D&D 5E Regauging Encounter Difficulty

[Xeviat]

So it seems that I really need to regauge the encounter difficulty in my 5E campaign. I've been updating "Red Hand of Doom" to 5E. I've been aiming for harder fights; the few "medium" fights they've had have been cake walks. I'm looking for some advice on how to ramp up the difficulty slowly so that I can get a feel for the PCs' strength without TPKing them randomly.

It was severely highlighted this last session. They've reached one of the big moments of the first chapter. They're assaulting a keep, and I had set up 3 hard fights with no short rest between, after they already had a medium and a hard fight before it with a short rest after. That medium and hard fight was a cake walk, partially because the group had a round to use ranged attacks safely (which is something I'll need to avoid in the future without calibrating for it).

Due to the players getting creative with their approach, what was supposed to be 3 hard fights has turned into one fight. One fight whose adjusted XP total should result in a TPK. We had to pause in the middle, but the party has already dispatched a few of the foes and is mostly doing okay.

Here's some things I've been noticing:

Player AC is pretty high: There's two 18s in the group, with most monsters having a +5 to hit. Another player is a Bear Barbarian so often has resistance to most damage.
Player Damage is really high.
Monster attack bonus is low. Few hits.
Monster damage is high. Few hits, but the ones that do land are huge.
Monsters have a lot of HP, but often have low AC.
I'm having to stretch to toss extra effects on monster attacks to make them interesting.

I still love the character building side of 5E, but I'm finding more and more need to recalibrate monsters. Any suggestions?

 

[I'm A Banana]

Big bits of advice:

1: Hit the 6-8 encounters/day. What's a cakewalk in encounter 3 is not likely to be such in encounter 6. Rages may run low.

2: With high AC's, high damage, and low monster attack bonuses, use more low-level monsters. When you're rolling 6 attack rolls, something is going to hit, and high PC damage is empty when the thing has 4-8 hp anyway. Hoards of lower-level critters also keep the individual hits more manageable.

3: Remember that 5e is designed so that the PC's win. If you're looking to be pushing them to the bleeding edge of desperation in every encounter, you'll need to re-calibrate some of 5e's design assumptions. Very doable, but you'll have to be pro-active.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I still love the character building side of 5E, but I'm finding more and more need to recalibrate monsters. Any suggestions?

My players don't really optimize their builds or their tactics, but I do favor Combat As War style play and emphasize player agency, so they usually have some kind of choice whether or not to engage vs. run away, and sometimes they have the opportunity to do stuff like smear captured drow sleep poison on their weapons, etc. Overall I'll call it a wash and say I expect their performance is about average, outside of their occasional bursts of brilliant creativity like using Stunning Strike + a Bag of Devouring to stun high-level monsters and stuff their appendages in the bag until the monsters get eaten. With that in mind:

I find that players have absolutely no problems at all with a Deadly fight, and Triple or Quadruple Deadly is about the right difficulty range if I want the fight to be a coin toss. There have been cases where they won fights at 10x difficulty or more, but those generally involved me emphasizing player agency and allowing them to set some kind of ambush. (E.g. around 11th level they rammed and boarded a neogi ship full of umber hulks, but instead of throwing all 22 Umber Hulks + 1 8th level neogi wizard + assorted regular neogi at them at once, I declared that the umber hulks were distributed over the ship and that only 1d4 would emerge onto deck and join the fight each round. I thought they were going to die for sure anyway, but the players still managed to "win", in the sense of driving off the umber hulks and getting the neogi to pay ransom instead of detonating the ship's suicide device.)

I remember one time in particular, after two or three Deadly fights with vampires, the players proceeded to a Triple-Deadly fight with vampires and zombies. The Triple Deadly fight in and of itself was 130% of the adventuring day XP budget when I calculated it afterwards, and the players won it partly through cleverness (the hobgoblin vampires were firing arrows out through the windows of a mansion at the PCs in the sunlight, while the zombies fought them outside; the PCs grappled some of the vampires and dragged them out into the sunlight, just as I had planned) and partly through brute force and character abilities (cleric blew 20 zombies away with Channel Divinity; it took him a couple rounds of Dodging to get them all clumped up around him nicely first, then he let them have it).

Anyway, I'd suggest still sticking mostly to the adventuring day XP guidelines, but use fewer, harder encounters. If you later on decide to abandon the adventuring day guidelines completely you'll at least have a feel for how things work.

One of the big surprises of 5E for me is how incredibly resilient 5E characters are. You may think they're almost depleted but if you actually game it all the way out to TPK it turns out they were only about 50% down. They can handle way more than you think they can.

One more note: none of the above applies if the DM is deliberately trying to game the system. You can TPK parties with Easy fights if you try hard enough (e.g. drow with sleep poison targeting PCs with weak Con saves). My observations above apply to a DM who roleplays the world without metagaming or tailoring challenges to PC weaknesses.

 

[Xeviat]

Anyway, I'd suggest still sticking mostly to the adventuring day XP guidelines, but use fewer, harder encounters. If you later on decide to abandon the adventuring day guidelines completely you'll at least have a feel for how things work.

That's what I have been doing, using hard fights mostly, with a few deadly fights. The bear barbarian and protection fighter duo has been proving to be a great defense. The wizard, though he has "low" AC, is still sitting pretty at an AC 15 vs. usually +5 attacks; that's added to the Shield spell and well timed fireballs. The 4th player is a valor bard and he's rather defensive as well, and still has spells like Fear to neuter combats.

It's interesting. It's very much rocket tag. I'm very tempted to rejigger some of the numbers and aim for longer fights so they're less swingy.

 

[Xeviat]

3: Remember that 5e is designed so that the PC's win. If you're looking to be pushing them to the bleeding edge of desperation in every encounter, you'll need to re-calibrate some of 5e's design assumptions. Very doable, but you'll have to be pro-active.

I'm learning that first hand. I'm okay with the PCs winning. What I'm not okay with is for a fight that was supposed to be scary (owlbears) turning into a cakewalk. And now the PCs are in the middle of steamrolling a named baddy. The next big combat is with a dragon on a bridge and I was looking at breaking it up but I think I'll have to do it all at once and see how they do.

I'm wondering if I don't purposefully focus fire if I should even be using the encounter difficulty multiplier for multiple opponents.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I'm learning that first hand. I'm okay with the PCs winning. What I'm not okay with is for a fight that was supposed to be scary (owlbears) turning into a cakewalk. And now the PCs are in the middle of steamrolling a named baddy. The next big combat is with a dragon on a bridge and I was looking at breaking it up but I think I'll have to do it all at once and see how they do.

The guidelines are made for 6-8 encounter days, and over the course of a day, the same "difficulty" (say, Medium) will get more challenging. Fresh characters can blow through even "hard" encounters. It'll cost them some significant resources, but they'll do it. If your characters are waking up and fighting owlbears, it'll be a very different encounter than if they need to fight owlbears after tackling 5 other encounters.

If that's not how you roll, you'll want to make some tweaks. If you want them to wake up and face The Scary Fight right away, you may want to tweak resting rules.

And again, you might want to look at replacing your big monsters with lots of littler monsters. Replace a dragon on a bridge with an equivalent CR of, I dunno, urds, and you might find that the flurry of attacks and ineffectiveness of spike damage neutralizes one of your party's advantages.

A not-insignificant number of groups seem to bowl into 5e with 3e/4e encounter assumptions, and find that the encounters are easy, because 5e has a stronger long-term strategy dimension than 3e or 4e did. By and large, your first encounters are going to drain resources, not threaten death, unless you're going out of the CR range.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

In a 6-8 encounter day, the challenge is getting to the end in good order, not in an single battle so much. 5E's focus on that does make it a bit more challenging to run fewer encounters per day, I'd imagine.

 

[Xeviat]

I had been (mistakingly) under the impression that keeping to the daily XP guidelines but reducing the number would have had similar effect. But as you point out, this is allowing the players to use their big daily resources with impunity and is making the Hard fights rather easy.

I still don't want to push hard for 6 - 8 encounters a day. I don't like the grind of those encounters. They're easy. They're trivial. The only threat is attrition. There's times when that works; traveling through dangerous territory. But that's survival tension, and it's not quite what I want at all times. So it seems I'll have to play around with the deadly fights and see just what the players can handle. I'm still interested in redoing the CR calculator and changing a lot more (aiming for a 4E feel of every fight is tough with more recovery between fights), but that's going to take some time.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I'm learning that first hand. I'm okay with the PCs winning. What I'm not okay with is for a fight that was supposed to be scary (owlbears) turning into a cakewalk. And now the PCs are in the middle of steamrolling a named baddy. The next big combat is with a dragon on a bridge and I was looking at breaking it up but I think I'll have to do it all at once and see how they do.

I'm wondering if I don't purposefully focus fire if I should even be using the encounter difficulty multiplier for multiple opponents.

Yes, you should use the difficulty multipliers unless PCs are using pure area-effect attacks that always hit all the monsters, because N monsters will do roughly N^2 (specifically, 1+2+...+N, which is equal to N*(N+1)/2) times as much total damage as one monster before they all die. That's what the multipliers are crudely emulating. In military theory this is often referred to as Lanchester's Square Law or the artillery equation.

 

[Xeviat]

Yes, you should use the difficulty multipliers unless PCs are using pure area-effect attacks that always hit all the monsters, because N monsters will do roughly N^2 (specifically, 1+2+...+N, which is equal to N*(N+1)/2) times as much total damage as one monster before they all die. That's what the multipliers are crudely emulating. In military theory this is often referred to as Lanchester's Square Law or the artillery equation.

Interesting. I was unaware. The formula doesn't get altered until you reach 6 PCs, and I've got 5 right now (they have an NPC with them); do you have a suggested alteration for a 5 person group (aside that it's adding more to their XP budget)?