I have a six person party. Game is designed for four or five people. I figure boosting hit points by 150% to account for damage from two more players was required. They are still wiping the floor with stuff and taking very little damage as a group.
D&D 5E Observations
- Thread starter CapnZapp
- Start date
I have a six person party. Game is designed for four or five people. I figure boosting hit points by 150% to account for damage from two more players was required. They are still wiping the floor with stuff and taking very little damage as a group.
I have a 6 player group (they had 3 NPCs with them also). One of the toughest fights they had was a combined ghoul/ghast/gargoyle battle. The paralysis nearly wrecked them. They were forced to either focus on the little guys to stop the paralysis, allowing the big guys to smack them, or focus on the big guys and just suck up that 1 or 2 characters per round were out of the fight. It was great fun to watch them scramble. They initially ignored the little guys, then quickly figured out they needed to get rid of them asap.
When designing encounters now, I pay much more attention to the synergy between the monster abilities. I basically look at HP, AC, and their special abilities and don't put much weight on CR. I do use CR to narrow down my options in monster selection at the start of the process, but am comfortable using a pretty wide range.
When designing encounters now, I pay much more attention to the synergy between the monster abilities. I basically look at HP, AC, and their special abilities and don't put much weight on CR. I do use CR to narrow down my options in monster selection at the start of the process, but am comfortable using a pretty wide range.
Last edited:
Vicar In A Tutu
Explorer
My players have yet to figure out how powerful the Great Weapon Master feat is, but Polearm Mastery is incredibly strong. The fighter with a polearm has been ripping the enemies to shreds. It does seem like a much stronger feat than many (most?) of the others.
Sacrosanct
Legend
I always find it odd when people who houserule the game and/or play it in a style different from how it's intended to be played then complain about how it's not balanced or it's broken. If you ignore things like encounter recommendations, of course that's going to affect your experience because many of the character choices have different things depending on how often you have short rests vs long rests. E.g., if you allow short rests after every encounter, of course classes like warlock and monk will seem imbalance.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with playing in a style you want, even if that's just optimized arena battles. Knock yourself out; it's your game. But you need to understand that if you do that, you'll need to adjust other things as well, and therefore I don't think it's very fair to the game to complain about how things are broken or imbalanced.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with playing in a style you want, even if that's just optimized arena battles. Knock yourself out; it's your game. But you need to understand that if you do that, you'll need to adjust other things as well, and therefore I don't think it's very fair to the game to complain about how things are broken or imbalanced.
FormerlyHemlock
Hero
Possibly several assumptions here...
a) if you by "Melee guys" mean average vanilla fighterish types, then yes, that would support my suspicion that regular hp and AC 16-17 simply won't cut it. Before my players ended up with their melee gods we had a PC death caused simply by initiative timings: first guy in the room, then most monsters, RIP first guy in room.
Creating an AC 21 character and a double HP character was a direct response to the realization that regular tanks aren't tanky enough to withstand even a single round if all foes are "forced" to focus fire on that single character.
b) you might feature lots and lots of ranged opponents in your game, but that is simply not the expected norm. Not for the Monster Manual and not for the fantasy genre in general. If your players can't make mighty bare-chested barbarians that manly wade into melee combat work, then you might want to dial down on the number of foes with effective ranged weapons and/or mobility greater than the party. Alternatively, you and all your players love that more modern "hide and snipe" feeling, and there is no problem. (But it did sound as if you have an issue with "melee guys" having "terrible survivability", amirite?)
c) Your point about "they don't scale" I don't even understand? Scale how? And who is scaling much better? Archers? Spellcasters?
(If you mean spellcasters, that's great. I would love to hear about spellcasters reclaiming their turf at mid to high levels, because at levels 1-8 they really are support characters in the melee guys story)
Gonna stop you right there before you manage to set up a possibly condescending straw man...
Cheers,
Zapp
Sorry, I don't mean to pick a fight. But there literally was someone on this forum the other day who described a "standard encounter" as "kick down the door and roll initiative." It's a valid playstyle, and such games will find that melee guys are lots of fun. So will any game that generally sticks to Medium or occasional Hard encounters. (This is not a claim that a game where melee guys have fun is restricted to Medium/Hard encounters. It's a sufficiency claim, not a claim of necessity.)
But when I play, I design my PCs for sandbox play--e.g. I want a level 3 character who has a good chance of taking on CR 17 threats successfully, or at least living to tell the tale by fleeing. I don't want to build my character around a metagame assumption of "appropriate" encounters, and flipping through the Monstrous Manual makes one thing obvious: melee is dangerous. Whether it is Medusas (30' petrification) or umber hulks (30' confusion) or ancient red dragons (90' breath weapon) or a Balor's/Fire Giant's fiery aura (damages when you strike in melee), there's a lot of bad things that are designed specifically to hurt a melee opponent. Furthermore, there are a fair number of opponents who can do bad things to a melee guy before he ever gets to attack them, maybe without him ever getting to attack them--look at prior complaints from certain posters about how wizards are relegated to buff-bots for Fly so that the warriors can attack the monsters. That's because a melee-focused party has no other way to deal with a dragon strafing.
What I mean by "doesn't scale" is "doesn't scale with party size." In military terms it's the difference between Lanchester's Linear Law and Lanchester's Square Law. You'd much rather be Square than Linear, especially because concentrating melee force makes it vulnerable to AoE attacks like Hypnotic Pattern.
When someone blows that Horn of Valhalla at my table, he'll get a whole bunch of berserkers for an hour, but unless the situation is dire there is a good chance that most of those berserkers will be doing nothing but Dashing on any given round. If those berserkers were hobgoblin mercenaries instead they'd be impacting the combat for lots of damage on every single round and they could do it from a dispersed formation. (Same thing goes if they are hobgoblin enemies avoiding Fireballs from PCs.)
Anyway, from your point (b) above it sounds like you play a style of fantasy where melee is very strong and bare-chested barbarians are the heroes of the day. I just wanted to emphasize that that is a particular style of D&D, not universal. But as you say, "If your players can't make mighty bare-chested barbarians that manly wade into melee combat work, then you might want to dial down on the number of foes with effective ranged weapons and/or mobility greater than the party," so clearly you are aware of this point. So I'm good.
RE: (c), yes, spellcasters are quite good in 5E, especially at tables where you use DMG spell point rules. They don't usually overshadow warriors at consistent single-target damage but they complement them nicely via control spells like Hypnotic Pattern, summoning spells like Conjure Animals/Animate Dead, and utility spells like Pass Without Trace. (Summoning spells can overshadow warriors rather easily if the players let it, but it will be quite obvious when that happens because the first thing the bard does in any fight will be to throw down a half-dozen animals and retreat behind total cover.) However, in a game calibrated for melee warriors, that kind of spellcaster support will probably feel unnecessary and redundant. Who would bother to conjure an Air Elemental just to fight [hits Random at kobold.com] a Nightmare, an Orc War Chief, and a Winter Wolf? That's a Medium encounter for four level 10 characters, and if all four of those guys are melee-specialized warriors, they will eat those three CR 3 (4) monsters alive and never miss the wizard. Spellcasters are redundant unless and until you start fighting monsters with CRs closer to your own level--if that same level 10 party went up against a Bone Devil and 2 Yuan-ti Abominations, then they might wish one of them were a wizard/bard. But that's a double-Deadly encounter, not Medium.
T
TDarien
Guest
Are you changing the number of monsters in the encounter? In my experience adding 1 or 2 PCs to the party creates a pretty big swing in the encounter difficulty and it doesn't sound like you're doing enough to balance the encounter properly.
There's a great tool for calculating encounters here: http://kobold.club/fight/#/encounter-builder
Also, how many encounters do you generally have between long rests? 5e is designed around a 8 encounter day. If you have fewer encounters than that you'll see your party breeze through most encounters, even deadly or impossible ones, without much trouble.
Apologies if you know all this already, but I felt it useful to point out.
I increase lower level monster numbers in groups by 50%. The extra hit points apply to large solo creatures.
I don't bother with the number of encounters per day unless it fits naturally. There is no way for a DM to ensure 6-8 encounters per long rest on a continuous basis without creating adventures that feel forced. IT's easy to have a large number of encounters in a dungeon or a lair. Very hard for general travel. Even when my party has run into the equivalent of 6-8 encounters, they have generally prevailed with fair ease unless it is a continuous stream of deadly.
What's amusing is that even WotC designed modules don't have 6-8 encounters per long rest. If that was their design intent as is often cited, even WotC is failing to provide that many challenges per long rest. Maybe they shouldn't have designed the game with so many encounters required to challenge players if they can't provide the number of encounters in their modules while creating a coherent adventure. Setting challenges by number of encounters is a bad design choice. I can't believe that would be a hard rule.
Somebody here on these Boards [can't for the life of me remember who.. Tormyr maybe??] has an interesting mechanic where he adds hit points equal to what I believe is four levels of CR for a solo creature encounter. For instance, if your critter is a CR 4, he looks on the chart on pg 274 and gives it hit points equal to a CR 8 critter. He seemed to have mathy stuff to back it up...
hawkeyefan
Legend
I don't hesitate to adjust monster HP on the fly if need be. If the PCs are making short work of a monster I expected to last longer, I just fudge up to the max, or in some cases, even more.
ExploderWizard
Hero
In one of my campaigns right now, I have 9 players!! This is so far out of explored party challenge territory that I am having to be very creative with monster stats without needing a small army to fight this group.
I have to make modified versions of most monsters, increasing both hit points and damage per attack ( unless it is appropriate for a small army to be encountered!) I love tinkering with monsters, converting older edition critters to 5E, and just getting to see what 9 PCs can do to my creations in just a couple rounds.
I have to make modified versions of most monsters, increasing both hit points and damage per attack ( unless it is appropriate for a small army to be encountered!) I love tinkering with monsters, converting older edition critters to 5E, and just getting to see what 9 PCs can do to my creations in just a couple rounds.
Similar Threads
