dave2008
Legend
This probably old news to some, but today I stumbled across this article from DMDave: How to Create Epic Encounters and I thought some people might find it useful. It begins with a short rant / description of how "Deadly" encounter are not intended to actually be Deadly (neither the description nor the numbers suggest they are truly deadly) as they only account for roughly 1/3 of your daily XP budget. He then goes on to describe "Epic" encounters as ones that use 50-100% of the daily XP budget - serious battles that could be a TPK if your not on your game. He then provides a great table to wraps this idea of Epic Encounters with solo monsters:
Epic Solo Monster Challenge Rating
I think this table is great and clearly shows that a creature of much higher CR than the party's level is needed to make a truly deadly solo battle in 5e. I have kinda know this for a while (I've often said once you hit 10-12th level you need a monster with a +10 CR to be a solo challenge), but it is nice to see it backed by some numbers analysis and put into a table.
Interesting notes:
Epic Solo Monster Challenge Rating
I think this table is great and clearly shows that a creature of much higher CR than the party's level is needed to make a truly deadly solo battle in 5e. I have kinda know this for a while (I've often said once you hit 10-12th level you need a monster with a +10 CR to be a solo challenge), but it is nice to see it backed by some numbers analysis and put into a table.
Interesting notes:
- A CR 24 Ancient Red Dragon is an Epic encounter for (4) 14-15th lvl PCs
- There is no CR appropriate solo monster for a group larger the (4) PCs at level 20 - I imagine we need some mythic monsters then! Maybe Fizban's can fix that.
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