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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vayden" data-source="post: 4605836" data-attributes="member: 57791">Hello again everyone! I hope you all had a good Christmas/Winter Holiday of Your Choice. I'm back with more!Tip #8) Use more monsters, not lessThe math can easily get off/grindy if you use elites or monsters that are much higher level than the PCs. You really want the PCs to have a to-hit chance between 45-60% - even using a "boring" at-will feels a little better if you hit with it. Now obviously to-hits will vary between the party members - a rogue with a dagger is going to hit AC more often than a paladin with an axe, but the general principle holds. On the flip-side, you want your monsters to have a reasonable chance of hitting the PCs as well if you're doing as I recommend and trying to bring a reasonable amount of risk into the encounter. Elites and Solos (esp Solos) are also things to use carefully, as are templates, since they turn monsters into elites. The economy of actions has been mentioned many times on these boards (elites and solos generally get less attacks than 2 (or 5) monsters of their level, so they're less dangerous). One side effect of this I haven't seen mentioned as often is that the designers have, in my opinion, given elites and solos too many hps in most cases (probably to compensate for the economy of actions problem). However, just giving a monster more hp doesn't necessarily make it that much more of a threat - in many cases it just makes the fight stretch on after its lost all drama - the elite is the only monster left, you have to hack through another 80 hp, but it has so few actions that it can't really threaten the players. What this means when picking monsters is that you generally want to stick to normal monsters and minions of a range between n-2 to n+3. If a monster that you want to use doesn't fit there, you probably want to bump its level up or down a bit using the DM's toolbox from the DMG (one of my all-time favorite sections of any DMG ever). The DMG advises not using this to bump a monster up or down more than 5 levels - I would say 4 is actually the maximum ammount of levels you can tweak with this - anything more or less, and you're better off finding a monster of the right level and re-skinning it (or making up a monster from scratch). Since you're using monsters that are close to the PC's level, you want to out-number them - most of the really good fights I've done use a collection of monsters at or slightly above the PCs level that outnumber the PCs by about 4 or 5. This gives the defender(s) a chance to shine by finding a good spot and locking down most of the monsters, while the back-line characters still have to stay on their toes to avoid the ones who inevitably make it past when the monsters have that great of an advantage of numbers. If you're lucky and play your monsters right, it'll also have a perfect curve of still-living monsters/PC resources - the last 3 zombies are a lot more threatening when everyone has already used their 2nd wind and the cleric is down to single digit hitpoints and is frantically screaming for someone, anyone to stand between him and the zombie 3 squares away from him. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Now of course, you still want to use elites and solos in your game - what would D&D be without at least the occasional dragon fight, right? You just have to put a little more work into these to set these up right. For starters, you probably want to reduce their hitpoints by about 20-25%, though your mileage may vary. Secondly, you need to surround them with a good complement of normal monsters - probably something that is the opposite of their role. Give an artillery/controller elite/solo some brutes up front, give a brute solo some artillery and skirmishers to circle around behind him, etc. It's very rare that you want to actually use a solo as a single monster, as it can easily get boring and repetive. If you do use the solo by itself, make sure to include some dynamic terrain to keep the tenor of the fight changing. Hope all that helps! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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