D&D help required! Large Party w/ 2 Optimisers!

[GemKnightDante]

So! I'm in the deep end here guys and gals.

This is my first campaign filling the role as the Dungeon Master and, well, I have group of Nine people. Nine. And no thinning the herd is not an option.

I'm managing in most every except one crucial part of D&D. Combat. tl;dr is after the blue text.


But first a little backstory!

Our little freak show is a pirate crew with the ultimate goal of becoming the ruler of all pirates, spearheading the strongest navy on the seas, making the royal navies of the world beg and plead to stay away from their lands. For the most part this is progressing nicely.

The campaign has three main encounter types. Trap laden ruins and temples, naval combat and generic combat. The first two of these I've had no issue with, they work well, but I feel it entirely falls apart in general combat.

With the size of the group I struggle to design a fair encounter for them, and often I fall upon the side of too easy than too hard. I don't want to kill them through imbalanced encounters because of my incompetence.

What makes it worse is that I have two players that have almost entirely optimised.

A Battle Master Fighter that seemingly never misses and deals no less than 20 damage a swing...

And a Fighter/Rogue Hybrid that's going to be nuking targets with even higher numbers.

This is at level 4.

Though the thing is that the second mentioned character hasn't started playing yet, he's a returning player, and thus making the ninth character. I've only been told of this oncoming storm of single target murdering fury.



tl;dr: Nine Man party - Two Optimising players. Help.

I'm honestly at a loss of what I should do. I've been trying for weeks to balance encounters, and I don't want to drop general combat entirely, so any help at all is appreciated!

If you'd like to know the full roster of players, the Race/Class list can be found on my profile.

[nickl_2000]

If you are trying to get those two out of the encounter for periods of time you keys will be wisdom checks. Fear, charm, and hold will be your best friend. You could even have some fun with suggestion as well

[Emay Ecks]

One easy way to make combat harder is to have the enemies ambush or surprise the party. Getting a full round of attacks off before the party can do anything might help balance encounters.

Another fun way is to have combat in varied hazardous environments. This way a small number of enemies with low cr can present an enormous threat. My dm once had our party of four lvl 5 characters fight against 3 gargoyles (cr 2) on a series of narrow bridges over a 200 foot deep pit (There were multiple opportunities to save if you fell, depending on how high you were). The gargoyles would spend their turns trying to push players into the pit, and it did result in a party member falling to their death.
You are doing a pirate campaign, so why not have more fights occur in water? Players without swimspeed (most of them) have disadvantage attacking in water (and there's also that whole not breathing thing).

Don't be scared to throw more or tougher enemies at your party either. You have nine lvl 4 party members. Nine. 5e gives a lot of advantage to the larger group (because more actions), and it sounds like your party will frequently be in that category. Think about what your party's CR would be if a group of monsters were to randomly encounter them. We don't want to be unfair to the monsters now do we?

Also, have your enemies behave in a much more tactical way. Have them focus priority targets, give them a tankier guy to prevent your party from running at their casters, or have some tactical surprises at their disposal (wands of fireball, the mage slayer feat, sentinel feat, maybe some traps and illusions they set up before the fight?).

[Armored Walrus]

One technique would be to make your battle maps bigger, and have enemies in multiple locations. Those two can't be everywhere at once, so the party will have to essentially break into smaller groups and handle the fights piece by piece.

[Vaz]

Many weak opponents; One famous idea is Tucker's Kobolds. Infinite Kobolds who do chip damage to the party through lots of low quality attacks and traps. Doesn't matter how many 4HP monsters you kill, there are infinite back. The task is try and achieve the objective and escape, or move through.
Monsters who can come back after taking a hit - a Zombie can take as much damage as they need, soak up all the extra damage, and then come back the next turn.

"Thorns" monsters - any time you hit they take damage back. Blade Ward/Armor of Agathys, Hex

Not something I recommend overusing, but stopping the party from resting properly. Raids at night are good equalising factors - people not wearing armour, while those who try to sleep in armour I often make a Con check with a DC equal to the AC provided by the armour or else they gain a level of exhaustion and have to spend Hit Dice to recover. Combining this with below possibly. But keep it rare and notable, perhaps if they don't make a habit of putting on a guard routine.

Incorporate variant Resting rules - i.e May spend no more than half your Max HD on regaining HP, and do not add Con to recovery (mitigate perhaps by a 5 minute Short Rest - see Epic Heroism variant). Long Rests do not auto recover HP, but instead allow you to spend as much HD as you wish, and add your Con to recovery if you get a full rest.

Mind Control Spells, like Dominate Person, or Fear (or Frightening Saves) to get them to run away.

Battlefield Control - whether mundane, from something as simple as a 20ft cube Pitfall trap can flat out stop a melee fighter from participating for a round, while using the dug out dirt to make ramparts to interrupt lines of sight from archers, oil spills with flaming braziers, torches, or magical fire to be thrown about. Or magical - even obvious looking Glyph Seals - these might do nothing, but could be very wary.

Grappling/Disarming - they'll struggle to make lots of attacks if they have no weapon and are on the ground.

If they're humans, then fighting in the dark (see night time fighting) is good.

Underwater levels. Everyone loves them.

Time sensitive missions where they can't just kill.

You've also got missions where you can flat out pull on the heartstrings. Look at the backstories, and see if you can manipulate their actions based on the events in game. One of the most memorable moments in playing video games for me was a Shooter where I launched Mortars into a bunch of enemies, revelling in the explosions, only to later find out that they were civilians/refugees fleeing fighting.

You can intersperse that by having them need to fight defensively, and have them drawn away to the other side of the battlefield by the flow of battle. Letting them solo that bit of an encounter is dead easy, because they can solo that with ease, and they feel like a boss, but the actual encounter in on the side of the battlemap.

[Unoriginal]

S
A Battle Master Fighter that seemingly never misses and deals no less than 20 damage a swing...

And a Fighter/Rogue Hybrid that's going to be nuking targets with even higher numbers.


First of all, is the Fighter/Rogue wearing a straw hat?



Second, have you checked their builds to see if they actually work?

[Beastrolami]

Take the MMO boss fight approach. Have a giant monster challenge the party. Make a show of it's power (to scare away the weak players) and give it some minions. Ideally, the optimizers will go after the big monster (along with the braver pcs) while the rest get to fight the minions. That way everyone feels like they had a difficult fight, and played an important role.

worth thinking about.

[CaptainSarathai]

Think of the basic pillars:
Social / Roleplay
Exploration
Combat

The Fighters and Fighter/Rogues are gonna do very well in combat. It's what their players built them for, so it would be almost unfair of you to take that from them.

On the other hand, if they are that deeply optimized, then they are probably also "min/maxed" and don't have a well-rounded suite of skills outside of combat. So use social and skill play to shine spotlights on your other characters.

Another trick with large parties is to break the "golden rule of roleplay" and let them split the party. Instead of your normal weekly gaming night, split the group up and play two separate nights, for a session or two. This lets you engage each player more quickly, but also lets you tailor encounters for the new group. If the two optimizers travel together, you can easily throw them very hard fights while giving the other group challenging fights that better fit their capabilities.

As far as designing fights for the whole group, there are lots of things you can do.

1. Make fights about more than just "kill those guys." If you have a Rogue who is really good with Lockpicking, then put some locked doors in your encounters; implement a time limit or endless waves of enemies, and have the rest of the party cover the rogue while he takes care of the door and disables traps, solves puzzles, and basically progresses them through the dungeon.

2. Play with Resistances and, to a lesser extent, Saves. When you attack the party, have some creatures (you may need to Homebrew) who are resistant to Physical Attack, or Vulnerable to Magic, etc. Basically, create enemies that your melee guys are less effective against. The trick is to still have creatures that they can fight. An extreme example of this would be a ghost who is totally immune to physical damage, escorted by their army of risen zombies. The magic users of the party are more encouraged to fight the ghost, while the fighters are murdering dozens of zombies.
I've also seen this done with saves, and that is the general consensus, but it's much less fun. Smashing a character with Sleep or Charm or something, takes them out of the fight entirely. Sometimes, this just has to happen, but if their character is lying on the floor snoozing, what do you think the player is doing?

3. Mess with Rests and Encounter difficulty.
Certain classes do better with more or fewer short rests. Sometimes, I'll run an adventure day with very few rests, to help spotlight my more Long-Dependent characters. Other times I hand out short rests like candy, and watch the Warlock cackle with glee.
You can also adjust the number of encounters per rest, but this can be a bit hit or miss, because if your players are used to a certain number of encounters per rest, they will play as though that's how many there will be. People talk about Wizards getting OP on short adventuring days, but that's because those wizards have come to expect short days, and blow their magical load early on. The answer then, is to basically tell your players, out of character, that they should expect more or fewer fights. If they're smart enough to intuit hints, then go ahead and do it in character, but most players aren't.

4. Big numbers mean diddly against little monsters
Your fighter throws 20 damage per swing. Your Bard can stab someone for 7 damage. Well, if you have a bunch of 7hp creatures, the Fighter isn't any better than the Bard; they both one-shot the enemy.
If you have characters built for single-target damage, then giving them a big glowing "hit this guy" sign is like giving them a birthday present. They'll whack away and the rest of the party won't get to do much; the whole encounter will boil down to
"put damage on the dragon - oh look, the Fighter puts more than the rest of us."
If you send in waves of chip-damage mooks, then everyone has to fight to avoid being swarmed. Oh, your fighter has tons of HP? That's when you definitely swarm him. Surround the Fighter with 8 goblins and keep refilling gaps until he's nearly dead. The Wizard can be scared by just 1-2 little guys in melee range. Rogue Sneak Attacks can be outright negated by swarming them.
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Running for a large group is difficult, because everything at the table slows to a crawl. Personally, I would do my best to keep everyone satisfied, but wouldn't be too worried about losing a few players. D&D is best with 4-5 people at the table. Half of yours can get bored and leave, and the campaign will probably get better.
Otherwise, remember that you can stretch an Adventuring Day over multiple sessions. At the pace your group probably plays at, you'll need to.

[Zorku]

9 people is a nightmare that I don't recommend, but if you're already running an 8 person party then you're not going to heed any advice like that.

For combats make sure that you've established what the marching order is like. You've got plenty of people to have strong folks at the front and back, but it's a big group so front/middle/back are the only ones that get to make perception checks for monsters sneaking up from that direction.

Try to make sure your combats aren't just a nice open meadow. Have a river that bisects the area (if you're near mountains then the river is fast and dangerous to cross, if you're near the coast then the river is slow and easy but much wider, and swim speeds are probably rare among your party.) Have any sort of difficult terrain that gives archers another round or two of shooting at people before anyone can dash up to them (except the ranger... if he's stupid enough to run into a mess of enemies way ahead of everyone else.)

Depending on how many casters you've got throwing out control effects, you might need every good encounter to have an enemy shaman that throws out counter spells or dispels control effects and so forth. And remember, if the party can tell which goblin casts spells before the first spell is cast then the goblins can tell which PC is a wizard before they cast a spell.

In tight places when your party sees some giant spiders in a room they should also find some spiders pouring out of a side room or even ones returning through the mouth of the cave they're in.



4. Big numbers mean diddly against little monsters
Your fighter throws 20 damage per swing. Your Bard can stab someone for 7 damage. Well, if you have a bunch of 7hp creatures, the Fighter isn't any better than the Bard; they both one-shot the enemy.
If you have characters built for single-target damage, then giving them a big glowing "hit this guy" sign is like giving them a birthday present. They'll whack away and the rest of the party won't get to do much; the whole encounter will boil down to
"put damage on the dragon - oh look, the Fighter puts more than the rest of us."
If you send in waves of chip-damage mooks, then everyone has to fight to avoid being swarmed. Oh, your fighter has tons of HP? That's when you definitely swarm him. Surround the Fighter with 8 goblins and keep refilling gaps until he's nearly dead. The Wizard can be scared by just 1-2 little guys in melee range. Rogue Sneak Attacks can be outright negated by swarming them.
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I want to add something to this. A lot of DMs avoid swarm-y combat because they can't handle compiling a long initiative list and walking through it. I see a lot of people go with side initiative, but that makes everything worse because there's no chance for anyone to respond before the whole encounter has dealt their damage.

Small creatures basically boil down to "I deal 1 attack worth of damage per round," so it doesn't actually matter if you keep perfect track of them. If there are a ton of goblins and one of them moves and attacks 3 times while 2 of them remain idle, the end result is the same, so long as they have all moved into suitable positions. You're probably not going to move one goblin up to the fighter, forget about that, and then say that the same goblin attacks 8 more times in this round, without any other goblins moving into range of the fighter. Your players would probably hate you if you did that, but again, that's because it would be weird to have such a bad memory.

So within some minor plausibility limits, you don't really need to keep close track of the little guys. Move them all up until they're locked in melee with folks, then just kind of switch to "one of the goblins pokes you" with the occasional "the goblin with a big scar over his left eye sinks a dagger into your side," without paying too much mind to exactly which goblins are doing the attacks or taking the hits.

With that in mind, I just group the goblins up on my initiative list. 4 of them go on initiative 18, 4 of them go on initiative 15, 4 on 8, 4 on 7, and 4 on 2. I'm doing this on scratch paper so I can just put a little X next to a group and now there's only 3 on that initiative. If I'm really focused then I keep decent track of which 4 belong in any group, but realistically I'm only using this many goblins because an ogre is leading them, and I just make sure that everyone is paying a lot more attention to the ogre than the gobs.

You don't have to exactly do what I've described here, but hopefully it sheds some light on the kinds of shortcuts you can take to keep yourself in control of the situation.

[furby076]

As some have suggested

1. Spread the enemies, with melee and archers. Yea ur pcs will have to spread out to get those archers or they will get taken out 1d8 at a time. Don't bunch up ur npcs...they are npcs, not dumb. Put some ranged in hard to get to spots (e.g., raining arrows from a ships mast, or top of a crevice in a cave, or top of tree, etc)
2. Even a magic user blended in. Fireball against your pcs will be a lesson learned to spread out. Trust me, one fireball and they will never walk tightly together
3. Make sure you have equal numbers, or heck, more enemies, but smaller cr. Overwhelm them. "Oh look, you do 20+ dmg per hit, that's cute....there are 18 enemies with 10 hp each".... side benefit, everyone gets to kill something
4. Pcs are notorious for poor planning and coordination. Don't be afraid to coordinate. Your npcs don't have to randomly attack. They are smart, they can pick off the person in robes, or the guy that got knocked out last round
5. Use traps and terrain to split the pcs. Maybe some end up on one side of a pit, and the others on another. Look, half the players can now take a potty break
6. Look at disabling tactics...trip and push r your friends
7. Check your players builds for accuracy. Post it here and someone can check. Heck, buy herolabs, and build each pc in there (takes 5 minutes for each one). Don't allow them to use UA....too much work for you. Stick to core.... normally i don't advocate this....but you have a 9 player group (ouch). If a player doesn't make it to game...his character disappears
8. Marching orders and use a large battle mat. No more trying to imagine the right scenario....its there....btw, for battlemats. Jenga makes for great trees, obstacles etc. I use little poker chips numbered 1 to 20 to represent enemies. Keep that list on ur side with hp, attack, smg, ac, saves
9. You have tons to manage, dont be in any rush to give out magic items. Get control of your table before you venture down that hole. You have a few levels before players can legit ask about perm magic items
10. Dont be afraid to fudge the dice, or sneak in a few extra enemies last minute. They will be reinforcements.
11. Dont ever pair the froup against one or two enemies...cause action economy states they will win
12. Everyone rolls in the open. Treat it like Craps. Everyone except you. I dont believe your one player always does at least 20 dmg at lvl 4. At some point he rolls 1s
13. Remember, 5 to 8 encounters before a long rest. Allow 1 or 2 short rests. Ine of the most stressful games i had, as a player, as when the dm didnt let us rsst (we sere in a cavern system full of spell scarred spiders, could only sometimes use magic safely, and were worried about drow ). The dm used insanity rules, but frankly, we were so happy to be out of the caverns

[Saeviomage]

At level 4, if you've a battlemaster who never misses and deals 20 damage per swing then:
a) You are misremembering/exaggerating, and he's not actually a big deal.
b) There's more to the story (ie - you have only a few combats per day, so he can precision attack every time he misses, plus he has something giving him constant advantage)
c) He's cheating

[Hrdven]

You have too many players. Split the party in two groups, and make somebody else DM the second group. You can play simultaneously and in the same campaign. Players can occasionally move from one group to the other, and if they feel like even have a fight against each other.

[Hrdven]

At level 4, if you've a battlemaster who never misses and deals 20 damage per swing then:
a) You are misremembering/exaggerating, and he's not actually a big deal.
b) There's more to the story (ie - you have only a few combats per day, so he can precision attack every time he misses, plus he has something giving him constant advantage)
c) He's cheatingthe group is too big to manage and it is inevitable that one player or the other will take advantage of it. One DM cannot check every detail of nine players constantly.

[Hairfish]

often I fall upon the side of too easy than too hard. I don't want to kill them through imbalanced encounters because of my incompetence.


Stop doing this, because the action economy shift from such a large party significantly tips encounters in their favor. Don't be afraid to slap them into the ground without compunction: spellcasting/healing enemies, legendary enemies who get legendary actions at the end of every PCs turn, dangerous environments.

[CaptainSarathai]

Stop doing this, because the action economy shift from such a large party significantly tips encounters in their favor. Don't be afraid to slap them into the ground without compunction: spellcasting/healing enemies, legendary enemies who get legendary actions at the end of every PCs turn, dangerous environments.
Exactly!

Good encounter design leaves "wiggle room." You can send in reinforcements or fudge some HPs to make a fight take longer.
Mix that in with occasionally making a fight "too hard" and then having some of the enemies flee or surrender after a certain point.

You can normally count on PCs fighting to the death once they've smelled blood and hooked their teeth in. Given a choice between,
"That was a good round, now let's run away from this lopsided fight while we still can!"
And
"We've got them on the ropes, push a little harder and we'll beat them!"

-they'll usually choose to stay and push their luck. Monsters don't have to fight like that, though. Monsters might decide to flee or surrender if it starts looking like too many would die to "win." Few monsters are selfless enough, or motivated enough, to risk their own death for a victory.

[Malifice]

My gut instinct tells me that you're getting the rules wrong. You are letting them do something that the rules say they should not be doing.

Please post a roster of the party.

Then also please advise how many encounters the party are getting per adventuring day. As a median average.

[Zorku]

Another good idea is to create a little cheat sheet for yourself. You want to know their highest base stat, lowest base stat (number doesn't matter, just which one is it,) max hp, passive perception, & knowledge proficiencies. Skilled opponents can estimate the first 3 within the first couple rounds of combat, and the other two are useful for deciding what to tell people when they poke their heads into a new room. No module I've ever seen is actually structured like that, but being able to say "Da'ren, you recognize the place in this portrait. It's a glade that you knew well in X forest," because I know somebody is proficient in nature, can really deepen the immersion, and really helps to make it look like I know wtf is going on.


Trust me, one fireball and they will never walk tightly together

Oddly enough, that doesn't seem to hold true with large groups.
There might be something else going on, but the large group I've seen the most of simply runs straight into everything, with everyone getting hit by the same fireball or most people getting hit by a shatter.

It doesn't help that fireball is so big either. I think maybe they are just assuming that there's nothing they can do to stay out of the 8 tile wide area it erupts into, maybe in general but also because everything is so crowded here.