Ignore this, I am a fool.

[Jon talks a lot]

I've started a solo game with me as the DM and my 10 year old brother as the only player. He made a ranger using the Tasha's variant ranger abilities. One would assume that, as he is a single character, even creatures of cr 1 are too much for him.

However, yesterday he fought a Quaggoth, cr 2, by himself, at level 2, and he easily won without making any crazy tactical plays.

I don't balance encounters, but I always play my creatures in a way that is reasonable to their stats, flavor, and any other outside factors.

6 INT monsters don't have the tactical ability or intelligence of the DM, they have the intelligence of something only barely smarter than a wild animal.

This is something I think many DM's struggle with. Don't put the monster in your shoes, get in the shoes of the monster.

A fight against 3 goblins (CR 1/4) was a harder fight for him than against the Quaggoth, because goblins are fluff wise very clever and tactical, so that's how I played them.

Not balancing encounters in my opinion leads to a much more memorable experience than having the players fight a battle perfectly curated and played to their power level which is a mistake that I've heard of a lot of people making.

Players don't want a fight that they should win, they want a fight where they either should lose and come out on top by sheer luck and skill. It feels so much better that way.

[sithlordnergal]

Sooo...two things to note:

First, avoid using CR to determine an encounter challenge. CR is wildly inconsistent, to the point where its almost meaningless. Case in point, Intellect Devourers, Basilisks, and Bearded Devils are all CR 3. Seven level 6 adventurers should be able to handle one of them with ease. However, one of those creatures are far, far more deadly to a party then the others, and usually its the Intellect Devourer since it can incapacitate you for a week. To put it on a scale of how deadly those things are, I had a part of 7 people, all level 6, fight one. It incapacitated a player on the first round it appeared with a single failed save from the player, and had the party not freaked out and focus fired on it, that player would have died. As it is, the player is now K.O.'d for an entire week.

Second, don't fall prey to the Intelligence = tactical ability trap. Its more a mix of Intelligence and Wisdom, given that Wolves can be surprisingly tactical in their approach to hunt down their prey, and even have pack tactics to show this, but have a 3 Intelligence. Not only that, but a lot of creatures we think of being as capable soldiers have low Intelligence, such as Orcs.

[MoiMagnus]

If the session is gonna be made of two big 2h megabattles with multiple layers in a mostly linear scenario (because those battles are the only battles the GM prepared for this session so they're gonna happen), I'd expect them to be balanced. And by "balanced" I mean that the players should feel in high danger and high risk of failure, while having enough tools and backup options available so that the actual probability of failure with clever play are negligible.

However, our group find that this kind of gameplay stray too far away from the intended D&D gameplay and that we had much more fun with homebrew systems tailored to our needs.

So when we actually play official D&D, I totally agree with you. "What monsters should be here are here" is a good way to create encounters (within reasons), in part because it adds the additional layers of "Do we actually want to fight those guys? Do we actually need to or is there a safer way?"

[Unoriginal]

However, yesterday he fought a Quaggoth, cr 2, by himself, at level 2, and he easily won without making any crazy tactical plays.

A CR 2 encounter for a lvl 2 PC is a Deadly encounter, it means said lvl 2 PC should still be able to handle 3 of those per long rest before running out of ressources.




I don't balance encounters, but I always play my creatures in a way that is reasonable to their stats, flavor, and any other outside factors.

Agreed.



6 INT monsters don't have the tactical ability or intelligence of the DM, they have the intelligence of something only barely smarter than a wild animal.

Quite untrue. INT 6 is much more than "barely smarter than a wild animal". There's examples of INT 7 characters that are fully literate and capable of running profitable criminal schemes, to put things in perspective.

Also wild animals, as noted by other posters, do have tactical abilities.



A fight against 3 goblins (CR 1/4) was a harder fight for him than against the Quaggoth, because goblins are fluff wise very clever and tactical, so that's how I played them.

3 vs 1 a way more dangerous situation than 1 vs 1, for a 5e PC. 3 cr 1/4 enemies are also a Deadly encounter for a lvl 2 PC, but with the added factor the PC can't focus all their power on one target and be done with it.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Players don't want a fight that they should win, they want a fight where they either should lose and come out on top by sheer luck and skill. It feels so much better that way.
A fight where both sides are of comparable power and the results depend on intangibles...so... a level-balanced encounter, in other words?

(It's worth noting that 5e's encounter difficulties intentionally skew low-- the assumption is that the party will slowly be worn down and forced to rest by constant easy battles, rather than constant life-or-death struggles. A group that knows what it's doing can easily handle double, triple, even quadruple Deadly encounters if they've still got most of their resources.)

[Dark.Revenant]

It's an old Gygaxian principle: The PCs should actually have a high chance of surviving, but the players should feel like they're on the precipice of defeat.

You can break from this, of course, especially if you don't want the answer to an encounter to be "kill the thing". Getting this across is a matter of tone and communication. For instance, if something is meant to be run away from, have it display its overwhelming power in a direct, unambiguous way if the players try to engage in combat. Maybe a PC dies from this, but don't TPK them in one round.

It's key to understand the capabilities of the PCs and what your monsters are capable of. CR is just a rough way of gauging Turns To Kill and Turns To Die; it's not a true measurement of difficulty. Think of CR 5 as, say, a baseline: it has the numbers to threaten a 5th-level character, but it might not have the powers and abilities to be a true threat in real combat. If you want combat to feel deadly, send a bunch of stat-sticks at the party and use monster abilities in a straightforward manner such that the party can predict, counter, and exploit them. If you want combat to be deadly, use interesting monster abilities against them in the most devious ways you can think of, and use combinations of monsters that amplify each other.

[stoutstien]

Action economy will trump just about any other factor when we are talking about balance. CR sort of addresses it with the encounter multiplier table but it a little more impactful then that.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Action economy will trump just about any other factor when we are talking about balance. CR sort of addresses it with the encounter multiplier table but it a little more impactful then that.

Agreed. And solos, especially, are the most variable. One good round can leave them (or the party) in a significant hole that totally tips the battle.

I ran an Ithillich (CR 22, in lair) against a party of level 10s. Sure, they punch above their weight. But they managed to trick it into starting combat at knife-fighting range (a really really good deception, enabled by the fact that one of the lich's other allies is the identical evil twin of one of the PCs), and the paladin got initiative 22 (so before lair actions and first turn of combat) and managed to put 3 high-level smites[1] (one of which was a crit) into its face before it could go. Oh, and the lich was at initiative 7, after the rest of the party. That one turn shaved off something like 100 hp with bad damage rolls; the others would have killed it just by normal attacks unless it managed to stun them all as a legendary action. Of course, as this was a "special" lich, it got to use its reaction to do a phase transition, so the fight continued in its other, Abyssal lair. It still wasn't nearly as much of a threat as it could have been.

[1] the paladin has an item/boon that lets them shield bash as if dual-wielding and the shield were a 1d4 light weapon, so attack, extra attack, shield bash. All with as big of smites as he had available.

[MaxWilson]

@OP, in general I'm in favor of naturalistic encounters, where creatures are in a scene because it makes sense for them to be there and not to provide a "balanced" encounter. I do confess to tailoring some adventures to the anticipated number of PCs who will be in them, but even then I don't tailor it closely and don't typically consult DMG tables except sometimes after the encounter has been run, to see for "officially" deadly it was supposed to be. I find that even PCs built and played relatively naively can still survive Deadly x3 or x4 encounters fairly easily even if they don't do anything especially clever or utilize broken spells/mechanics. Deadly x6 is tilted against the PCs, and Deadly x10 is definitely difficult and courting death in a straight up fight.


Action economy will trump just about any other factor when we are talking about balance. CR sort of addresses it with the encounter multiplier table but it a little more impactful then that.

Well, it depends. Splitting attacks and damage into multiple creatures / actions is helpful for avoiding single-target disabling via grappling / Hypnotic Gaze / Tasha's Hideous Laughter / etc., but potentially harmful for avoiding AoEs like Fireball / Hypnotic Pattern, unless the creatures are sufficiently dispersed and supporting each other via ranged attacks. Hence (apparently) why the adjusted XP table only scales predicted difficulty as the 3/2 power of quantity instead of the square: 3/2 is a compromise between linear (AoE) and square (direct attacks) scaling.

[Dark.Revenant]

Deadly x3 or x4[....] Deadly x10[...]

By Deadly x10, do you mean for instance if the Deadly threshold is 20,000 XP, you're sending 200,000 (adjusted) XP of monsters at the party?

[MaxWilson]

By Deadly x10, do you mean for instance if the Deadly threshold is 20,000 XP, you're sending 200,000 (adjusted) XP of monsters at the party?

Yes. IME that is too much of a difference to overcome via good luck on dice--defeating a 10x Deadly encounter is possible but requires a plan, and possibly specific spells or consumable magic items (a Horn of Valhalla has prevented several potential TPKs in the past...).

For example, for a 9th level party, 3 Dire Trolls and 3 Fire Giants is 90,000 XP, and the Deadly threshold is only 9600 XP. That's approximately Deadly x10. That encounter is definitely beatable by the right party (e.g. Shepherd Druid 8/Divine Soul 1, Hexblade 1/Lore Bard 8, Jorasco Necromancer 8/Life Cleric 1, Paladin 8/Divine Soul 1) with appropriate tactics, but a naive party that just wades in and starts making attack rolls with a Reckless Barbearian and a Mastermind Rogue and spell support from a Storm Sorcerer and an Arcana Cleric--that party is going to die, or get captured.

Typically if you see a 10x+ Deadly encounter in one of my adventures you can guess that I'm not going to force you to fight it even as a climactic battle. It might be the impetus which is "supposed" to make you flee in a direction where you'll find useful information, or it may be the guards guarding a vault with information and magic items that will make the rest of the adventure "too easy," and you're "supposed" to sneak in or trick them into dividing themselves so you can kill them separately (or ignore the vault entirely and do the adventure the normal way), etc. But I'll never complain if you want to fight them anyway (and suffer the consequences) instead of avoiding them.

I think of Deadly x10+ fights as "walls" between adventure nodes, not passages, but they're not indestructible walls. Just like in X-COM: UFO Defense, you can blow holes in the walls if you want to make your own path.

[J-H]

Jon, you may want to check out http://www.themonstersknow.com/ for a lot of insight on running different monsters.

[Unoriginal]

Jon, you may want to check out http://www.themonstersknow.com/ for a lot of insight on running different monsters.

That insight is to be taken with a grain of salt, as the author has some peculiar and unsupported ideas. IIRC I think he states an INT 8 Gnoll Chief is barely smart enough to craft a weapon, for example.

[MaxWilson]

That insight is to be taken with a grain of salt, as the author has some peculiar and unsupported ideas. IIRC I think he states an INT 8 Gnoll Chief is barely smart enough to craft a weapon, for example.

I don't really like that author's approach to tactics--it's too heavily based on class stereotypes, and having monsters with high ability scores default to certain assumptions about PCs. I don't typically get real insight into actual monster capabilities tactics from that web site--and too many entries wind up just rehashing the same old advice about how to react to bards, or monks, or clerics, same old same old. But, read it and decide for yourself. Maybe I got unlucky and just read all the wrong entries.

Edit: I don't think so though. The latest entry, on Undying soldiers and Counselors, is just more of the same. I don't even see basic stuff mentioned like "with AC 17, Dodging and then using opportunity attacks and Legendary Actions to attack is a powerful way for the Councilor to stay safe while still projecting offensive power, especially while maintaining a spell like Banishment VI or Hold Person V or Spirit Guardians VII."

[Eldariel]

Second, don't fall prey to the Intelligence = tactical ability trap. Its more a mix of Intelligence and Wisdom, given that Wolves can be surprisingly tactical in their approach to hunt down their prey, and even have pack tactics to show this, but have a 3 Intelligence. Not only that, but a lot of creatures we think of being as capable soldiers have low Intelligence, such as Orcs.

I'd generally say Wis is for using the same (in wolves' case, genetically learnt) tactic efficiently and adjusting it to modifiers while Int is for thinking on your legs, coming up with tactics based on the circumstances and switching tactics on the fly. Wis enables efficient tactical orthodoxy in a sense (e.g. wolves are very smart about how they round up their targets, tire them down, and then drag them down but they have a specific toolbox they pretty much always default to), while Int enables tactical creativity.

[MaxWilson]

I'd generally say Wis is for using the same (in wolves' case, genetically learnt) tactic efficiently and adjusting it to modifiers while Int is for thinking on your legs, coming up with tactics based on the circumstances and switching tactics on the fly. Wis enables efficient tactical orthodoxy in a sense (e.g. wolves are very smart about how they round up their targets, tire them down, and then drag them down but they have a specific toolbox they pretty much always default to), while Int enables tactical creativity.

Yeah, Int lets you do abstract reasoning and quantitative reasoning ("he who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense"). For example, wolves might realize that longbows can hurt them, and flee from longbows until night falls... but quantitative reasoning (Intelligence) will tell you that longbows reach a saturation point if there are enough wolves, and that that saturation point is lowest when the distance to traverse is low (due to cover or nightfall or stealth), the ground is clear (not difficult), and the longbowmen have nowhere to easily retreat (base of a cliff, hampered by noncombatants, have valuables with them, etc.). This might lead intelligent wolves to do something new, like set fires to create refugees and smoke for cover and then saturate the defenses with several packs of wolves at once, accepting losses in order to defeat the humans in detail.

Intelligence helps you find optimal solutions through reasoning even in a situation that you've never actually seen before, instead of just reusing the same optima again and again.

[Unoriginal]

I'd generally say Wis is for using the same (in wolves' case, genetically learnt) tactic efficiently and adjusting it to modifiers while Int is for thinking on your legs, coming up with tactics based on the circumstances and switching tactics on the fly. Wis enables efficient tactical orthodoxy in a sense (e.g. wolves are very smart about how they round up their targets, tire them down, and then drag them down but they have a specific toolbox they pretty much always default to), while Int enables tactical creativity.

Wolves don't genetically learn tactics, though, they're taught by the older wolves for one part and figure the rest out.

[huttj509]

Typically if you see a 10x+ Deadly encounter in one of my adventures you can guess that I'm not going to force you to fight it even as a climactic battle. It might be the impetus which is "supposed" to make you flee in a direction where you'll find useful information, or it may be the guards guarding a vault with information and magic items that will make the rest of the adventure "too easy," and you're "supposed" to sneak in or trick them into dividing themselves so you can kill them separately (or ignore the vault entirely and do the adventure the normal way), etc. But I'll never complain if you want to fight them anyway (and suffer the consequences) instead of avoiding them.


In your adventures do the players have a way of knowing how deadly the encounter is? If they've fought one of the creatures recently, and now there are 6 of them, sure, but far too often in my adventures we run up against something with no context to know how tough it is.

Unless we've read the MM/module or something.

For example, 3 Dire Trolls and 3 Fire Giants. I have no clue how tough that is offhand. Were I a player there I'd have no information other than "hmmm, large group of big guys."

[UnintensifiedFa]

In your adventures do the players have a way of knowing how deadly the encounter is?

Perhaps a little Nudge? Like "He looks scarier than most you've fought' or "You're not sure you could win in a standard fight".

Idk if it's essential to the campaign the DM should feel free to give nudges to the Players, of course, it's up to the Players to do what they will with that information.

[Hytheter]

This might lead intelligent wolves to do something new, like set fires to create refugees and smoke for cover

The idea of wolves using fire for tactical advantage is terrifying and I definitely want to use it in a game some time.

[Eldariel]

In your adventures do the players have a way of knowing how deadly the encounter is? If they've fought one of the creatures recently, and now there are 6 of them, sure, but far too often in my adventures we run up against something with no context to know how tough it is.

Unless we've read the MM/module or something.

For example, 3 Dire Trolls and 3 Fire Giants. I have no clue how tough that is offhand. Were I a player there I'd have no information other than "hmmm, large group of big guys."

I generally allow Insight check to roughly gauge how dangerous a thing looks, and Int-checks of course give you information on target's traits (durability, damage, etc.) and thus let you gauge it that way.


Wolves don't genetically learn tactics, though, they're taught by the older wolves for one part and figure the rest out.

It's a combination thereof. They have natural aptitudes and tendencies around which wolf populations build their tactics. This is pretty apparent when you look at dogs bred for whatever purpose: for example guarding a herd vs. guarding a location vs. pulling a sled vs. hunting [any given creature] vs. whatever. This is anthropomorphic selection producing genetics suited for any given task and as any dog owner can tell you, behaviour generally matches their tendencies. They can be trained up to a point, but their genetic features have a significant influence on what kinds of tasks they are able to perform. There's also the fact that there's a stunning amount of unity in wolf pack tactics around the planet in spite of e.g. North American wolves and European wolves having little to no contact for millenia: it's more than cultural, it's a combination of culture and biology.

They are smart and capable of learning, to the excess of what domestic dogs can, but this doesn't change the fact that hunting tactics of wolves are fairly uniform across populations with no contact, which speaks for one of two hypotheses:
1) Only one set of tactics wolves are suited for.
2) Strong genetic foundation for the cultural learning that takes place.

Of which both are really one and the same far as our discussion goes: whether wolves hunt as they do because they're only suited for it or their genetic foundation influences their cultural learning, fact is that their genetics largely dictate their hunting tactics even though they're capable of adapting and creativity up until a point. Of course they do have differences in tactics for different creatures (e.g. against large prey they first try to frighten the creature to run since engaging a large creature that turns to fight is very risky), and there are differences in average pack sizes between populations; they aren't uniform, but there are more similarities than differences.

[MaxWilson]

In your adventures do the players have a way of knowing how deadly the encounter is? If they've fought one of the creatures recently, and now there are 6 of them, sure, but far too often in my adventures we run up against something with no context to know how tough it is.

Unless we've read the MM/module or something.

For example, 3 Dire Trolls and 3 Fire Giants. I have no clue how tough that is offhand. Were I a player there I'd have no information other than "hmmm, large group of big guys."

Yes, there are a number of ways. I'm always looking for even more ways to give players information, but here are three ways you can expect to see me use send difficulty signals:

(1) Prior exposure to these or similar monsters;

(2) NPC comments beforehand on how tough certain monsters are (I have to be careful though not to scare players too much--sometimes need to emphasize to fresh players the difference between an NPC saying "XYZ monster is nigh-invulnerable [from NPC's point of view and to the best of their knowledge]" and the DM saying "XYZ monster is nigh-invulnerable [for reals]");

(3) In many situations I give XP up front, when I drop the problem in your lap, instead of waiting until after when you've solved it. I give this XP proportional to the second-easiest way I have arranged for you to solve the problem. In a pure combat encounter like you might be envisioning, the easiest way to deal with the problem (for now) is to simply flee or surrender, and the second-easiest way is "kill the monsters", so if you wake up in the morning and are told, "You find your house surrounded by Fire Giants and Dire Trolls demanding your surrender--gain 45,000 XP," well, the fact that you're facing (un-adjusted**) 45,000 XP worth of monsters is a pretty clear metagame signal that it will be a very tough fight if you choose to resist.

**Players have no reason to know or care about "adjusted XP". It's just a DMG accounting trick for difficulty calculations. From a player perspective, 1 orc is 100 XP, and 10 orcs is 1000 XP, not 2500 "adjusted XP". Of course players also know from experience that killing one orc ten times in a row is much easier than killing ten orcs at once.


The idea of wolves using fire for tactical advantage is terrifying and I definitely want to use it in a game some time.

The way I envision it happening involves a captured human, a tinderbox, flint and steel, and the wolves growling every time the human tries to step away from the tinderbox.

[Kurt Kurageous]

The idea of wolves using fire for tactical advantage is terrifying and I definitely want to use it in a game some time.

Easily done by a werewolf or better, a wolf-were who has learned to build fires.