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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 6600564" data-attributes="member: 2011">There is no such thing as a "standard party". And having only one healer in a group of five PCs is the exception. Your group is unusual if only one PC in 5 can heal in 5E. I also didn't know there was a recommendation of 4 PCs for 5E.Yes, my party is larger than normal. But 5 players is the average that I have had over the decades. Last year, we started a 4E campaign with 6 players. Unusual for us, but it is what it is.When we went to 5E, I got together with every single player individually and they took the race / class that they wanted to take. The did not know about the other PCs. So drop one PC from the list with a table of 5 instead of 6 from our group, you'll still have a lot of healers.Fighter (damage mitigation)Rogue (arcane, eventually)Wizard (arcane)Cleric (healer)Bard (arcane, healer)Ranger (healer)After the Wizard died (and got replaced with a Paladin) and with the new PC coming in, we will now have:Fighter (damage mitigation)Rogue (arcane)Cleric (healer)Bard (arcane, healer)Ranger/Wizard (arcane, healer)Paladin (healer)Druid (healer)Yes, there are more than 4 or 5 PCs here, but this is not that atypical of a 5E party. Everyone plays a different class. We have 4 primarily melee types (Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, and Paladin; the Cleric does so by choice), we have 3 semi-melee / semi-caster types (everyone else). Everyone can melee if necessary. Everyone has a ranged attack of some sort. And everyone but the Fighter can cast spells.In 5E, this is not that atypical of a makeup of PCs with the exception of how many there are.As for CR, that's simple. More PCs = higher CR that I can throw at them. I threw a Red Dragon halfway between Young and Adult; averaged stats and hit dice and AC and breath weapon between the two, something like 8 spells (I double Cha), traps, terrain; and they had one character (the 3rd level NPC Ranger, the character the 7th player is currently playing) go unconscious. That's CR 13 or 14 (Young is 10, Adult is 17). Yes, it scared the bejeezus out of them and it's Fireball spell and Breath Weapon and such did some serious damage, but they kept themselves really spread out and pulled it off (the Dragon did not even get to use its Web spell, but it did go invisible on them). Granted, if the Dragon would have encountered them in a smaller room, they would have had a tougher time spreading out (I only ever caught 3 PCs/NPCs in an area effect at a time), but it had traps and such to try to make up for that. I don't funnel all of my PCs into a breath weapon death trap (although if the dragon would have survived which it almost did, a future encounter would have been in a smaller room).I tend to use CR merely as a rule of thumb anyway. I look at the total hit points of foes, special abilities, terrain, AC and such and figure out how much damage per round the PCs have to dish out to take it out. I compare this to how much damage PCs normally dish out and figure out how many rounds it will take. If the number gets too high, I know that the encounter is going to be too deadly. For your gnoll encounter, I would have done the same thing, but I would have known that the gnolls would originally face the choke point, but eventually bust through it. I would have then limited the gnolls to some more reasonable number because unlike your DM, my gnolls would almost definitely eventually bust through the line because I use shove and grapple in my games. I also do things like have one foe knock a PC prone and then have 4 or 5 foes go up and Advantage beat on the prone PC. The DM can do this if he has a lot of foes and he can bust through PC tactics (like choke points).</blockquote>

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