How difficult do you make your encounters?

[theduck]

I guess pretty much what it says on the tin. I was wondering how good the encounter building guidelines in the dmg, and more specifically what difficulty do you normally aim when making your own encounters. I've heard the pre-written modules are pretty brutal, especially at lower levels, what with owlbears and whatnot, and to be honest, that sounds awesome (our group sometimes tends to favor story based campaigns, so most encounters tend to not be terribly difficult, and I think we are looking to shake things up) but I don't want to overdo it.

Danke.

[bokodasu]

Try them out and see how it goes for you. I'm running HotDQ now, and by the books most of the random encounters in the very first scene are deadly. I think it's a wee bit much, but eh, I've got six players.

Aim for a range throughout the adventuring day - you're meant to have a variety of encounters, some should be easy and some should encourage running away. Being able to always defeat everything is boring, and being able to never defeat anything is frustrating (outside of a few specific horror scenarios).

[GWJ_DanyBoy]

If it's a one-off type where I'm certain the party will rest before doing any more fighting, anything less than hard or deadly is usually a waste of people's time, unless I'm doing it for plot reasons.

In an area where multiple encounters are happening like a dungeon or whatnot, I do a mix. A bunch of Medium or less encounters to wear party resources and give a sense power and of earned progress as the party clears areas, mixed with some crunchy hard encounters so things aren't bland and have a sense of danger. There's usually at least one or two deadly encounters, or what can turn into deadly encounters if mishandled (two encounters at once, or in bad terrain or immediately following an avoidable trap). Deadly encounters are usually the big bad of the area, or are designed to be avoidable or surmountable without combat if the PCs are paying attention.

[Rilak]

At level 9 currently, doing encounters around double deadly XP (party of 4) and no PC has yet dropped to 0 HP.
With a good team you can go pretty far once you are out of levels 1-2.

[ImperiousLeader]

I haven't checked. I'm running the Hoard of the Dragon Queen, and the players just finished chapter 2. So the early stuff is pretty deadly, but I also have 6 PCs (7, last time). I add a monster or two to the listed encounters, and while I have knocked out a few PCs, I haven't killed anyone.

[mr_odd]

It really depends on your table's play style. Some tables focus on the characters they make, others focus on sorry, some focus on story, some focus on combat, some want difficult, some just want to relax.

[MadGrady]

It also really depends on class distribution. Do you have some martials with higher hit die that can tank the baddies and absorb damage, while your caster/utility guys deal DPS?

Or are you a party of rogues, bards, and wizards who go down with one lucky gobin crit?

This is, of course, by no means an exclusive list, or the cause of all player deaths, but it can play a part......maybe.

Just a little

[Fwiffo86]

My players insist on tackling things at the most difficult possibility they can.

I have even had players handicap themselves (No Bob, no healing. We can take it. Just whack em).

I calculate all encounters at maximum deadliness. Routinely more than one character will be dropped in every fight. They love it.

[theMycon]

For actual challenge, I make them just hard enough that players have to try something new. This is unrelated to XP difficulty; because tactics and monster capabilities are a much better indicator of difficulty than just XP of monsters.

I've had XP budgets that were 1.5x "deadly encounter" level where no-one got hurt, because melee monsters charged the raging barbarian and there wasn't anyone else.
I've had "moderate difficulty encounters" that KO'd 2 players because the monsters were played intelligently (ex: sleep/charm the barb, send melees in on the casters, archers spring attack behind trees).

I've found no-one likes fighting on a flat, featureless plain; and that having party size +/-2 monsters reaches the perfect balance of "they can see progress", "players not bored because their turn comes up every 10 minutes", and "pain in the ass to keep 7+ baddies straight".

[unwise]

I seldom run an enounter, or string of encounters, that is not deadly.

I do like to give the PCs some opportunity for advantage before each fight though. If the archer can shoot the lock off the cage of the tiger the guards are poking with sticks, or something similar, the fight becomes more chaotic, but easier.

[ghost_warlock]

As pretty much always, action economy seems to be the only real economy.

My party of six 2nd-level PCs breezed through an encounter with three dire wolves, supposedly a deadly encounter, with hardly a scratch. Twice as many PCs as monsters makes for an easy encounter if the characters are half-intelligent with their tactics.

When they hit 3rd-level, it took three gnolls, a gnoll pack lord, and two giant hyenas to challenge them. Equal numbers of PCs and monsters made the action economy more fair.

I'm planning on running them, still at 3rd level, against a pair of CR5's in the near future to see how they fare. I think they'll be okay, to be honest.

[Louro]

Party at level 6. Planned a deadly encounter: wereboar, salamander and 3 fire snakes with plenty of full cover to avoid long range stuff. They were mounted on horses and it was REALLY easy for them.
Mounts are a huge advantage. You can get the horse run towards an enemy, take the disengage action and get away if it has movement left. Great for positioning for wizardry AoE stuff.
We have homeruled that you need a handle animal check to make the horse disengage and dodge if it is not a war horse (trained for such things).

[mephnick]

I generally start at a medium CR encounter and build from there. By the time I get to a good balance, it seems I'm almost always throwing extremely "deadly" fights at the players to give them a challenge. The CR guide in most of D&D IME is extremely lenient.

[Demonic Spoon]

My party of six 2nd-level PCs breezed throhttp://www.giantitp.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?63-D-amp-D-5e-Nextugh an encounter with three dire wolves, supposedly a deadly encounter, with hardly a scratch. Twice as many PCs as monsters makes for an easy encounter if the characters are half-intelligent with their tactics.


The deadly threshold for a 2nd level party is 1200 XP.

3x dire wolves is 3 * 200 = 600 base XP. Three monsters is a x2 XP multiplier on the table. However, your party includes 6 players, so you drop down one tier on that multipliers table, so the final XP for that encounter is 900 XP, which makes it barely a Hard encounter.

[Lonely Tylenol]

Hard or Deadly, with workarounds that make the encounter easy. One example I have used at a table is a Gnoll patrol group (with, if I recall, one or two Gnolls and two Hyenas), wherein the Gnoll, if encountered in combat, would take an action to light a torch and throw it into the air as a sort of signal flare, alerting the three Gnolls at the top of the hill while his pet Hyenas charge at the group. Incapacitating the Gnoll before he can light the flare (if it falls into the tall grass, it may set it ablaze) means he won't be able to alert the Gnolls atop the hill, and they won't join combat 1d4 rounds later. Failure means the group will have to deal with the three Gnolls atop the hill in addition to the ones below, which turns the encounter from Easy (for a 2nd-level group of 4) or Medium (for a 1st-level group of 4) to Deadly for either.

(My group struck the Gnoll down while the torch was still in hand after being lit, but ignored the torch after it was dropped, so it caused a brush fire which alerted the Gnolls atop the hill anyway, just with a long enough delay for the group to finish off the patrol group first. Only you can prevent forest fires!)

[theduck]

Thanks for all the replies, this has helped me get a better idea, I think - in general, it seems that that if there isn't supposed to be a terribly large number of encounters in a given day, aim for the higher difficulties, and that some of 5e's deadliness is limited to the earlier levels, where getting one shotted is a larger risk and options are more limited.

As an aside, are dragons under cr'ed in this edition as well?

[Rallicus]

As an aside, are dragons under cr'ed in this edition as well?

After 10+ sessions running 5e, I feel like CR isn't an exact science and the amount of variables that could constitute a change in difficulty are so vast and numerous that there's really no way of building a perfectly balanced encounter. Granted, CR has always been a bit weird (thinking back to the Giant Crab and House Cat here), but I think it's even more glaring in 5e. Thankfully the death mechanic is a bit more forgivable than in 3.X, so there's a bit of leeway once you pass the first few levels.

Are dragons under cr'ed? It really depends on the encounter. I'd say they might be over cr'ed, personally; the fact that they don't have any sort of resistance to regular attacks (bludgeoning, slashing, piercing) even at "ancient" status is a bit mind-boggling. To say nothing of their lack of spellcasting ability, which made them pretty fearsome back in 3.5.

As for how difficult I make my encounters: sometimes they're difficult, sometimes they're a cakewalk. And most of the time it's the underleveled encounters that really give my players a hard time, strangely enough. When your level 3 bear totem barbarian can go toe-to-toe with a wereboar in a solo match, you know something about CR in this edition is really, really off...

[TheDeadlyShoe]

A level 3 bear totem barbarian is tougher to kill than many characters of level 5 or 6. It's not particularly surprising that with a little luck they can go mano y mano with a physical slugger critter. You can't adjust the creature or the CR just on the basis of fighting a giant hp pool with resists, since then that creature will be overwhelmingly deadly for normal characters.

in a party situation, the barbarians toughness is less noticable since just existing doesn't help the squishies.

basically its just that anything that makes a character powerful in narrow situations will inevitably screw with challenge posed by creatures. Since making characters powerful in narrow situations is a great way to distinguish class choices etc. the CR system will (as you say) remain more art than science.

[LucianoAr]

well its not entirely the creatures, but the way they are played to, as stated earlier

if the enemies focus fire on the casters and then spread and use combat tactics to maximize damage distribution an easy encounter can turn into a nightmare.

[Particle_Man]

I stick with the medium level of difficulty (but I have a large party - going much higher would likely guarantee at least one pc death).