Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Croesus" data-source="post: 7196172" data-attributes="member: 35019">Yes, 1E had encounter building guidelines, though they were basically "Based on the level of the dungeon, roll on this table, put that monster in the room." As for winging it, it takes time to become comfortable enough with a system to build encounters on the fly. For me, I'd say it took about a year of solid GMing before I reached that point. Which seems about right, as the same thing happened in 1E - my first attempts were lousy, but got better over time.One thing to consider is that 5E is very swingy, which can make it seem like encounters are grossly unbalanced (either too weak or too strong). Just this past weekend my players explored an old tomb and had only three encounters. Each fight was well within their level range, but my dice were hot and they had trouble in all three fights. In the last fight, in a single round, the mummy whiffed, but its five supporting skeletons all hit, one with a crit. One character was down, the other two were left with single digit hit points (they were all 4th level). Fortunately they had just enough power left to eventually take down the mummy, which ended the fight. They pulled it out by the skin of their teeth, but for a couple rounds, I thought I had a TPK on my hands. So it's not just about being able to eyeball encounters, it's about recognizing that luck can play an outsized role. All the guidelines in the world won't guarantee an encounter is easy or tough.</blockquote>

Verification