D&D 5E Challenge Rating

[Balfore]

How do you determine higher challenges with larger groups?

If you have a CR 11, and 10 PCs @ level 20.
How many CR 11s do you need?
Or, how many CR 11s with extra mobs of lesser CR?

Or, just rank up the CR 11, and add another one?

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[Warmaster Horus]

Experience. CR is a very limited figure of merit for determining challenges for your players.

 

[MostlyDm]

Do you have the DMG?

I recommend starting with the encounter building guidelines in there, and the XP budgets listed, to determine challenges.

Use CR as a guideline of what to include when meeting your XP budget, not as the primary determining factor.

 

[MNblockhead]

I prefer the recent Unearthed Arcana Encounter Building guidelines over those in the DMG, but I use these as a starting point if I use them at all. The best encounters are bespoke encounters, designed for the specific party.

Encounter Builder rules in the DMG and UA are most useful when preparing for public games where you may not know who will be joining. The UA guidelines are useful for new GMs that need some help getting started on designing encounters. I find the DMG guidelines get too complicated.

I find that the Encounter Guidelines tend to make for easier encounters when you are dealing with experience players. They seem to be designed to help GMs avoid making encounters too deadly.

 

[Balfore]

We don't use XP, never have.
We use milestone/encounters/roleplaying segments for leveling up.

Also, the group is level 20.
They are very experienced and we have played together for nearly 20 years.
This is my first time DMing 5th, and I am taking them into an epic finalé in 3 more sessions.
We've always had another DM, but nevner went beyond 20 (or epic levels in past editions)

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[Ovinomancer]

Use kobold fight club. It's at kobold.club. Great site for planning encounters. I use it to get a feel for a given encounter and tweak from there.

Against a 10 man level 20 party:
6 CR 11 is a medium fight
7 is a hard fight
9 is deadly x1
14 is deadly x2
17-18 for deadly x3

An experienced party should be able to handle deadly x2 or x3 fights pretty well, but there's always a question when the party's outnumbered. Add in some interesting battlefield things and you'll do fine. If you're concerned, throw half of them in at once and keep the rest back as a reserve.

 

[Quickleaf]

How do you determine higher challenges with larger groups?

If you have a CR 11, and 10 PCs,
How many CR 11s do you need?
Or, how many CR 11s with extra mobs of lesser CR?

Or, just rank up the CR 11, and add another one?

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I think once you're at ten PCs, you're pretty far off the reservation when it comes to the DMG guidelines. There are a couple reasons why, but the foremost is that the "force multiplier" effect – usually considerable in 5e (and the reason why the DMG has an XP value multiplier for large groups of monsters) – will be substantially lessened against such a massive party.

My best suggestion is to use [MENTION=6780929]Gobelure[/MENTION]'s guidelines for calculating appropriate challenges: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?367697-Encounter-difficulty-how-to-fix-it

What he does is removes the force multiplier (or rather sort of works it into the underlying math of his simple system); this is great if, for example, you want to determine a more representative difficulty (Easy/Medium/Hard/Deadly) for an encounter involving, say, a CR 17 Lich and a bunch of CR 1/4 Zombies. In your case, it also is helpful because [MENTION=6780929]Gobelure[/MENTION]'s math lessens the impact of the force multiplier increasingly at higher levels.

So I'd suggest that as your starting point.

EDIT: Also, we need to know the level of your PCs.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

We don't use XP, never have.
We use milestone/encounters/roleplaying segments for leveling up.

Also, the group is level 20.
They are very experienced and we have played together for nearly 20 years.
This is my first time DMing 5th, and I am taking them into an epic finalé in 3 more sessions.
We've always had another DM, but nevner went beyond 20 (or epic levels in past editions)

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It's not that you need to use experience in your game, but that the encounter building guidelines use the XP of monsters to determine the overall challenge.

In 5E, CR is a measure of threat, not challenge. Challenge is determined by the total experience of all monsters involved. If a monster's CR is higher than the level of the party, then the monster is likely to kill a PC, even if the XP budget is such that the party will easily defeat the encounter.

So, when building an encounter, you choose the level of challenge: easy, moderate, hard, or deadly. This will determine you XP budget.

Then you choose monsters to fill up that budget, generally choosing from monsters of a CR less than or equal to the level of the party. Though, for a major boss-fight or the like, you might want to go a bit higher.

 

[Balfore]

That's the thing, this group of 5 people, (now playing 10 total characters, because those characters have never played beyond 18-20l, these players have played together for nearly 20 years.
They face-roll everything, they play like a well oiled machine-each knowing their rolls and place in the battle.

With 5 PCs, at level 20, they can easily faceroll a CR 21 Lich. The Eldrich Knight could almost solo the Lich. Even with 10 zombies in the way.

When you have that level of synergy, you need greater challanges... no?

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[Oofta]

My recommendation is to use one of the alternate CR calculators mentioned above and adjust fights based on your experience.

Something I do (especially with a new group) is to have the monsters I want to through and then some rough numbers of how many would make sense. For example, I use a spreadsheet (sorry don't have the link any more) that I plug in the numbers.

So let's say I have gnolls and a band of giant hyenas attacking. Two gnolls riding two giant hyenas may be easy, 3 each is moderate, 4 each is hard and so on (I haven't actually crunched the numbers)

So in my notes I have
creature easy med hard
gnolls x2 x3 x4
giant hyenas x2 x3 x4

In many cases it's going to be a different mix - 2 of this type of creature and 4 of that type.

So I just throw an easy/medium encounter at the group. If it's easier than I want I can always have a second wave come in. After the first couple of encounters I know what threat level the group can handle and I adjust accordingly.

So a combination of using one of the CR calculator mixed in with the results of previous combats.

Of course no calculation is perfect, some fights are going to be easier or tougher depending on synergies and other random factors.