DM Help How's the CR system and encounter design/planning this edition? [Archive]

Malifice

2016-05-14, 06:45 AM

Okay, calm down, I believe you. You're an amazing DM. You're wonderful. I believe you because I don't want to create a group of level 10 characters just to prove you're right.

My point wasnt that you need to be an amazing DM. It was that it wasnt as hard as the poster was suggesting.

But anyways, that being said, I want you to actually give us constructive advice about how to put together a compelling encounter based on DMG guidelines. Even if you prove you can create a good encounter, that's worthless for this thread and forum unless you tell us how you do it, and everyone can actually profit from it.

Please tell us.

Step 1: Consider and then impose a realistic and natural time limit for your adventure. Example: the PCs are hired to recover a macguffin from a BBEG. If they fail to do so by midnight (in 6 hours time) the BBEG will raze the town (and come looking for the PCs) with a far more dangerous demonic army. Their employer (or the hook whatever it is) suggests the BBEG is in an old temple ruin 2 hours out of town.

Step 2: Sketch out 6-8 encounters based around the encounter budget (usually with a theme in mind). Consider the abilities of your PCs when you do this (tailoring your encounters to provde a challenge to the PCs and their standard tactics, and designing the occasional encounter that the PCs are expected to steamroll with their standard tactics and powers - so they can showcase those abilities). Example lets assume a 10th level party featuring a Wizard (who uses fire magic and flying), a GWM BM fighter, a life Cleric, and a Rogue (assasin) with expertise in stealth, and a ranger dip for Pass without Trace. The DM sets up an encounter on the way to the ruin where the flying wizard can make short work of a bunch of landlocked baddies, but places the rest of the dungeon in tight cramped quarters where flight is not an option. He ensures that he has a mix of high AC monsters to negate GWM (but also places some mooks to showcase it and the wizards fireball, and a low AC high HP monster to do the same). We ensure the upper part of the ruin is well lit (stopping a lot of sneaking and surprise shennaigans) and the monsters are reasonably close together, with a mean of alerting the others. The lower level of the dungeon is darker, and the BBEG is distracted, allwoing for the Assasin to possibly sneak up on him and ambush him. We'll also include some undead (a dangerous encounter featuring numerous undead) so the cleric can do his thing ans showcase his abilities.

Step 3: Leave a place or two where the PCs can get a short rest, or work natural 'breaks' into your adventure where they might consider taking a short rest. In this example lets have an encounter on the way to the ruin, with a side lair for the PCs to explore (with a second encounter in that lair). They can then short rest (if they desire) before hitting the ruined temple. From there we'll place three more encounters (and maybe a trap) in the temple itself, before the PCs hit a shaft leading down to the dungeon level (environmental challenge). Down in the dungeon level, we'll have two more encounters (an inanimate golem type guardian, and a distracted BBEG and minions). The PCs can get another short rest at this point before decending down the shaft to deal with these last two threats.

Step 4: Have a random encounter or two in mind to throw at the party if theyre having too easy a time of it. In this case, we can have a few demons show up (sent by the BBEG) to harrass the party.

Step 5: Draw a map, set a few DCs and stat up the encounters to the XP budget as per the DMG. Dont forget to place intresting environment (difficult terrain, interactable objects and things to play with, lighting and weather, cover, etc) in these encounters. Dont forget not to count 'weaker' mooks in the overall number of monsters when multiplying the encounter xp to determine difficulty.

Remember, the trick to 5E isnt individual encounters. The DMG is clear that a party is expected to defeat a [medium-hard] encounter using around 15 percent of its daily resources, with the overall goal of reaching your objective with enough gas in the tank to deal with it and win. The trick to 5E is that the encounters only form a fraction of the adventuring day. Many resources (and whole classes) have resources that are expected to carry them through 6-8 encounters.

Each encounter is a hurdle - you need to design the whole race for them to work as intended. You need to look at the bigger picture (the resource drain on the PCs ability to complete the mission) when assesing the difficulty of encounters. Routinely throwing deadly encounters where the party face even a 10 percent chance of a TPK means your average party doesnt survive to 5th level.

mephnick

2016-05-14, 07:06 AM

It probably works fine if you plan 6-8 encounters in a day, but I have never (in 20 years across many groups) played in a campaign like that outside of a linear dungeon crawl.

Of course D&D is designed to run dungeon crawls and nothing else, so attempting to stretch it into something else is our fault, I'll grant that.

The rest variants help a little bit if you want to avoid the insanity of 6-8 encounters a day, but it still becomes 6-8 encounters a long rest (whatever length of time that may be) to make the system work properly.

Malifice

2016-05-14, 08:29 AM

Cybren

2016-05-14, 08:37 AM

Change long rests to weekly things if you prefer a slower pace. Sorted.
That does change non-dungeon drawing dynamics in odd ways, so it winds up being an inelegant solution. Honestly, CRs are only ever a vague guideline and its assuming too much to ask for it to work 100% perfectly, and I find you can circumvent the "everything is too easy if you don't get 6 encounters in a day" by giving a good deal of uncertainty in whether you're going to get into a fight at all.

Malifice

2016-05-14, 08:45 AM

That does change non-dungeon drawing dynamics in odd ways, so it winds up being an inelegant solution. Honestly, CRs are only ever a vague guideline and its assuming too much to ask for it to work 100% perfectly, and I find you can circumvent the "everything is too easy if you don't get 6 encounters in a day" by giving a good deal of uncertainty in whether you're going to get into a fight at all.

There is nothing stopping you from 'zooming out' to the longer rest variant when the PCs are engaging in overland travel, and then 'zooming in' to the standard rest variant when theyre in a dungeon.

Long rests are longer in the wilderness, 'because the PCs are spending time exploring and travelling'. They're shorter when 'zoomed in' to a dungeon as the PCs are rushing it.

The other option is to simply use a milestone system with handwaved short rest 'recharges' after every 2-3 encounters (or after a night sleep, whichever comes first) and long rest recharges every third such rest (or after a full weeks rest, whichever comes first).

This encourages players to push on, but gives them the option to fall back.

Gastronomie

2016-05-14, 10:20 AM

Malifice

2016-05-14, 10:48 AM

I actually do think what Malifice posted is pretty good advice. Sorry for not really trusting you.

Just, it also is true that, as many others posted above, I haven't ever been in a campaign where you actually have 6~8 encounters per day. It was 3 or 4 at most. In fact I think I've never actually done a "dungeon crawl" ever before. It may be related to the playstyle of my DMs, but anyways.

Now that you've explained it, it may be good for when creating dungeon crawls.

Weirdly the problem (in my experience) is often more becuase most sessions only feature 3-4 encounters and its easier on the bookeeping to call a long rest between sessions.

Its also down to a lack of understanding of the paradigm iteself. The DMG is pretty clear that long rest resources are supposed to carry you through 6-8 medium encounters, and you are expected to get around 2 short rests over this same period of time between long rests (and the classes imply imbalance could occur via granting more or less long or short rests, on account of relying on different resource replenishment mechanics between the classes - obviously a Warlock gets a lot more oomph if a short rest is allowed after every encounter over a 12 encounter day between long rests over say, a Wizard)

The DMG could do with some more explicit advice that this is the framework the game kind of balances around, but I feel they wanted individual DMs to instead run the game and balance it to taste themselves. Not all peeps see it as a problem, and those that do (but dont want to stick to it) can use the rest variants as presented.

They wanted to keep it as a guideline, but not hardcode it as a rule.

MaxWilson

2016-05-14, 10:54 AM

Run into any particular pitfalls as you were learning them? Any areas that seem to be contentious or stir up arguments over how to implement them or what they mean?

Any sources you'd recommend to look at as a supplement or preparation for looking over the rules in the DMG themselves?

So far I've skimmed over the DM's Basic Rules version of them while doing some other things before I get access to the DMG proper, so I was interested in any prepwork or guides I could look into before getting my grubby mitts on the book itself if it's not just completely straightforward and intuitive.

There's a lot of confusion over XP multipliers--read the rules carefully. Two and a half common misconceptions:

(1) There's a lot of people who think at first that the "adjusted XP" you use to compute encounter difficulty is also supposed to increase the XP awarded to the players. But it's not intended for that purposes--it's just part of the DM's calculation for determining encounter difficulty.

(2) Some people, on the other hand, fail to use adjusted XP for calculating how many encounters can fit in an adventuring day. These people use raw XP instead, despite the table being labelled "adjusted XP". This results in adventuring days which are about 1.5x to 2x longer and harder than official adventuring days. Ironically, that ends up making them about the right length because official days are too easy.

(3) This last one isn't necessarily a misconception of the rules but a matter of opinion: the rules say you should ignore weak enemies for purposes of the XP multiplier unless, in your opinion, those enemies contribute significantly to the difficulty of the combat. Some people think this means you should almost always ignore weak enemies (e.g. 2 Frost Giants and 4 Winter Wolves = don't count the Winter Wolves because they are only CR 3 and the giants are CR 8) but this is wrong--due to bounded accuracy, large numbers of weak enemies will almost always significantly contribute to the combat. The only case I actually recommend not counting the weaker enemies is when it's obvious that they won't contribute, e.g. 1 adult red dragon and two kobolds is not twice as hard as an adult red dragon, although if you don't kill the kobolds quickly they can still do some damage such as Helping or tossing nets on PCs (with advantage from Pack tactics) to make them easier targets for the red dragon. But it's definitely not twice as hard; maybe 10% harder. But other than that, you should always count all the monsters, IMO.

So, there's that. But I actually recommend almost totally ignoring DMG guidelines after the first few sessions because they give a bad experience which relies too heavily on attrition, which encourages DMs to force players into combat (as opposed to stealth or negotiation or any other out-of-the-box thinking), which leads to both degradation in player agency (because it's bad when the DM is emotionally invested in a certain outcome of an interaction happening ('combat occurs')) and one-dimensional play (because everything turns into combats).

BTW, you know about kobold club, right? http://kobold.club/enc will compute encounter difficulties for you, and even generate random encounters to give you a feel for what level of "official" difficulty the rules think a given PC group can handle.

Also BTW, IME, triple- or quadruple-Deadly is about the right level of mechanical difficulty for something that is supposed to be a 50/50 tossup (i.e. either side could win, depending on who's played smarter, which ought to be the PCs because unlike the monsters/NPCs they can think in bullet time) such as a gladiator fight. This also implies that if you want to deter players from even starting a fight (e.g. guards for a bank vault that's supposed to be a heist) you need to go significantly higher than Quadruple-Deadly, or use tactics/monsters which are stronger than their official CR would indicate (Banshees, Intellect Devourers, PHB classes).

==============================================

Thats your DMs fault and not the systems.

Give me your party composition, and I'll design 6-8 [medium-hard] encounters using DMG guideleines for you to have a look at. You can explain to me how your party would easily crush them all in a single adventuring day.

This is a good example of the misconception #2 I talked about above. Malifice is going to compute an adventuring day based on raw XP instead of adjusted XP--it's the only way to fit 6-8 Medium/Hard encounters into the XP budget the DMG gives you, and even then you have to use encounters with a high XP multiplier due to multiple monsters. If you have a lot of solo encounters that are Medium/Hard encounters you'll bust your budget after only 5 or 6 encounters.

==============================================

But anyways, that being said, I want you to actually give us constructive advice about how to put together a compelling encounter based on DMG guidelines. Even if you prove you can create a good encounter, that's worthless for this thread and forum unless you tell us how you do it, and everyone can actually profit from it.

Please tell us.

If you want to challenge PCs while staying within DMG guidelines, you're going to have to deliberately game the system a little bit. Instead of just throwing together monsters until they hit DMG thresholds and assuming that will work, you have to pick monsters that work well together and that target likely PC weaknesses. (I say "likely" because I don't believe in building bespoke encounters for specific PCs; that's cheating. But you can build a dungeon which will probably challenge any given group of PCs that enters it.)

Here's some tips:

(1) The rock-paper-scissors circle for 5E is approximately: Solos < Mobs < Spellcasters with AoE < Solos. When possible, try to have at least two different kinds of monsters in the fight, e.g. a mob of hobgoblins for DPR AND a Flameskull for AoE, or a bunch of skeletons and a Banshee. Also, mobs go well with creatures that have control-type abilities: Giant Constrictor Snake (restrains one enemy) while all the hobgoblins trash that enemy at advantage.
(2) Vary the terrain and allow opportunities for partial cover. Especially use cover for insubstantial monsters like Banshees which can take cover anywhere at will (even inside of things) at the cost of a small amount of damage. Also, monsters like hobgoblins fighting from fixed positions will realistically always create partial cover for themselves as part of standard tactical doctrine.
(3) Use morale rules and don't always fight to the death--run away sometimes. But don't always just give up either--sometimes you should withdraw/hide and wait for a better opportunity. Players get amazingly nervous when they know there are three or four goblins out there in the darkness just waiting for them to get in another fight with something else.
(4) Don't be afraid to take opportunity attacks if it gets you where you want to go.
(5) Lie prone against missile fire sometimes, especially against Sharpshooters and especially if you have ranged weapons of your own (hobgoblins). Obviously you shouldn't do this where you could take cover instead, and you should be careful about doing this when a PC could get into melee range of you.
(6) Achieving a favorable situation > better doing HP damage. Watch players panic when a gargoyle grapples a PC and begins to lift him off the ground.

Because I don't like gaming the system, I don't always use these tips (I am particularly leery of #4 because it doesn't fit most monster psychology--now you are wounded and surrounded by enemies, which most creatures would not like even if it does force the PC wizards to Dodge/Disengage/Misty Step away and therefore is a tactically smart move) and I prefer to just ignore the DMG guidelines instead and use more/tougher monsters (which also lets the players earn more XP and treasure, which is fun for them) but there they are if you want them.

Malifice

2016-05-14, 11:20 AM

(3) This last one isn't necessarily a misconception of the rules but a matter of opinion: the rules say you should ignore weak enemies for purposes of the XP multiplier unless, in your opinion, those enemies contribute significantly to the difficulty of the combat. Some people think this means you should almost always ignore weak enemies (e.g. 2 Frost Giants and 4 Winter Wolves = don't count the Winter Wolves because they are only CR 3 and the giants are CR 8) but this is wrong--due to bounded accuracy, large numbers of weak enemies will almost always significantly contribute to the combat.

Max, we had this discussion on a different forum regarding these exact same monsters in the adventure I wrote.

The party were 5 x 13th level PCs who had some nice magic items (increasing their effective power level), access to feats and MCing and the SCAG.

If I were to have increased the overall difficulty of the encounter by virtue of multiplicaton for 6 creatures, then the inclusion of the 4 x CR 3 wolves would have inflated the 2 x Frost giants (the main threats) overall difficulty into 'deadly' territory. Seeing as the encounter itself (when played out) demonstrated that the party in question overcame the encounter using about 15 percent of total resources, I stand by my call to multiplying the giants combined XP by 1.5 (the multiplier for 2 creatures) and then adding the XP of the wolves to this total after this multiplication (making it a medium dificulty encounter).

2 x CR 8s and 4 x CR 3s against a party of five fully rested and magic item equipped 13th level PCs should not be deadly. At an eyeball (and as proved by the actual playtest) its probably an upper limit medium encounter edging on hard.

Its a DMs call type of thing if the monsters significantly contribute to the difficulty of the encounter - they were 10 CRs under the average party level and in my view then (and now) did not.

If given my time again, I would do the same thing. Even Celtivan (who fought me on everything in that adventure) agreed.

Also BTW, IME, triple- or quadruple-Deadly is about the right level of mechanical difficulty for something that is supposed to be a 50/50 tossup (i.e. either side could win, depending on who's played smarter, which ought to be the PCs because unlike the monsters/NPCs they can think in bullet time)

We come from very different schools of thought and playstyle indeed.

Malifice is going to compute an adventuring day based on raw XP instead of adjusted XP--it's the only way to fit 6-8 Medium/Hard encounters into the XP budget the DMG gives you, and even then you have to use encounters with a high XP multiplier due to multiple monsters. If you have a lot of solo encounters that are Medium/Hard encounters you'll bust your budget after only 5 or 6 encounters.

There is some debate over this table (the XP per adventuring day table). The table itself refers to 'adjusted difficulty XP' yet the text that explains how to calculate it, refers to earnt XP. Text trumps table rememeber.

Also, as you point out, the number used actually tend to line up more with earnt over adjusted (when following the preceeding guidelines on building an AD's encounters).

At the very least, its worded poorly.

MaxWilson

2016-05-14, 11:22 AM

Max, we had this discussion on a different forum regarding these exact same monsters in the adventure I wrote.

Wait, you're Flamestrike?!?

If so, that explains soooo much.

There is some debate over this table (the XP per adventuring day table). The table itself refers to 'adjusted difficulty XP' yet the text that explains how to calculate it, refers to earnt XP. Table trumps text rememeber.

Also, as you point out, the number used actually tend to line up more with earnt over adjusted (when following the preceeding guidelines on building an AD's encounters).

At the very least, its worded poorly.

For the sake of the reader, I'll paste in the relevant text here and let each reader judge for himself/herself. Emphasizing in bold relevant bits of text. Underlined part is what Malifice thinks is important:

The Adventuring Day
Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average
luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six
to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the
adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers
can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters,
they can handle fewer.
In the same way you figure out the difficulty of an
encounter, you can use the XP values of monsters and
other opponents in an adventure as a guideline for how
far the party is likely to progress.
For each character in the party, use the Adventuring
Day XP table to estimate how much XP that character is
expected to earn in a day. Add together the values of all
party members to get a total for the party’s adventuring
day. This provides a rough estimate of the adjusted XP
value for encounters the party can handle before the
characters will need to take a long rest.

Adventuring Day XP
Level
Adjusted XP per Day
per Character
1st 300
2nd 600
3rd 1,200
4th 1,700
5th 3,500
6th 4,000
7th 5,000
8th 6,000
9th 7,500
10th 9,000
11th 10,500
12th 11,500
13th 13,500
14th 15,000
15th 18,000
16th 20,000
17th 25,000
18th 27,000
19th 30,000
20th 40,000

Malifice claims that because the text at one point uses the word "earn", that the text is discussing raw XP awards and not encounter difficulty (which is based on adjusted XP plus environmental modifiers). You can judge for yourself whether or not you agree with him, but at least now you've read the text and know that people read it different ways.

Malifice

2016-05-14, 11:24 AM

Wait, you're Flamestrike?!?

If so, that explains soooo much.

Penny dropped eh? I beat you by a few months.

MaxWilson

2016-05-14, 11:35 AM

Penny dropped eh? I beat you by a few months.

I don't often read Flamestrike's posts aside from that one thread.

cobaltstarfire

2016-05-14, 11:35 AM

NewDM

2016-05-14, 12:08 PM

My point wasnt that you need to be an amazing DM. It was that it wasnt as hard as the poster was suggesting.

Step 1: Consider and then impose a realistic and natural time limit for your adventure. Example: the PCs are hired to recover a macguffin from a BBEG. If they fail to do so by midnight (in 6 hours time) the BBEG will raze the town (and come looking for the PCs) with a far more dangerous demonic army. Their employer (or the hook whatever it is) suggests the BBEG is in an old temple ruin 2 hours out of town.

Step 2: Sketch out 6-8 encounters based around the encounter budget (usually with a theme in mind). Consider the abilities of your PCs when you do this (tailoring your encounters to provde a challenge to the PCs and their standard tactics, and designing the occasional encounter that the PCs are expected to steamroll with their standard tactics and powers - so they can showcase those abilities). Example lets assume a 10th level party featuring a Wizard (who uses fire magic and flying), a GWM BM fighter, a life Cleric, and a Rogue (assasin) with expertise in stealth, and a ranger dip for Pass without Trace. The DM sets up an encounter on the way to the ruin where the flying wizard can make short work of a bunch of landlocked baddies, but places the rest of the dungeon in tight cramped quarters where flight is not an option. He ensures that he has a mix of high AC monsters to negate GWM (but also places some mooks to showcase it and the wizards fireball, and a low AC high HP monster to do the same). We ensure the upper part of the ruin is well lit (stopping a lot of sneaking and surprise shennaigans) and the monsters are reasonably close together, with a mean of alerting the others. The lower level of the dungeon is darker, and the BBEG is distracted, allwoing for the Assasin to possibly sneak up on him and ambush him. We'll also include some undead (a dangerous encounter featuring numerous undead) so the cleric can do his thing ans showcase his abilities.

Step 3: Leave a place or two where the PCs can get a short rest, or work natural 'breaks' into your adventure where they might consider taking a short rest. In this example lets have an encounter on the way to the ruin, with a side lair for the PCs to explore (with a second encounter in that lair). They can then short rest (if they desire) before hitting the ruined temple. From there we'll place three more encounters (and maybe a trap) in the temple itself, before the PCs hit a shaft leading down to the dungeon level (environmental challenge). Down in the dungeon level, we'll have two more encounters (an inanimate golem type guardian, and a distracted BBEG and minions). The PCs can get another short rest at this point before decending down the shaft to deal with these last two threats.

Step 4: Have a random encounter or two in mind to throw at the party if theyre having too easy a time of it. In this case, we can have a few demons show up (sent by the BBEG) to harrass the party.

Step 5: Draw a map, set a few DCs and stat up the encounters to the XP budget as per the DMG. Dont forget to place intresting environment (difficult terrain, interactable objects and things to play with, lighting and weather, cover, etc) in these encounters. Dont forget not to count 'weaker' mooks in the overall number of monsters when multiplying the encounter xp to determine difficulty.

Remember, the trick to 5E isnt individual encounters. The DMG is clear that a party is expected to defeat a [medium-hard] encounter using around 15 percent of its daily resources, with the overall goal of reaching your objective with enough gas in the tank to deal with it and win. The trick to 5E is that the encounters only form a fraction of the adventuring day. Many resources (and whole classes) have resources that are expected to carry them through 6-8 encounters.

Each encounter is a hurdle - you need to design the whole race for them to work as intended. You need to look at the bigger picture (the resource drain on the PCs ability to complete the mission) when assesing the difficulty of encounters. Routinely throwing deadly encounters where the party face even a 10 percent chance of a TPK means your average party doesnt survive to 5th level.

There's a lot of confusion over XP multipliers--read the rules carefully. Two and a half common misconceptions:

(1) There's a lot of people who think at first that the "adjusted XP" you use to compute encounter difficulty is also supposed to increase the XP awarded to the players. But it's not intended for that purposes--it's just part of the DM's calculation for determining encounter difficulty.

(2) Some people, on the other hand, fail to use adjusted XP for calculating how many encounters can fit in an adventuring day. These people use raw XP instead, despite the table being labelled "adjusted XP". This results in adventuring days which are about 1.5x to 2x longer and harder than official adventuring days. Ironically, that ends up making them about the right length because official days are too easy.

(3) This last one isn't necessarily a misconception of the rules but a matter of opinion: the rules say you should ignore weak enemies for purposes of the XP multiplier unless, in your opinion, those enemies contribute significantly to the difficulty of the combat. Some people think this means you should almost always ignore weak enemies (e.g. 2 Frost Giants and 4 Winter Wolves = don't count the Winter Wolves because they are only CR 3 and the giants are CR 8) but this is wrong--due to bounded accuracy, large numbers of weak enemies will almost always significantly contribute to the combat. The only case I actually recommend not counting the weaker enemies is when it's obvious that they won't contribute, e.g. 1 adult red dragon and two kobolds is not twice as hard as an adult red dragon, although if you don't kill the kobolds quickly they can still do some damage such as Helping or tossing nets on PCs (with advantage from Pack tactics) to make them easier targets for the red dragon. But it's definitely not twice as hard; maybe 10% harder. But other than that, you should always count all the monsters, IMO.

So, there's that. But I actually recommend almost totally ignoring DMG guidelines after the first few sessions because they give a bad experience which relies too heavily on attrition, which encourages DMs to force players into combat (as opposed to stealth or negotiation or any other out-of-the-box thinking), which leads to both degradation in player agency (because it's bad when the DM is emotionally invested in a certain outcome of an interaction happening ('combat occurs')) and one-dimensional play (because everything turns into combats).

BTW, you know about kobold club, right? http://kobold.club/enc will compute encounter difficulties for you, and even generate random encounters to give you a feel for what level of "official" difficulty the rules think a given PC group can handle.

Also BTW, IME, triple- or quadruple-Deadly is about the right level of mechanical difficulty for something that is supposed to be a 50/50 tossup (i.e. either side could win, depending on who's played smarter, which ought to be the PCs because unlike the monsters/NPCs they can think in bullet time) such as a gladiator fight. This also implies that if you want to deter players from even starting a fight (e.g. guards for a bank vault that's supposed to be a heist) you need to go significantly higher than Quadruple-Deadly, or use tactics/monsters which are stronger than their official CR would indicate (Banshees, Intellect Devourers, PHB classes).

==============================================

This is a good example of the misconception #2 I talked about above. Malifice is going to compute an adventuring day based on raw XP instead of adjusted XP--it's the only way to fit 6-8 Medium/Hard encounters into the XP budget the DMG gives you, and even then you have to use encounters with a high XP multiplier due to multiple monsters. If you have a lot of solo encounters that are Medium/Hard encounters you'll bust your budget after only 5 or 6 encounters.

==============================================

If you want to challenge PCs while staying within DMG guidelines, you're going to have to deliberately game the system a little bit. Instead of just throwing together monsters until they hit DMG thresholds and assuming that will work, you have to pick monsters that work well together and that target likely PC weaknesses. (I say "likely" because I don't believe in building bespoke encounters for specific PCs; that's cheating. But you can build a dungeon which will probably challenge any given group of PCs that enters it.)

Here's some tips:

(1) The rock-paper-scissors circle for 5E is approximately: Solos < Mobs < Spellcasters with AoE < Solos. When possible, try to have at least two different kinds of monsters in the fight, e.g. a mob of hobgoblins for DPR AND a Flameskull for AoE, or a bunch of skeletons and a Banshee. Also, mobs go well with creatures that have control-type abilities: Giant Constrictor Snake (restrains one enemy) while all the hobgoblins trash that enemy at advantage.
(2) Vary the terrain and allow opportunities for partial cover. Especially use cover for insubstantial monsters like Banshees which can take cover anywhere at will (even inside of things) at the cost of a small amount of damage. Also, monsters like hobgoblins fighting from fixed positions will realistically always create partial cover for themselves as part of standard tactical doctrine.
(3) Use morale rules and don't always fight to the death--run away sometimes. But don't always just give up either--sometimes you should withdraw/hide and wait for a better opportunity. Players get amazingly nervous when they know there are three or four goblins out there in the darkness just waiting for them to get in another fight with something else.
(4) Don't be afraid to take opportunity attacks if it gets you where you want to go.
(5) Lie prone against missile fire sometimes, especially against Sharpshooters and especially if you have ranged weapons of your own (hobgoblins). Obviously you shouldn't do this where you could take cover instead, and you should be careful about doing this when a PC could get into melee range of you.
(6) Achieving a favorable situation > better doing HP damage. Watch players panic when a gargoyle grapples a PC and begins to lift him off the ground.

Because I don't like gaming the system, I don't always use these tips (I am particularly leery of #4 because it doesn't fit most monster psychology--now you are wounded and surrounded by enemies, which most creatures would not like even if it does force the PC wizards to Dodge/Disengage/Misty Step away and therefore is a tactically smart move) and I prefer to just ignore the DMG guidelines instead and use more/tougher monsters (which also lets the players earn more XP and treasure, which is fun for them) but there they are if you want them.

Great suggestions, but they imply one thing: As a DM you have to know the system inside out and understand how all the mechanical bits interact. You have to know every feature of your party and how they interact with monsters features. You have to know every monster feature and how it interacts with the players.

Basically you have to be a master statistician that has the entire set of 5e rules, spells, feats, monsters, classes, and races memorized in order to run the system as intended.

I'm sorry but most people can't handle that.

The CR system is mostly swingy garbage as far as my last face to face DM (and everyone else at that table) was concerned. (I personally consider him to be the best in all areas of gming too)

He basically had to just eyeball everything and build encounters on gut feeling, because the CR doesn't give a very good ballpark for how challenging most of the monsters will end up after taking everything else into consideration. (how we play, what is available in the room for us to abuse or at least catch on fire, how rested we're likely to be by the time we reach that encounter)

Exactly.

pwykersotz

2016-05-14, 12:13 PM

Unpopular opinion, I like the CR system quite a lot.

Note that this is different from liking how every monster is CR'd, but the DMG system feels very solid to me. CR is, to me, a simple calculation of difficulty to kill given the party's ability to engage the foe. It's true that WotC lowballs the difficulty for the non-hardcore though.

The trick is to realize that special abilities don't factor in too much, unless they affect the damage soak (HP/AC) or damage output (attack/saves/damage) of monsters. Special abilities such as flight, incorporeality, teleportation and the like can completely change the scope and framing of a battle, which means it's on the DM to determine if intelligent use of these is right for the situation. Especially at higher levels, the number of tricks your party has probably put the scope and framing of the battle at their advantage. So by adding some CR-less special abilities, you can level the playing field and allow the two sides to actually engage each other, which is when that CR calculation shines.

Malifice

2016-05-14, 12:55 PM

The CR system is mostly swingy garbage as far as my last face to face DM (and everyone else at that table) was concerned. (I personally consider him to be the best in all areas of gming too)

He basically had to just eyeball everything and build encounters on gut feeling, because the CR doesn't give a very good ballpark for how challenging most of the monsters will end up after taking everything else into consideration. (how we play, what is available in the room for us to abuse or at least catch on fire, how rested we're likely to be by the time we reach that encounter)

CR isnt used to design encounters. Solo creatures are way off in XP budgets.

A single CR 8 is barely a 'hard' encounter for 5 x 5th level PCs. The PCs are expected to face off against (and defeat) 6-8 such creatures over the course of a single adventuring day [getting around 2 short rests as breathers] before running out of resources.

MaxWilson

2016-05-14, 01:12 PM

Great suggestions, but they imply one thing: As a DM you have to know the system inside out and understand how all the mechanical bits interact. You have to know every feature of your party and how they interact with monsters features. You have to know every monster feature and how it interacts with the players.

Basically you have to be a master statistician that has the entire set of 5e rules, spells, feats, monsters, classes, and races memorized in order to run the system as intended.

I'm sorry but most people can't handle that.

Well, you kind of do have to do this to be a good DM. And if you don't know it when you're starting out, you have to learn. DMing is hard, son. It's a learned skill.

It would be nice to have better tools for helping new DMs. I don't have any such tools ready yet but I am working on it. It would be nicer if WotC had used some of their development budget and those fancy C# programmers they hired a couple years ago to create their own tool, but that's water under the bridge now so now it's on us, the players of the game, to do it ourselves and for each other.

================================================== =========

CR isnt used to design encounters. Solo creatures are way off in XP budgets.

A single CR 8 is barely a 'hard' encounter for 5 x 5th level PCs. The PCs are expected to face off against (and defeat) 6-8 such creatures over the course of a single adventuring day [getting around 2 short rests as breathers] before running out of resources.

That's just wrong, even by your own interpretation of adventuring day budgets. 5 x 5th level PCs have an adventuring day budget of 17,500 XP, and a CR 8 creature is 3900 XP (both raw and adjusted XP). The PCs are "expected" to be able to face only 17,500/3900 = 4.48 such encounters per day, not 6-8.

Malifice

2016-05-14, 01:39 PM

That's just wrong, even by your own interpretation of adventuring day budgets. 5 x 5th level PCs have an adventuring day budget of 17,500 XP, and a CR 8 creature is 3900 XP (both raw and adjusted XP). The PCs are "expected" to be able to face only 17,500/3900 = 4.48 such encounters per day, not 6-8.

I was basing it off the 6-8 medium to hard rule, not the table.

A CR 7 is 2900 xp (so a medium threat for 5 x 5th level PCs). 6 of them = 17,400xp and is more inline with both the 6-8 rule, and the AD guidelines.

Id suggest that the following:

Giant ape
Drow mage
[short rest]
Grick alpha
Oni
[short rest]
Yuan-ti abomination
Young black dragon

Would prove more a decent challenge for most parties of 5th level PCs to handle in a single day. And thats just solo creatures, under XP budgeted for an adventuring day, and all medium encounters.

MaxWilson

2016-05-14, 01:52 PM

I was basing it off the 6-8 medium to hard rule, not the table.

A CR 7 is 2900 xp (so a medium threat for 5 x 5th level PCs). 6 of them = 17,400xp and is more inline with both the 6-8 rule, and the AD guidelines.

Id suggest that the following:

Giant ape
Drow mage
[short rest]
Grick alpha
Oni
[short rest]
Yuan-ti abomination
Young black dragon

Would prove more a decent challenge for most parties of 5th level PCs to handle in a single day. And thats just solo creatures, under XP budgeted for an adventuring day, and all medium encounters.

Yeah, that sounds fine from a combat perspective. The big challenge will be narrative: explaining why all these creatures just happen to be found in the same area, and why they are both non-hostile to each other (so not killing each other off) and yet also are noncooperative enough with each other to allow themselves to be defeated in detail. At minimum, for example, the drow mage's first response to danger should be to Teleport to safety and pick up the Oni and the Yuan-ti abomination and come find the party while they are resting. Preventing 6-8 encounters from turning into one giant encounter is the hard part.

In practice, some groups of PCs will be able to handle much, much more than these six encounters, if they don't become one giant encounter.

Malifice

2016-05-14, 02:11 PM

Yeah, that sounds fine from a combat perspective. The big challenge will be narrative: explaining why all these creatures just happen to be found in the same area, and why they are both non-hostile to each other (so not killing each other off) and yet also are noncooperative enough with each other to allow themselves to be defeated in detail. At minimum, for example, the drow mage's first response to danger should be to Teleport to safety and pick up the Oni and the Yuan-ti abomination and come find the party while they are resting. Preventing 6-8 encounters from turning into one giant encounter is the hard part.

In practice, some groups of PCs will be able to handle much, much more than these six encounters, if they don't become one giant encounter.

Mate I just plucked some random CR7s from the MM. I put no thought as to 'why'.

That said in my old old Rolemaster campaign from the 80's an early 90's, we had a six year all weekend every weekend (I was dedicated back in high school) campaign where the DM would sketch out a map, and we would explore it, with a room being opened triggering a roll on the Creatures and Treasures monster table (the RM MM).

After the battle random rolls would be made on the treasure charts and off to the next room we would go (after sucking down some Akbutege and other healing herbs and stemming the bleeding and nerve damage and open fractures).

Used to be such that a room with a vampire in it would be down the hall from a half dozen Vard Orcs (the 4 armed types). Round the corner, a wyvern would be chilling out waiting for us. A level up and a Cave drake would be lurking in a room (no idea how he got in there) and next door a few war trolls were kicking back playing card.

Made no sense, but was the best campaign Ive ever played in. The Mage got to 60th level and dual classed into Cleric. Her 'triad of plasma' spell was a thing to behold, as was her constant battles with the Anti-paladin and his fell beast mount (with a red mohawk called Rex) and the High Warrior Monk.

Full sandbox using Angus McBrides MERP maps (we'd randomly pick the three dot symbol for ruins on the map and head there for several days to kill/ loot explore). Get back to town and identify and hock off all the magic items, and purchase more healing herbs (you run through them at an extensive rate in rolemaster).

Had 4-5 parties running around the world at various levels due to the constant attrition rate. We were all invariably evil PCs, and PvP was the norm. Went rhough like 19 characters, with 4 retired, 5 killed by PvP, and 10 by the DM.

It'll never be topped. All of my greatest RP stories come from that campaign.

But I digress.

MaxWilson

2016-05-14, 02:54 PM

I'm not your mate, kid.

Malifice

2016-05-14, 03:08 PM

I'm not your mate, kid.

Its an Australian term for 'buddy or friend'.

You older than me? I find that hard to envisage.

MaxWilson

2016-05-14, 03:10 PM

I'm still not your mate, kid.

Malifice

2016-05-14, 03:12 PM

I'm still not your mate, kid.

I'd use derogatoy terms instead if you prefer, but the sites rules prohibit this.

Which is probably for the best considering your attitude here following a compliment or friendly banter.

MaxWilson

2016-05-14, 03:21 PM

You already use "mate" that way--from what I've seen it's your standard "tell" whenever you get caught out in an inaccuracy and want to backpedal/change the subject.

NewDM

2016-05-14, 08:24 PM

Well, you kind of do have to do this to be a good DM. And if you don't know it when you're starting out, you have to learn. DMing is hard, son. It's a learned skill.

It would be nice to have better tools for helping new DMs. I don't have any such tools ready yet but I am working on it. It would be nicer if WotC had used some of their development budget and those fancy C# programmers they hired a couple years ago to create their own tool, but that's water under the bridge now so now it's on us, the players of the game, to do it ourselves and for each other.

================================================== =========

That's just wrong, even by your own interpretation of adventuring day budgets. 5 x 5th level PCs have an adventuring day budget of 17,500 XP, and a CR 8 creature is 3900 XP (both raw and adjusted XP). The PCs are "expected" to be able to face only 17,500/3900 = 4.48 such encounters per day, not 6-8.

I've been DMing since early 2E. I'm an old hat to DMing.

I used to think like you do, that the DM should know everything and then be able to balance insanely hard stuff all the time. Then I played 4e and I realized a well designed game does not fall to those kinds of problems and I could actually focus on designing the world rather than trying to brute force calculate what the parties chances are against every encounter.

In 4e there were only a couple of creatures that I encountered that caused problems. One was the shambling mound (absorb 'out of play' condition and half-damage dealt to SM goes to absorbed party member) and that was because the party kept wailing on the thing knowing what it was doing to the other character, and the Beholder which I gave the vampire template to and those two combined made it a regenerating Beholder with a drain attack. Other than that I could literally throw anything within the encounter guidelines at the party and it just worked.

Now whether you liked 4e or not isn't the issue. The issue is that the problem doesn't lie with not being a near omniscient DM, the problem lies with 5e's encounter system.

Gastronomie

2016-05-14, 08:34 PM

I've been DMing since early 2E. I'm an old hat to DMing.But your username...

NewDM

2016-05-14, 09:29 PM

But your username...

When I made the account I was new to 5e. I'm a new 5E DM.

Grod_The_Giant

2016-05-14, 09:40 PM

Now whether you liked 4e or not isn't the issue. The issue is that the problem doesn't lie with not being a near omniscient DM, the problem lies with 5e's encounter system.
That sort of ability is I think am artifact if 4e's homogeneity. For better or worse, 4e characters all follow pretty much exactly the same template- and that template is fairly limited in terms of what it lets you do. When everyone is working with roughly the same set of very straightforward powers, the math becomes pretty easy.

5e has far more variabiles to consider. Different classes have different specialties, different rates of resource use, different ways of interacting with the world, and often very different powers and features. If 4e encounter design is basic arithmetic, 5e encounter design is multivariable algebra. (And 3.5 is calculus)

MrStabby

2016-05-14, 10:00 PM

So I am in the school of not bothering with CR calculations.

My approach, especially with unexplored party compositions or unknown factors is just to be flexible.

First thing the bugbear patrol does is shout an alarm - in d4 rounds time re-enforcements arrive but you decide how many when you see if you have under/overspecced the encounter. Give the enemies one use items - maybe a powerful scroll saved for such a time as it would save the NPC's life.

In more familiar territory just eyeball the encounter. After the 1st round how many of your enemies do you expect to still be able to act? i.e. not dead, not behind a wall, not paralysed, blinded or whatever. Is that enough to make the rest of the encounter appropriately hard? If not add more meat, change tactics, change enemy composition, make the enemy prepared (sometimes hearing the clanking party approaching in time to spend a round putting buff spells up will make an encounter much tougher), spread them out (if fireball type spells are an issue) or have some in cover.

I generally use the DMG monsters for inspiration though, rather than as direct building blocks. My players know that so there isn't any "but the book doesn't say goblins use poison on their arrows!" type complaining.

I think that the hard part with this is understanding what resources the party has used after encounters - hit dice, spell slots etc. especially when some are short rest and some are long rest recharge. You may underestimate the challenge of your encounters if you don't factor in that 2 out of the 5 characters went nova on round 1 using a lot of resources and the party overall did well on initiative... What in practice was a very one sided battle may be harder than you were thinking.

It is a weak answer, and maybe little consolation but experience and a willingness to be flexible is better than following a rigid set of rules. The DMG can't be expected to handle every eventuality, just be prepared to make mistakes.

Firechanter

2016-05-14, 11:31 PM

MaxWilson

2016-05-14, 11:32 PM

I've been DMing since early 2E. I'm an old hat to DMing.

I used to think like you do, that the DM should know everything and then be able to balance insanely hard stuff all the time. Then I played 4e and I realized a well designed game does not fall to those kinds of problems and I could actually focus on designing the world rather than trying to brute force calculate what the parties chances are against every encounter.

In 4e there were only a couple of creatures that I encountered that caused problems. One was the shambling mound (absorb 'out of play' condition and half-damage dealt to SM goes to absorbed party member) and that was because the party kept wailing on the thing knowing what it was doing to the other character, and the Beholder which I gave the vampire template to and those two combined made it a regenerating Beholder with a drain attack. Other than that I could literally throw anything within the encounter guidelines at the party and it just worked.

Now whether you liked 4e or not isn't the issue. The issue is that the problem doesn't lie with not being a near omniscient DM, the problem lies with 5e's encounter system.

Ah, I see your point. Let me rephrase my intended point: in 5E, you do kind of have to do that to be a good DM. That may or may not be the case with other systems, but it's basically the case in 5E. Do you disagree?

================================================== =======

My main gripe with monsters / combat in 5E is that it's rather hard to create interesting encounters that don't feel like one side steamrolling the other.
Most monsters have very high damage output, to the point that they can solo a PC in as little as two turns. The best response to that is for the PCs to have even higher damage so the monster drops before its second turn. In short, the system devolves to Rocket Tag.

Sounds like a problem with the players--they are so offense-minded that they are the ones who turn it into rocket tag.

The nice thing is that, as DM, you don't have to play along. You can do fun things like use goblins who, due to Nimble Escape and Stealth +6, don't do much damage but are annoyingly hard to kill. (Shadows are even scarier than goblins in the right conditions.) Or you can use hobgoblin (Mongol-style) archers who strafe PCs with arrows from horseback and/or force the PCs to get creative (e.g. play dead and wait for them to try to loot your body) or get dead, or other hobgoblins who fight from behind fixed fortifications/partial cover.

In 5E, defense is generally easier to boost than offense because the designers kept really tight control over DPR abilities but liberally sprinkled the PHB with defensive abilities and spells of all sorts, shapes, and sizes. Just look at the Death Monk, which has an at will fear ability! Then there's Wrathful Smite, Blink, Mirror Image, Shield, Absorb Elements, Sanctuary, Shield of Faith, Haste, Expeditious Retreat, Instinctive Charm, Misty Escape, Stone Skin, Polymorph, Defense style, Defensive Duelist, Missile Catch, Blade song... need I continue? If your players are ignoring defense in favor of pure offensive strategies, they are handicapping themselves into glass cannons--no wonder it turns into rocket tag! Play a few one shots with them, in which you kill them mercilessly until they improve their tactics. (This... is not... the end... (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32eywT-bQhQ) That might actually be a fun scenario for a one-shot.)

Zman

2016-05-14, 11:36 PM

Thats your DMs fault and not the systems.

Give me your party composition, and I'll design 6-8 [medium-hard] encounters using DMG guideleines for you to have a look at. You can explain to me how your party would easily crush them all in a single adventuring day.

No its not; its just balanced for a longer adventuring day.

Exactly. If you deviate from the base assumptions about balance and CR you'll have to make adjustments to maintain balance. A fewer harder difficulty encounters can do it, etc. Basically you have tax their resources ideally over multiple encounters or multipart encounters.

Personally, my biggest trouble is finding plausible opportunities for short rests. I think I need to give them out in between encounters when narratively appropriate turning a short breather into a short rest. For instance, when the party was making their way through Orc caves while a small army was drawing their forces out. They has multiple rapid fire encounters before a deadly miniboss fight with Orc Chieftan and Eye of Gruumsch and Mooks. Basically, they had a time crunch so an hour Short Rest wasn't plausible meaning that healing was limited(mitigated by my "breather" single hit dice heal rule), and short rest resources weren't regained as they hit around a half dozen encounters. I planned for that and adjusted it, but giving a Short rest prior to the boss fight and adding another Mook or two would have been better and by the books assumptions.

Malifice

2016-05-15, 12:16 AM

My main gripe with monsters / combat in 5E is that it's rather hard to create interesting encounters that don't feel like one side steamrolling the other.
Most monsters have very high damage output, to the point that they can solo a PC in as little as two turns. The best response to that is for the PCs to have even higher damage so the monster drops before its second turn. In short, the system devolves to Rocket Tag.

Note that I don't like whittling down huge meatbergs in hour-long attrition wars either. Some middle ground would be nice.

By your own admission you use 'deadly' encounters, and you use fewer of them per adventuring day (thus allowing - actually forcing - your players to nova).

You're creating the rocket tag phenomena mate. Your players are nova-ing, so you're increasing difficulty, thus forcing your players to nova.

Use more encounters of [medium-hard] difficulty. Dont let the players long rest until they've fought 6-8 [make sure they know though, so they conerve resources appropriately].

Try it and see how it goes.

Firechanter

2016-05-15, 12:43 AM

Unfortunately I have no say in the matter, since I'm not the DM.
I'm inclined to agree with you that Deadly+ encounters force going nova. But, as I said before, we roll over Med encounters in 1-2 rounds _without_ going nova.

To me, the solution appears to be to use or tweak monsters to have less offense, more defense/HP. Without going too far into 4E territory where players have to whittle down 1000HP, 1D8+4 at a time. :p

Malifice

2016-05-15, 01:31 AM

Unfortunately I have no say in the matter, since I'm not the DM.
I'm inclined to agree with you that Deadly+ encounters force going nova. But, as I said before, we roll over Med encounters in 1-2 rounds _without_ going nova

Try doing it 6-8 times in a row between long rests.

Seriously. If you give me your party compostion I can design a few encounters and you can eyeball them and see how you'd fare?

Then we can see if its a problem with the system, or an issue with how your DM is staging his encounters.

NewDM

2016-05-15, 03:44 AM

That sort of ability is I think am artifact if 4e's homogeneity. For better or worse, 4e characters all follow pretty much exactly the same template- and that template is fairly limited in terms of what it lets you do. When everyone is working with roughly the same set of very straightforward powers, the math becomes pretty easy.

5e has far more variabiles to consider. Different classes have different specialties, different rates of resource use, different ways of interacting with the world, and often very different powers and features. If 4e encounter design is basic arithmetic, 5e encounter design is multivariable algebra. (And 3.5 is calculus)

Yes, and many of those variable are not necessary. Its like trying to use Common Core math to figure out an algebra problem.

lperkins2

2016-05-15, 04:46 AM

To address the OP's questions:

As has been mentioned, the system was designed around small groups of monsters and rapidly breaks if you get away from small groups (either solo/duo or large groups cause issues). It is trivially simple to create an encounter that, by the numbers, is fine, but will result in a TPK (think 41 skeleton archers, spread out to avoid AOEs, against a level 8 party if the party is surprised, counts as a hard encounter, will probably kill at least one player, only gives 2,050 exp).

It also has serious problems for combat-as-war games, since it doesn't take terrain or circumstances into account. That said, at low levels, and for getting the hang of encounter building, it's pretty good. Keep in mind combat in 5e at level 1 is really swingy, so don't be surprised if a run of good or bad luck makes the encounter a landslide for (or against) the PCs.

If you've not seen it, I think Kobold Fight Club was mentioned, it's a nice way to calculate EXP rewards as well as filtering monsters by CR, alignment, source material, and name.

All that said, after my first session of 5e (I've DMed other systems for years now), I had a pretty good feel of how things are likely to go and chucked the whole CR system (even for awarding experience).

The reason is because there is at best a weak correlation between 'Adjusted XP' and encounter difficulty. Malifice argues, and I happily concede, that there are encounters of 'medium to hard' difficulty which, when packed together can challenge a standard adventuring party. But that's not the issue with the CR system, the problem is that you cannot tell from the 'Adjusted XP', nor even from the monster list, if a given encounter will be hard or trivial. While it is true that 3 skeletons will never be less dangerous than 2 skeletons (ceteris paribus, since the third can simply choose to do nothing if it would interfere), the same is not true in comparing a skeleton to a shadow, since the shadow is at a severe disadvantage in sunlight and vulnerable to radiant damage, even though the shadow is 'worth' 2x the EXP.

So while I concede that there are challenging encounters that fit the criteria of the DMG, the question isn't about challenging encounters so much as good, fun, memorable encounters. And by that metric, the CR system fails, not because following it always produces bad encounters, but because there is no correlation. But that's not the only flaw with the CR system.

There are a number of other issues with the CR system, which basically come down to this: D&D is a tabletop combat simulator and when your only tool is a hammer... That is why you're pressured to run 6-8 combat encounters a day, which is great for murderhobos, but not so great for the rest of us.

The general problem is that you've only got so many degrees of freedom in crafting your encounter. You can't control the composition of the party, and can only slightly control their actions. You presumably already have a campaign world started, which carries with it a bunch more restrictions. Using the CR system adds another restriction without actually giving anything of value. Malifice's example actually illustrates this rather nicely. Note that this doesn't mean I think it would be a bad adventure or anything of the sort, just that he's crafted the adventure outline specifically around being a 'level appropriate' challenge.

First, he says to put the party under a time constraint, and gives examples of what sorts of time constraints would make sense. This is great for many adventures, but precludes any sort of player-driven standing quest (I'm going to assassinate the evil king by sneaking into his castle on a night of my choosing). Now, there is still an element of time-sensitivity: once you start the player-driven quest, things start happening in response. And I understand the goal here, keep the players from long resting every room.

Second, he tailors the encounters specifically to challenge the party he has. Again, there is nothing wrong with doing this, but it makes it harder to sketch out your maps for the campaign long in advance, since you have to know your party composition. And yes, many things just make sense for a BBEG lair no matter what party composition you have, but this definitely has a feel of creating a video game level rather than telling a story.

Third, he uses 'random encounters' that aren't. The players probably won't even realize that the encounter didn't just randomly happen, and might not realize the monster selection isn't random. But it makes me leery, since you're effectively punishing success.

Like I said, none of this is a problem, per se, it just restricts what kind of encounters you build while giving little value back.

Personally, I prefer to create encounters that feel as natural as possible, which includes encounters far above the party's capabilities if directly attempted. This does run a risk of causing the nova->higher difficulty encounter next time -> more nova cycle, but it is generally pretty easy to break out of that. People have mentioned changing mechanics, which might be a good option for some groups, but generally isn't needed. What is needed is uncertainty. There are two general categories of nova events. The second is the cyclic kind, where the party is faced by something dangerous enough that they must kill it before it acts or they lose. This is to be avoided. The first is the discretionary nova where the party just steamrolls a 'medium encounter' because it's planning to long rest every room. Countering this by upping the difficulty of the one-encounter-per-day is what leads to nova type 2. Putting in a time constraint has already been mentioned, but it's worth mentioning the soft time constraint (more money the faster we work). The more effective method is to simply thrust the party directly into a 'deadly' encounter after they nova a medium encounter. Note that you should probably give the party a chance to retreat. Having them lose out on the treasure when a single cast of their top spell slot could have delayed the monster long enough to collect the treasure before retreating is usually enough to prevent discretionary novas. This has led past groups to routinely end their day with all there once-per-long-rest powers unused, by simply being extra cagey.

In my latest campaign, my players are doing everything they can to avoid combat, or at least to save any limited resources, since I don't give out EXP for killing things.

Firechanter

2016-05-15, 08:58 AM

Try doing it 6-8 times in a row between long rests.

Seriously. If you give me your party compostion I can design a few encounters and you can eyeball them and see how you'd fare?

Then we can see if its a problem with the system, or an issue with how your DM is staging his encounters.

First off: the question is academic, since no, repeat, not a single group of anyone I've known to play 5E, has _ever_ done 6-8 encounters per ingame day on a regular basis. It's simply not practical. For all it's worth, the system could function perfectly under these parameters, but it would still be worthless because nobody plays that way.

Secondly, as has also been pointed out already, just mixing and matching a handful of creatures from the MM that fit the required XP range is one thing. Meaningfully fitting them into an adventuring day is an entirely different story.

But, For Academic Purposes ;), our party setup is pretty typical: Bearbarian, Vengadin, Fire Sorc, Life Cleric, and on and off a Bladesinger. We just hit 10 last session. A couple of our characters are relatively optimized but our playstyle isn't; particularly in the teamplay department. For instance, the Barb refuses to draw aggro (i.e. go Reckless), despite him having effectively 3x the HP of the Pally. Consequently, up until recently the Pally - being a much more attractive target - has eaten dust at least once in every fight, whereas the Barb has rarely fallen below 80% HP. Similarly, the Cleric refuses to Bless, and the Wizard wastes his spells on combat-buffing himself instead of boosting the real melees or, well, altering reality in our favour. The only character in the party that actually supports others and/or casts tactical spells is the Sorcerer.
Sry, went off on a tangent there. I guess it's been bothering me more than I thought it did.

MaxWilson

2016-05-15, 09:38 AM

It also has serious problems for combat-as-war games, since it doesn't take terrain or circumstances into account. That said, at low levels, and for getting the hang of encounter building, it's pretty good. Keep in mind combat in 5e at level 1 is really swingy, so don't be surprised if a run of good or bad luck makes the encounter a landslide for (or against) the PCs.

*snip* But that's not the issue with the CR system, the problem is that you cannot tell from the 'Adjusted XP', nor even from the monster list, if a given encounter will be hard or trivial. While it is true that 3 skeletons will never be less dangerous than 2 skeletons (ceteris paribus, since the third can simply choose to do nothing if it would interfere), the same is not true in comparing a skeleton to a shadow, since the shadow is at a severe disadvantage in sunlight and vulnerable to radiant damage, even though the shadow is 'worth' 2x the EXP. *snip*

People have mentioned changing mechanics, which might be a good option for some groups, but generally isn't needed. What is needed is uncertainty. *snip lots more good stuff*

I endorse everything that lperkins says in his post. Really good stuff there.

=========================================

For instance, the Barb refuses to draw aggro (i.e. go Reckless), despite him having effectively 3x the HP of the Pally. Consequently, up until recently the Pally - being a much more attractive target - has eaten dust at least once in every fight

Huh. That's weird. Sounds like your Paladin maybe needs to learn to use Shield of Faith and/or Wrathful Smite, and maybe use a shield too. When you're already got AC 18-20, imposing disadvantage on the target through fear (Wrathful Smite) is the next-best thing to becoming immune to it. And note that Wrathful Smite doesn't wear off unless the target burns an action making a Wisdom check to try to stop being frightened--and Wisdom checks (like other checks) are of course made at disadvantage while in the presence of something that frightens you.

I put this problem on the Paladin, not the Barbarian.

The fact that the wizard wastes spells combat-buffing himself is weird though. The cleric thing might be weird too, depending on what he/she does instead of Blessing.

Firechanter

2016-05-15, 10:43 AM

Grod_The_Giant

2016-05-15, 10:49 AM

Yes, and many of those variable are not necessary. Its like trying to use Common Core math to figure out an algebra problem.
Eh, it's a D&D standard-- look at how many complaints of 4e "same-ness" there were when they tried to fit every class to the same framework.

Malifice

2016-05-15, 11:18 AM

First off: the question is academic, since no, repeat, not a single group of anyone I've known to play 5E, has _ever_ done 6-8 encounters per ingame day on a regular basis.

My current campaign I'm running hits this mark most [adventuring] days.

I'm running my players through an Age of Worms campaign coverted to 5E. They're currently up to the Arena battle after vanquishing the Mind flayer underneath the Free City. Theyve had two side adventures [that I also converted] which were originaly designed for 3E and AD+D respectively as side adventures [D0 - Hollows last hope and C3 - Lost Island of Castanamir].

In addition they've sandboxed around Falcons hollow for a few levels, and have engaged in a long period of overland travel from Falcons Hollow to Absolom [campaign is set in Golarion].

The party is 8th level.

Here is how its gone down to date [with how I enforced pacing and time explained in the individual adventures]:

Prologue: [Conversion of Pazios D0] Adventurers get to the town of Falcons Hollow and there is a plague. They have 1 week to sandbox explore the nearby countryside and recover the three ingredients or the mission fails and the dont get paid. People are dying by the day, so time is of the essence!

[The whispering Cairn]: PCs get wind of unexplored Azlanti cairns in the nearby hills. They also get wind of a rival bunch of adventurers (from the AoW AP) that are planning on looting them. Those adventurers will return to town in three days; the PCs have this long to solve the riddle of the face in the darkness and loot the Whispering Cairn or face a humiliating defeat and lose their claim to the treasure.

[Three faces of evil]: The PCs get wind that Thuldrin Kreed (the local evil gavel of the Lumber consortium) is working with a local dark cult. Exploring the ruins, the PCs find themselves thrust into a life and death struggle against evil cultists, trapped in a dark underground cavern with few places to rest.

: The PCs embarking on a long overland trip on behalf of their mentor, stumble upon a castle under seige by lizard folk. After defending the castle from several (6-8) waves of lizardfolk, and taking a long rest to recover, they discover that their patrons friend (the Sorceress who defends the keep) has been abducted by the lizardfolk. If the PCs cant track the lizardfolk back to their swampy lair, and rescue her in 24 hours, she'll be eaten by the savage humanoids as part of a royal feast.

[The lost island of castanamir] See above. Travelling by sea from Andoran to the great city of Absolom, to seek the advice and council of the sage Eligos, the PCs ship is attacked (and damaged) by a Chimera. The PCs notice after the attack, that the creature came from a nearby island - one that doesnt appear on any known maps. The captain warns them that they have 3 days to explore the small island before the repairs are done, and he has to set sail. On exploring the island, the PCs stumble upon a mysterious black portal. Upon entering the portal, the PCs find themselves trapped in a maze of teleportation portals - and it dawns on them they only have three days to find the escape before they get marooned!

Doppleganger adventure with the Mind Flayer]. After spending some R and R in the free city (and some hard earned GP) the PCs are framed for a murder and captured. They manage to escape, but face a race against the clock to confront who captured them and locate the evidence to clear their names, before their captors discover they have escaped. To complicate this matter, their captors [and unbeknown to the party, one of them] are dopplegangers, and the party doesnt know who to trust! After locating the information, the PCs are attacked by a Mind Flayer (who is scrying them) during a hastily arranged long rest. Realising the threat he poses, they defeat his minions and finish the long rest and head to his lair before he can regroup his thralls for a second attack.

TL;DR - Your DM needs to set time limits on his adventures. 'Rescue the princess/ recover the macguffin by midnight or else bad thing happens.' This is vital to avoiding the 5 minute adventuring day, maintaining pacing, realism, a sense of purpose to your adventures, dramatic tension, game balance between the classes and encounter balance, and driving the narrative.

Can you imagine a novel or a movie where the protagonists were free from any time pressure? If you need to rescue the princess/ blow up the death star/ throw the macguffin into the volcano or whatever, you need to do it for a reason and before the princess gets terminated/ Yavin gets blown up/ Sauron finds you and Gondor falls.

It's simply not practical.

It is practical, it just requires some work. See above.

Seeing as your DM completely misses the 6-8 encounter adventuring day expectation of 5E, and has created a game of rocket tag, I expect your adventuring group will consist of long rest resource heavy classes (Full casters, Barbarians, Paladins) and very few short rest resource classes (Monks, Fighters, Warlocks). Its a given that your group considers the latter to be 'weak' and the former classes to be 'strong'.

This is due to long rest classes being able to nova like crazy on 0-3 encounter adventuring days and dump [rages, smites, spell slots, sorcery points] like its going out of fashion. Those resources are supposed to be rationed over a 6-8 encounter adventuring day, featuring about 2 short rests.

TL;DR - Your DM is encouraging nova tactics. Heck - his failure to police the 5 minute adventuring day and his dialing up the difficulty of encounters mandates nova tactics, further punishes the short rest based classes further (making them look even weaker than they are) and also creates a game of rocket tag that youre noticing.

Secondly, as has also been pointed out already, just mixing and matching a handful of creatures from the MM that fit the required XP range is one thing. Meaningfully fitting them into an adventuring day is an entirely different story.

Time pressure. Every adventure story ever features it. So should yours. Some examples off the top of my head:

The BBEG will sacrifice the princess at midnight three days hence on the winter solstace, or use the macguffin he stole (or whatever) summoning a horrible demon if you cant stop him before then
You dont get paid unless you can recover [macguffin] before X
If you can recover the [macguffin] before time X, you get a bonus in the form of a magic item each
You need to recover [the macguffin] before the rival PCs do so
You need to warn the prince about the plot on his life before the assasin strikes
The BBEGs power grows rapidly. He must be stopped before he can syphon the macguffins power, or else the town will be destroyed
The plauge is affecting the town and people are dying each day. If you cant find the cure by the end of the week, there wont be a town left!
Unless you can locate and destroy the Dracoliches heartstone by midnight, he will return to wreak a horrible vengance!
The item the PCs recently recovered is cursed. If they cant find the pool of radiance and bathe in it before the end of the week, they will bear its results for a year and a day!
The PCs mentor has been captured by lizardfolk. They plan on eating him as a feast to celbrate the new lizard kings triumph in 3 days time. Its up to them to stop him in time!
A mysterious tower has just appeared in the centre of town. Research tells the PCs its the tower of the mad archmage Bigulbob, famous for his magic items of power. It is cursed to randomly teleport throught the planes every 24 hours. Can the PCs get in, loot the tower and solve its mysteries, and get out before they are whisked away to another time and place?
The PCs are captured, and must escape before [X] or else the BEEG will do [Y]

Or whatever.

Its not that it cant be done (or even that it's hard to do). It just requires a little bit of work to do, and an understanding of the underlying resource mechanics of the game your playing.

But, For Academic Purposes ;), our party setup is pretty typical: [B]Bearbarian, Vengadin, Fire Sorc, Life Cleric, and on and off a Bladesinger. We just hit 10 last session.

Yep; all long rest dependent classes to a man. I knew it.

This is a party optimsed for shorter adventuring days, and nova tactics.

Righeo. Lets go with:

Hook:

Your party is approached in town by a messenger from [the Bearbarians tribe/ a PCs relative/ the Clerics church/ the local Elf villiage (or whatever)]. Long story short [the Bearbarians brother/ PCs relative/ church member/ Elf princess] has been captured by an evil BBEG diabolist, whom the messenger tells the PCs is to be sacrificed at midnight (in 8 hours time) in fulfillment of an ancient curse. If succesful this will summon a powerful devil lord into the realm; and the local area will be decimated (or whatver consequence works best).

The messenger has a map leading to an ancient and forgotten ruin, 5 hours ride to the North (rumoured to be loaded with deadly traps and magical loot). He implores you to help save the NPC, and to leave as soon as you can!

Behind the curtain:

[The adventure is now set up with a hook, if the Bearbarian saves his brother he becomes heir to the tribe or whatever, or the PCs get the gratitude of thier church/ the local Elf queen or whatever; this sets up character development and addtional hooks. Additionally, now the PCs know the time frame of the adventure, and the consequences for failure. They know they have to get to the ruin, kill the BBEG and rescue the NPC by midnight or they fail. They know to marshal and conserve resources and manage rests around this paradigm]

With a 5 hour travel time to the ruin, this leaves the PCs with 3 hours to track the BEEG down and slay him. This equates to 1 hour of adventuring time, leaving enough time for 2 short rests. Metagame: if the PCs can get to the ruin faster (via magic most likely) then they will have more opportunities to short rest on arrival, however they use reources to do so (likely spell slots for travel magic).

Encounter design:

Encounters: Medium: 6000-9,499xp; Hard: 9500-13,999xp.

Encounter on the way to the ruin: A mated pair of 2 Wyverns swoop down from the dark night and attack the PCs on the way to the ruin [adjusted xp 6,900 - medium; awarded xp 4,600]
Encounter just outside the ruin: An Ice Devil and 5 Thugs [cult members] in chainmail and with greatswords are involved in a ritual in front of the temple. Patches of difficult icy terrain litter the area, and a blizzard limits visibility and may damage unprotected PCs. [adjusted xp 12,000 - hard; awarded xp 12,000]
[short rest possible outside ruin before going in]
1st interior ruin encounter: A Hobgoblin Warlord, A hobgoblin Mage, 2 Hobgoblin brutes [Orog stats], and 10 Hobgoblins [mercenaries paid off by the BBEG] guard the main chamber of the ruin. [adjusted xp 12,000 - hard; awarded xp 6,500]
2nd interior ruin encounter: An Arcanloth observer and 5 more Thug cult members guard this chamber [adjusted xp 8,900 - medium; awarded xp 8,900]
3rd interior ruin encounter: 2 Chain devils guard the stairs to the dungeon level [adjusted xp 11,700 - hard; awarded xp 7,800]
[PCs have now cleared out the upper level of the ruin, and a short rest is again possible]
1st dungeon encounter: 2 shield guardians hide behind fake plaster walls, ready to burst out and attack the PCs. One has a fireball stored, the other has a lightning bolt - both spells are at 4th level [adjusted xp 8,700 - medium; awarded xp 5,800]
2nd dungeon encounter: BBEG: a Drow Mage [with counterspell, wall of force, and mirror image] 2 cult fanatics [bless instead of shield of faith] 6 Thug cult members [as above] and a Bone devil guard this room All villians have bless active from the cult fanatics. Due to unholy training, the cult fanatics have firebolt instead of the sacred flame cantrip, are treated as 5th level casters [2d10 fire damage, +3 to hit] and ignore penalties for cover, other than full cover. [adjusted xp 13,250 - hard; awarded xp 9,400]

If the PCs fail, a Pit fiend is summoned at midnight. It (along with as many Thug cultists, devils and yuguoths you want) attack and destroy several nearby towns, including the Bearbarians town (or whatever the PCs care about). Additionally the Bearbarians tribe (or whomever you used as the hook) disown him for his failure until he atones (by slaying the pit fiend).

Run through that series of encounters without a long rest and see how you fare!

Note, I didnt multiply the overall XP to account for the 'minions' in the thugs, hobgoblins and cult fanatics [their XP was added to the overall difficulty though]. I took a guess that your group has magic items roughly in line with the DMG guidelines, which bumps up th PCs power over their own CR so this evens it out in the long run. The Thugs can be dumbed down to easier challenges by removing the armor and replacing the greatswords with lower damage weapons [as per thier MM statblocks]. Depends on the competence of your party really. Due to the mook heavy nature of the aventure, and the abundance of AoE effects in your party from the Sorc, Wizard and Cleric, it should be right 'as is'.

Also note, I would include a trap as a further resource depletion tool - a 10d6 falling block trap reflex DC half, Perception/ Investigate DC 20 and disable DC 15, targets a 10' by 10' section of the coridoor (get a Rogue in your party!), and for random encounters I would also include some devils to attack the PCs. I might also let the Arcanaloth be negotiated with to change sides and assit the PCs for an alternative social encounter. Depends on the nature of the players I guess.

The above adventure took me all of 1 hour prep time to write up, stat out, balance and design, and you have several sessions of play here. Your DM just needs to pull his finger out and stop being lazy (or come to grips with the underlying rest/ resource meta of 5E).

cobaltstarfire

2016-05-15, 12:08 PM

CR isnt used to design encounters. Solo creatures are way off in XP budgets.

A single CR 8 is barely a 'hard' encounter for 5 x 5th level PCs. The PCs are expected to face off against (and defeat) 6-8 such creatures over the course of a single adventuring day [getting around 2 short rests as breathers] before running out of resources.

I don't know what you're assuming was going on at my table, but it sounds like you've made the wrong assumption and what you're saying has little to do with my post. Soooo *shrug*

Bottom line, in my experience as it is, the system in place for building encounters is not good or accurate. I feel we would have been better served with general guidelines on building an encounter (taking into account surroundings, party make up, and resources at the time of the encounter). Rather than the current set up, which doesn't really work in practice.

Malifice

2016-05-15, 12:29 PM

Bottom line, in my experience as it is, the system in place for building encounters is not good or accurate. I feel we would have been better served with general guidelines on building an encounter (taking into account surroundings, party make up, and resources at the time of the encounter). Rather than the current set up, which doesn't really work in practice.

What about the encounters I posted above? Whats your thoughts on them?

I followed the guidelines in that adventure.

Firechanter

2016-05-15, 12:32 PM

Well, you assume a bit much about my group and our DM. For one thing, the tendency towards LR classes was more or less coincidental. Since all except 1 player had none or very little experience with 5E before this game started (some had played to level 5 before in a different game, others not at all), nobody did any math about 5 minute adventuring days. The DM had also made clear that we'd get 1 LR per 24 hours, but not more than 2 SR per day.
Besides, two of the PCs do benefit from SRs - for Channel Divinity if nothing else.

Secondly, you assume that we never had time pressure. As a matter of fact, we did, most of the time actually. There's been a timer ticking from Day One, even though we've had only vague ideas of what would happen if we didn't act fast enough.
What's true is that the DM doesn't seem to like large dungeons. So far we've only had three; one derelict temple, one ex-wizard tower and one corrupted wizard academy overrun by aberrations. In two of those cases, there was a kind of background radiation that made Long Rests not impossible, but incurred a risk of losing sanity, so we had a very strong motivation to take as few LRs as possible. (Due to the large radius of this "radiation", retreating outside was not an option either)

So those were the few instances where we had something you could call a dungeon. In most other "quests", the "quest area" looked something like "Entrance room with warmup encounter -- Main room with main encounter -- Final room with or without boss and loot/macguffin". And in one case, the "main encounter" would have been impossible so we had to think our way around.

That said, I kinda like that little adventure you cobbled together. However, I'm not convinced wrt your practice of littering everything with thugs and then refusing to include them in the Challenge calculations - _especially_ if you uparmour and upgun them.
Another quibble; the Wyverns don't seem to really make sense.
BTW, what's an Arcanloth?

Personally, I would absolutely love such a run. I like the feeling of "full adventuring days" rather than five minutes.
Make no mistake, the game is great fun and the DM is one of the best I've had; his biggest strength are definitely his NPCs though. Maybe I can talk to him to see how he feels about some "dungeons" of the style you proposed.

Zman

2016-05-15, 12:46 PM

One thing about the 6-8 encounters per adventuring day, IMO there doesn't have to be that many, but the party should believe that there could be. At my table there is often talk of if they should blow resources on their current encounter due to threat of further encounters that day. Just last session they were helping defend a City from an Orc/Ogre invasion lead by an Ogre Mage. They decided the Wizard shouldn't hold back and he used both his 3rd level slots to take out swaths or Orc's, their ladders and even wound Ogres. But, the next three encounters meant he was severely conserving resources and had very little left when they followed the Knights out of the city to cut the head off the snake. In retrospect I should have just given the benefit of a short rest to th group between some of he encounters, but otherwise the group never knew how many fights they have left.

Just getting players to believe there could be more fight means they might hold back resources. If as DM you become predictable in very few nova friendly encounters per day your players will adapt, add it a ran dome encounter or two or make some multipart and you can fix this. Nothing makes the point like a party that novaed the one encounter for the day to be set upon by Phase Spiders that night on watch, to the point they never complete a long rest and then have to either stay longer and give up part of the day under time crunch or move on depleted. A single 4am ran dome encounter means they have to stay out till noon for the benefits of a long rest. Many players will say just start late, but you can point out in character that isn't something adventurers would likely especially if there is time pressure. This can be as simple as spotting a dragon silouette cross the moon and make them decide whether t march through the night to caves for safety or skipping a fire and camping to push through the night or risking it.

Malifice

2016-05-15, 12:50 PM

That said, I kinda like that little adventure you cobbled together. However, I'm not convinced wrt your practice of littering everything with thugs and then refusing to include them in the Challenge calculations - _especially_ if you uparmour and upgun them.

Thanks mate.

Its hard to tell [without seeing your party] if the thugs present a real meaningful challenge. With three full casters I assumed access to a lot of AoE effects, high ACs (meaning the Thugs will struggle to hit) and so forth.

As a compromise, if the PCs are having a hard time of it by the mid point of the adventure, remove some Thugs and Hobgoblins from the following encounters. Same deal, if theyre smashing it add some. Its easily fixed on the fly.

Another quibble; the Wyverns don't seem to really make sense.

Theyre a [not so] 'random' encounter. A mated pair hunting at night.

I'd ask for the parties marching order on the way to the ruin, and then announce that I was checking for a random encounter, roll some dice and pretend to look something up. Then sigh and then shake my head before mumbling something about the PCs being in trouble. Then I would announce the PCs hear a swooshing sound from above, before the arrival of a shrieking pair of Wyverns (one male and one female) into the parties midst.

-Roll initiative.

BTW, what's an Arcanloth?

Arcanaloth. Yugoloth spellcaster. Nasty beasties. In the MM under Yugoloths.

One thing about the 6-8 encounters per adventuring day, IMO there doesn't have to be that many, but the party should believe that there could be.

Exactly. You just need enough longer adventuring days so your group internally polices resources around this expectation. Once you get the balance right, its the players that self regulate.

It makes reaching for that high level spell, entering rage, hitting that action surge, or pulling the trigger on a divine smite a meaningful player choice, and not an automatic go-to button.

Rocket tag is repetitive and boring. It also throws the maths out, renders many classes obsolete, and combat boils down to a game of initiative, and an escalating power struggle, with an ever increasing chance of either a TPK or a boring battle thats over before it starts. It also increases the DMs workload [figuring out how to balance super deadly encounters and buffing the crap out of them] more than what policing the adventuring day does.

lperkins2

2016-05-15, 03:20 PM

Rocket tag is repetitive and boring. It also throws the maths out, renders many classes obsolete, and combat boils down to a game of initiative, and an escalating power struggle, with an ever increasing chance of either a TPK or a boring battle thats over before it starts. It also increases the DMs workload [figuring out how to balance super deadly encounters and buffing the crap out of them] more than what policing the adventuring day does.

That's an excellent summary of the common 'rocket tag' problem. And your advice for how to deal with it is serviceable, where some of us disagree is whether it is the best or only solution to the problem. I maintain it is neither, both because it places unneeded constraints on the types of encounters you can use and because the same advice you give would work even ignoring the CR system. Also because if you're running a CaW campaign, the players may regularly exit these medium encounters with no LR resources and only few SR resources expended. Maybe that's just me, since my groups usually have a couple of geniuses in them.

In thinking about the advice you've given, I've come up with a little more of my own.

First, is remember the role of initiative (not the mechanical kind) in the narrative, similar to initiative in chess, more like in fencing. Basically, before an engagement begins, someone acts and someone reacts. Malifice's advice is pretty good for when the PCs don't have the initiative, since that is when the PCs will be under the tightest time constraints. It is much less applicable when the PCs have the initiative, yes they need to keep pushing the BBEG to keep him reacting, but there is much more flexibility since they choose where, when, and how to press the attack.

Second, there are other ways to break out of the 'rocket tag' problem. It's easiest if you don't give EXP for killing things, but can be done even if you're in some bizarre world where you get better at picking locks by killing kobolds. In that case, you need to give EXP for beating or surviving the encounter, even if you don't kill all the monsters. DMs tend to think of this when they want a recurring villain, but true villains are probably less likely to retreat than 90% of the creatures encountered. First decide what the creatures want, it's almost always their own survival, followed by pain-avoidance, food, shelter, companionship, entertainment, and treasure, in species-dependent order. Once the party makes it clear that continuing to engage with the party is unlikely to result in them getting what they want, they'll break off the engagement. This means you can send things at the party which they have no hope of killing, but which can be convinced to leave. There's a reason my parties usually devote their highest level spell slots to defensive spells (wall of force et cetera), and then save them until emergencies. One of my favorite encounters of this type was actually a very powerful dragon which decided that the low level adventuring party was going to be its entertainment. It torched some of their equipment and sent them scurrying for cover. Once they realised it had specifically targeted their empty wagon and was laughing at them, they refused to play along and it got depressed and left. Had they nova'd and actually managed to hurt it, it might have gotten angry and killed them.

Point is D&D is a combat system, which rewards murderhoboism. You either have to specifically tailor your encounters to match the level of murderhoboism you want or you have to tweak it and give reasons to not simply treat every encounter with an unfriendly as a combat encounter. I tend to favour the latter, since groups tend to like the story more than rolling dice.

Malifice

2016-05-15, 03:30 PM

That's an excellent summary of the common 'rocket tag' problem. And your advice for how to deal with it is serviceable, where some of us disagree is whether it is the best or only solution to the problem. I maintain it is neither, both because it places unneeded constraints on the types of encounters you can use and because the same advice you give would work even ignoring the CR system. Also because if you're running a CaW campaign, the players may regularly exit these medium encounters with no LR resources and only few SR resources expended. Maybe that's just me, since my groups usually have a couple of geniuses in them.

In thinking about the advice you've given, I've come up with a little more of my own.

First, is remember the role of initiative (not the mechanical kind) in the narrative, similar to initiative in chess, more like in fencing. Basically, before an engagement begins, someone acts and someone reacts. Malifice's advice is pretty good for when the PCs don't have the initiative, since that is when the PCs will be under the tightest time constraints. It is much less applicable when the PCs have the initiative, yes they need to keep pushing the BBEG to keep him reacting, but there is much more flexibility since they choose where, when, and how to press the attack.

Second, there are other ways to break out of the 'rocket tag' problem. It's easiest if you don't give EXP for killing things, but can be done even if you're in some bizarre world where you get better at picking locks by killing kobolds. In that case, you need to give EXP for beating or surviving the encounter, even if you don't kill all the monsters. DMs tend to think of this when they want a recurring villain, but true villains are probably less likely to retreat than 90% of the creatures encountered. First decide what the creatures want, it's almost always their own survival, followed by pain-avoidance, food, shelter, companionship, entertainment, and treasure, in species-dependent order. Once the party makes it clear that continuing to engage with the party is unlikely to result in them getting what they want, they'll break off the engagement. This means you can send things at the party which they have no hope of killing, but which can be convinced to leave. There's a reason my parties usually devote their highest level spell slots to defensive spells (wall of force et cetera), and then save them until emergencies. One of my favorite encounters of this type was actually a very powerful dragon which decided that the low level adventuring party was going to be its entertainment. It torched some of their equipment and sent them scurrying for cover. Once they realised it had specifically targeted their empty wagon and was laughing at them, they refused to play along and it got depressed and left. Had they nova'd and actually managed to hurt it, it might have gotten angry and killed them.

Point is D&D is a combat system, which rewards murderhoboism. You either have to specifically tailor your encounters to match the level of murderhoboism you want or you have to tweak it and give reasons to not simply treat every encounter with an unfriendly as a combat encounter. I tend to favour the latter, since groups tend to like the story more than rolling dice.

You dont want to force 6-8 all the time though. You just need to do it enough so your players come to conserve resources and avoid nova and rocket tag of their own violition. I aim for around 50 percent of the time with the other 50 percent of the adventuring days a mix of 0-3 encounters for the most part, and the rare longer adventuring day.

Interspersed with this are downtime, social encounters, roleplaying and other 'non' adventuring days.

Mix it up, but get your players in the habit of the 6-8 encounter day. The encounters and class balance is based around this assumption.

Firechanter

2016-05-15, 04:43 PM

I tend to always play in "endurance mode" -- even when I'm sure that there won't be a boatload of encounters I still try to conserve my resources to have some reserves just in case, and also to maintain the possibility of getting as far as possible without resting.

Not everyone in our group does that, though. One player has figured that usually we only have a handful of encounters per day and goes nova all the time. Last session I suggested that this might be his way of telling the DM that he feels he's staying below his capabilities, as not to say: not challenged enough. Of course here the danger is that the DM might respond to this by giving us not more, but deadlier encounters, i.e. increase the rocket tag factor.

Edit:
The DM and one other player were in another group where everybody played only the most dominant strategies - so a good deal more optimized than our group. The DM responded by making the encounters ever more deadly. Eventually they arrived at a point where they had to expend 100% of their resources to survive a single encounter, so they needed a Long Rest after every battle. I think the campaign eventually faltered at some point.

MaxWilson

2016-05-15, 04:43 PM

No, the problem was that the Pally, having GWM, is a very offensive build with very high damage potential and (originally) relatively low AC. And of course once a player invests character resources like Fighting Style and a Feat into two-handed weapons, they don't want to let that go to waste by reverting to sword&board.

Okay, but still what is stopping him from using Wrathful Smite or Thunderous Smite in a defensive way[1]? Or, in a big combat against lots of foes, Shield of Faith? I understand now that the Barbarian is "refusing" to tank by going Reckless, but let's suppose for a second that he did begin going Reckless--the rational strategy for an enemy would still be to target the GWM Paladin, because he is a glass cannon. That doesn't mean all enemies will act rationally--maybe the Barbarian can taunt them into attacking him anyway--but there's a lot of benefit to be gained from beefing up the Paladin's defense even slightly.

I understand your frustration with the cleric. I wonder if discovering Spiritual Weapon would reduce his determination to Sacred Flame all the time? You can maintain Bless and still do Spiritual Weapon and a melee or crossbow attack or Sacred Flame. Or, maybe he really just doesn't like being a Blessbot and isn't going to cooperate. My players are like that actually--they spend as much time trying to differentiate themselves from each other as they do fighting the monsters. A couple of weeks ago this led to a fifth-level PC going off to kill a bulette on his own, because he didn't want to wait for anyone else to come with him. And since he was also too impatient to do recon or anything, this meant that when (due to rolls) the bulette snuck up on him and knocked him down to zero HP in one attack, there was no one around to save his bacon and he got eaten, the end. C'est la vie--some people just don't like playing D&D as a team game I guess. :(

[1] For example, use Thunderous Smite to knock someone prone, then attack again with your Extra Attack, and then retreat 30'. You just got in a full attack sequence plus some extra smite damage, and they will get one opportunity attack at disadvantage for being prone, instead of a full attack sequence. It's probably not quite as good defensively as Wrathful Smite but it does let other PCs attack the prone target with advantage in melee, plus it works on stuff that can't be frightened, like ghouls.

Malifice

2016-05-15, 04:53 PM

I tend to always play in "endurance mode" -- even when I'm sure that there won't be a boatload of encounters I still try to conserve my resources to have some reserves just in case, and also to maintain the possibility of getting as far as possible without resting.

Not everyone in our group does that, though. One player has figured that usually we only have a handful of encounters per day and goes nova all the time.

Yep. Seen it myself. It can be a shock for new players coming into my group when the reverse happens and they steamroll a few early encounters and then get stuck with cantrips and 3 hit points for the last 3 or 4 fights. They adjust quickly though.

Last session I suggested that this might be his way of telling the DM that he feels he's staying below his capabilities, as not to say: not challenged enough. Of course here the danger is that the DM might respond to this by giving is not more, but deadlier encounters, i.e. increase the rocket tag factor.

There are plently of threads on this here and elsewhere. Explain to him the 6-8 encounter/2 short rest paradigm and show him a few of them. Show him the DMG encounter section where it discusses the 6-8 encounter 2 short rest paradigm.

Ask him to format around half of the next few adventures in line with the 6-8/ 2 short rest meta (not all of them though - he'll likely cry outrage at that and there is no need for it) or at the very least ask him to design and run you guys through a few consecutive 6-8 medium/ hard encounter adventuring days, and see how it plays out.

My guess is all these problems will dissapear.

lperkins2

2016-05-15, 06:40 PM

You dont want to force 6-8 all the time though. You just need to do it enough so your players come to conserve resources and avoid nova and rocket tag of their own violition. I aim for around 50 percent of the time with the other 50 percent of the adventuring days a mix of 0-3 encounters for the most part, and the rare longer adventuring day.

Interspersed with this are downtime, social encounters, roleplaying and other 'non' adventuring days.

Mix it up, but get your players in the habit of the 6-8 encounter day. The encounters and class balance is based around this assumption.

So, I think we've argued past each other, which is probably a good thing, considering the amount of high quality advice in this thread. You've argued that the easy solution to 'rocket tag' is to lengthen the adventuring day, or at least convince the players there is a high possibility of a long day so they conserve resources. I don't think there's anyone here who thinks it wouldn't be effective, although I am curious to hear from someone who tries it after entering the rocket tag death spiral. I can see that it would prevent rocket tag, I'm just not certain how it would play out when the party novas the first medium encounter...

That said, I think the disagreement is over what constitutes a 'medium encounter'. Obviously, you can create 'medium encounters' which fit into the DMG 'Adjusted XP' system, and again, your advice on how to do that is good. But you can also create 'medium encounters' with creatures significantly above the 'Adjusted XP' target and with creatures below that target. In fact, if you're playing with highly optimized characters and wickedly smart players, you may have difficulty in creating a 'medium challenge' using monsters that fit the DMG definition of 'medium', this doesn't mean you should jump to 2x deady, just that your normal encounter may count as barely into the 'hard challenge' range. Conversely, my current campaign has 3 players new to 5e, two of whom are new to TTRPGs in general; for them, monsters in the low end of the 'medium' range are proving to be a suitable challenge, simply because they are more likely to attack 'head on' and less likely to work together effectively.

The issue with the CR system isn't that the CRs are systematically too low, simply that the circumstances surrounding the encounter matter far more than the choice of monster involved (a point you've implicitly made by recommending time constraints, more encounters per day, and well lit, cramped dungeons). Like I said, I think we were arguing past each other.

NewDM

2016-05-15, 07:44 PM

Eh, it's a D&D standard-- look at how many complaints of 4e "same-ness" there were when they tried to fit every class to the same framework.

Except the 'same-ness' of 4e had nothing to do with encounter design. Encounter design worked in 4e because the conditions and damage were balanced. Spells that caused conditions in 4e didn't instantly win a fight. The damage output of spell casters was not 80% of non-casters across large groups of enemies. For instance the sleep spell was very powerful in 4e. It could affect any creature that wasn't specifically immune, but they got at least two saves. The first save made them drowsy and the second put them to sleep. So even if you were successful they were still attacking for a round. Saves in 4e were balanced in that you rolled a d20 and if you rolled 10 or higher you were successful and there were extremely few modifiers to saves. The damage output of casters to non-casters (controllers to strikers) was extremely different too. A controller did around 50% of the damage of a striker (melee damage based character).

If they had got rid of 'same-ness' and kept everything else it would have worked like this:
spells would give multiple saves so when the enemy spell caster cast sleep on the level 1 party, the party would have two rounds to stop them. Combined with the concentration mechanic this would make an interesting and dynamic encounter that could actually be balanced, instead of "This one has sleep so it could end in a TPK with a few unlucky rolls, but is otherwise a cakewalk."

If the damage was more in line fighters, rogues, and barbarians would deal 2x the damage of casters and enemies that used the same spells as casters would be more in line with their other statistics so their spells would be the same CR as their defenses.

Unfortunately they decided to put save or die back in along with super high damage (a 3rd level fireball that hits 10 creatures deals 280 damage and the caster can usually cast 4 or 5 per day.). So the low end and the high end are miles apart which makes balancing encounters almost impossible.

cobaltstarfire

2016-05-15, 08:10 PM

What about the encounters I posted above? Whats your thoughts on them?

I followed the guidelines in that adventure.

My only real thoughts on it after a quick skimming is that it looks interesting. I like that there is some push/pull to it to make the players consider when and where they choose to rest if at all. (though I'd become tired of it if it was a constant...theme)

It looks like some of the encounters have an awful lot of mobs in them though. Especially if you want to encourage the party to manage their resources and rest time (if they rest at all) smartly. But I'd have to look at actual rules and stat blocks for what I'm saying to be meaningful.

I wish I could give more/better input, but currently my books are packed away, and I personally haven't actually looked at encounter building since a few months after release. The DM and the rest of the table had a conversation about the encounter building rules being unreliable for us (encounters turning out too easy or hard), and I never thought about it again till like...last night or whenever it was I posted here about my own experience!

But I would play at your table, it sounds like at the very least you are a reasonable and thoughtful DM. If something did go wonky with your encounters it sounds like you would compensate one way or another to keep the encounter in line with how hard/easy you want it to actually be for the party.

gatewatcher

2016-05-18, 03:17 PM

The fact that anyone here is even suggesting throwing a "double/triple deadly" encounter at a group is a sign that the encounter calculator is not doing what we need from it.

To be clear; the formula in the book is NOT a measure of how hard the encounter is but rather does it drain a dangerous amount of resources from the party over a prescribed 6-8 encounter structure.

It would be nice to have one for a single fight or have "number of encounters" to be part of the formula to accommodate a smaller number of encounters.

I naturally fall into 4-6/arc and I see a lot of examples of this online. 1-2 intro/hook, 2-3 conflict, 1-2 resolution. If they are all deadly the group often has spells and health to spare...

Also 7 encounters, 4 things per encounter, 28+ kills per day; where are they all coming from?!

------------------------
So to answer the original post directly

Estimate group damage per turn; throwing an encounter with less may result in no actions by the monsters
Don't be afraid to go over deadly; read the monster though
Single monster fights are nearly impossible; they either one shot players or players kill before it acts
Be aware of distance. A longbow+ sharpshooter feat can fire with no disadvantage at a range of 400ft
Plan too many? have them run

Ashdate

2016-05-18, 06:14 PM

JNAProductions

2016-05-18, 06:42 PM

Actually, creating monsters is REALLY easy in 5E. At least, in my opinion. Just takes a bit of getting used to.

MaxWilson

2016-05-18, 06:52 PM

The fact that anyone here is even suggesting throwing a "double/triple deadly" encounter at a group is a sign that the encounter calculator is not doing what we need from it.

Well, maybe. I rather think it's at least partly by design though. 5E is designed for casual players; so it makes sense to calibrate the baseline pretty low. Given an encounter which new players will struggle with and find hard, but experienced old optimizers will blow through using broken combinations, is it better to label that encounter "Hard" or "super Easy"?

WotC had to pick one, and they chose to call it Hard. Which is fine, it makes players feel good to know that they beat a Hard or Deadly encounter, and who wants to take away their sense of victory by relabeling it Moderately Easy? But if your players are finding such encounters moderately easy, and are getting bored, it's up to them and to you to seek out greater challenges.

The same can be said of new players who blow through encounters using awe-inspiring magic items from the DM instead of optimization.

LaserFace

2016-05-18, 07:03 PM

I'm not going to be able to match some of the passion in this thread, but,

I find the CR system adequate. It's not perfect, but I don't really have complaints. Sometimes encounters are easier than I anticipate, other times it's the other way around. I haven't officially killed any PCs, but it could have gone that way a number of times throughout our campaign, so far. And, I'm not really looking to kill my players or really coddle them; I would say I run my encounters by-the-books (with a few minor touches to keep it interesting).

I think my biggest challenge with encounter design is simply giving a prolonged fight. I don't want 4E length in combat, but sometimes I'd like things to drag on a bit. I can enjoy a long slog against a boss monster. But, save use of very long distances, obstacles, or amazing enemy mobility, the PCs and monsters seem to rip each other apart very quickly when they close the distance.

So really, all my encounter planning energy really gets put into making cool set-pieces that let me extend a fight and do crazy ****. I sort-of ignore monster stats beyond getting appropriate CR (sometimes for custom monsters I just borrow stats from an already existing MM entry) and things seem to be working fine for us.

Malifice

2016-05-18, 09:09 PM

The fact that anyone here is even suggesting throwing a "double/triple deadly" encounter at a group is a sign that the encounter calculator is not doing what we need from it

Nah, it's a sign that people dont understand the assumptions behind the encounter calculator.

To be clear; the formula in the book is NOT a measure of how hard the encounter is but rather does it drain a dangerous amount of resources from the party over a prescribed 6-8 encounter structure.

Yep.

It would be nice to have one for a single fight or have "number of encounters" to be part of the formula to accommodate a smaller number of encounters.

There is. If you want to run your campaign with 0-3 encounters per day instead of 6-8, then the longer rest variant is right in the book.

Sticking to rests 'as is' but ignoring the 6-8 encounter adventuring day is what is causing the imbalance.

DMs are only throwing a single encounter at the party then allowing the party to long rest. The consequence is the party are able to freely nova the encounter and triviallise it. Short rest based classes are then made to look inferior and long rest classes are shining.

So DMs are doing the worst thing possible to counter this. They are dialing up the difficulty of encounters (instead of ensuring more per rest). This makes the problem worse. It turns combats into a giant game of rocket tag, increases the chance of a TPK, removes player agency and forces them to use nova tactics, and further diminishes short rest classes and further strengthens long rest classes.

I naturally fall into 4-6/arc and I see a lot of examples of this online. 1-2 intro/hook, 2-3 conflict, 1-2 resolution. If they are all deadly the group often has spells and health to spare...

I highly doubt any groups could run through 6 deadly encounters in a single adventuring day and come through the other side with resources to spare.

I would love to see your party composition and typical encounters.

Also 7 encounters, 4 things per encounter, 28+ kills per day; where are they all coming from?!

The dungeon.

Most published adventures to date contain at least 6-8 encounters in any ruin/ dungeon/ tomb/ area the players are mapping. Frequently more. Pull out any module and have a look.

Be aware of distance. A longbow+ sharpshooter feat can fire with no disadvantage at a range of 400ft

I dont know too many DMs who start encounters at ranges of 400'. Barring the adventurers encountering something in an open field (a very rare thing indeed) then this is definately an outlier.

Most enemy engagements in Vietnam were at 30' or less. Engagements at 400' are rare even today in places like Afghanistan and Iraq with modern weapons. Considering the default setting for DnD is a CQB environment (inside a dungeon) then you shouldnt see all that many 400' engagements.

MaxWilson

2016-05-18, 09:21 PM

I highly doubt any groups could run through 6 deadly encounters in a single adventuring day and come through the other side with resources to spare.

Willful ignorance.

Most enemy engagements in Vietnam were at 30' or less. Engagements at 400' are rare even today in places like Afghanistan and Iraq with modern weapons. Considering the default setting for DnD is a CQB environment (inside a dungeon) then you shouldnt see all that many 400' engagements.

This is outright false. What's the first thing that pops up when you Google Afghanistan average engagement distance (https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=afghanistan%20average%20engagement%20distance) ?

2 Interview with MAJ (P) Vern Randall, National Police Zone G3 mentor, Afghanistan, August 31, 2009. MAJ Randall stated that “The average small arms engagement range here in RC-East is 500 meters”
3 Maximum effective range for the M4 carbine is listed as 500 meters for a point target in FM 3-22.9.Nov 30, 2009

Obviously 5E characters can't actually engage the enemy at 500 meters because even a Sharpshooter can only reach 182 meters (and a range-optimized Sorlock can barely reach 365 meters). But they can prepare to engage the enemy at that range.

And, if you get tired of encounters happening at knife range (30' or less), you need a point man.

Malifice

2016-05-18, 09:24 PM

As a former 4e DM running his players through his first 5e campaign, I find building encounters very frustrating. Not only because the guidelines for the book seem to underestimate difficulty, but there is a ridiculous amount of math involved tweaking encounters due to all the multipliers and such (and creating or refluffing monsters seems like a big pain in this edition).

http://dhmholley.co.uk/encounter-calculator-5th/

The above is your friend.

When it comes to tweaking monsters, just eyeball it. Adding an extra attack or bumping the AC by 2 or 3 or adding 50 percent extra HP, or a legendary save or action or two, just edge the CR up by a point or two.

Its also really useful (and quick) just to reskin existing monsters. Want an Orc Mage? Use the Mage in the MM and just call it an Orc. Want some Hobgoblin brutes? Use the CR2 Orogs. Want a War Ogre? Use Hill giant stats. Want a Kobold boss? Use the Hobgoblin captain stats. and so forth.

Your players wont notice the difference.

It shocks me, given that they went with CR ratings, that they didn't try and tie CR ratings to player level like in 4e. It's such a brilliant idea!

There is still a corellation - the CR of a monster is used as a rough guideline for the relative power of a monster. As a general rule you want to avoid throwing monsters at the party with a CR more than 2 over the level of the PCs.

My recommendations: use solo monsters cautiously (you definitely want the ones that have extra attacks in between PC turns), and don't use hordes of weak monsters. They're both too much bookkeeping, and +3 to +4 to hit on mid-level characters is going to miss so often it's not worth rolling the d20s.

Disagree re hordes. Mid level PCs will have ACs from 15-20. With a hit bonus of +3-4, mooks provide a constant threat.

Willful ignorance.

Yeah Max, you're wrong. Feel free to give me the stats of an average party of any level, and Im more than happy to stat up 6 deadly encounters [two short rests allowed].

We can see just how many long rest resources the party has left after 6 deadly encounters.

This is outright false.

As someone who has served over there, I can assure you its not.

Obviously 5E characters can't actually engage the enemy at 500 meters because even a Sharpshooter can only reach 182 meters (and a range-optimized Sorlock can barely reach 365 meters). But they can prepare to engage the enemy at that range.

For all the good it does you in a dungeon, go for it.

MaxWilson

2016-05-18, 09:36 PM

Yeah Max, you're wrong. Feel free to give me the stats of an average party of any level, and Im more than happy to stat up 6 deadly encounters [two short rests allowed].

We can see just how many long rest resources the party has left after 6 deadly encounters.

Moving the goalposts already, eh? Previously you claimed that no party exists which can handle 6 deadly encounters in a row with resources left over. Now you're claiming that for each party that exists, you can hand-craft 6 deadly encounters which will leave them no resources left over. I don't believe that claim either (not because it's impossible, but I've seen the encounters you construct and they don't meet the bar), but it's interesting that you had to abandon your initial claim and make a new one.

When someone says "My PCs can handle six deadly encounters with resources left over," your response is to call them a liar, but I believe them. Not all deadly encounters are created equal, and unless the DM is deliberately creating encounters to game the system and be PC killers, it's quite plausible for a party to blow through some or many Deadly encounters without any resource expenditure at all, especially if the DM is running a Combat As War game.

It happens. DMs deal with it just fine by turning up the difficulty, or letting the players turn it up themselves.

gatewatcher

2016-05-18, 09:41 PM

While CR and pc level scale at the same rate for determining proficiency that is about where the relationship ends. PC level and CR have, unfortunately, no relationship.

However I do believe monsters of the same CR are relatively equal; corner cases aside. Some will disagree and they will have some great examples but I think their more often equal then different.

I think my biggest challenge with encounter design is simply giving a prolonged fight.

I would take suggestions on how to do that. I can never tell how long a fight is going to last. I just have a problem where I have a creature that can do 2-3 cool things and he gets only one off; I'm talking even dragons here.

What is a good length? I find their on cleanup duty by round 3-4, and that's me improving as it used to be round 2.

MaxWilson

2016-05-18, 09:52 PM

I would take suggestions on how to do that. I can never tell how long a fight is going to last. I just have a problem where I have a creature that can do 2-3 cool things and he gets only one off; I'm talking even dragons here.

What is a good length? I find their on cleanup duty by round 3-4, and that's me improving as it used to be round 2.

When I've got my evil DM hat on, I find several hours to be a good length. That is, if an enemy force remains in-being long enough to prevent the PCs from resting (even if it's a weak enemy force like a few leftover goblins) and/or increase psychological tension on the PCs, then I feel like that's a good length of time. This is especially easy to accomplish in cramped terrain like Malifice uses--if encounters tend to start at 30', then there must be plenty of total cover around for goblins to hide behind, and plenty of lakes for them to swim across/under, and maybe some secret doors, etc.

Usually I'm not that evil, but with dragons I totally would be. Darkness, stealth, and uncertainty are the PCs' bane. (Also, spellcasting dragons rock.) Any given engagement with the PCs may only last a round or so (just long enough to possibly gain a surprise round, to grapple a PC and fly off with it, and maybe to breath a little flame/cold on the party while you're there) but if the PCs know you're coming back (possibly at full health after a short rest) they will be keyed up the whole time.

Malifice

2016-05-18, 10:49 PM

Moving the goalposts already, eh? Previously you claimed that no party exists which can handle 6 deadly encounters in a row with resources left over.

No Max, I said: 'I highly doubt any groups could run through 6 deadly encounters in a single adventuring day and come through the other side with resources to spare.'

I highly doubt any group could do 6 deadly encounters in a row and make it through to the end of the day with resources to spare is not the same thing as 'No party exists' that could do so.

I don't believe that claim either (not because it's impossible, but I've seen the encounters you construct and they don't meet the bar), but it's interesting that you had to abandon your initial claim and make a new one.

Not this again. In your opinion. In my opinion (and in the opinion of players who actually played the encounters) they do.

Not all deadly encounters are created equal, and unless the DM is deliberately creating encounters to game the system and be PC killers, it's quite plausible for a party to blow through some or many Deadly encounters without any resource expenditure at all, especially if the DM is running a Combat As War game.

Im sure I could mess around with the encounter creator and create intentionally easy 'deadly' encounters (multiplying overall difficulty by counting mooks for example), but whats the point?

Lets not white room this, but lets assume a competent DM is designing the encounters, with a goal of challenging the party of PCs he actually plays with.

Occasional Sage

2016-05-18, 11:38 PM

LaserFace

2016-05-19, 01:50 AM

MaxWilson

2016-05-19, 04:00 AM

Digressing toward the original topic some: does anybody have general thoughts on building encounters for small groups with disparate experience? I'm putting together an intro adventure for a nephew who has never played, and his dad with 30+ years of experience; it's REALLY TOUGH to tell what's going to be reasonable!

My players aren't optimizers, but FWIW they had run tonight running their PCs (Fighter 2, Paladin of Devotion 3, and Barbarian 1 w/ a Bag of Tricks) through the following encounters:

1 crocodile, 100 XP/not even Easy
1 demon-headed skeleton (Minotaur skeleton w/ 500 gp emeralds for eyes), 450 XP/Hard
4 skeletons, 400 difficulty/200 XP/Medium
1 Ogre Zombie, 450 XP/Hard
[players tried to take a short rest, but one player wandered off and triggered the following]
1 Bone Naga, 1100 XP/Double Deadly [this encounter wound up lasting four hours, with a short rest in the middle of it, due to the initiative variant I use; eventually the Paladin managed to Turn it and force it back where it came from]
[then players took a long rest, at the end of which the dungeon was flooding and everything was difficult terrain when they fought the following]
4 Shadows, and then two rounds into the combat 2 Mummies in addition, 3600/6x Deadly

The total adventuring day budget is 2100 XP, but that doesn't account for the magic item (Bag of Tricks).

Anyway, due to some poor decision-making (such as the aforementioned wandering-off-looking-for-trouble-while-everyone-else-is-trying-to-rest, and a couple of questionable tactical decisions like using Channel Divinity for Sacred Weapon instead of Turn Undead) the players ended up losing this time, badly enough that they just had to declare a loss and rewind time back into an alternate universe (i.e. retcon "you guys never came here, Mourn never died, and you get zero XP/treasure for this session; there is no treasure map, and you wake up with a bizarre dream about skeletons and minotaurs and a mummy glaring at a huge hunter shark and a polar bear in a room flooded with water while a tiefling floats lifeless nearby"). They could have chosen instead to keep the gold and XP they had earned but then Mourn would be dead, and the player really wanted to keep him alive and play out his story, so losing all the gold and XP was the price he paid...

Nevertheless, for casual, unoptimized players facing 6x Deadly odds, they did pretty well, and they had fun even losing. (The most un-fun thing about the night was a squabble between players over treasure; I took a five-minute break to study my notes, and the players were able to calm down and work things out between themselves.) I wouldn't worry about your nephew. As long as you DM them well and make them feel like their choices matter, and do all the other standard DM tricks like ensuring they have enough information to be empowered, etc.--as long as you do your job, the "difficulty" of the adventure is almost incidental to the amount of fun they can have.

Malifice

2016-05-19, 04:56 AM

My players aren't optimizers, but FWIW they had run tonight running their PCs (Fighter 2, Paladin of Devotion 3, and Barbarian 1 w/ a Bag of Tricks) through the following encounters:

1 crocodile, 100 XP/not even Easy
1 demon-headed skeleton (Minotaur skeleton w/ 500 gp emeralds for eyes), 450 XP/Hard
4 skeletons, 400 difficulty/200 XP/Medium
1 Ogre Zombie, 450 XP/Hard
[players tried to take a short rest, but one player wandered off and triggered the following]
1 Bone Naga, 1100 XP/Double Deadly [this encounter wound up lasting four hours, with a short rest in the middle of it, due to the initiative variant I use; eventually the Paladin managed to Turn it and force it back where it came from]
[then players took a long rest, at the end of which the dungeon was flooding and everything was difficult terrain when they fought the following]
4 Shadows, and then two rounds into the combat 2 Mummies in addition, 3600/6x Deadly

The total adventuring day budget is 2100 XP, but that doesn't account for the magic item (Bag of Tricks).

Anyway, due to some poor decision-making (such as the aforementioned wandering-off-looking-for-trouble-while-everyone-else-is-trying-to-rest, and a couple of questionable tactical decisions like using Channel Divinity for Sacred Weapon instead of Turn Undead) the players ended up losing this time, badly enough that they just had to declare a loss and rewind time back into an alternate universe (i.e. retcon "you guys never came here, Mourn never died, and you get zero XP/treasure for this session; there is no treasure map, and you wake up with a bizarre dream about skeletons and minotaurs and a mummy glaring at a huge hunter shark and a polar bear in a room flooded with water while a tiefling floats lifeless nearby"). They could have chosen instead to keep the gold and XP they had earned but then Mourn would be dead, and the player really wanted to keep him alive and play out his story, so losing all the gold and XP was the price he paid...

Nevertheless, for casual, unoptimized players facing 6x Deadly odds, they did pretty well, and they had fun even losing. (The most un-fun thing about the night was a squabble between players over treasure; I took a five-minute break to study my notes, and the players were able to calm down and work things out between themselves.) I wouldn't worry about your nephew. As long as you DM them well and make them feel like their choices matter, and do all the other standard DM tricks like ensuring they have enough information to be empowered, etc.--as long as you do your job, the "difficulty" of the adventure is almost incidental to the amount of fun they can have.

I'll assume it wasnt an arcane Bone Naga; the 8d6 damage lightning bolt or the 8d8 sleep spell would have ended the encounter before it began.

Also TL;DR - your first deadly encounter nearly wound up with a TPK, despite you giving the players a short rest in the middle of it, before you finally TPKd them with your next deadly+ encounter... forcing you to retcon the whole campaign.

How are you not seeing this? Youre running 'Fantasy underground Vietnam', where every encounter is a grim fight to the death where the PCs have a 50/50 chance of a TPK.

JNAProductions

2016-05-19, 08:46 AM

I'll assume it wasnt an arcane Bone Naga; the 8d6 damage lightning bolt or the 8d8 sleep spell would have ended the encounter before it began.

Also TL;DR - your first deadly encounter nearly wound up with a TPK, despite you giving the players a short rest in the middle of it, before you finally TPKd them with your next deadly+ encounter... forcing you to retcon the whole campaign.

How are you not seeing this? Youre running 'Fantasy underground Vietnam', where every encounter is a grim fight to the death where the PCs have a 50/50 chance of a TPK.

The players had fun. That's what matters.

MaxWilson

2016-05-19, 10:05 AM

I'll assume it wasnt an arcane Bone Naga; the 8d6 damage lightning bolt or the 8d8 sleep spell would have ended the encounter before it began.

It was an Arcane Bone Naga. Lightning Bolt fried the Barkeep's (Barbarian's) summoned Boar and took 16 HP off the Fighter (he made his save). The Naga paralyzed the Barkeep with Hold Person III (but the Paladin made his save), critted the paralyzed Barkeep to -11 HP (but he has 18ish HP at first level due to being a dwarf with around 18 Constitution so he didn't die), killed the Giant Bat with a 10d6+3 crit, and then (because the other players were kiting it) declared its next action as "retreat to THIS corner and ready a Hold Person spell on the next hostile it sees." This was the third lull in combat.

The first lull involved the solo adventurer (Fighter 2) who found it running away back to the party and the party barring the doors; after several minutes of quiet that same adventurer opened the door again--to the loud protestations of the other players/PCs--and discovered that the Naga had been holding a readied Lightning Bolt all that time.

The second lull in combat came when two of the PCs retreated out of the line of sight of the Naga and readied actions to dive bomb it as soon as it entered the room, while it and the third PC (Fighter 2) both declared a Delay in full view of each other. That's a Mexican standoff (it was hoping he'd commit to an action like an attack so it could charge and bite him), and undead always win games of patience, so eventually (after five minutes of game time) the Fighter 2 broke the entente by retreating around a corner and donning his shield, which is when the Bone Naga entered the room and cast Hold Person III to paralyze the Barbarian and the Paladin (despite getting hit with a readied action by both of them).

The third lull in combat came as described above, because undead can hold actions for centuries at a time and the players were short on time before the dungeon filled up with water and they lost their chance at the treasure. This lull lasted long enough that Mourn (the Paladin Tiefling) wanted to count it as a short rest, and I shrugged and said, "sure." In fact it lasted until the Barkeep/Barbarian (who had made his death saves) woke up four hours later, triggering the held Hold Person from the Naga (he saved successfully), allowing the other PCs to resume the combat without getting paralyzed the minute they showed their faces. The Fighter beat the Paladin's initiative and did some damage with his bow, then the Paladin turned the Naga and drove it back down the corridor from whence it came and slammed the doors again. The fighter wanted to pursue down that corridor first and look for treasure but the other players screamed "Nooo!"

Then they wanted to take an eight-hour break there in the dungeon (slowly filling with water) but didn't trust the Fighter not to go opening any more doors while everyone else was resting... there was some discussion of tying the fighter up but an Insight vs. Deception contest between the Paladin and the Fighter finally persuaded the Paladin that the Fighter was not, in fact, going to do any such suicidal thing for now, so they got their long rest in after all and woke up in lots of water and everything was difficult terrain.

Also TL;DR - your first deadly encounter nearly wound up with a TPK, despite you giving the players a short rest in the middle of it, before you finally TPKd them with your next deadly+ encounter... forcing you to retcon the whole campaign.

That's right. A player did a dumb thing (exploring alone when everyone else is trying to take a rest, waking up the monsters) and nearly got everyone killed. He really wanted to repeat the pattern immediately but other players were barely able to dissuade him. Later on, the players made some more mistakes (not as huge as the first one), and they barely lost (not TPK, just a single death--mummies are slow and can't catch retreating PCs). That's a feature, not a bug. Imagine how boring the game would be if someone made huge mistakes and still got away with the treasure. The possibility of failure is a vital element in the game.

My players went home last night talking about the awesome things they did in that tomb. Their main disappointment was that they just barely failed to get the treasure out safely because Mourn got killed dive-bombing a mummy while at 1 HP--last night was one of the few times (two times over the past year?) when I give them a huge grin and tell them something like, "You lost tonight... which means that as the DM, I won!" and they freely acknowledged it to be so while muttering resentfully at the player(s) whom they think were responsible for the loss. [Obviously I don't really have adversarial feelings toward the PCs, but I roleplay creatures that do, like the Bone Naga, and I want them to feel that so they view the DM's creatures as the enemy and not the other PCs.] Next time we'll see if they learned from their mistakes and do better. For a combat-only session it was a huge success.

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Edit: BTW, it is because I have ways to push the envelope without destroying the fun at the table that I know how much they can handle. Some people claim that certain kinds of adventures are "impossible" for players to deal with, but until you actually run those kinds of adventures you don't know the way I do... you may be surprised at how much even unoptimized, uncooperative PCs can handle without breaking. Remember how I recommend triple- or quadruple-deadly for a 50/50 fight (anyone could win, depending on who is smarter)? This was a 6x Deadly fight, so my rule of thumb says the PCs ought to lose unless they fight smart... and they did. But they could have won with better tactics and more teamwork, and maybe next time they will.

@OccasionalSage, I hope that story is useful data to you in your disparate-experience situation. Keep the emphasis on player choices and player agency and they will have fun.