D&D 5E Creating combat encounters: looking for tips

[robus]

There are so many variables that I think the consensus is that it's hard to say. But there does seem to be some feeling that once you're out of the squishy levels the guidelines in the DMG are on the easier side (and you're starting at 5 so definitely not squishy). If your group is experienced then probably ratcheting up your XP thresholds would be good. So an "easy" encounter is a "medium" encounter as per the DMG. But try it and see - there's no substitute for experimentation at your table.

 

[Jediking]

A key thing to remember is that the CR can give you numbers, but the DM gives the difficulty. Looking at a NPC/monster's stat block gives some help about what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how you use them can change a lot. A couple Hobgoblins with some Wolves will be a lot scarier than Orcs and more Orcs, even if the CR and XP are the same. Unless the Orcs are more cunning and tactical than usual, and the Hobgoblins are raw recruits and just rush in one at a time.

And the environment and terrain can help or hinder either side, but isn't factored into CR.

 

[Oofta]

I use an alternative spreadsheet that I found which doesn't really take number of opponents into consideration, just adds up the total XP of the enemies. It seems to work reasonably well.

The biggest issue that I see with the number multiplier is when you have one high level creature and multiple low level/minion types. Large numbers of mooks doesn't seem to have as big of an impact as the guidellnes would suggest in my experience.

There's also a significant difference between groups, with some groups just having the right combination of players, PCs and tactics. Against that group I throw deadly encounters with creatures with CR 2-4 levels above their level.

Another group I'd stick pretty close to base guidelines so I don't end up accidentally killing PCs permanently.

I do keep a closer eye on CR/level at lower levels. A CR 12 monster may not be be a big threat to a party of level 10, but a CR 3 monster is deadly for a first (or possibly even second) level party.

 

[iserith]

The biggest issue that I see with the number multiplier is when you have one high level creature and multiple low level/minion types. Large numbers of mooks doesn't seem to have as big of an impact as the guidellnes would suggest in my experience.

Note that the DMG does cover this (page 82): "When making this calculation, don't count any monsters whose challenge rating is significantly below the average challenge rating of the other monsters in the group unless you think the weak monsters significantly contribute to the difficulty of the encounter."

 

[Tony Vargas]

Hi, I've read the section on creating encounters, but I'm left wondering how much the XP budget and CR guides are actually useful in practice.

Not very. At low level, they're OK for single-monster encounters, at higher level they tend to give 'too easy' combats. The very idea of CR/EL guidelines is comparatively new, starting with 3.0, AFAICR, before that, DMs just placed encounters based on what 'made sense' or by random tables - eventually learning, through experience, to place encounters of a desired degree of challenge and/or to tweak encounters on the fly to get the desired results. More art than science to it, then & now.

For instance, are the easy medium hard deadly encounter ratings indicative of actual difficulty levels in practice?

If you keep in mind that easy/medium/hard are more in reference to resource expenditure, and that 'deadly' means 'might kill one or more characters,' rather than 'likely TPK,' sure.

Do monsters with a higher CR than the party level actually pose a significantly higher threat?

Yes. 4 giants is a significantly greater threat than 4 kobolds, for instance. A lone higher-level monster might be a perfectly reasonable threat, though.

Do the XP multipliers for the number of monsters encountered make sense?

It makes sense to have them - Bounded Accuracy makes being outnumbered even by 'lesser' enemies very dangerous.

 

[Azurewraith]

So my more specific quesiont is: have you designed, for your party in the game that you are DM for, combat encounters where you regularly spent XP budgets in the hard or deadly, or even above deadly, difficulty rating? And what about CRs, do you sometimes, or even often, use monsters that have CRs over the party's level without killing everyone? And finally, have you found that the number of creature multipliers are indeed quite accurate?

Every single encouter I run is either deadly or higher and my PC's consistently knock out atleast 3 of these before resting. Maybe 1 in 10 encounters result in some one going down but a quick spare the dying/healing word and boom all those failed saves are gone and there in positive hp ready to fight(minus what ever injury they revived when going down).

I did use an alternative stat Gen method where I rolled a single set of stats and that was the array and I'm allowing feats. To balance this I'm also running linguring injuries upon crit or ko(expanded table I found online)

As for higher crs again I do it all the time just use your head and think ok this creature can cast fireball on my 3rd lvl party only one guy is likely to make the save 30+damge in round will wreck the party in most cases. Also eyeball resistance and immunities but you knew that. Don't worry to much about regeneration I put 3 3rdlevel PC's up against a loathsome troll(limbs fall off and fight along side the troll) I believe is cr5 off top of my head. Tough fight yes, memorable yes, did they win yes.

At the end of the day I think it all boils down to do you want the PC's to feel like death is allways an option at every corner, or should the PC's be super man in a world without kryptonite? Another question are you and your players ok with a tpk? One of my favorite campaigns of all time came from a tpk the party failed to stop the bbeg who proceeded with his plan for world domination, new PC's were rolled 100years later trying to overthrow the regime.

 

[Li Shenron]

Hi, I've read the section on creating encounters, but I'm left wondering how much the XP budget and CR guides are actually useful in practice. I'm looking for comments and tips from those that have designed enough combat encounters to comment. For instance, are the easy medium hard deadly encounter ratings indicative of actual difficulty levels in practice? Do monsters with a higher CR than the party level actually pose a significantly higher threat? Do the XP multipliers for the number of monsters encountered make sense?

thanks for any tips.

I don't know about the XP because I am largely winging those and basically just pacing level advancement as I wish. But the CR guidelines IMXP give you a very easy game overall, so if that's what you're looking for you should be mostly safe following the guidelines.

Another option is ignore everything and go sandbox!

 

[Ancalagon]

When I do a challenging fight my design goal is "if the players just hack blow for blow, they will lose", ie it is up to the players through clever play and sound strategy to ensure victory.

That's tricky though because it means you need a pretty solid idea of how tough your party is. And in 5e, I really don't have that yet

I always assume that the CR's are just a guideline, to make sure that you don't accidentally murder your own players.

If you are in the habit of accidentally murdering people, no book will save you.

 

[Quickleaf]

I'm in my 5E beginnings however. I've only DMed 2 sessions, one-shots. Now, we're shortly starting a campaign and I'm looking at the baddies that I'm going to pit against the PCs and wondering if they're not too strong. E.g. they will likely start at level 5 to move towards level 7 by the end; and i'll be opposing slaads, including a death slaad who's the BBEG (CR 10); and a bunch of opponents that have CRs between 5 and 9, and of course weaker ones too. In planning some encounters, I realive that by including a single high CR monster I'm sometimes already busting my "hard" or even "deadly" difficulty XP budget.

As you know from your past DMing experience, you're dealing with a big ball of "It Depends."

How many PCs are in your party? What classes are they playing? How skilled are the players? How likely are they to try outside-of-the-box things to circumvent rolling in combat entirely? How intelligently/ruthlessly do you run your monsters? How many encounters/day do you throw at them? Which monsters specifically are they facing? How fresh are they in a given encounter?

With slaadi, specifically red and blue slaadi, the danger is less in the immediate encounter and more the effects of the diseases they impart. For your 5th-7th level party (you still should tell us the #'s and composition if you know it), you're probably not going to want to send more than 1 blue/green/gray slaad at them at a time. Possibly with a couple slaad tadpoles. I'll explain my specific thoughts/experiences below, but one thing to consider is the regeneration ability that all slaadi have — there's no RAW way to circumvent it, so the more slaadi you include the more that regeneration is going to really hamper the PCs' day. For that reason alone, they are tough contenders for a 5th-7th level party.

You might get away with sending 2-3 red slaad at them when they're fresh, though that would be one hell of a fight.

The blue slaad can infect up to 2 PCs/round, preventing them from healing and reducing their maximum HP by 10 every 24 hours, cumulatively. And only a wish ends the transformation! That's a PC-killer monster right there! I would only send 1 blue slaad against them at a time.

The green slaad and the grey slaad I've made better use of as subtle enemies thanks to their shapeshifting and ability to detect thoughts. Because of their ability to turn invisible and cast fireball (avg 28 damage on failed save — compared to 38 HP for a 5th level cleric with 14 Constitution), they are very dangerous creatures. So while you miiight be able to throw 2 green slaad at them (most likely at the upper level range for the PCs that you gave), definitely only throw 1 grey slaad at them in any given encounter. I base that off of the 1/day fireball of the green slaad and 2/day fireball of the grey slaad. Hit a 5th level party with 2 fireballs and you're looking at several charred PC corpses at least.

(1)So my more specific quesiont is: have you designed, for your party in the game that you are DM for, combat encounters where you regularly spent XP budgets in the hard or deadly, or even above deadly, difficulty rating?
(2) And what about CRs, do you sometimes, or even often, use monsters that have CRs over the party's level without killing everyone?
(3) And finally, have you found that the number of creature multipliers are indeed quite accurate?.

First off, you're going to get different answers here because of all those variables I listed above. However, I tried to start an experiment to take this from the purely anecdotal into a spreadsheet with some form of collected data:

ACTUAL 5e Encounter Difficulty (GoogleDrive)

(1) MY experience with a fresh (uninjured, no resources spent) party of 6 low-level PCs (low to moderate optimization, mix of player skills), is that the answer to your first question is YES, more than half the time I design encounters where the XP budget is hard or deadly.

(2) For your second question, for my current games (at 3rd level and 4th level, respectively) I tend to use monsters no more than CR+2 above the party's level. I'm sure as they get to higher levels that threshold will increase. For example, having 3rd level spells once they hit 5th level (like your PCs are starting) will be a power jump. I'll also add that it's HUGELY dependent on the specific monster's capacities. For example, CR 2 carrion crawlers. Even with the way 5e neutered their paralyzation power, a single carrion crawler was scary at 1st level, and a trio of carrion crawlers was terrifying at 2nd level.

(3) I think the encounter multipliers work fine if you're using them in a simplistic way. However, when you start combining monsters of significantly different CRs the DMG multipliers break down (i.e. a lich and a crawling claw do not merit a 1.5x encounter budget XP multiplier). As [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION] mentioned the DMG covers this in an artistic license binary sense — if you think the crawling claws contribute meaningfully add them in, if not leave them out. OTOH [MENTION=6780929]Gobelure[/MENTION] posted a great mathematical solution to this issue: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?367697-Encounter-difficulty-how-to-fix-it It gives you slightly different encounter outputs than the DMG, but (arguably) you'll get a bit more accuracy in encounter building...if that's your thing.

As an aside, when you say "or even above the deadly difficulty rating," I think you might be misunderstanding the encounter XP guidelines in the DMG p. 82. The values on the chart are interpreted thus:

OOC: 5. Compare XP. Compare the monsters' adjusted XP value to the party's XP thresholds. The closest threshold that is lower than the adjusted XP value of the monsters determines the encounter's difficulty.

Lastly, I'll say that after having played 5e a bit, I understand all that seemingly frustrating "generic" advice I received at first. There really are a lot of variables and the system is quite robust. I'd treat your first couple sessions as a chance to become familiar with your players's play styles and their PCs' capabilities. Experiment around a bit while the PCs are relatively fresh — throw an encounter you think would be easy, another time throw an encounter you think would be an "average" challenge, and another time throw an encounter you think would be deadly. That will give you a good baseline for your particular group more helpful than any amount of advice (whether from other DMs or from the DMG).

EDIT: And make it cool!

 

[Rhenny]

I develop most of my encounters without using xp budget and base them almost entirely on what makes sense for the location/stories. Sometimes after the fact, I check them and I find that I create a mix from easy to double deadly which is what I'd suggest. I think variety is the best guideline.

Right now, I'm running PotA at 5th level and the bard in our group uses both hypnotic pattern and hold person to great effect. Variability is my best defense and it makes the bard's player make more interesting decisions in play. He holds his hypnotic pattern until he faces larger numbers. He likes this very much.

That said, I always keep a few extra "reinforcements" in my back pocket for times when it seems logical and I want to push the party further. Also, I constantly make perception checks for nearby mobs to see if or when they respond to any battle noise.

I'm finding that quantity of foes really does make the encounter more difficult especially if there are a mixture of melee and ranged attackers. Also, spellcasters tip the balance more toward deadly so having 1 or 2 of those behind a melee force can be a challenge.

Overall, the published encounter guidelines tend to produce easier encounters than expected, but they are a good set of guidelines for estimating the difficulty of an encounter.