"Sequential" Encounters?

[Alistaroc]

I know discussing how to do a boss fight "right" has been done to death. I figured I'd go with the multi-stage approach, but I can't find anywhere with rules or guidelines about the difficulty of subsequent encounters. It hardly feels like throwing 3 Deadly enemies in a row at a party would be an even fight. For a party of 5 level 8s, that would be three adult black dragons in a row.

I usually use blog of holding's monster manual on a business card (here (http://blogofholding.com/?p=7338)) to create my creatures and bosses, and Kobold Fight Club for difficulty brackets. Seems to work fairly well in my experience.

TL;DR Are there any rules/guidelines for encounters one-after-another?

[OldTrees1]

From a system agnostic point of view:
Sequential encounters without breaks are more threatening than sequential encounters with breaks but much less threatening than larger encounters.


Test the waters:
5E is heavily biased in the PCs' favor. Even more so than other editions. So you have some decent wiggle room. Maybe start with 4 medium or 3 hard encounters without breaks rather than 3 deadly encounters without breaks.

[Unoriginal]

I know discussing how to do a boss fight "right" has been done to death. I figured I'd go with the multi-stage approach, but I can't find anywhere with rules or guidelines about the difficulty of subsequent encounters. It hardly feels like throwing 3 Deadly enemies in a row at a party would be an even fight. For a party of 5 level 8s, that would be three adult black dragons in a row.

I usually use blog of holding's monster manual on a business card (here (http://blogofholding.com/?p=7338)) to create my creatures and bosses, and Kobold Fight Club for difficulty brackets. Seems to work fairly well in my experience.

TL;DR Are there any rules/guidelines for encounters one-after-another?

The Theros book has rules for that.

[MaxWilson]

I know discussing how to do a boss fight "right" has been done to death. I figured I'd go with the multi-stage approach, but I can't find anywhere with rules or guidelines about the difficulty of subsequent encounters. It hardly feels like throwing 3 Deadly enemies in a row at a party would be an even fight. For a party of 5 level 8s, that would be three adult black dragons in a row.

I usually use blog of holding's monster manual on a business card (here (http://blogofholding.com/?p=7338)) to create my creatures and bosses, and Kobold Fight Club for difficulty brackets. Seems to work fairly well in my experience.

TL;DR Are there any rules/guidelines for encounters one-after-another?

5E's guidelines are poor enough that no book answer is going to be more help to you anyway than experience and playtesting. Now of course we know from Lanchester's Square Law of Combat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanchester%27s_laws) that fighting three black dragons is about nine times harder than fighting one dragon, whereas fighting one dragon three times is only about three times harder. But does that mean it's too hard, or not? Lanchester's Laws don't tell you that.

FWIW, three adult black dragons in a row sounds tedious to me but not scary, for a party of five level 8s. In each fight, each PC has to average about 40 HP of damage to bring the dragon down, and the dragon is likely to do 30-60 HP of damage to at least one member of the party. They may be able to re-use some spells/abilities like Animate Objects or Polymorph or Bladesong or caltrops/Spike Growth/Wall of Fire against multiple dragons depending on timing and terrain, but things like Barbarian Rage will probably lapse in between combats and need to be re-cast. It may or may not be possible to heal back up to full HP via e.g. Aura of Vitality in between combats but at least you can leave the spell running during combat.

I think the main thing to be aware of is that there's going to be psychological pressure to deal with the dragons quickly so things don't snowball. Players will (correctly) feel in their bones that if they have to fight all three dragons at once, they're probably going to TPK, so they'll probably nova really hard on dragon 1 and nova as hard as they still can on dragon 2. If the dragons are on a timer, i.e. if there's a possibility that they really do have to fight all three dragons at once if they're too slow killing #1 and #2, there's a real possibility of a death spiral where once things start going a little bit wrong they quickly go VERY wrong, which could be a good or a bad thing depending on your goals as a DM and the kind of game you want to be running.

But ultimately the best way to get a feel for this is to run a few practice combats, with or without your players, using builds/tactics that you've seen them use in actual play. This is exactly as true for three fights in a row as for one fight by itself. There's a thread about one such scenario going on right now (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?623150-Tactical-Challenge-5-10th-level-party-of-four-in-a-subterranean-deadly-fight), with a 10th level party vs. a Deadly x2 followed by a Deadly x4 encounter. So far the main takeaway seems to be that knowledge is power, and that knowing enemy stats and force dispositions can turn a potential TPK into a cakewalk. The same thing will apply to Black Dragons.

E.g. if someone turns into a Giant Ape and starts grappling the dragons as they show up (with Bardic Inspiration Dice and Cutting Words to ensure success) while the rest of the party bombards the dragon from afar from behind partial or total cover, the dragon could essentially be forced to engage with the Giant Ape's plentiful extra HP instead of threatening actual PCs with acidic death. It gets even worse for the dragon if the Giant Ape stuffs the dragon into a Large space so that the Squeezing Into a Smaller Space rules come into play and give attackers advantage on their attacks against the dragon, while it's stuck attacking back at disadvantage. Then the players just need to renew their Polymorph spell between dragons (plus whatever they're using to counter Fear, e.g. Heroism) to give the Giant Ape a fresh set of HP.

Some DMs would view that kind of curbstomp as a disappointing result because the die rolls turn out to not matter much. Some would view it as EXACTLY THE WHOLE POINT OF PLAYING D&D. I'm the latter kind. I like to give players really tough challenges and encourage them to find a way to turn it into a curbstomp by using their heads. However, dragons are special and I give them all spellcasting in order to make it a multi-layered challenge: not only do you have to beat the dragon's breath weapon/physical attacks/mobility/stealth, you also need a plan for countering the counter-countermeasures he's going to use against your countermeasures. E.g. he may do a Quickened Dispel Magic on your Giant Ape, or a Quickened Dimension Door to safety, so you need a Counterspell of your own and a way to make sure you are unlikely to be Counter-Counterspelled. Needless to say this results in dragons with effective CRs much, much higher than the MM dragons.

[MoiMagnus]

Whenever you try to raise difficulty (sequencing encounters, increasing CR, etc), keep in mind that not all PCs will suffer from it the same way. And while that's fine on an exceptional basis, if you start using it frequently, if might end up be frustrating to some specific members of the team.

In particular, PCs that rely on short rest might feel much less powerful than PCs that rely on long rests if you sequences encounters without a possibility of a short rest at the middle (this can be patched with a "5min short rest, max twice per day" variant).

[MaxWilson]

Whenever you try to raise difficulty (sequencing encounters, increasing CR, etc), keep in mind that not all PCs will suffer from it the same way. And while that's fine on an exceptional basis, if you start using it frequently, if might end up be frustrating to some specific members of the team.

In particular, PCs that rely on short rest might feel much less powerful than PCs that rely on long rests if you sequences encounters without a possibility of a short rest at the middle (this can be patched with a "5min short rest, max twice per day" variant).

Or a magic item. E.g. Hanner's Refuge (http://www.ethshar.com/TheUnwelcomeWarlock.shtml): a postage-stamp-sized piece of cloth which when stuck on a wall grows into a full sized tapestry of an idyllic village which PCs can actually step into. Time passes very quickly in the village, and it's possible to spend an hour resting while only a few seconds pass in the outside world, but if you stay too long (more than two hours or so, subjective time) you become trapped in the world of the tapestry until the sun sets (which may feel like a year or more in subjective time). You can give it charges or frequency restrictions on how often it can transmit people back and forth, e.g. once per day in and once per day out.

[Porcupinata]

The big advantage of sequential encounters is that you can easily adjust them on the fly depending on how the party are doing.

Did the party wipe the first wave, barely getting scratched? Add a couple of extra creatures to the second wave.

Did they get unlucky rolls or otherwise do badly, getting more injured and using more resources than you expected them to on the first wave? Make the second wave smaller than it was going to be.

It's a great way to adjust an encounter to avoid a walk-over or a TPK without having to start fudging dice rolls.

[Vogie]

The big advantage of sequential encounters is that you can easily adjust them on the fly depending on how the party are doing.

Did the party wipe the first wave, barely getting scratched? Add a couple of extra creatures to the second wave.

Did they get unlucky rolls or otherwise do badly, getting more injured and using more resources than you expected them to on the first wave? Make the second wave smaller than it was going to be.

It's a great way to adjust an encounter to avoid a walk-over or a TPK without having to start fudging dice rolls.

100% this.

There aren't great guidelines for this because just saying "encounter" can be wildly different once number of monsters, PC classes, spell choices, number of players and their experience is taken into an account. My party of 5 level 8s could probably take on a CR 14 with decent difficulty, but they could cruise through a "CR 30" encounter of 2 CR 6 Cyclopses(?) and 6 CR 3 Minotaurs... just because Hypnotic Pattern Exists.

At the same time, The "Three Adult Dragons in a Row" wouldn't really a tax on your players... if they know that it's coming. If they're just cruising around and stumble on that series of encounters that happens to fall in that category, they'll do poorly. If they KNOW they're going to be running through a gauntlet of such things, just having that in the back of their minds will change how they tackle each encounter. They won't go nova on the first one, limp through the second, and die during the third - They'll pace their spell slots, cooldowns, abilities, consumables and even hit points.