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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kbrakke" data-source="post: 7158282" data-attributes="member: 6781797">Do you have your rogue sheet because 50 consistent damage in a round seems absurd.Surprise round hand x-bow with assassinate is at best 10d6+8 (Shot 1, auto crit from surprise and sneak attack (1d6+4 + 3d6 + 4d6 crit), Shot two auto crit for 2d6+4) for an average of 43 damage assuming he hits both shots. If you play the rules exactly as written, the Assassin is frankly the worst archetype. Assuming a human with the alert feat he gets +9 to init, which is great, but he still has to both surprise the creatures and get higher than them in initiative. Every round after that, unless he gets a lucky crit he hits for 5d6+8 a respectable 25 damage, but that's about what Great Weapon Fighter can reach sans feats (2d6+4 with rerolls *2 is on average 25 damage a round) and that assumes the fighter uses literally no other abilities. Suspicions that you're not playing assassinate properly aside you should just suck it up when they complain about boss HP. Or you should practice running monsters very quickly. Very recently (Literally Yesterday) my group of 5 level 6 characters encountered 43 Gnoll Hunters. I blazed through my gnoll turns. Always use average damage, and the specifics don't matter as much, E.G don't worry about exact movement unless you're in a specific environment, people can just move and attack as needed. When it comes to solo monsters #1, never do it, #2 really, don't have a solo, #3 if you have a solo buff it insanely. At level 5 complaining about a solo having over 100 hp is laughable. I would expect (Based on what I posted earler for average damage ~25 per character at level 5) that you would want around 200 HP or so to provide a feasible challenge.  My default technique is to make any solo monster actually just two monsters sharing the same body. So if they're level 5 and I wanted a challenging solo encounter I would just staple two CR 5 monsters together. Say they were fighting hill giants, and finally got to the hill giant chieftain, I would just run the encounter with what I say is one monster, but it acts like three hill giants. It gets three turns, and has thrice the HP. I would probably throw a single legendary resistance in there too to throw them for a loop.In order.1) Make sure you have all the assassin rules correct. If they both _surprise_ the enemy and _roll higher_ in initiative do they get auto crits, but they can still only sneak attack once. 2) Develop ways to run large mobs faster, bounded accuracy really does do as advised, so a hoard of lower CR characters is something to keep as an encounter option. Figure out how you want to do it, average damage, you can do average hit rates too if you want.3) Even with bosses have minions around in a fight to keep them busy. If you want a higher powered feel I like having monsters that feel like Elite Soldiers be the lieutenant something that can distract a party member or two to keep the boss safe.3b) If you insist on actual solo encounters, you should almost never use a monster in the MM straight up, give it something to smooth out the action economy imbalance. It can be making it functionally equal to multiple monsters, it can be legendary actions, lair actions or some other ability, but it always needs something.</blockquote>

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