D&D 5E Problem Choosing Solos to Challenge The Party

[Mistwell]

I've been playtesting 5e for aboout 9-10 months now. I have it pretty well down finding challenges for the party with multiple creatures. They've had several battles come down to the wire, with players dropping left and right, and even a couple times where the party barely escaped with a retreat.

But I am have a real problem finding a solo monster challenge for them.

I will give you a recent example:

Party is 4th level: 2 fighters, 1 ranger, 1 wizard, 1 rogue, 1 cleric
Challenged them with a solo Wyvern, a 6th level creature.

Now you might be thinking, "well, 6 PCs, of course they beat it". Not so fast!

The party killed the Wyvern in a single surprise round, and it only really took four of them to do it. The Wyvern never even got a single round to act. The Cleric hung back in reserve, and one of the fighters mostly maneuvered rather than attack. In fact, the rogue took it for one-third of it's hit points in the first round with a well placed assassination sneak attack (thanks to surprise he got advantage and auto crit with max sneak attack as well, so that's 6 (arrow) + 4 (dex) + 6 (sneak attack) + 1d6 (crit, he rolled a 6) for 22 damage), the wizard took it down most of the rest of the way with a scorching ray (three rays which each do 2d6 damage if they hit, for 18 damage), and then the ranger and one fighter did clean-up (average 13 damage each I think). Bam, the thing was dead.

And even though some of this involved lucky rolls, it's not like it would have lasted much more than one round beyond that anyway. The thing would have hit someone, maybe hard but not hard enough to put them down, and then the party would have taken it down the rest of the way the next round, even if only four had participated.

And unfortunately that's probably my 4-5 attempt to challenge them with a solo, and each time it ends pretty quickly with the party being fairly unharmed by it.

So I'd like some advice from playtesters here. How much higher of a level do I need to go to challenge the party with a solo? If they are fourth level, do I need to use a 7th level creature (Lich)? 8th (Succubus)? 9th (Cyclops)?

Won't it get to the point where that creature will outright kill a PC in one round eventually? I mean, a Cyclops can do 40 damage in one round (2 attacks at 20 each), which is enough to take down anyone in the party. Heck, the Lich can Cloudkill twice, covering an entire 40 x 40 room, which does 6d8 damage (half on save) per round to anyone in the room, and it's immune to the damage. That's also going to TPK a party I think.

I'm just not sure which creature to choose to challenge the party, without a likely TPK. Any suggestions?

 

[Savage Wombat]

I presume you're using the 10/13 playtester packet, and not violating an NDA of some sort? I'm curious as to how the encounter budget system answers your question.

 

[Bryk]

I have been DMing D&D Next for 9-10 months too, 2 groups of the same campaign

I understand where you are coming from precisely and while not familiar with other versions can state my beliefs on why this occurs.

First. I too have a group of 5 and a group of 6.

Past the first few levels, attack rating caps out, as well as armor class. The only difference then is HP. This allows creatures of lower level to still have a good chance to hit higher level creatures. The down side is this doesn't make higher level creatures directly more challenging. This is due to killing an individual creature takes longer but not harder (unless they have resists/immunity).

I personally have 2 solutions for you.

1 - have additional low level creatures along with the solo creature. I know this is a "cop out" response, but it works.

2 - customize the HP of the creature to be even greater. - This will most likely achieve what you are looking for. This in D&D Next will allow you to make fights more challenging due to making the fights longer, but still possible. This is due to exactly what you say, if you throw a cloudkill Lich at the party, if they fail they pretty much die. They just don't have the HP yet.

3 - A combination of 1 and 2. This is how I have designed my high level content for the future. To have an insanely high HP level 20 boss, with a lot of low level support creatures.

 

[Mistwell]

I presume you're using the 10/13 playtester packet, and not violating an NDA of some sort? I'm curious as to how the encounter budget system answers your question.

Yes. I am not a private playtester, just a public one like everyone else.

I understand where you are coming from precisely and while not familiar with other versions can state my beliefs on why this occurs.

First. I too have a group of 5 and a group of 6.

Past the first few levels, attack rating caps out, as well as armor class. The only difference then is HP. This allows creatures of lower level to still have a good chance to hit higher level creatures. The down side is this doesn't make higher level creatures directly more challenging. This is due to killing an individual creature takes longer but not harder (unless they have resists/immunity).

I personally have 2 solutions for you.

1 - have additional low level creatures along with the solo creature. I know this is a "cop out" response, but it works.

2 - customize the HP of the creature to be even greater. - This will most likely achieve what you are looking for. This in D&D Next will allow you to make fights more challenging due to making the fights longer, but still possible. This is due to exactly what you say, if you throw a cloudkill Lich at the party, if they fail they pretty much die. They just don't have the HP yet.

3 - A combination of 1 and 2. This is how I have designed my high level content for the future. To have an insanely high HP level 20 boss, with a lot of low level support creatures.

Thanks, that's some solid advice.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Truth be told... I dunno if there's really anything you necessarily can or need to do? The party was in the absolute best position to accomplish their job and in a situation that should rarely happen against a wyvern-- every single member of the party got surprise on him. With the wyvern's Keen Senses (thus a WIS check + 5), the odds of an entire party sneaking up on it should not be that often. So the group's situation kind of lucked out.

If you really want to see what is really up... you should run the fight again as a playtest outside the game and not have the wyvern surprised. That would cut out the Assassin rogue's critical attack right off the top, and depending on how initiative fell, the wyvern might get to act earlier. And once that happens... the wyvern immediately would take flight and begin divebombing enemies. With a reach of 10' on its sting, it could do flybys on melee combatants who couldn't attack it back with OAs unless they also had a reach weapon. Thus it would entirely fall on ranged attacks to bring the wyvern down.

So there's possibly a chance that the fight was only as one-sided because of the horrible position the wyvern found itself at the top-- a position that odds-are it shouldn't be in that often. I'd be curious to see what the results would be with a wyvern that wasn't surprised and could get off the ground and whether its a more likely Solo monster for a 4th level party of six?

 

[jadrax]

I think pretty much you need something with Legendary Actions, such as the Aspect of Kazit Gul, Lich and Vampire in Dead in Thay.

 

[Jack99]

Been playtesting seriously only since november/december, but campaign is going well and my players are halfway through level 9.

IME, the monsters are the part of Next that require the most tweaking. I find, if balance vis-a-vis the encounter guidelines is what you are looking for, they need a boost, both AC, to hit and hit points.

I have found this Website to give out some really good advice. I have grabbed much of the info there, put together with my own experience from playing and made this cheat-sheet, which I use to change my monsters.

 

[am181d]

I agree with this general criticism. I frequently find that solo monsters go quicker than I'd like them to, which is why I tend to either (a) boost some of their stats, (b) add secondary monsters, or (c) chain encounters so wear down the PCs over time.

I'm an experienced enough DM that I can make it work, but I hope they did a LOT of work on the monster math since the final public playtest...

 

[Rhenny]

Hello Mistwell..the bestiary as such does make it more difficult to challenge higher levels.

One of the issues has to do with how D&D 5e is designed more for adventure planning over the course of a number of encounters rather than an encounter by encounter design paradigm.

As a result, often, what I do is I have multiple encounters bleed into each other. For example, the party might be fighting the Bugbear Chieftain and his elite soldiers in one area, but after about 2 or 3 rounds of fighting, the other soldiers from a nearby area react and enter the fray. This doesn't address your question about solo monsters though.

For Solos, I just use the Legendary mechanics from L&L and the Dead in Thay creatures.

Last game, I made a Bugbear God Avatar by modifying the L&L Legendary Black Dragon. The fight against it lasted 10+ rounds and scared the heck out of the players. I also gave the players 2 rounds of ranged attacks until the Bugbear God Avatar engaged in combat. That gave the party a little time to soften it up before it really unleashed its true power.

Most importantly, for any solo is the ability to make multiple attacks and use area of effect type attacks that can damage multiple opponents at one time. Most of the time, I've found that our fighter (AC 21) doesn't feel threatened much by claw, bite and other weapon attacks, but when he's caught by a burning hands, fireball, cloudkill etc. he starts to feel it.

If you haven't read my last playtest session, you can check it out here. I even have the stats I used for the Bugbear God Avatar there.

Cheers.

http://community.wizards.com/user/1497701/blog

 

[Jack99]

For Solos, I just use the Legendary mechanics from L&L and the Dead in Thay creatures.

Only used the legendary monster template once, when they fought a level 10 black dragon. Tweaked it a bit, to fit the new stats I had given the dragon, but the mechanics worked very well, the combat options and moves seemed a natural fit to the dragon, and the combat felt very... natural? Definitely better than most solo combats I ran in 4e, but of course, it was only one combat.