve to prevent a TPK from happening - at least until you get better at encounter building. (meaning, a passing NPC who rescues them, or a helpful forest creature, or, the merchant manages to dig out a healing potion or jar of alchemist's fire he forgot about earlier, etc)

 

[Hand of Evil]

See the DM Advice thread in my sig, there are a number of older topics on the subject you may find helpful.

 

[Janx]

Here's my generic 3e methodology:

Calculate the Effective Party Level (EPL) = total levels of all charcters in the party divided by 4
Why: because the standard 3e party is 4 PCs. if you have more PCs, this will inflate the EPL, which is what you need to know.


For an average encounter, pick enough monsters so the CR is equal to the EPL

Go 2 or 3 higher in CR for a harder encounter

CR=EPL/2 for easy encounters

For a low level party, it's harder to eyeball less than 1 CR. The +2 or 3 CR to make it harder seems to always hold true.

CR = EPL times 2 should be a really hard if not impossible encounter, per what I can discern.

I am not big on modifying monsters to make them harder. That's too much work. If you need a CR5 monster, don't jack with an orc, grab a CR5 monster from the MM. Much less work, and gets you encounter variety in the long run.

4e seems to encourage using a variety of critters in a fight. Why send in 5 orcs all alike, when you can send in 1 gnoll and 3 orcs. More flavor. Decent idea, even in 3e.

If I need to use NPCs rather than monsters, I use a NPC generator (even random ones). Don't spend forever making a guy who's gonna die..

Thats it in a nutshell. The things to really ponder, are how high of a CR total to throw at a party, as that's where a TPK can happen quite easily.

Also, be aware that the CR system isn't perfect, nor does it account for environment. A monster in the right environment can be tougher than its CR belies.

 

[Sven D'zell]

I know this thread is older, but I wanted to throw in my two cents. Hopefully someone will reply

Janx, when i searched for this thread, I was looking for something numeric, like what you have there, but after reading yours, im just not sure how i feel about it. Hopefully you can clarify what im misunderstanding.

Im running a game now, probably my 4th or 5th one thats actually developed into a long campaign. I have 4 PCs (actually 3 PCs running 4 characters) who are all at level 4. Thus, the EPL is (4+4+4+4=16)/4= 4. In our last session, I put them up against 6 Imps. this was supposed to be two different encounters, but they kinda did something stupid and let one escape to warn the others so i just hit em from both sides. Some of them had already been poisoned, and one player got poisoned in the encounter, AND i sneak attacked em with 6 invisible assailants, but, nonetheless, although it took forever for them to kill the sneaky buggers, they really werent in any kind of critically wounded condition when it was all said and done. I would really call the difficulty they had with this encounter pretty "average".

So in your system does 6 CR2 Imps count as a CR12 encounter? or do you use the CR as each imps level and divide the 12 by 4 to get an EPL of 3 (which would kinda make sense)? Because if so it seems like I could put them up against two chain devils and expect them to do ok, maybe?? That seems like its pushing it...

I guess I should mention that they have silver weapons, so I guess the devils are losing some degree of CR from that.

So, yeah whats everyones take on that?

 

[Michael Silverbane]

Multiple critters of the same Challenge Rating combine oddly... 2 critters of CR equals (about) 1 critter of CR +2. Determining the Encounter Level of multiple critters is even more wonky than using the CR of a single critter. It is very easy to get combinations that are much weaker or much stronger than normal.

So... 6 CR 2 imps should equal about one CR 6 critter. This should have been a moderately tough fight for a group with an Effective Party Level of 4.

The group being equipped with the right tools for the job probably brought the encounter down to about an Encounter Level 5, which a level 4 party should be able to handle without too much trouble.

Also, the level of optimization of your player's characters can make a huge difference in what sorts of encounters they can handle. The group that I am currently running for is very optimized... So I usually toss one critter per character with a CR equivalent to the party's average level. They have consistently overcome multiple such encounters per day, and much fun is had by all (except for the poor monsters, who get trounced time and again).