Encounter Building Walkthrough

[Necrosnoop110]

Can someone walk me through encounter building in simple terms for 5th? How many opponents vs how many PCs? What kind of loot assigned? Common pitfalls? Things to look out for and adjust for?

Thanks,
Necro

[MrStabby]

I will try and post a bigger answer when I have more time...

But start off by working out what the point of the encounter is. I give some examples below:

1) showcase a new monster so the players get an idea of its capabilities in a relatively safe environment before facing them in deadly encounters.

2) an attritional encounter designed to not kill the party but to draw out resources to make later encounters more dangerous.

3) a narrative role - showing cruelty of a faction, indication of a betrayal or mercy or to foreshadow something.

4) Giftwrapping on some loot or a plot item

5) easy encounter to showcase how badass the PCs have become.

6) dangerous encounter to really challenge the PCs.

7) situational encounter to showcase a PC ability or to help a specific PC shine.

8) exploring atypical encounters - do the party like hostage rescue, complex traps etc.

9) introducing a new NPC.

Just some examples.

With this nailed, you can move to the next step.

[Yakk]

Encounter balancing as written in the DMG is a mess of over complex math and it falls apart on atypical encounters.

Here is, in my opinion, a simpler system. It handles not complete vanilla cases smoothly, and is very similar to the DMG system on vanilla cases.

First you start with a chapter. A chapter is a bunch of stuff that if you take a long rest before completing there will be story consequences. Bad guys get away, finish plot, hide treasure, get reinforcements, burn a farm, whatever.

Break that chapter down into 2-4 scenes (average 3). A scene is a set of stuff that if PCs take a short rest before finishing them, there are story consequences.

Fewer scenes is easy, more scenes is harder.

Now for the scene. Each scene has 2-7 encounter points in it. These "purchase" encounters. Easy is 1, medium is 2, hard is 3, deadly is 4. You can also have super-deadly for more than 4. More points is, again, harder.

Encounter don't have to be combat. If they are combat...

Add up the PCs levels and the monster's CR.

For 1 CR use 1.2. For 1/2 CR use 0.8, 0.6 for 1/4 CR and 0.4 for 1/8 CR for their power (you use these in large numbers, so fudge factor matters here).

For monsters over CR 20, add an extra CR-20 bonus to their power.

Now compare with sum of PC levels.

Sum/6 is easy
Sum/4 is moderate
Sum/3 is hard
Sum*0.4 is deadly (aka 2/5)

Now adjust for charop and gear. If they have lots of charop and gear, effective player level is higher.

This method needs no group size multipliers or XP calculations. It emulates the DMG math through clever use of constants for "vanilla" cases, like "you face 7 orcs", and gives better results for edge cases, like 7 guards, 2 orcs and an ogre.

This is a "backward" version of the 5e dmg encounter building, where we start with the long rest and build down to the individual encounter. If you build encounters without including the rest of the "adventuring day" 5e interclass balance fails.

I personally find this much easier to justify pacing wise if we use gritty rests. A scene can be the only danger in an adventuring day that way, and doesn't require a month of real life playing.

[Man_Over_Game]

I make all of my own monsters, and ignore CR, so ignore this if you make your own. Although it's a pretty easy and fluid system if you do as well.


Average player HP per level = 4 + (Level * 6.5)
Minimum player HP per level = (above value * 0.6)
Average player DPR per level = 5 + (Level * 3.5)
(DPR = Damage Per Round)

Multiply the total average HP of the party, and divide that total by 3. That's your expected "Badguy party total DPR"
Multiply the total average Damage of the party, and multiply that total by 3. That's your expected "Badguy party total HP"

Now start making badguys by dividing your HP and DPR budget into chunks for each enemy.


Make sure that no badguy can deal as much damage in a single turn to hit the player minimum HP threshold (above in green). So if the party is level 5, none of your monsters can deal more than 21 average damage in a single turn. Note that this is turn, not round, so you can make a successful boss just by dividing the damage that spills over your "Damage Per Turn" threshold by giving the boss Legendary Actions, or by just spending more of your damage budget on minions.
The reason you do this is because you do not want a scenario where a player was unable to react to a problem. The more telegraphed the problem, the more the player can react to it, and there normally isn't a step between "Enemy approaches you" and "Enemy attacks you" that a player can often interact with, and we want our players to die because they deserved it. We want them to know that they deserved their failures, so you have to lower the burst damage to make that possible.

The more minions you have, the more you can afford to add on more damage. This is because dividing the HP budget across more minions makes the enemy group more susceptible to AoE, and AoE is generally more damage-efficient than single-target alternatives. As a result, having more enemies with the same total HP turns the enemy group into a "glass cannon", so to speak. With every unit past the first, you can probably increase the total DPR by 10%. So if you have 50 DPR to spend, and you have 10 units, you now have (50 * 1.9 =)95 DPR to spend.


Say you have a level 3 party of 4 players.
Average player HP per level = 4 + (3 * 6.5) = 23.5
Minimum player HP per level = (above value * 0.6) = 14.1
Average player DPR per level = 5 + (3 * 3.5) = 15.5

Party HP Total = 23.5 * 4 = 94.
94/3 = 31.33 = Enemy Party DPR

Party DPR Total = 15.5 * 4 = 62
62*3 = 186 = Enemy Party Total HP.

So there's a few ways you can chop this up:

You can't have a 186 HP boss with 31.33 damage in a single turn, as you'd kill a player in a single hit (14.1 threshold). However, you could divide those attacks into two turns across the round (such as one turn on Initiative 11, and one turn on Initiative 20) dealing 13 damage per 2 separate turns and maybe add a synergizing Lair effect to compensate for the 6 DPR that you're missing.

You can have three different enemies with 62 HP each that deal 13 damage each, and that'd be fine as long as their Initiatives didn't overlap too much.

You can have 5 enemies with 37 HP each that each deal an average of 8.5 (1d12+2) damage each, and that'd be fine.

Or you can have 10 enemies, 18 HP each, dealing an average damage of 5.5 (1d10) damage each, and that'd also be fine.





Plan your encounters to last about 4 rounds, so try to have roughly 1-2 rounds' worth of movement. This means you'll want either a battlemap that's about 60 feet between the two parties, or a smaller battlemap with Difficult Terrain and walls.

Try to include elements that involve one each of the following:

Something utilizing movement.
Something utilizing strength.
Something utilizing investigating.

This is because these are the things that players may try to leverage when they aren't going straight for the number crunch. Your Barbarian may Dash to the boulder on the cliff in the first turn, then Rage and make an Athletics Check to push it down the cliff onto your foes the next. Or maybe your Knowledge Cleric is able to identify the special ritual the cultists are protecting to recognize that it's actually a summoning circle, and that it needs to be dispatched immediately. Or maybe the enemy mages are protecting themselves by using a bunch of constructs, so the party Monk dashes past by running up the walls to directly engage with the mages and prevent them from safely commanding their golems.

The more telegraphed and preventable a boon is for an enemy, the more powerful you're allowed to make it. For example, maybe a boss has a Legendary Action that knocks a target prone, but crits against targets that are prone when he attacks them during his turn. That'd be something that's both telegraphed and preventable, and an acceptable mechanic to include. The more of these you include, the better, as they reward players for playing in-the-moment, instead of following their preplanned script of actions that they'd otherwise spam each fight.

[Azuresun]

Can someone walk me through encounter building in simple terms for 5th? How many opponents vs how many PCs? What kind of loot assigned? Common pitfalls? Things to look out for and adjust for?

Thanks,
Necro

For the actual rules for building encounters....they're a bit confusingly worded, but it goes like this:


1: Figure out the "budget" for an encounter (p82 of the DMG). For example five level 3 PC's would have values of 300 (easy), 600 (medium), 900 (hard) or 1600 (deadly).

2: If it's a single enemy, then just compare their XP value to the values of the party to figure out roughly how tough it'll be. So for the values above, a single Ettercap (450) would be classed as Easy, and a single Weretiger (1100) would be classed as Hard.

3: For multiple enemies, their XP costs are added together, then a multiplier to their base cost is added. So if I want to have the PC's fight three Thri-Keen (200), then I add them together (600), then multiply that by 2, for a total of 1200 (Hard).

4: When determining XP from multiple creatures, the PC's only receive the total cost, the multiplier is only used for determing how tough the encounter will be. So in the above example, they'd get 600 XP, not 1200.

5: Apply any ad-hoc modifications you see fit. This is more of an art than a science.

6: Despite what you read on forums, the DMG explicitly recommends 6-odd encounters if they're all Medium difficulty . If there are more easy encounters, you can run more in an "adventuring day", and more hard or deadly encounters lets you run fewer.I lean towards fewer and harder, since it lets the fights be more challenging, and more meaningful.


Things to bear in mind:


1: Be careful of monsters that can KO PC's with an average or above-average round's worth of damage rolls. If they do it on a crit or with a limited spell ability, that's less of a problem.

2: Be careful of abilities that can gate out PC's. A raksasha with spell immunity is the classic, but if you're going to have them fight demons when nobody has a magic weapon or damage it's not resistant to, it'll be tougher than the CR indicates.

3: Put some time into thinking about how the enemies will act--they want to win, and will try to tip the scales in their favour if possible. Intelligent enemies (and even some unintelligent ones) will try to ambush the PC's, or fight on terrain that favours them. Ranged combatants will want to be as far back as they can, enemies will try to seek cover if the enemy has ranged attacks.

4: Use the combat options in the PHB. Mobs of enemies might Help their buddies, giving them advantage, or they might try and grapple or knock down PC's.

5: If the PC's are relying on certain tactics, don't be afraid of throwing one or two encounters where those tactics don't work so well. Maybe a melee-heavy group runs into perytons who keep flyby attacking, or maybe a group who likes buninating things must fight a devil. Try to make them think or improvise, without frustrating them.

6: Generally, a race to 0 HP can risk being dull. Mix things up with additional objectives or circumstances that affect the battlefield, such as:
--Some baddies are fighting to delay the PC's while someone else makes off with a treasure or hostage.
--The environment is hazardous for one or both sides (burning building, sinking boat, long drops, etc).
--The PC's have an NPC ally fighting with them, or civilians trying to flee the area.
--Additional enemies arrive midway through what looked like an easy fight.
And so on.

7: Monsters with "leadership" abilities or buffs like Bless can make minions a bit more scary than they normally would be. Having a Knight or Hobgoblin Captain leading a group of mooks adds +2.5 to all of their saves and attacks on average--not too shabby!



And common pitalls:

1: Single monsters can often be easier to beat than their CR indicates, since the PC's are simply throwing out more actions per round, and the monster is making more saves against debuffs that can cripple them. Even weak minions can help break up the focus fire--and I've found it works well if they simply can't easily target the boss in the first round. Also, abilities like a gaze attack or damaging aura can give a boss more punch against multiple enemies.

1a: Never ever ever ever plan on your boss escaping unless you've REALLY tipped the scales in his favour. If they just get one more round of attacks before he Dimension Doors out, that's when the planet-splitting paladin crits will happen.

2: That one guy who's memorised the Monster Manual and immediately knows what to do against every single monster. Try mixing up their appearance a bit, or their abilities. For example, maybe it happens to be radiant and necrotic damage that stops troll regeneration, rather than fire and acid (it's not like anyone in-universe ever told the PC's to use fire). Or maybe the troll is troll is called something entirely different and appears squat, white and toadlike rather than tall, green and gangly. As you get more experience, you can try switching around monster abilities using the DMG guidelines.

3: If a monster's abilities could be frustrating or overly luck-dependent for PC's to deal with, give them some in-character warning about how to avoid it. For example, bodak's are notorious for suddenly jumping out and death-gazing a fool, knocking them out with a single failed save. If you want to use them, maybe foreshadow with people who seem to have dropped dead without a scratch on them, and a survivor who's babbling about how you can't look into its eyes.

4: You don't have to have 6 encounters per day, but you usually want more than one. If the PC's can just unload everything in one encounter every time, then that's a problem. Try to give PC's a reason they can't just retreat and long rest after every fight in a way that's boring and strains credibility. Maybe the remaining enemies in a site prepare or abandon the site, maybe they attack PC's as they're resting, maybe there's a clock ticking.

5: "Deadly" isn't really that deadly if the PC's are fighting effectively and preparing for each fight. It means there's a risk of someone dying, not a certainty.

6: Some of the lethality level of a game will depend on how much enemies are targeting downed PC's before they can be healed. It's probably a good idea to have an explicit policy on this, to avoid bad "the hell was I meant to do about that?" feelings. The level I go with is that downed PC's only get attacked if that enemy has no other targets that are actually a danger to them, they want that specific character dead over the others, or if I want to scare them a little. :smalltongue: Even unintelligent beasts might just drag an unmoving enemy off to eat later.



Most importantly, don't panic! Run some relatively easy and low-stakes combat to get used to how things shake down and figure out what the strengths of your PC's are. And remember that an encounter that was an anticlimactic cakewalk to you may well make them feel like the biggest badasses in the world, and that time you screwed up and nearly TPK'd may have them feeling breathless and cheering when they pull victory out of thin air.

[Demonslayer666]

I use donjon's random encounter generator to give me lots of ideas. It allows you to put in the number of characters and their level, the difficulty, and the terrain.

You can also use donjon's treasure generator to make things easy.

Be careful with ambushes, they make encounters much more difficult. Be careful with too many creatures, just a
few extra makes it a lot more difficult. Single monsters will go down quickly as the party will focus fire.

You will really need to get a feel for the party and how well they work together. Ramp up slowly, the tipping point is a fine line.