Multiple Players vs One Player

[Setharious]

I am DMing a party of 3, all currently level 3. I want to make a player character for a boss fight. For a general concept of balance, what level should the boss character be? I tend to use CR calculators for my encounters, but do not know how to translate player levels into CR.

[Teaguethebean]

Be very careful with player character bosses I wonder used a lv20 death cleric who either would have one shotted the players or didn't and I let them live a round so they one shotted her. Leaving her minions to keep fighting.

[No1ofIntrst]

What I would do is use monsters with class levels as a basis for balance (Veteran, Priest, Druid, etc). Most of these (level 5-6) are a medium to hard fight. If you want it to be slightly more difficult, a level 7 is a deadly encounter.

[Greywander]

3v1 is going to be tricky to balance. The action economy will be working against your boss, and one failed save can end the fight in round 1. On the flip side, if you crank up the boss's damage to compensate, then he may very well be one-shotting the PCs, which won't be any fun, either.

When it comes to PCs, or any character built like a PC, 3v1 is not good odds, even if you're a high level character against several low level characters. The exact level gap does make a difference, as a well placed Fireball might end the fight in the boss's favor in round 1, but this is something you'll need to be careful about. This is why legendary actions and legendary resistance exists.

I can't give you any solid advice, as I'm not an experienced DM by any stretch, but I'm tentatively going to recommend a 5th or 6th level boss, if they're a caster. 3rd level spells give a massive power spike that will make them very difficult to take down. However, I'd still expect this to be a short fight, however it goes. But short doesn't mean easy; one wrong move on the PCs' part could spell a TPK. Sometimes short fights are okay, though, as the players are aware of the danger and feel good about dealing with it so efficiently.

For a martial boss, I'd make them a bit higher. This will beef up their HP a bit without drastically increasing damage. Don't just attack, though, but try to do other tricks that will get them an edge against the players. And especially have them act intelligently during combat. One type of boss that might be interesting would be a grappler that is amphibious or can hold their breath, and grapples the PCs one by one and drags them underwater to drown them.

It would help to know what class or at least what kind of character you're planning for a boss.

[zinycor]

I am DMing a party of 3, all currently level 3. I want to make a player character for a boss fight. For a general concept of balance, what level should the boss character be? I tend to use CR calculators for my encounters, but do not know how to translate player levels into CR.

How hard d you want the fight to be?

[Setharious]

I am not really sure on a class, but I do want them to be martial, but I am also leaning towards druid. They won't be alone, I intend to give them at least two infantry men based on the ones listed in this link https://imgur.com/a/aO8yx
I do want it to be a fairly difficult fight. The character race (if this helps at all) is a wildhunt shifter from the list of eberron races.
I do wonder if I just make this boss the same level, and add in infantry men to make the battle more difficult instead of worrying about higher levels. I am pretty new to DMing, and the one thing I feel i struggle with pretty badly is balancing fights, as I have knocked down my party to the last man in nearly every fight they have been in so far, which is why i am asking for help this time around.

[Greywander]

One thing worth remembering is that a "fair" fight, i.e. 50/50 odds, is considered deadly. The PCs are "supposed" to win, so fights where the odds are against them should be rare or should be fights they're intended to run away from. Given how fickle dice can be, even an easy fight can end in a TPK.

If you really want to make the fight feel tough, try employing conditions. Poisoned is a good one, as the player still has agency. Something like paralysis just means they sit in the corner not doing anything, which isn't fun. You want to debilitate them without outright taking them out of the action. You could, for example, have a wolf or other pet-type creature grapple the mage, making it difficult to cast spells (give the pet Mage Slayer for added threat), even though the creature itself is relatively weak. Blindness is another good one, and debilitating for casters and martials alike.

Just be aware that effectively utilizing conditions will skew the odds heavily in your favor, and could lead to a TPK if you aren't careful.

[zinycor]

Probably a level 5 martial character will be challenging enough to be fairly difficult to leave an impression but beatable.

[No1ofIntrst]

I would suggest a level 6 moon druid, as they can help get around the action economy deficit, though that might be a little too difficult. You could have them start off with 1 less lvl 3 slot to help balance the fight.

[MaxWilson]

I am DMing a party of 3, all currently level 3. I want to make a player character for a boss fight. For a general concept of balance, what level should the boss character be? I tend to use CR calculators for my encounters, but do not know how to translate player levels into CR.

Oh, you want an NPC with class levels, not a PC boss. At first I thought you were going to split the players into two teams and have one be the bad guy.

I'd suggest a 3rd level Goblin Shadow Monk abusing Pass Without Trace and Nimble Escape + shortbow. He's robust enough that you can insert him into the adventure fairly early, and have him interfering in many or most combats, but also low damage enough that it will not destroy balance in those fights. Mostly players will burn actions Searching for him or Dashing towards him, and he won't let them rest, but in actual fights he's just doing d6+3 most of the time, threatening their concentration and just being ANNOYING.

Also give him an annoying jerk personality, like... Vector from Despicable Me. Every time he shoots at a player or catches an arrow, shout "bree-yark!" in your most obnoxious Vector voice, and do a little shimmy dance with your hips.

It will be immensely satisfying when/if they finally squash him, but they'll still have to mop up his minions and get the treasure to safety.


I am pretty new to DMing, and the one thing I feel i struggle with pretty badly is balancing fights, as I have knocked down my party to the last man in nearly every fight they have been in so far, which is why i am asking for help this time around.

What you need isn't balance help--it's a plan for what the villain wants and what to do if he gets it. And that plan needs to be something which is also fun for the players. As you're thinking about his reasons for coming into conflict with the PCs, prioritize reasons which will give the players something interesting to do if he wins, besides lie there being dead. An easy one is "he'll sell them into slavery for 500 gp each, keeping all of their equipment." (Slaves usually cost about the value of two years' worth of their labor, so this assumes they can generate about 1gp per day.) Or he could take a hostage and enlist them as agents in an espionage ring. Or sell them to mind flayers for brains.

As long as you have a plan for what to do if the bad guy *wins*, you don't need to sweat if it looks like he's going to. Besides, he probably won't.

[Ganryu]

Yeah, did that my first time DM'ing. Bad idea.

Did it twice infact. PCs have high damage, low health. That makes instantly unfun one way or another.

First time had PCs hunting a refugee PC, decided I'd have a worse enemy show up and force them to work together. Rogue rolled a crit on the first turn and killed the refugee PC. I had to bull**** why he wasn't dead outright.

The the NPCs I had were fighters with buffed health. Just wasn't pretty.

2nd time DM'ing, I used monster blocks, even for humanoid NPCs that were clearly warlocks. And it worked. Their abilities weren't based on PC warlocks, but without telling the party, they started asking 'are we fighting those warlocks again' due to the reflavoring I gave them. Just work with flavor.

Had a boss kobold I gave the stats of a young dragon that worked amazingly well.

Now, for a good resource, use http://tools.goblinist.com/5enc . Set it deadly.

[Man_Over_Game]

I am DMing a party of 3, all currently level 3. I want to make a player character for a boss fight. For a general concept of balance, what level should the boss character be? I tend to use CR calculators for my encounters, but do not know how to translate player levels into CR.

There are two different problems you'll be facing, and you'll want to look at them separately but address them together:


Dealing with being outnumbered

3 units that deal 2 damage each turn outpaces 1 unit that deals 5 per turn.

Dealing with burst damage

A unit that deals 2 damage per turn only has 4 HP. Boss with an average of 5 damage hits them once, and now they're out of the fight with no opportunity to react to their mistake. It's generally bad game design to not leave room for your players to adapt.




Problem 1: Balanced Teams
The solution to base the HP of one team off of the damage of the other. That is:

Boss's HP = Party's damage after 3 rounds.
Party's HP = Boss's damage after 3 rounds.


To draw up some estimates as to what you should expect:

Average Damage-per-round = 5 + (3 * level)

Average HP = 4 + (7 * level).

Boss DpR: since your level 3*3 team will have an estimated total HP equal to 75 HP, your Boss should be dealing 75/3 damage-per-round (25 DpR).

Boss HP: since your level 3*3 team will deal a total of 42 damage per round, your boss should have a total effective HP of 42*3 (126 HP)
To avoid having things feel too "gamey" by having a massive HP enemy in the 100's, you can utilize "effective" HP. That is, multiplying someone's real HP by a form of damage mitigation. This could be in the form of AC, Damage Resistance, Temporary Hitpoints, a heal, or whatever have you. In this case, you need a boss that can take 142 damage's worth of attacks and abilities, BUT it doesn't have to be 142, only its worth.

For example, a Bear Totem Barbarian only needs about 78 HP to match this level of durability, due to his Rage mitigating most of the damage he receives by 50%. However, because of the fact that it's restricted to his usage of Rage (which can be removed through something like Hold Person), and also due to the fact that it doesn't block Psychic damage, it doesn't quite block 50% of all damage but instead blocks something closer to 45%. 142 * (1-0.45) = 78 real HP

Problem 2: Mitigating burst

So here's the thing about having teams balanced this way: Player HP and Player Damage don't scale at the same rate. In fact, the average Damage-Per-Round of your boss is 25, which also happens to be the average HP of a character at level 3. That means that, on average, he's killing someone every turn. What you want is for players to be concerned about 30% of the team's durability each turn, not kill 30% of the party each turn. Killing creatures does two big things:


Lowers their combat effectiveness. By the time the Boss hits Round 3, he'll be playing at 100% strength (and 30% total HP), and the Players will be playing at 30% strength (and 30% total HP). This means that things are actually less balanced than what we originally planned for, as the group with the numbers will lose Damage-per-round (and other contributions) with each round.
Makes for poor drama/game design. Players, and even worldly denizens, deserve to learn and control their fates. They cannot learn when they have no chance to act after a mistake.


However, messing around too much with the numbers from Section 1 can have some lasting effects. Lowering damage to 20 damage per turn isn't enough of an impact to prevent the death of, say, the party Wizard, yet that's decreasing the boss's overall damage by 20%.

Rather, the best solution is to divide up damage evenly. For example, rather than 25 damage on a single turn, try to deal 25 damage over the course of a round. Wizards of the Coast does this by using Legendary Actions. You could do the same. 25 damage divided into 3 turns is 8.33. You could simply have a Sword-and-Board Fighter that deals 1d8 + 4 damage on their turn, and replaces their Action Surge with a Legendary Action that activates x2 times evenly spaced over the round.


Alternatively, you can modify the numbers to slow down the pace of the game.

If you don't want to change mechanics to divide out damage, you can lower how much damage is being received and dealt. To lengthen the game (and damage-to-kill against the boss), simply multiply the boss's HP by the additional length of time you want.

If you want the Boss to not deal 25 damage in a round, you can do this by reducing the amount of damage that their attacks do. 25 damage in a round is the equivalent of a level 7 character's damage. A Fighter, in this example, would have Extra Attack, and so would be dealing about 12-13 damage per attack. If you wanted to reduce how much damage he'd deal against players, you can just lower his damage per hit to, say, 8. This would mean he'd deal 16 damage per round instead of 25, and the players would live until round 4.7 (75/16).

This does mean that you'll want to increase the boss's life to compensate. If he's scheduled to kill the players on round 4.7, he should be scheduled to die around the same time (Player damage after 4.7 rounds = 197 Effective Boss HP).

For the sake of spells, I find that balancing things based off of estimated character values is the way to go. That is, if your boss is to deal an expected 16 damage per round, then his damage equivalent as a character would roughly be a level 4 character, and so should be treated as a level 4 caster (in terms of offensive capabilities).



Summary

Make it so that the Boss is scheduled to kill the players at the same time the players are supposed to kill the boss.

Make it so that the Boss can't ever kill a player in a single turn. Over two turns, or even in a single round, is fine, as long as the player had the chance to react and change their fate between First-taking-damage and Taking-lethal-damage.

Player Average Damage-per-round = 5 + (3 * level)

Player Average HP = 4 + (7 * level).

Things don't have to make sense-they have to be balanced. Because of that, durability on a boss should be dramatically higher than the boss's lethality. When players deal x3 more attacks than you, you need x3 the HP as them.

Don't have a boss that can regularly kill a party member in a single hit. If you have to downscale the boss's damage, upscale the boss's life by the same percentage.

[da newt]

There is a lot of thought and logic in MOG's post, but if you are planning to include 2 henchmen as well, I think it would change things pretty substantially.

I'd assume if you add the 2 henchmen's HP (17*2) and damage (6.5*2 / round) into the same basic calculations, it should still work well for the BBEG (leaving 90 ish effective hp and 12 dm /round - for a martial character that might be like a 5th lvl Barbearian w/ sword and board), although the infantrymen probably won't last more than 2 rounds.

Of course if the party decides to attack all melee 1 v 1, the results may be very different than if they decide to focus fire on the BBEG with spells etc ... All this variability plus randomness of rolls, make it hard to predict.

Also, if you look closely at those infantrymen, they are 3d10 hp and one sword attack +2 each which = a very generic lvl3 figher, so maybe the BBEG ought to be less than above ...


BTW MOG, how did you determine the DPR formula? It feels a little high at 14 / round for a lvl 3 PC - before the first ASI, multi attack or lvl 3 spells (some rough estimates : rogue w/ bow + SA =~ 13, warlock EB + HEX =~ 11, S&B fighter + dueling =~ 10, Barbarian w/ maul + rage =~ 11)

[Man_Over_Game]

There is a lot of thought and logic in MOG's post, but if you are planning to include 2 henchmen as well, I think it would change things pretty substantially.

I'd assume if you add the 2 henchmen's HP (17*2) and damage (6.5*2 / round) into the same basic calculations, it should still work well for the BBEG (leaving 90 ish effective hp and 12 dm /round - for a martial character that might be like a 5th lvl Barbearian w/ sword and board), although the infantrymen probably won't last more than 2 rounds.

Of course if the party decides to attack all melee 1 v 1, the results may be very different than if they decide to focus fire on the BBEG with spells etc ... All this variability plus randomness of rolls, make it hard to predict.

Also, if you look closely at those infantrymen, they are 3d10 hp and one sword attack +2 each which = a very generic lvl3 figher, so maybe the BBEG ought to be less than above ...


BTW MOG, how did you determine the DPR formula? It feels a little high at 14 / round for a lvl 3 PC (some rough estimates : rogue w/ bow + SA =~ 13, warlock EB + HEX =~ 11, S&B fighter =~ 8, Barbarian w/ maul =~ 11)

Because burst damage is a thing.

"Real" combat (that is, when healing spells saves someone's life, when players grant Advantage on an ally's attack, and when Battlemasters blow their Superiority Dice) lasts about 3 rounds. After that point, Warlocks aren't able to spend their Spell Slots, Wizards and Sorcerers are resorting to their 2nd highest spell levels, and Fighters can't use Action Surge.

What we assume is conditional "Burst" damage actually occurs about 50% of the time! So if we make our estimates based on a realistic lowest power default (that is, basing Fighter damage off of just their standard Attack damage), you'll actually be estimating too low.

I originally estimated 10 + (2 * Level). And while this accurately tracks a character's "default" damage, that's really just only able estimate how much damage someone would do if someone made virtually no tactical or resource-dependent decisions to improve their damage.

A good example of this is a Great Weapon Samurai Fighter, a build fairly common by level 5 or 6:


---------------------------

Let's assume your Samurai Fighter has a +3 Mod, a 2d6 Weapon, and is level 6.

Default Attack, no feat: 10 damage per attack, or 20 per round

-5/+10 Attack: 10 damage + 1.5 per attack, or 23 per round
The average roll on the die you need to hit as a Fighter is about 8. At level 6 and a +3 mod, this means you're usually facing creatures who have about 14 AC.

This would mean you had a 65% chance of hitting with your 10 damage, resulting in a real damage-per-attack of 6.5.

Needing a 13 or higher (from the -5) would result in a 40% chance to hit. Combine this with your 20 damage attack, and you'll have a real damage-per-attack of 8.

8 - 6.5 = +1.5.

-5/+10 Attack with Advantage: 10 + 4 damage per attack, or 28 per round.
Same reasons as before, but now with charts!

https://rpg.stackexchange.com/a/76656/45619

Consider the fact that Samurai can grant this Advantage effect on all of their attacks in a single turn, up to 3 times per day. Additionally, he can use his Action Surge per Short Rest.

Assuming you have about 6 combat rounds in a day (2 encounters, or 1 big one), that means the Samurai would be able to apply Advantage 50% of the time, in moments where it'd be actually needed. We could also assume that the Fighter will be able to use Action Surge once per Encounter, as that seems realistic with so few Encounters in this example. So that means 1/3 of the time the Samurai is fighting, he's dealing double damage.

So his rounds would look something like this:


56 damage - Action Surge, 1st Fighting Spirit
28 damage - 2nd Fighting Spirit
20 damage

Short Rest between encounters

56 damage - Action Surge, 3rd Fighting Spirit
20 damage
20 damage



So now we can just average those up. 200 / 6 = 33.33 damage per round.

--------------


For reference, my current estimation of 5 + (3 * level) would guess about 23. While this is significantly lower than the example Samurai, it's fair to say that a Class so Combat-heavy on the Combat-NonCombat scale, with a build entirely focused around damage, with a subclass entirely focused around damage, should be able to output 50% more damage than the average chump. In comparison, an equal-level Forge Cleric's average attack damage would be 8.

It's important to consider all sources of damage, even temporary ones. Even from your example numbers, it appears you may have forgotten to include things like a Fighting Style (4.5 + 3 + 2 = 9.5) + Action Surge (9.5 * 2 = 19) , Barbarian's Rage (7 + 3 + 2 = 12) + Reckless Attack (Advantage increases hit bonus by about +4, increasing chance to hit from about 6/10 to about 8/10, meaning a 33% increased chance to hit. 12 * 1.3 = 16), or the fact that a level 3 Warlock has 2 level 2 spell slots (Shatter against 1 target, with a 50% chance of missing, is 10.125. Assuming it's cast against 2 targets = 20.25 damage). We estimated a 3 round combat in my previous example, yet a level 3 Fighter will output 19 damage 1/3 of the fight, and the Warlock will maintain about 20 damage for 2/3 of the fight.

Even if someone wasn't aiming strictly for damage, they were likely instead aiming for something more circumstantially worthwhile. That is, going for damage would have contributed less. For example, a Sword-and-Board Fighter might take the Dueling Fighting Style to match the example I mentioned on the previous line. However, it might actually be more beneficial for the same person to take the Protection or Defensive Fighting Styles to accommodate their team's needs. Just because they didn't gain +2 damage does not mean they didn't gain the equivalent worth of +2 damage, and so should still be assumed they're worth that +2 damage. Because most players who optimize do so towards damage, and because damage is a universal method of quantifying your contribution in combat, estimating someone's maximum damage potential is generally a good way of estimating their overall combat contribution, even if they aren't contributing much damage. This doesn't always work, as some characters don't modify damage numbers all that much (Bards and Druids contribute more with combat utility than numbers), but it works enough.

TLDR:
Estimating that a Fighter deals (2d6 + 3) * 2 damage per round is actually estimating their minimum. Their maximum would account for them spending their resources (like Action Surge or Fighting Spirit), which might be up to 3x more than their default. Average their minimum default with their maximum potential to determine their actual contribution in combat.