D&D 5E Challenge Levels (Deadly Question)

[Uller]

Just keep in mind that those encounter thresholds seem to work best in the context of an "adventuring day" that consists of 6-8 encounters of varying difficulty. Deadly is probably a misnomer. Difficult is probably a better word. A Deadly encounter at the beginning of the day will most likely just sap a lot of resources. Unless it includes a monster with a significantly above the party level and it manages to actually use whatever feature it is that makes it "tough" no one will really feel like they were close to death.

For my part I dont worry about big climactic battles. I just let the players do what they want and the NPCs do what they do. Some adventures end with a whipser. Some end with a nail biter. Makes the nail biters seem even more fun.

 

[jgsugden]

The tables, are, unfortunatelty not that useful unless you stick to point buy, recommended levels of treasure and the PCs are not optmizers. If they're not the 'typical PCs', then the combat scaling doesn't work too well and using it results in combats that are boringly easy to win, even at 150% of the Deadly level.

The only thing you can do is experiment a bit. See how the PCs measure up to foes and then adjust the difficult setting of the game to accomodate.

 

[wedgeski]

The tables, are, unfortunatelty not that useful unless you stick to point buy, recommended levels of treasure and the PCs are not optmizers. If they're not the 'typical PCs', then the combat scaling doesn't work too well and using it results in combats that are boringly easy to win, even at 150% of the Deadly level.

True, but the tables are an essential place to start!

The only thing you can do is experiment a bit. See how the PCs measure up to foes and then adjust the difficult setting of the game to accomodate.

And this is absolutely true. 5E is pitched on the easy side for my group, freeing me to design encounters that are much more difficult than the norm. But, I still needed "the norm" to know where to start.

 

[Dit464]

MY current DM, is running a slightly home-brewed Forgotten Realms campaign, its more RP heavy but he allowed us to roll our stats, but to keep our 1 to 2 combats per long rest relevant he throws pretty much everything at us within that day, most encounters involve at least one of us almost going unconscious. And the most recent session was insane because he kept rolling crits and near crits that night, virtually everyone else missed their spells/attacks and the only one who stayed above half health was our wizard.