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<blockquote data-quote="Tobold" data-source="post: 7964852" data-attributes="member: 6691663">Hi there! I am currently DMing the 5E Essentials Kit adventure Dragon of Icespire Peak for a group of 5 players. In that adventure there is one encounter [SPOILER WARNING] called Shrine of Savras in which the group encounters &quot;4 orcs per characters plus 3 ogres&quot;, if they are level 4 or level 5. So for my 5-player group, that would be 20 orcs. Furthermore, unless the players attack at night (which isn't an obvious strategy, because several of them don't have darkvision), the encounter says that there is no way for the group to approach without raising an alarm from the guard orc on the tower and encountering all those orcs and ogres at once. Even if the characters sneak in unseen, all the orcs and ogres except for one guard are in the same location, so there is no easy way to fight them separately.Now my group isn't overly specialized in area of effect damage spells. I have three melee characters and two spellcasters. So apart from the problem of an encounter with 23 enemies taking bloody forever, I also seems very deadly to me. Already the total xp of the orcs and ogres would qualify the encounter as &quot;deadly&quot; for a level 4 group, and that is without taking into account the &quot;adjusted XP&quot; formula for groups of enemies.Has anybody here either run this specific encounter, or has experience with 5E combat involving such large numbers of enemies? I have the feeling I need to tweak this; but then, what is an encounter that isn't really playable as written doing in a D&amp;D starter set? Am I just imagining things, and my players are going to cut through those 20 orcs and 3 ogres like a hot knife through butter? Or are my tingling DM-senses correctly warning me of a design problem?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Tobold, post: 7964852, member: 6691663"] Hi there! I am currently DMing the 5E Essentials Kit adventure Dragon of Icespire Peak for a group of 5 players. In that adventure there is one encounter [SPOILER WARNING] called Shrine of Savras in which the group encounters "4 orcs per characters plus 3 ogres", if they are level 4 or level 5. So for my 5-player group, that would be 20 orcs. Furthermore, unless the players attack at night (which isn't an obvious strategy, because several of them don't have darkvision), the encounter says that there is no way for the group to approach without raising an alarm from the guard orc on the tower and encountering all those orcs and ogres at once. Even if the characters sneak in unseen, all the orcs and ogres except for one guard are in the same location, so there is no easy way to fight them separately. Now my group isn't overly specialized in area of effect damage spells. I have three melee characters and two spellcasters. So apart from the problem of an encounter with 23 enemies taking bloody forever, I also seems very deadly to me. Already the total xp of the orcs and ogres would qualify the encounter as "deadly" for a level 4 group, and that is without taking into account the "adjusted XP" formula for groups of enemies. Has anybody here either run this specific encounter, or has experience with 5E combat involving such large numbers of enemies? I have the feeling I need to tweak this; but then, what is an encounter that isn't really playable as written doing in a D&D starter set? Am I just imagining things, and my players are going to cut through those 20 orcs and 3 ogres like a hot knife through butter? Or are my tingling DM-senses correctly warning me of a design problem? [/QUOTE]

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