D&D 5E Encounter Building math: or I killed 2 PCs last night.

[dream66_]

Do we have any understanding yet of proper encounter building math?

Last night we were doing a little old school dungeon crawl as I got to run a game but didn't have anything prepared.

I sent a 5 person party ranged fighter, cleric, rogue, wizard pregens plus a paladin, up against 4 orcs, and 6 goblins, a total CR of 3 1/2

They expended ALL their resourced, and the cleric and paladin died. Cleric fell to a 1 on a death save. Wow that was unexpected, to go from, we'll get you up next round, to, dead.


But so is a 3 1/2, a decent fight for 5 level 1 pcs?

 

[wedgeski]

That's a 1750 XP combat (4 x 100 XP orcs, 6 x 50 XP goblins, multiplied by 2.5 for 7-10 monster gang). The basic DM's PDF specifies 500 XP as a deadly encounter for a 5-man 1st level party...so, yeah, the PC's were lucky to get out as well as they did.

Don't use Challenge Rating as a measure of total encounter difficulty. CR's are there as a guide-post to let you know which monsters are *appropriate* for your party.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

You don't use CR to calculate the difficulty of an encounter. CR is a "you must be this tall to ride" feature. If you have a creature of CR 5, it may have some abilities that a group of level 4 characters have no way to counter, for example.

To calculate the difficulty of your encounter, use the XP table on p. 57 of the DM Basic Rules. In this case, you have an encounter worth 700 XP (hard for a level 5 party), but you have to multiply the XP value to account for the fact that there are many monsters (2.5 x harder), for a total of 1750 XP. This is described as deadly for a party of 7th level characters.

Since you have 5 level 1 characters, I believe it's already good enough that someone managed to survive. That said, I don't think a party of level 7 characters would have a hard time against your encounter. It's more an art than a science, it seems.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

That's a 1750 XP combat (4 x 100 XP orcs, 6 x 50 XP goblins, multiplied by 2.5 for 7-10 monster gang). The basic DM's PDF specifies 500 XP as a deadly encounter for a 5-man 1st level party...so, yeah, the PC's were lucky to get out as well as they did.

It seems my math was wrong as well!

Still, at 350 XP for each character, the encounter planned by the OP is very deadly for a party of 3rd level characters. That's why it almost ended in a TPK.

 

[drjones]

I think what you ran into here is the 'floor' of difficulty on low level monsters. With bounded accuracy you should be able to put together encounters with large amounts of low CR/XP monsters and have a reasonable difficulty but at level 1 the only low enough power monsters are bunnies and rats. Orcs and Goblins at that point are on an equal footing with players and can dish out significant damage so you can't have a large number of them yet.

 

[Astrosicebear]

Ive made the same mistake. We are used to older edition leeway. But with bounded accuracy, monsters stay deadly much longer, which means monsters above the PCs pay grade tend to be very strong.

 

[dream66_]

Well I completely missed page 57, I was looking before the monsters not after.

Handy page, need to print that.

Well, at least the survivors leveled LOL

 

[bganon]

Also, I don't know if they're done tweaking things yet, but at least for the fractional CR monsters it seems that adding CR isn't too terrible a way to gauge appropriateness.

For example, with Orcs (CR 1/2), tossing two at a first level party is tough but not crazy (hard for a party of four), three is getting dicey (deadly for just about any party of lvl 1 characters), and four is right out.

For Goblins (CR 1/4), four against a level lvl 1 party is hard for a party of five, and just barely deadly for a party of four, so they might survive. Six goblins is pushing into deadly territory again.

So it seems that for fractional CR, it's roughly a guide to the max number of those creatures that you can toss at a level one party and expect survivors.

 

[Zardnaar]

Also, I don't know if they're done tweaking things yet, but at least for the fractional CR monsters it seems that adding CR isn't too terrible a way to gauge appropriateness.

For example, with Orcs (CR 1/2), tossing two at a first level party is tough but not crazy (hard for a party of four), three is getting dicey (deadly for just about any party of lvl 1 characters), and four is right out.

For Goblins (CR 1/4), four against a level lvl 1 party is hard for a party of five, and just barely deadly for a party of four, so they might survive. Six goblins is pushing into deadly territory again.

So it seems that for fractional CR, it's roughly a guide to the max number of those creatures that you can toss at a level one party and expect survivors.

I used 4 orcs on a level 1 party and they killed them all. 6 Goblins are in the LMoP adventure as well for level 1 PCs. I am finding the pacing difficult to work out though as it specifies that you can use less encounters if they are hard/deadly. I had a 6 member level 5 party take on 17000xp worth of stuff and win so there is that as well.

The encounter level guidelines are a bit of a joke it seems. Just be careful with level 1 PCs is all I can say.

 

[wedgeski]

The encounter level guidelines are a bit of a joke it seems. Just be careful with level 1 PCs is all I can say.

If anything I think the multipliers for large encounters are a bit over-egged, but the guidelines are far from "a joke". You're always going to have to massage things to meet your players' expectations and abilities.