D&D 5E DM in trouble needs advice/help to balance encounters in his campaign.

[tom1017]

Hi all.

So here's the situation:

I'm a veteran RPG player (been playing for more than 30 years now) but I've been acting as a Game Master only recently, also discovering D&D 5th ed in the same time.

To sum up, most of my experience comes from playing Warhammer RPG and Call of Cthulhu, and to put things simply I'm struggling to balance encounters when the players have a lot of HP and powerful abilities.

The thing is I've been convinced to become DM for my group because the guys heard of the Tyranny of Dragon campaign and wanted to play it. Since we're French and I'm the only one comfortable with reading English, I agreed to give it a try (also the system seemed quite cool and caught my attention).

Only, I found the campaign hard to play the way it's written (not trying to start a debate here), so I decided to go the way some advise: use the books as sourcebooks and the result is I've been rewriting the story a bit.
So far it's been working well enough and I haven't got a scenario issue, but the fights are an issue:
The last encounters were just so easy for the players I don't know what to do to give them a balanced challenge.
And they're only at the 5th level !!! (well except the thief who's 6th).

Anyway, I read somewhere D&D 5th ed. was sometimes difficult to master once the characters reach the 10th level or more because they're so powerful, but I didn't think I'd be that confused when they're 5-6th and we're not quite at the middle of the campaign (they're just about to finish the dead men marshes part).

So if anyone could give me some advice, I'd really appreciate, because atm, I just feel I should throw scores of trolls and vampires at my players but it's really not what I'm used to in RPGs. I mean when you play Warhammer RPG, those creatures are really rare. Maybe I need to change my perspective...

Thanks in advance for the help.


edit: spelling

t.

 

[ad_hoc]

Could you provide examples of encounters that were too easy?

There is a lot of potential for the DM to make the encounter itself easy regardless of what creatures the player's are facing.

Aside from that HotDQ has very powerful creatures in it. The party is expected to engage in the exploration and social interaction pillars to survive. How much did you change?

Do you have the DMG? There is a page there which shows you how to estimate what will be medium, hard, or deadly encounters (with definitions of what that means).

Finally, how many encounters are the party facing per long rest on average? 6 is a good number. Some days can be shorter of course but the threat of having more is what is important. Long rest characters are overpowered if they only face 1-2 encounters per long rest. Individual encounters can be easy, it's surviving many of them that becomes increasingly difficult.

- Oh, one more thing - How many players are there? 4 is the sweet spot. The game really starts to break down with 6+. The sheer number of actions the party has every turn means they will have a lot of control over battles. The counter to this is to have even more enemy creatures which creates even longer fights. You're going to end up having little spot light time per player, a lot more combat time than a typical D&D game would have, and balance will tend towards extremes - enemies wiped out or the party in a death spiral.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The thing is I've been convinced to become DM for my group because the guys heard of the Tyranny of Dragon campaign and wanted to play it. Only, I found the campaign hard to play the way it's written (not trying to start a debate here),

There's a poll running here of "top three best WotC adventures" - I'm pretty sure ToD is coming in last.

so I decided to go the way some advice: use the books as sourcebooks and the result is I've been rewriting the story a bit. So far it's been working well enough and I haven't got a scenario issue, but the fights are an issue:
The last encounters were just so easy for the players I don't know what to do to give them a balanced challenge.
And they're only at the 5th level !!! (well except the thief who's 6th).

5e is actually meant to be pretty easy after the first couple of levels. There's a number of factors that go into that, to make it more accessible to new players, for instance.

But one that can easily cause issues is that 5e is calibrated around a long slog of an adventuring day. Your party should get a short rest maybe every-other encounter, and a long rest only after 6-8 encounters. That should force them to be careful with using spell resources, run them out of HD and low on hps, so that there is a challenge, either in terms of resource management throughout the day, or if they screw that up, in terms of not having much left to face the last encounter or few. Shorter days mean increasingly noticeable class imbalance, and encounters starting to seem laughably easy. You can, of course, crank up encounters well past deadly to cope with the latter, but it does tend to get into a spiral, you dial up encounters, the party gets tapped out, rests sooner, and before too long you've taught you players to throw everything they've got at every encounter, then rest ASAP - the infamous "Five Minute Work Day."

 

[iserith]

Here is a tool you can use to check where the combat challenges in the module fall with regard to expected difficulty: Kobold Fight Club. See also "Combat Encounter Difficulty" in the DMG for an explanation as to how the designers define "Easy," Medium," "Hard," and "Deadly." This will help you set your expectations of what the challenge looks like on paper and how it plays out at the table.

Even armed with the above information, however, it's important to remember that player skill really matters. The more skillful the players, the more handily they will change a Deadly encounter on paper to a Medium encounter at the table through their strategy and tactics. As well, a Hard encounter might turn into a Deadly one if the players aren't as skilled or their characters are low on resources. There are many factors that will mitigate or exacerbate a challenge's difficulty such that what the formula predicts will not always be accurate. That said, I think this is okay. If the players, through their informed decision-making and solid application of their strengths while covering their weaknesses, just completely stomp what you would have anticipated being a Deadly encounter, that's great for them. Their decisions mattered and their teamwork and tactics paid off and this can be quite rewarding.

 

[LordEntrails]

As mentioned, rest frequency is key. You can use optional rules in the DMG for slow healing. Also, until you get more comfortable balancing encounters, use waves. In other words, let them encounter the first group, if on the second round they are trouncing them, then reinforcements arrive. Sometimes with notice and sometimes without.

Remember, variety is always important, don't become predictable.

 

[Oofta]

As others have stated, the number of encounters makes a huge difference, I use the alternate rules in the DMG to help with that (short rest is overnight, long rest is a week or more).

The other thing I did was get rid of the number of monsters affecting the overall challenge, I just come up with an XP budget as if there was only 1 monster.

There are a lot of detailed tactics that can also help depending on your group. Mix up the tactics of the bad guys, try to split the party, have enemies approach from all directions, send monsters in waves. For that matter, have the bad guys run away now and then ... possibly returning with reinforcements. For dragons in particular there was another thread with a link to an article here. How to Play a Red Dragon like an Evil Genius

But ultimately there is no secret formula, encounter design is more of an art than a science. Throw more encounters with a higher XP budget until it feels like it's too much and then back off a bit. Remember that not every fight has to be to the death.

I've run games for multiple groups, and what one group could handle would wipe another out. Sometimes what I think will be an easy fight turns out to be deadly and vice versa.

 

[tom1017]

Thanks a lot for the quick replies.

I think you guys nailed it: We're very far from 6-8 encounters in between rests. It's usually more like 1-2 :/

I lack the experience to wear the characters down and force them to develop strategies to save their strengths.

On the other hand, when I think about it, they also lack that experience: I almost lost the whole group in the cult's secret temple, when they just explored it in one go without ever resting. The last encounter would have been deadly hadn't I decided the creatures were young and therefore naive in their strategy...

Now to address an advice you gave me: I have a tool on a French D&D website to simulate encounters so I use that to evaluate them. I suppose there's just not enough fights all in all, except for that secret temple scenario but in any case we're really not used to play dungeon crawling style.

In our last game I just got caught off guard when the players ran into 3 NPCs and half a dozen soldiers: the damned sorcerer (or whatever it's called in English... not the one with a pact or a book, the one with innate magic) vaporized 85% of my strengths in the blink of an eye, with a fireball :'(
I realized I found it hard to evaluate the strengths of the NPCs because they don't fit in my webtool to simulate encounters...

Ah well, I suppose I have a long way to go to learn how to be a good DM.
Thanks again for the help and tips.
Cheers !

t.


edit: since we're not used to play multiple battles in a row, it may actually help and fit our gaming style if we change the resting rules as you suggested. I need to ponder the options and maybe discuss them with my players. We'll see. Kudos

 

[5ekyu]

Need more data to offer more than just generic shots in the dark.

Examples of encounters that seemed " too easy"?
Party specs - any relevant details.


Otherwise it's just flailing in the dark.

Like most RPGs the GM is expected to get a handle on party strength thru play and envounters as you go along. CR and default modules are just baselines, not prescriptions.

So, let us know specifics and we might be able to help.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I run tables with usually 7 PCs (of which probably at least 3 have healing abilities.) As a result, I have made two very basic changes at the base minimum to running monsters that has helped up the challenge greatly (without me having to spend time checking CRs or encounter builders etc.):

• Each monster has Max HP.
• Each monster's attack damage dice are maxed and I'll roll a 6-sided die to add to it in place of the bonus (just so the numbers are a little random.)

That there is enough to usually prolong fights into the 3rd round, and doing max damage (plus a little more) drops PC hit points much quicker and necessitates the PCs use of healing spells and the like. The heal-thru (either during or after combat) is such that I still won't tend to knock people out (and even if I do manage it on one, they get stabilized very quickly anyway)... but at least each player feels like they are getting hit extremely hard in the moment. So the combats has tension even if they aren't actually life-threatening.

 

[Oofta]

In our last game I just got caught off guard when the players ran into 3 NPCs and half a dozen soldiers: the damned sorcered (or whatever it's called in English... not the one with a pact or a book, the one with innate magic) vaporized 85% of my strengths in the blink of an eye, with a fireball :'(
I realized I found it hard to evaluate the strengths of the NPCs because they don't fit in my webtool to simulate encounters...

Ah well, I suppose I have a long way to go to learn how to be a good DM.
Thanks again for the help and tips.
Cheers !

t.

Rule #27 of DMing strategies: don't have the monsters appear in fireball formation.

Just remember rule #1: sometimes the PCs stomp on your bad guys. Let them enjoy it, you'll have plenty of time for vengeance.