"No, wait, challenge rating is fine! Just make sure you have 6-8 combat encounters per adventuring day!" Yeah, that's the topic for the "other video" we alluded to in this one.
. . . Except not all encounters are combats, and the DMG just suggests 6-8 encounters with no specification on whether they are combats, puzzles, or negotiations.
i like the idea of a few quarter turn fights and i say quarter turn fights in that one of the charaters can easily dispatch the enemy be it a low lvl quick easy kill gives the party a sense of danger and waking into a dungeon but also not a big empty room with 10 enemies and 4 of those are at the end i would say push the number up to 30 or 40 and throw them at the party more with pacing and maybe give them the feeling of walking into a place of danger with enemies so i would have most of my fights at 0% chance of death with the big fight being closer to 45%. if i wanted to warn the party do not continue throw 10% chance at them and push it up faster before they get themselves in to deep they actually leave
I feel the biggest problem with a "system" is that level progression is bonkers. CR as a guide is a TPK machine in the first few levels and it's a joke after level 7-8. The squishiness of first levels makes every fight an adrenaline rush. I ran LMoP once for a suboptimal, unlucky party and 2 PCs DIED on the first encounter. Without focus firing or any smart move by me. Just non-extreme luck. I agree that it's an illusion. To me, fights should be easy and look hard and that's all on how the DM presents the fight.
@@tomraineofmagigor3499 monk is the weakest class straight up, it cannot keep up with damage at any level even constantly using flurry of blows, go watch treanttemple monks video about it and it explains in no uncertain terms just how bad the monk is (The answer is that the monk is basically a useless class)
I feel like it's important to remember that a "Medium difficulty encounter" is one that doesn't have much chance of downing a party member and basically no chance of actually killing one. It's an encounter in which one or two party members MIGHT need to use healing resources.
The best part about "balancing" encounters will always be when you prepare an easy fight and your party gets their butts kicked for no apparent reason. It's almost the same with "easy" puzzles lol
I had a DM who ran an adventure back in 3.5 that involved a singular opponent, a rune hound across a bridge of ice or crystal. A party of 5, all decent players......and only the squishy wizard survived by the end (myself). Would've had to retreat too, but a pair of back-to-back crits right before fleeing with a pair of Icy Burst arrows finished the hound off, and I was able to stabilize two of the dying players. TLDR, some fights can be surprisingly challenging 😛
Yeah, I had a group of like 8 lvl 3 players fight against an animated carpet and I had multiple players go down before they killed this one CR ½ monster. That one combat that should have been a joke lasted over an hour.
I threw a roper against the party. The simple act of making it a stalactite 30 feet in the air lowers its effective range from 50 to 40 feet, but instead makes it so where when party members break free, they take fall damage. A single CR5 monster devastated my level 7 party of 6, and it didn’t even have minions.
Lol. We've undoubtedly had nights like this : This should be an easy encounter. I rolled a 1. Uh, ok. And I rolled a 1. Um, ok. So I rolled a 3. Wow... so I rolled a nat 20...
I think it's interesting to hear Monty say this, because I've always assumed that Monty had some alternative way of calculating battle difficulty, as I've always thought he is strangely good and bringing battles to a razor's edge without actually killing characters.
I think a lot of that comes from experience as a DM and knowing his players. Like he said his players for Drakkenheim know the game well and he probably plans for that. If you put those encounters to brand new players they would probably die.
@@Xecryo I play a lot with players with different skills and level of knowledge. I often use a lot of tricks like second waves, low health emergency buttons for NPC captains. Things the players can't see until I use them, so I can judge whether or not to use them, and they can make something feel dangerous, because then they're guessing "are there more, can he do it again?"
What I’ve learned from watching Monty in Drakkenheim is that a good DM does not kill the party they just consistently almost kill the party. They keep it tense both narratively and in combat.
I believe the trick to that is having a deep knowledge of tactics, and then making tactical mistakes when predicting that the players are going to fail.
This is the Search For the Holy Grail right here. I’ve got experienced players, so I have to work to keep them guessing and challenged, they always out-perform the curve. I like mine to go a 4th round, to give them that unexpected sense of “They’re STILL up?!” In my mind, I have three types of combat encounters. There’s one where the combat isn’t the point of the encounter., it’s just there to spice up an investigation/exploration part of the campaign. It’s the MacGuffin/book/ clue they need to survive the encounter to find to get them (back?) onto the trail of the next plot point. I want to scuff them up a little bit, maybe knock off about a quarter of their HP. They can’t get their next clue without a little bit of a scuffle, right? Then there’s the “It’s time for a fight for a fight’s sake!” This one’s gotta be a scrap. I want the party to be down to half HP, and down a bunch of resources, but I don’t want it to get deadly, unless the dice totally overrule me. Then there’s a boss fight. I want them out of resources and down to about a quarter-HP by the end of it, with the chance we could lose somebody if they make a tactical error, or the dice decree it. I always think about how an encounter affects the player-characters. They’re the ones playing the game. The monsters themselves are means to that end. Again, I’ve got experienced players. They know when they’ve actually accomplished something by playing well and beating a tough challenge. I’m trying to give them that feeling.
Love your style on this! Sometimes the planned scuffles go hard and sometimes the boss goes easy, but this attitude seems like it would be very rewarding for your players 😮
@@HandsomeDanVacationRentals I don’t even know about that, my friend. I’m the LEAST experienced at my table, and the one with no prior 5e DM experience. I just fell into it as the one with the most time to invest into it, thinking about it, etc. I try to keep it fun, and I’m lucky to have a table with good table dynamics, similar aesthetics, ideas about what’s “fun,” like that.
@@robcaboose510 Thanks, like I replied to the other comment, I’m the least experienced in our group at running 5e (I’d been away since 2e). But I have the time to invest. I have two weeks to prep a 2-1/2 hour session. I want my friends to win, & have fun, but I HAVE to referee a fair game, too. I always roll out in the open, never behind the screen. So, if I’ve driven myself appropriately crazy during the two weeks leading up to the session, I’ll hit the sweet spot on the encounter balance, and if the dice tell them “Tonite ain’t your night,” then that’s how it goes. 🤷🏼♂️
I just ran a very casual "Intro to D&D" 2-part one-shot for some coworkers, and I have to say, doing it your way is something I should have erred on rather than going too easy on them (which I absolutely did). An attitude like yours is something I will strive for in the future, and discussions like this video are a means to doing that with higher understanding.
I really like the way one of you put it when you said it's more about drama than anything else. Fights that feel like you did something awesome to get through them alive, even though in reality it was almost guaranteed you'd walk away unscathed. That gives longevity necessary to the campaign while also making things interesting moment to moment.
I think "deadly" should mean a decent chance of a TPK. Deadly encounters should be something that the party should try and avoid. Many players have the mindset that every encounter is beatable which easily leads to parties of murderhobos. The world of D&D should be a place that feels like it's a living, breathing world where pissing off the wrong person could get you killed.
Peasant: "Beware, adventurers! The cave on your path hides a terrible fire spitting monster!" Lvl1 Monk: "I enter the cave" DM: "As you approach the cave, a wave of fire coming from the darkness flows through you. You're now a dead pile of ashes, don't bother throwing dice"
@@irenewhitcomb1813 I do partly think it's an issue that 5th edition doesn't really provide many satisfying things outside of combat. Especially if you were playing a martial class like 99% of the time their class features are purely combat focused. Granted you could say that's where the sort of diversity of the party is supposed to come in but a lot of those classes that also have utility skills for things outside of combat are also really good in combat because most of their class features are combat oriented as well.
Deadly in the game just means there's a chance one or more characters might get knocked down to 0 (assuming a party with full resources). If you only want to do a single challenging encounter in a day, you might to do a double-Deadly or maybe even triple-Deadly encounter depending on the party's level and magic items. But if you follow the adventuring day mechanic and put a regular Deadly encounter at the end of the adventure when the party is down on their resources and health, that usually works out just fine.
The problem is, those 'deadly' encounters you want them avoiding are typically the boss encounters they need to defeat to complete their quest. So... if they avoid the deadly encounters, they are avoiding any of the hero questing they are playing the game for. The fights that should be avoided are the ones that nickle and dime the party so they aren't entirely ready for the deadly boss encounter. However, how do you avoid those fights if they stand between you and the boss? My group likes to try to avoid them, but those attempt typically fail due to one person or another in heavy armor. Eh, maybe the quest is to retrieve something or plant something, so it makes sense to avoid the fight. But, if the quest is 'stop this guy before he obliterates the city'... well, the party is going to have to face that fight. What makes sense : "We just saw a dragon fly by. Let's not go poke that." What doesn't make sense : "The dragon just promised to torch every village within 3 days flight before hitting the city... well, we'll we might lose one or two if we face the dragon so let him scorch this kingdom to the ground." If your part seeks out battles outside those required for the quest, throw around some deadly ones for them to wander into. If your players turn murderhobo (solution to everything is combat), then yes give them the opportunity to punish themselves. I mean, if they are attacking citizens in a town then a sting might be made by the city to try and catch the group. On the other hand, if your party is ignoring the quests and wandering off in search of monsters to hunt. Maybe a 'heroes campaign' isn't the right style for the group, and they should just be monster hunters clearing the area around the city. Or if they are attacking civilians, then it should become a villains campaign where they are eventually attacked on sight for approaching a city. (And in that case, part of the problem is that NPCs perish instantly if a PC sneezes on them.) By all means, make a living world where there are deadly encounters everywhere... but the moment those deadly encounters become a threat to a city, it becomes a quest option, and thus the heroes are expected to deal with it. Unless, you have upfront told your players that a lot of things will happen and they aren't expected to resolve much, if any of them. They aren't the heroes saving the world, they're just above average citizens trying to survive their day to day lives. But you also need to be ready for the consequences of having a dragon siege Neverwinter for a year, since no one is able to fight it... what with there being no heroes. And also be ready for them never venturing far from the city since they'll probably lose one or two people just traveling to one of the villages... if the villages are still even there.
Unfortunately the encounters from official modules are generally really poor…I’ve had to rewrite pretty much every encounter for Curse of Strahd. The math here is what I’ve used. Give monsters and players a 55-65% chance to hit or save (looking at AC or saving throw numbers). Give enough effective hit points and damage to last a few rounds (between 2 and 4 depending. Using %chance to hit and such). And then don’t rely on the numbers to make it interesting. Use neat abilities, terrain, puzzles, weaknesses, narrative beats, alternative goals (not just kill them all), and enemy morale to make the encounter interesting. Make sure your monsters have a similar number of actions per round as your party. Make sure you don’t have a monster that can kill a party member in one hit (unless you specifically choose that to be part of it)…yeah. There’s a lot of art to it more than science.
Yeah like the video I do not usually go by CR rating when balancing encounter, I use the DPS of the party vs the Health and DPS of the enemies consider how many attacks it will take to kill on or the other, special abilities included in offense and defense and determine it like that. I think CR is broken because just plopping a monster into the game with no thought of how they will interact with the party is quite useless for so many reasons
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said we want drama in combats. That’s what we’re really after. My mind is now veering off to design encounters that are dramatic but don’t necessarily threaten the party (threats to others they care about, destruction of important things, even fighting a friend that is mind-controlled etc). It’s the possibility of failure that makes a great encounter, but failure can mean more than just the death of party members.
My personal DM experience is that the encounters that get the biggest reactions have moments that LOOK dangerous or dramatic even if they aren't mechanically that difficult. A monster that shrugs off an attack without flinching because it has good defenses comes off as more intimidating than one that hits harder but is easier to hit. An ogre that grapples and picks up a PC is more terrifying than one that does the more optimal trick of just swinging a club. The second monster that breaks invisibility to punch the Wizard from behind. The additional wave of minions that comes in from the flank after a round of fighting. The fact that the entire place is on fire, or the fight is on a very narrow ledge. In these cases, it doesn't matter if the thing's probably going down in a round - the players don't FEEL like everything is under control.
It would be a good idea to read the definition of CR from the DMG for context. I was surprised when I read it. CR means it is easy for a well-rested party of the corresponding level.
Challenge rating doesn't mean it's a difficult encounter for a party of 4 of the same level. On page 82 of the DMG, there's a table that's a part of a section on how much experience an adventurer can handle at different difficulties. Using 1 monster of a CR of the party level tends to get between a medium and hard encounter. Since I don't run 6-8 encounters a day (the recommendation comes from this section in the book), I tend to run exclusively hard to deadly encounters, which seems to balance out the campaign nicely. The combat obviously requires a little tweaking from just dropping monsters straight from the MM onto an open field, but overall I think the balance is fine.
the real formula is the Daily budget xp, you just can run 2 deadly+ encounters per day... but ppl dont do this, they dont even make 50% of total budget before a long rest and say "oh, 5e it is too easy".
@@claytoncardoso4538 Then maybe the expectations of THAT MANY encounters is unrealistic for the average DnD game. Either way, it means the CR system needs a redesign
@@shawnwolf5961 I don’t think 3-4 encounters (deadly difficulty) is a lot for an adventuring day. They don’t have to be combat, just scenarios that require the PCs to use 1/3 to 1/4 of their resources (or more) to resolve.
@@shawnwolf5961 average d&d game? bro, you can't fix something that people play wrong. The normal thing, since 2e, is to do the whole dungeon with only 1 day's resources. If you play tabletop dnd like it's a baldurs gate pre-patch where you press rest at every corner... the problem is with you, not the system.
@@jefR6875 But the rules aren't 3-4 a day, it's 6-8. Most tables just don't have that much combat in one session. I think WotC assumed people would have a lot more combat (and maybe they did back when 5e first came out, idk). But for OneDND they need to rework their CR system, and I don't think there's any room to objectively disagree on that tbh.
Great watching this after chatting to you guys at PAX Unplugged! Fantastic stuff, definitely want to do something like this for my group as we have 5 players, 18th level characters, major magic items AND a dedicated healer who can output a LOT of healing. Very much proves a lot of theories and gut feelings I've had over many years of DMing. VERY good video! Thanks guys! Edit: Also, interesting how this related to the info from the core rules that assumes a party is fighting 8-10 encounters PER LONG REST. I know streamed games are different (3 hours, can't have 6 sessions in a row of combat it's too dull) but I don't think I've ever played in private games that have 8-10 encounters per long rest (and yeah I know encounters doesn't always mean combat encounter, but encounter = loss of resources/threat to the party).
Damn and I thought getting the players to do 4-5 in one day was hard. Getting them to do more than 5 encounters before a long rest seems very difficult.
@@TheJerbol It's very hard to tell from the rules if the assumed 10 encounters per long rest is 2 combats and 8 traps/social/puzzle encounters or 5 combats and 5 other encounters, or mainly combat encounters
Hi. Interesting discussion. With 30 years of DnD on my back I think one important point was missed out: It is most relevant how smart your Monsters are. Players usually identify the most critical opponent first and focus/boost their attacks accordingly. In return many encounters feature monsters that just dish out to next possible targets, thus spreading their damage and being less threatening. However, if the DM has his monsters act smart, concentrate on what is most dangerous for them (e.g. cleric in case of Undead), then a fight may be much more difficult without changing any resources. Cheers from Germany....
An additional point to consider, methinks: That table in the D&D Master book is meant to help when there is a less experienced player base on average. There is a huge difference in efficiency when it comes to using combat capabilities between very experienced players and a group of beginners. An experienced group knows exactly when to cast what, how to ensure getting advantage on attacks etc. while a less experienced group may not. In consequence a specific monster may be more or less challenging without changing its stats. To give an example: We are a long established team, about 4-5 players on a regular base. Some time ago one of the players got a new girlfriend and she decided to check out what that hobby is he is "wasting" his time one. In addition, my wife also decided to join in. So we had two additional players adding power to the group which was compensated by our DM of course. But while our ladies combat moves were interesting, surprising and even funny, so adding to a nice experience, they made the group less efficient in general and some fights became intensive that would otherwise just have been a warm-up.
One thing to account with the CR is that a lot of the assumptions made are based on a 6 encounter advanturing day. I've never met a table that plays 6 encounter per adventuring day.
I don't think it's the core of the issue, but it does add to the problem a lot. I think the core of the CR problem is that a lot of encounters are not decided by doing hit point damage, so DPR, AC and hit points should not be the focus of CR calculations.
In a large dungeon or something, my table could easily have six encounters. But that’s the exception, where it’s not feasible in-character for them to stop and find a safe place to rest once they start getting worn down. For general run of the mill playing, it’s unusual for them to have more than two in an adventuring day, because they’re running around the city or traveling through the wilderness, and their characters know their limits and have the freedom to head back to the inn or pitch camp at any time. So once any one character starts approaching the red line, the entire party is likely to ease off on the adventuring until they’ve completed a long rest.
To even complicate things further, another variable is the skill of the people playing in the game. I'm a newer DM that plays with a group of friends that have finished one campaign total, and their builds, use of abilities and strategy will not rival what your group of dedicated players and students of the game will achieve. Great video. We are just starting Dragon Heist tomorrow and I've been binging you guys looking for tips, ideas and ways to make it awesome!
It doesn't help that most of the monsters themselves don't follow the rules of challenge rating. Take the ballgura my favorit punching bag for Cr and the guy has the same hit points as a Cr one creature. Without his reckless attack he also wouldn't ever hit the broadside of a barn. Yet he is Cr 5 which is higher than a banshee, and a few other monsters. He is less stronger than a Cr 2 sea hag or Cr 3 green hag. His resistance helps against spells except his saving throws and stats are so bad they are near garenteed to succeed anyway while counting his magic resistance. Dude is less intelligent than dumb brute monsters like ogres. He showcases a bunch if interesting in isolation mechanics but fails on every front while being an easy showcase of why Cr makes no sense.
I don't think it's the core of the issue, but it does add to the problem a lot. I think the core of the CR problem is that a lot of encounters are not decided by doing hit point damage, so DPR, AC and hit points should not be the focus of CR calculations.
When played optional, assuming a wisdom of is enough understanding for utilizing basic tactics, a Barlgura cr comes from being effective with its ambush tactics. 5e description is horrible at describing their tactics, having two spells that let them walk towards the party, another to create diversions, and another to prevent movement in a area. They get deadly in Corrdinated groups or surprise one-on-multiples of one. If not playing this way a Barlgura false onto a squishy cr 3. Do find demons damage resistant ably earns is money against blaster spellcasters that don’t understand the concept of diversity spell damage.
I may have missed it, but I think a key thing to factor in as well is action economy, I always find it feels much more deadly having an enemy that hits 3/4/5 times than an enemy that maybe hits once or twice!
This... This explains, why my last two big encounters (homebrewed, but based on close to cr constructs) made good encounters. The players felt the message and had some level of drama, while also feeling the needs to come up with solutions, with actions of desperations. I talk a lot with them regarding their change or if they see their chars change or develop in a direction, and I try to help them with that.
I have personally found in my campaigns that the second I surprise my players with anything, the combat gets significantly harder. Fighting insurmountable forces? They go seal team six on the baddies. Regular old zombies come up from the ground around the players? Nearly lose 2 of them. So personally, I would recommend finding ways to add a twist to the combat to force players to think on their feet a bit more. Definitely haven't checked the CR of anything I've used in a while though.
I agree. Encounters become considerably more difficult when you add other factors into the mix. Things like terrain, natural hazards (spike pits, lava, fast moving water, uneven terrain, etc), wandering monsters, surprise rounds and more. Monster tactics help a lot too. Multiple encounters across a single adventuring day is also important. If you don't wear down your party's resources, how do you expect them to find anything difficult?
Enemy waves is the best thing I've ever done as a DM, especially for deadly encounters. Start with the same amount of enemies as are in the party. So if you have 5 PC's, put 5 enemies in the combat. Unless every single character in the party is capable of instantly wiping out each enemy on their turns - you should have 1 or 2 remaining. Next round, add a couple more at the beginning of the initiative order - kind of like a lair action. Third round, add another 2-3 but make one of them a stronger enemy. Round 4, add a couple more weak ones, and by the fifth (they most assuredly wouldn't be able to kill all of them, by the end of every round) you bring out a boss or "boss" and with the remaining forces and a somewhat drained party - it becomes a very intense encounter. I have never done this were it wasn't nail biting and the best part is that it was only one combat encounter, but felt like 4-5. And if you feel the party is becoming overwhelmed - just don't bring in the next wave, and give it another round or 2. The first one I did was with a bunch of Sahuagains and 5 Level 5 characters. Round 1: 4 Sahuagins + 2 Sahuagin Champions Round 2: 4 more Sahuagins show up Round 3: 2 more Sahuagins show up. Round 4: 1 more Champion shows up Round 5: They were getting overwhelmed, so I didn't bring any this round and they were able to take out a few more. Round 6: 1 Sahuagin Blademaster shows up, along with 2 more Sahuagins show Then the next few rounds are them versus the Blademaster and the remaining enemies. It works incredibly well, especially when Sahuagins are getting advantage on hurt enemies. The time crunch, the spell management, the chaos, the numbers - it works incredibly well IMO, and works way better than just having 13 Sahuagin, 3 Sahuagin champions and 1 Blademaster all standing the same room and having to fight them all at once (which they would have lost).
One side being collectively surprised is a huge swing in balance. I recently did what I expected to be a moderate to easy encounter, but the enemies killed it on their stealth rolls to set up an ambush and suddenly with a surprised party they were in a fight for their lives. Another one recently I surprised the party and an assassin-style NPC downed the tank in one turn. Conversely, if the party gets a surprise on the enemy, it usually becomes a cakewalk. One round of mostly unmitigated damage from one side has a massive effect in a math game like this.
@@johnsmith-fy8jo 1d4 + spell casting isn't that meaningful. So much so that healing word is used only to bring dead people back to the combat, but it isn't used as a mean of reseting the party hp between fights
As highlighted, encounters are an art. Static balance/CR is a bit of an illusion at worst, starting point at best. Dice swing, and that's what makes it fun. In lieu of static pre-designs, I started thinking of encounters as KITS to give DMs flex. I aim for players to last 3 rounds, then tune encounters as-needed at/for the table. Monsters can call in backup.
This would be an amazing tool if it was a spreadsheet with all the MM monsters data in it. Where you could fill out HP, and damage output and it would spit out a list of monsters that met the parameters within a margin of error.
It’s been really fun to see how after they made a book they started to think a lot more critically about game design. It’s been fun to watch! Writing that book really taught them a lot! It’s hard to know where your knowledge gaps are until you’ve had outside input like you would get creating a book.
Nah. It is well presented, but I assume anyone giving the PHB and DMG a casual read will realise this. I know everyone in my group did. We consider CR a joke. But then most of the people I play with have a background in maths and physics, so maybe if you have a group of theatre trained actors, they will not.
@@rogerwilco2 yeah, so do I. What’s your point about math backgrounds? It still takes time to do all the math to present this. It’s not a 4 minute process. Of course we all already knew the challenge rating system was garbage. The community has been bitching about it for awhile. But it was nice to see some actual numbers that most of us simply have no time for, presented well, and demonstrating just how bad off it actually is.
I think you need a mix of combat types. Sometimes, your party needs to feel OP! Give them a low level encounter where the wizard AOE's an entire swarm, leaving the leader there to interrogate. Other combats need to have unique elements that are intended to counter the party's standard strategies. At the end, I always try to play my BBEG by-the-book, so when they die they know it was a fair fight *evil smile*
Personally I always increase a monsters HP and run "deadly" encounters. Sometimes they last more than a few rounds but my players always feel like they are on the razor's edge. I always get comments about how much fun they have and how they felt like they were close to losing. Personally I don't worry about any of my players dying because death saves in 5E are so forgiving, even when a PC goes down there is a pretty good chance the Cleric will have a healing word to save them before they actually die. Unfortunately it's not a science just more of an intuition and reading the table.
I think this is how a lot of DMs play. This totally changes the value of a bunch of classes in the game and most of the combat magic items, and entirely changes the intentions of every mob in the game. If the cleric has 10 healing spells and one fight … they can burn through spells like it’s nothing. Sure! Now give them 6-8 fights in the day. Instead of 10 spell slots in that one fight they have less than one spell slot in each fight. Is the cleric going to heal someone? Will the cleric spend a spell slot out of combat knowing that’s one fewer spell to deal damage or heal with? It becomes a different game. This other game? That’s the game they created. You’ve been playing something else with a book that looks similar. A once per day magic item … and you do combat once per day. Yeah, neat. When you’re doing half a dozen combats per day using that magic item is a big deal! Changes the value of it entirely. Also changes the value of anything that recharges on rest … ki points, warlock spell slots, superiority dice, action surge ….
Love this content. I would also try to include a factor for how intelligent the creatures are. Enemy tactics as controlled by the DM can seriously swing encounter difficulty.
I know you guys are looking for a mathematical equation for this, but I typically like to have more creatures to add to the encounter on standby in case it's too easy and have something that my creatures would do to waste an action or 2 if the encounter is too hard. Example I had a party face three stone Giants. If the encounter was too easy I was going to have more Giants come out of the nearby cave. If the encounter was too hard (Richard ended up being) I had one or two of the Giants waste their action vomiting because in this story they were addicted to eating acid from a nearby acid pool.
At CR 13, use the deadliest creature in D&D: the skeleton horde. For Cr 13, that's 50 skeletons. The most threatening encounters I've ever run involve lots of skeletons, and have been tense and savage and the players really felt in danger. The point being, action economy is king!
For a one-shot, I had an opening that started in media res with the BBEG already having won and his skeleton army already overrunning the city, and the party just needed to escape. These were regular skeletons-just for every one defeated, another took its place. It was incredibly dicey; almost lost a couple PCs in the very first scene. There's definitely something to be said for quantity over quality, provided you can run the scene smoothly without getting bogged down.
Great until your DM uses too small of a map and tidal wave go brrrrrt. Oopsie my level 6 wizard just did 300+ damage in one turn because your horde clumped a little too much (real story).
Another fun way to see the wonk of monsters CR is adding sidekick levels to them, some of these 1/2 CR creatures are not like the others and with only slight changes become lopsided easily.
Oh yeah, if a Shadow gets Sidekick levels it becomes an absolute UNIT. And Shadows by themselves are already more powerful than other CR 1/2 Monsters!!
The important thing you completely missed, is that with multiple bad guys in an encounter to beef up the enemy hit points, they will deal less damage to the players as combat rounds pass due to monster death. So if they're doing 70 damage, but a third of the monsters are killed at the end of the first round, now they're doing closer to 46 damage. The third round the monsters might only do another 23 damage.
I would love to see these theories put into playtesting - and putting that encounter into video format - and put it side by side with an encounter built in one of the popular CR calcs (like Kobolds fight club)
Great Video. A little on Probability math. All things being equal, with a 5% chance of dying, this is a 95% survival rate. Should you survive the first combat, you have 95% survival on the second. So the survival rate of 2 combats together is 90.25% (.95*.95) Three combats is 85.7375% etc. Following this math down, the survival rate of 100 combats is 0.5921%
@@ZetaMoolah ok, for clarity, I usually run a monthly one-shot. It will have an easy and hard encounter, or a deadly encounter. I like to have a mix of monsters and then the characters level up for the next month.
Just like to say this video helped a lot, as a new DM, planning my very first one shots and campaign a big worry for me was balancing encounters. This gave me so much to think about and a lot of tools i could take away to implement into my planning. So thanks guys 👍
You attack your players with an underpowered group of enemies, but then story tell your way into making the encounter appropriately hard to give the feeling of that razor's edge to your players. Have the enemies get a reinforcement; have something explode; have the environment suddenly intervene to impair your players. There are enough ways to buff the enemies during the encounter to make it feel consequential.
Reinforcements are always a great tool, and allows you to bring more powerful enemies into play. I also utilise a couple of simple tactics for intelligent monsters. If I have a bunch of archers then I will have one with a leadership role which can organise the archers to fire in synchronised volleys (becomes an aoe with a saving throw), this also speeds up the combat for the amount of creatures but also increases the damage output of those creatures. I also have shield walls (gives cover to those in it when attacked from the front) and pike lines (gains polearm master reaction if attacked from the front).
This. I think CR is just a guideline. DM has a number of ways to make it harder or easier when required. Like throwing something at a strong party to soften them up before the actual encounter. Doing these calculations like you would do for a PC RPG scripted encounter to determine if the difficulty is appropriate is kind of meaningless.
This was the best D&D video I watched in a while. Love you guys. Yeah, its really tough. I'm currently running an homebrew Theros-Setting and want the Characters to feel like heroes of greek myth. But heroics only come with danger. I almost gave up on challenge rating & just slap things there that fit the theme and are not OVERLY deadly. Adjust things during the combat as I go, thats what the DM screen is for. It aint easy.
When I want an encounter to look and feel harder than it is, I break out the hourglass. You get 30 seconds or suffer from panic, I roll on the confusion table. The phones go down, and everyone suddenly remembers what's on their spell list and in their inventories. I will sometimes do this for traps as well but that actually can be quite deadly so it's usually a very obvious trap or dangerous situation that gets it, like a burning building or something.
From Xanathar's we can see that the intended challenge rating of a solo monster for 3 x 13 lvl party is CR 15 legendary creature, not 13 normal. Adult Bronze/Green dragon doesn't have as much HP but it can fly, has legendary resistances and breaths stuff from afar. It is also a monster that most likely should have a lair to back it up. Not that it would be deadly in most cases, but I would say it would be a moderate challenge. This is also not considering the rather crazy off curve artifact weapon or other magical items that the party most likely has.
So, funny thing right: Paizo, for both Pathfinder first & second edition, & for Starfinder, actually remedy this issue. Instead of balancing CR to a party of 4, they created a chart that shows how CR should, roughly, be adjusted to your party size. The creatures in question are balanced under this CR gradient. It also helps that in PF2E & Starfinder they've removed the RNG from health so that it's just a flat increase per level, which gives the GM more to work with on dealing damage to the players.
Ahh...a fellow path player. I just started 5e this month and just picked up lvl 2. I love the simplicity of 5e however the challenge rating is bonkers hahaha. The bandit captain as CR 2 is crazy lol.
I dunno man, I DM'd for Pathfinder 1E years ago, and their CR system is pretty busted too. Didn't matter how I adjusted the encounters according to their charts, my party usually just steam-rolled most encounters even when I deliberately made them all deadly according to the CR charts. I even beefed up some of them with appropriate player class levels that, according to their charts, should have made the enemies way more dangerous - and it really didn't do much. My party put out so much damage, fights tended to rarely last more than a few rounds and they were rarely ever in actual danger - not the least of which because of the party Paladin.
@@Draeckon Rolls can still have a factor in it, & they did iron out a lot of issues from first to second edition. I think the guideline gives a better idea of what to bounce off of, instead of a vague balance around a party of 4. It's not perfect; but it's better.
One of the things I noticed is that PCs have WAY more action economy than monsters. My two fixes for the broken CR: 1) Maximize hp for monsters 2) Give them a number of feats equal to there PB, focusing mostly on action economy
For me, the hardest thing to consider is all the different abilities some monsters have that don't relate directly to damage, but can make encounters harder
This has definitely changed the way I will think about combat encounters and I think it will lead to being able to create encounters that are balanced in whatever way I want them to be.
3.5 was wild. You could have a character who existed as two different entities take levels in rogue, take knives that hit twice for every attack, and add hair knives for extra hits whilst the fighter does two attacks with the wizard playing rocket tag in the background, nuking everything xD challenge rating stood no chance haha
Also, it was a nightmare to calculate challenge rating for more than one creature or for a number of players different from four. As a DM, balancing encounters in 3.5 was almost impossible.
Not to mention that in 3.5, attack bonus vs monster AC made no sense at higher levels. If you wanted to give even a small kind of miss chance to the party fighter you had to artificially inflate AC, otherwise there was almost no point rolling the dice. But then this could push AC out of the reach of any rogues or monks who tended to have a much lower attack by that time. Plus, this meant if you wanted to challenge the party with humanoid you were basically forced to give the enemy mad magic items like +5 weapons and armour to even begin to make a challenge. Which of course the party would insist on looting, resulting in ridiculous situations like the party hauling dozens of +5 weapons and suits of plate mail around a dungeon! And this doesn't even touch on the imbalance of high level spellcaster PCs!
@@PJRZ1 That mostly depend on the incredibly stupid way the "wealth" was managed and the fact that AC didn't go up with levels as attack did. If you take as granted that a character would have a certain amount of wealth at a certain level, that says nothing about what kind of bonuses he would get from its items. Also, if you grant the players to always be able to buy what they could not find in loot, you will soon lose control over the amount of personalized bonuses each character would accumulate. Another wrong assumption on the part of the developers was that buffer type characters would use their powers and spells mostly to buff their better suited companions, while reality has shown us that they will more gladly buff themselves so they can rob the job of the other players. One last wrong assumption is that items will get consumed, destroyed, lost, stolen and, at some point, replaced by different ones. That's why the sunder, disarm and grappling maneuvers were in the game. That's why badly failing a save should have damaged the equipment too. That's why most of the magic items found during adventures should have been consumables. Treasure tables in 2nd edition and earlier versions of the game were built so that permanent magic items were incredibly rare, and there was no market for them either. But obviously, not many DMs actually went to the length of destroying or stealing the equipment of their players (the common excuse was that it is too much a hassle to apply all the rules). And the really bad habit to start a campaign above first level added to the problem, since each character basically started already with a perfectly customized and highly efficient set of magic and mundane items, throwing the balance in the bin. All this without even starting to address single items or effects which were highly exploitable in many situations.
I think this is a great start to make something more mathematically accurate. You would also need to consider the type of monster vs the types of characters. For example, you might have a high CR monster with great HP and DPR capabilities but if it is all dependent on being in melee and your players can create unfair ranged opportunities then that CR essentially turns into a CR 0. But if you have a monster that can fly or teleport or even turn invisible, that becomes a completely different challenge level.
Nice Vid, guys. In my Excel sheet, I calculate Party Total HP and also AVG HP (to answer the question of who might go down if focussed). I then calculate their Avg DPR, and their Burst DPR (for 1 round). Once I have those numbers, I then go to the monster side. I calculate amount of HP monsters require to last 1 round (aka "trash mobs"), 2 rounds (avg mobs), 3 rounds ("lieutenants") and 4 or more rounds (bosses) vs the party's avg DPR, and amount needed to survive their Burst DPR. Then I calculate monster damage by taking the Avg HP of the party and assigning DPR to the monsters as 0.1 x the Party Avg HP (for trash mobs), 0.2 (for avg monsters), 0.25 (for LT's) and 0.3 (for bosses). What I get is trash monsters who will only live a round and only deal 10% of a PC's health, or avg monsters which live 2 rounds and deal 20%x2 or 40% total, or LT's who live 3 rounds but deal 25%x3=75%, or bosses who live 4 rounds and who could deal 30%x4=120% of the Avg HP of the PCs (meaning, 1 goes down, or else 2 get really beat up). I then tweak the numbers up or down if I add special abilities to the monsters (flight, spellcasting, resistances, etc.) I can also use either the normal HP or Burst HP for the monster depending on if the PCs get there at the beginning of the day or end of the day (when their resources are depleted.)
I've been putting alot of thought into the subject of this video. I've created a spreadsheet for DPR calculations specifically to populate suggested statistics for a monster, in a similar way to the chart that they give you in the dmg. I'm going to test it out this week and see if it's a better representation of what a CR is supposed to do.
I think another thing to consider is that the party should be having 4-6 encounters per day. Not each encounter has to be combat but I think part of the balance is also "how much of the party's resources are depleted per encounter?" It's why boss encounters are so tough to balance in 5e.
I think the other thing you might be not factoring in is how often you are encountering battles. Long rest -> Storm giant -> long rest is fine and a piece of cake. A storm giant in the middle of a blizzard with more encounters on the way....that is gonna be an issue. I think the CR ratings were built with a specific number of encounters in mind. I typically like one big battle per rest instead of 5 stupid easy ones that drag out my session times, so yeah I can see why a CR13 wouldn't be sufficient. But if you are throwing 5 encounters per day, that action surge shouldn't even really be factored in, spell slots dwindle...etc...
There's no way to factor in resting, so no they don't consider it. Players are overpowered. There's only a select few of monsters that are overpowered, mainly with save or die abilities. They also never found a way to match the power of magic with melee damage, melee damage is a complete joke.
An extremely important point. The game itself factored in more encounters per day than the average table actually has. I think they counted on 4-5? Something like that. Typical table is 2-3
The DMG states an adventuring day is 6-8 rests and 2 short rests. That’s what the game is balanced for. Then people don’t do that … then people are concerned with the game not being balanced …. 🤣 Every D&D channel has a video like this. “How come when I play the game exactly the way I want to instead of how I was told to do it the game isn’t as hard as I’d like it to be?” Game design and balance is a complex topic. There are variables you can change that will wildly impact the output.
@@wingedhussar2909 Eh, melee is generally not resource intensive and has more magic items that can combo off of it. A flametongue longsword averages 16 damage per hit at 20 STR, which puts it at 48 per round on a level 11 Fighter. And that’s completely unlimited and before you work in any additional damage bonuses. As a rule caster magic items have finite per day uses and don’t give anything like that kind of bonus damage
@@wingedhussar2909 Overpowered compared to what? DnD isn't a symmetrical game, such as a miniatures wargame where both sides have equal amont of troops at their disposal. The DM can always challenge the players by increasing the difficulty or number of enemies in an encounter. In fact, having an endless supply of monsters available to the DM is what *I'd* call overpowered 😄
It gets much worse when you start running the numbers and put the monsters through this rating system and you find that the example CR 13 monster may actually have an offensive CR of 16 and a defensive CR of 10, which will then average out to that CR 13. As for a system for making more balanced encounters, I would recommend looking at Sly Flourish's "Lazy Encounter Benchmark" where your players are converted to monster CR and then you build an encounter based on total CR of the player party vs the monster total CR. It's a great system and I love using it.
Here's the basics of the LEB system. Player Conversions Levels 1-4, Player level x 0.25 Levels 5-10, level x 0.50 Levels 11-16, level x 0.75 Levels 17+, level x 1 Player Example: 1 @ level 4 (4 x 0.25 = 1), 3 @ level 3 (3 x 0.25 = 0.75 x 3 = 2.25), = 3.25 CR Party pool Then subtract monster CRs from that total until you reach zero for a hard encounter, anything in the negative would be a deadly encounter. Monster group 1: CR 1 x 2 (2), CR 1/2 x 2 (3), CR 1/4 (3.25), total of 4 monster up against 4 players. Monster Group 2: CR 2 x 1 (2), CR 1/4 x 5 (3.25), total of 6 monsters to 4 players (1.5:1)
The problem with this video is that they do not take in account of the "adventuring day". The whole system is built around it, so not including the key assumption will make the whole system fall apart.
@@Cloud_Seeker This is pretty valid since as the adventuring day goes on, the players overall power (or CR from my later comments) will reduce while all monsters are always at the ready and 100%.
Guys, but did you check the chapter on calculating encounter difficulty? I dont believe 5e is CR od a monster is calculated for a party of 4. The CR is an abstract value you use to calculate the difficulty of the encounter, taking into account all monsters and all PC levels
It is based on 4. A CR 5 monster is supposed to be a medium encounter for a 5th level party of 4. There's a section on calculating it for larger or smaller groups, which may be what you are thinking of
@@ADT1995 And the definition of a "medium encounter" is basically that a party might use some resources. Medium isn't "evenly matched" - medium is victory, with no casualties, and a character might be missing some hp. A 50/50 encounter (IE, evenly matched) - way past deadly
@@rich63113 that's why I said "medium encounter" not "balanced encounter" Despite the name medium means that the party will kick the monsters teeth in unless they are really low on resources Thanks for bringing this up, I should have included it in my original comment Personally my combats range from hard to >5x the deadly threshold just to keep players from obliterating everything.
@@ADT1995 Same. Anything below deadly is just a speedbump. At my table the party usually faces two or maybe three combat encounters between long rests, so I start from double deadly and go up from there.
Love your advice here and that you did the maths in a real campaign situation. Surprised at the results though. I thought they'd made it 2-3 rounds, not 1-2. My big gripe with their encounter design is that their monsters' damage comes more from high damage on success than consistent but lower damage, so you can't really just say 'I'll just use a higher CR monster, since the average damage works out' because if you do that, you're not factoring in the variance. I think a really good homebrew battle balance calculation system has to try to account for variance as well.
I'd be curious to see what the numbers look like if you balanced around Hard / Deadly encounters. By design, Deadly encounters are advertised as only having a chance of character death. The ones before then are undoubtedly going to be much lower risk then.
The “hard” and “deadly” encounters assume 6-8 encounters that day. That’s 5-7 other opportunities to diminish party resources … plus out of combat instances. No one should be surprised that when you completely change class resources and magic resources that the expected challenge of a fight or a monster isn’t the same. It’s like …. If I give you have as much salary as you have now and then talk to you about your disposable income … things will seem harder, right? But, if suddenly you have twice as much money as you make today you’ll have more disposable income. The same things won’t be as hard to buy. Imagine you have 10 spells per day. And you have 1 fight per day. Now imagine you have 10 spells per day and you have to get through 8 fights and also maybe have spells for non combat encounters ….. How excited is your cleric going to be to heal you when they have 3 fights left to go and have 2 spell slots left for all healing and also all offensive spells and also for any out of combat stuff? Sounds like a different game, right? And, you can rest early … but we’re just gonna have to increase the odds of your rest being interrupted.
@@zero11010 I don't disagree. Though I think what they want out of Medium encounters sounds like what falls under the category of Deadly encounters according to WOTC at least. I normally do about the standard encounters per rest, but even when I don't using Deadly encounters generally seems to still be a challenge.
i'm pretty new to DM'ing, but i'm a sucker for liar actions even with one of the first quests they did at LV 1 the monster had a liar action, giving them a sort of clock and diverting their attention making them think "do we clear the minions first, rush the boss, how fast do new minions come and in what ways?"
The solution I use is having monsters with scalable attributes. You can justify it with the notion that same monsters are not clones, one maybe older, another maybe in the best shape, another is the dumb brother :) So the HPs, the AC and every other attribute go from a range of X to a range of Y, and "coincidentally" the group is going to face the one that is not OP and also not a joke, according to what the DM finds appropriate. Other than that, there is also the old trick of adding last minute minions who serve and help the boss.
Excellent analysis. Been running games for 37 years and have always lived by the philosophy of the difficulty of the encounter is based of the narrative. - Is this supposed to be an epic battle where your players are fighting for their very lives, but they are mopping the floor with your baddies? Time to up the intensity and make adjustments on the fly. - A routine combat encounter is wrecking your players? Milk the dramatic intensity, but make adjustments on the fly. TL;DR - always be prepared to do what is necessary to make the story exciting for your players, make the stakes matter, and give them moments to be the heroes. You will never go wrong with this. You and your players will have gaming memories you talk about decades later. Thank you for all your hard work Dungeon Dudes!
Thank you! I can imagine that it is not simple, balancing schedules and all. But they are a joy to watch in your campaign and I truly feel that they will add to your content, which is already excellent.
Because of all the player options and potential homebrew, you can never make one system that will reliably always count as an Easy or Medium encounter. When an Easy encounter is the 5th of a day, it may not be that easy. I feel almost no DM has 6-8 encounters in a day. Thats why we want the combats we DO have to make an impact. In that regard we need to up the ante. When I compare monsters from 3.5edition with monsters of general same build and same CR then you see that actually at very low CR's (1/8 up to CR 1) monsters in 5e are harder to kill than in 3.5. In 3.5 giant rats was the way to go at 1st level. If you put in 4 giant rats against a party in 5e you might end up with a TPK, (which happened). Then as CR increases monsters in 5e become weaker and weaker. After CR12 differences become big. This is also because of the Bounded Accuracy principle, I get that, but I do feel that WotC have been too cautious here. Creatures of CR12 and higher should be better than they are now. For a time I have solved this by actually using the 3.5 monsters in my 5e campaigns. But now I have build a system where I have given monsters Damage Reduction and it seems to work very nicely. If you want I can show the tables.
This is an amazing topic to begin to discuss and I'm excited to see it! Another important balancing factor is considering that maybe your party isn't super optimized either. For example, 2/3 campaigns that I have been in, have had one player that (while we recommend the strongest stuff), decides not to use that for character or personal reasons. So to answer your question and how I have been running games; A medium encounter should deplete at least a quarter of the characters' total resources including health, spell slots, feats, etc. (can be split in anyway, as long as the total is roughly a quarter) since you can string multiple medium encounters together that feels reasonable, a hard encounter should be about half the resources, and then a deadly encounter should require a minimum of 75% of their total resources, if not all of them to get out alive and successfully. I would try to make a boss take nearly everything if I could, but that's a razor's edge to walk with luck being a major factor, so I always like to leave a small variance of like 5-10% so that the luck going super badly won't kill the party... Completely. A way I have put this into action for example is that my party of 3 level 7 characters (two of which are highly optimized, with the third being just solid) all fought against The Hungry, a CR 11 creature (with some environmental hazards). The fight was intended to be difficult and did indeed drop the tank to a quarter health, with the others being relatively unscathed as they used a lot of spells and resources. I feel like a decent calculation help is that if it's a one versus party situation you can relatively safely use a creature with double the party's average level in CR and have it be a good boss fight. Knock the CR down one or two notches for a hard fight, one or two more for a medium, etc. Anyway, sorry for the long comment and ramble. I really like this topic and I think if we can find a quick formula it would be amazing! TL;DR: I used a creature a CR that was 4 greater than average party level for a solid hard encounter. I also feel that totalling up player health and enemy damage is a great basis for this new paper math formula we're looking for, and the missing component we need is 'how do we quickly and easily gauge party damage mitigation and damage dealing, including the majority of effects?'
I run a campaign for a 5-character part, all currently 14th level. I have found the best way to make combats dramatic and interesting is to introduce unfamiliar monsters (Kobold Press, Pathfinder, homebrew), and challenging/unusual terrains and environments. I also run the mobs at max HP. My players are smart, creative, and experienced, so I'm constantly on my toes. Using unknown and unusual creatures solves unconscious metagaming. On average, a character goes unconscious every three sessions, and most times, the players have told me they weren't sure they weren't going to make it through unscathed. Not every combat is deadly - and nor should they be - so resource management becomes a crucial factor. Great video, guys. I appreciate your content and passion for the game!
This video is pretty cool. I ran the numbers on CR a while back and came to similar conclusions. I’m glad that you spelled out that the true purpose of encounter balancing is to bring out the right mix of drama and tension.
I think there were two key assumptions that didn't bear out that skewed challenge rating - 1) 6-8 combat encounters per day (this would force players to be very stingy with cooldowns, but no one does this because it's unwieldy at the table) 2) Low-magic setting (the 5e playtest was a low-magic setting, but once it launched it immediately became common to see everyone kitted out in basic magic gear by level 5) Since neither of these things bore out, CR is greatly inflated vs realistic encounters. HOWEVER, there are a lot of weird standouts that punch above their CR - see shades, trolls (if players/characters don't know how to stop regen), and redcaps. I think you're right in saying that there's no way to really boil down D&D encounters quantitatively. There are just too many non-DPS factors like CC, the weird popcorn healing, and sheer player ingenuity. Additionally, bounded accuracy means that focus firing a single target is incredibly deadly by just adding bodies to the field (i.e. the tyranny of action economy), but like you said you don't necessarily *want* to kill the players, just create dramatic tension. I think this is just better done with story telling and creative, non-DPS-check style encounters. A good thought experiment for you guys, that I think might make a great video, would be to think about how to design non-combat encounters to match a CR-style system. These can be (ab)used liberally to drain player resources without them catching on before the big battle. These kinds of systems promote a much more narrative-driven game that isn't as well supported by the DMG, which could help enrich dungeon master toolkits.
This has genuinely been my journey as a dm for the past 17 years of running D&D and Pathfinder. Safe to say, it is a very delicate line to ride finding that medium and can very much agree a lot of the times not only calculating your party's capabilities Stat wise but also the extent of their abilities can stretch those numbers to make the challenge less viable than it would to take a cookie cutter example through the reference chart. At one point I tested this out between multiple different groups I was running: similar compositions in party makeup, 5 members to each group, level 5 party, Town Square with 1 major raised platform, multiple assassins [3 ranged, 6 close range] 2 basilisks. Group 1 struggled to subdue the party, took 5-6 rounds, 2 casters dealt back and forth with the archers, martials did their best to defend them from the close range enemies until the party could come back together to deal with the basilisk problem, cleaned up the stragglers that tried getting away.... Party 2, same comp...... 2 rounds, the only real difference being the fighter of the party being a centaur instead of human, and defense style, flipped the entire counter on its head. So with that in mind yes, I'd say even with it meaning extra prep time especially if you're looking to meet a certain urgency, it'd help you as a dm in leaps and bounds to take your party and possibly run the characters though scenarios yourself with even perhaps the strategies your familiar with the party using and throw in best/worst/and average possible outcomes to get a good idea on how the encounter may wear on the party's capabilities to see where things may lead.
Hi guys, this was one of my favorite discussions so far, love your content!! And as someone that's actually studying game design, this is a fascinating topic. I've definitely felt this even as a "rookie" DM, having only run about 10 to 15 sessions, a "medium" encounter almost TPKs my party, while a "hard" encounter was a total breeze, and even though these were low level characters obviously, I feel like the dice play a major role in this, maybe the D20 is part of the issue, so maybe changing the system could help somehow, like in 2d6 you're more likely to land 6s, 7s, or 8s in total, maybe a system with 2d10s could be more balanced, altough tougher to get crits and epic fails. But specifically for encounter balance, my best guess would be to have a Pokémon-ish type of system, where each individual monster has "strengths" and "weaknesses" and I don't mean just type of damage resistances and such, I mean: "This monster uses X attack that requires dexterity saving throws, so it has strength against a party with low dexterity" or "This monster has a ton of AoE, so it is effective against bigger parties, but weak to one beefy barbarian" or whatever. Tagging each monster with these types of "mechanical advantages" would help in telling when to use them, let's say if the monster has a few advantages against the average of the party, you could think the challenge rating goes up by 2 or 3, or something like that, I feel this would give a better idea of what to pit against your party for intriguing scenarios.
Brilliant minds think alike ^^ I'm currently tinkering on a high level oneshot because I found a couple high CR monsters I like. I made an experiment and asked both my potential players if they want to play at higher character level or rely on what they can potentially find as well as own skills and abilities, or if they want to go underleveled but have a choice of some magical gear as starting gear. Almost exactly 80% answered that they want a choice of magical gear. I'm a strong believer that this, as well as combinations of races, classes and other stuff breaks the 'CR Formula' in a way that it's nearly impossible to make a one-fits all way of assigning CR. I usually try to learn what my teams strengths and weaknesses are and modulate based what can take advantage of what.
I arranged for an encounter with a Narzugon, his Nightmare mount, 2 hell hounds and 4 Bloodletters (my own creation). The party has a 3rd level Totem Barbarian/4th level Champion. A 5th level Gloomstalker Ranger/2nd level Rogue. A 7th level Moon Druid, 2-7th level sorcerers. 1 Divine Soul and 1Shadow, and a 7th level totem Barbarian. This Is a full strength Narzugon from the Avernus campaign. I gave him the Polearm master feat and the Sentinel feat. The Nightmare was downed as it flew in by the Ranger. The Ranger had another attack used against the Narzugon which forced her to make a CON save of 20 or be frightened of it. The Ranger failed 6 rounds in a row. So only the 3/4 BarFighter and Druid were able to attack it. The Shadow Sorcerer was able to Misty Step in and Thunderstep out causing the Narzugon full damage and the Druid and BarFighter half damage. After 6 rounds of combat we had to quit since it was 2 AM. Druid is down. BarFighter went down and came back at 1 HP (Half Orc). The Narzugon is down to 84 HP. 2 Bloodletters remain at full HP, which the 7th level Barbarian and Divine Soul Sorcerer were taking on, both those characters are at about half HP. Oddly enough the Gloomstalker is still full strength because she's at range, though she also took out both Hell hounds and the Nightmare by herself. I know if I hadn't given the Narzugon feats, this fight would be over.
IMO balancing around "deadly" encounters is probably better than using straight CR. That is, your level 13 party of 3 should be fighting a CR 17 monster. The exception is at low level. An owl bear against a level 1 party of 6 has a realistic chance to become a TPK.
I feel like there are two important factors that need to be taken into account when trying to figure any of this kind of stuff out. The first one is that "killing" a player doesn't necessarily mean they're completely dead, just that they go down. Since having even 1 HP means they're fully functional this isn't actually that bad for the players. The second thing to keep in mind is those same players' play styles. Some parties are very cautious with their resources which can get them into trouble on lower level and counters, but others are more than happy to blow through those same resources and then figure out a way to sneak in a rest.
In my games with 0 HP you're dead, and with 1 HP you can barely walk and most of your abilities are compromised. In my opinion that makes for a more challenging game and for a more epic while realistic narration.
Well thought out topic, thanks for the upload. I think one factor to consider in a quick calculation is the idea of the action economy in the game. A single strong enemy, in general, is at a sizable disadvantage to the party in terms of the action economy. Perhaps the monster's CR minus .5 per character in the party would give a more accurate value for the threat to the group. Or just an adjustment based on how outnumbered the group is comparatively, either monster or pc.
Very interesting discussion, and huge amount of work from you to calculate all of that ! I've had my first experience as DM a few weeks ago for a oneshot, and something I thought almost instantly after looking at some monsters is that CR kinda sucks haha. What I found was the best to balance a bit the mix between AoE/control and solo target damage output is to have different monsters. I feel like you would need 2 or 3 different monsters of different threat level. Though I had a party of 6, which gives the opportunity to have a good number of monsters, I still felt like that several low HP monsters, one or two medium HP and a "boss" is a good way to balance things out and to have a good encounter.
Great vid, Dudes! Maybe your most helpful ever for DM's. I have a party with 6 players that routinely shocks me at how easily they kill the monsters I send against them. Thank you!!👏👏👏🙏🙏🙏
"The player characters feel threatened, but maybe actually aren't." This is how I set up monsters (and their minions) in Monster of the Week. Part of the reason I moved away from 5e and towards MotW is that, when I do have combat, I don't need to work through a pile of expected damage outputs on the fly.
This is a really good starting point for a system. I think for a generalized system, we could talk about AC15DPR or AC20DPR, matching the AC15/20HP, representing the damage and health asked to correspond to AC 15 or 20. Resource use could be accounted for using a factor, e.g. 2 for full spellcasters and 1.5 for other classes.
This might be my favorite video you guys have thrown out. Normally I'm not too concerned about number crunching but my players are up around level 16 now and their level 10-15 encounters and boss fights all went really...anti-climatically. I am really excited to try this system out and feel confident it will help balance things out.
CR is dodgy at low levels, broken at mid levels and practically unusable at high levels. Depending on your parties health, dps, utility and itemisation they can clear a supposedly appropriately level CR in one round and likely kill something much more dangerous with little effort. The proposed system is much more sensible. I normally just find an appropriate enemy and buff it considerably or give it friends. I have a friend who uses max hp for all monsters as starting point and buffs them further from there.
Just to say, one of the most important things that my longtime gm did when we were playing 3.5 was to let us all engage in a "non - canon" white room combat scenario for about 2 hours every 2-3 levels. He would place a monster that he felt should be relatively challenging to the party and we would see how our party could handle it (this was partly to see if our characters work the way we wanted after a the recent level up, so this was a window of opportunity to "take back" some of our decisions if it wasn't working as we wanted), this really gave everyone a really good understanding of just how everyone really worked, and how we could all try and set each other up for success in the combat. Once he felt he had a good understanding of the parties current capabilities we would then engage in a bit of free for all pvp, seeing how our characters held up vs each other for a bit of fun. Edit: That group was very much into following the rules, and having Death be a very real and likely scenario. It has been very interesting trying to play with other groups ever since, because going so hard into it for several years, it made things so dramatic and meaningful. Doing courageous things mattered so much, as you were really risking your character to do them. It also really made you realize that a character dying was really just a chance for you to make new characters with other stories. But most groups I've found just, don't want to engage in such a cut throat playstyle, they are there to relax and have cool moments, they don't want to know what failing the roll to jump across the broken bridge will do, they just want it to succeed. Or to have a crossbow bolt crit succeed vs the rogue while they are disarming it, suddenly making things very dire as he also failed the poison DC check........ instead I often find DM's and players just kind of telling each other what happens, with rolls only mattering insofar as what numbers have they managed to crank out of their hits. Not saying that they don't miss or things like that, but if it is an important roll and it failed? Very few DMs will let it go beyond failing the quest, and most won't even allow that.
This is a game where people can spend 4 actions and spells to try to open a door and still fail. There can be no fair balancing. Most times a combat felt challenging to me was because the monster was rolling to high and my party too low. While in a different day the same monster and enemy can be easily dealt with. As much as I hate it on principle. An exciting combat would need to have adaptive difficulty and depending on how things were going the dm could modify the stats of the creature without the party noticing it.
This is fascinating. I've been watching D&D games for about four years but haven't been able to play much and I'm about to run my first one shot (hence why I'm here) and I had no idea this problem existed. This really helps me out.
I love all of your videos, but this is one of my favorites. As a math nerd and D&D fan, this is perfect for me. I do agree that CR is silly. It's more of a way to assign a "level" to the monster more than an encounter building tool. To me, it seems more appropriate to assign a CR to a monster to determine its proficiency bonus and spell/ability DC are than a simple math tool for fights. In one of my games, my party encountered a boss fight and seeing the math play out with dice rolls and modifiers (we play on Foundry and the DM has a lot of public rolls), I noticed this particular boss had a +11 to hit, and a +9 to damage. Turns out, my DM forgot to assign a CR when building the NPC in Foundry, so this NPC had the default proficiency bonus of +2. If my DM had assigned an appropriate CR to match this NPCs power level, that combat encounter would have likely ended in their favor rather than ours. A +11 to hit against our warforged armorer artificer's AC was often a miss (the DM did not roll very well that night). An appropriate CR would have made it look more like a +14 or +15 to hit, and I would be telling a story about our TPK instead. Point being, if using online tools and/or VTTs, don't forget about CRs on your custom NPCs/monsters because it does make a difference, but not the kind that the DMG is referring to.
Something that I did recently was I did a 7 hour session by myself and took control of my PC's and simulated a swarm of enemies with multiple waves, and then also a "boss" fight with a higher CR creature and a few minions. It took absolutely forever but it helped me know how things were going to go. Once I ran the boss fight however it went worse than I thought quickly because I rolled a few crits, but that's besides the point
Hey guys, I love your videos! Even though I'm DM for shadowrun which has no CR, I feel your contemplations are relevant. From my perspective, challenge doesn't necessarily mean whether players can easily kill or survive an encounter. I think you need to look at the problem more holistically. If, for example, the mission is to free hostages, it doesn't really matter if the party could easily survive the encounter - it's still considered a failure even though all monsters are easily slain, if one survives long enough to kill the hostages. Even if player death is not on the table - everyone and everything else is. If the players may save their own skin, they still could lose their equipment, connections, relatives, reputation.. so even if a character could kill a single goblin in a single blow, a group of goblins could still be a challenge for a level 13 group if the mission isn't just about survival in combat.
Hello Kelly, hi Monty, You present a very salient point: CR is not a glove which fits every party composition the same, and encounter-balancing would be better off being tailored to the individual party. During the summer/fall I derived a few dozen formulas to (very) accurately calculate average damage, contingent on the attacker’s stats, the target’s AC or Saving Throw bonus and a bunch of other factors. The system has worked well for adjusting encounters in my own games so far. Give me a holler if you’re interested in the some formulas, spreadsheets and PDFs. They include a lot of math and some neat graphs.
We had a good lesson in encounter balancing in our Strahd campaign a few months back. DM set up an encounter with a big inflated enemy designed to wipe the floor with us with little difficulty, scoff, and walk away disappointed. The party (Hexblade Warlock [me], Ghostslayer Blood Hunter, Beast Barbarian, Artificer/Chronomancy Wizard) stumbled across a hunter on the way to Valaki. My Hexblade and he had a chat as we walked, I heard a sound and as I turned, the hunter attempted to strike me with his spear as half a dozen werewolves in wolf form burst from the woods. Roll initiative! So, as stated, this was a "supposed to lose fight", setting up a reoccurring miniboss for the campaign. He was supposed to knock us all down in a few rounds, and leave us unconscious near the gate to Valaki. But instead we steamrolled the Alpha werewolf and his pack in just 4 rounds. Only one of us (me) even got hit because I 1v1ed the Alpha, and even then it was only once. Even his unique and monstrous transformation couldn't save him from the party. We consistently rolled 17s, 18s, 19s, and 20s, whereas the DM rolled
What I've noticed about this edition is that it's more about how many attacks the monsters are getting versus the party. If you have one monster, it gets one turn vs the party's 3-4. The encounters that I've run in my current campaign that seem to be the deadliest/closest calls are the ones that have more turns than the party gets, even if it's a single monster. Examples: I had a 6th level party go against three winter wolves... and a young white dragon, all in its lair. The wolves were at the start, the dragon joining in after the 2nd round. The half-orc cleric ended up using Relentless Endurance because of failing the save on the breath weapon, and everyone was badly hurt, but it rode that bleeding edge and they still talk about it over a year later. I also did a homebrew monster with the same party at 9th level that was a crystalline core which had six other crystals around it (meant to be a boss fight). The core buffed/healed the crystals while they attacked, slaying the core destroyed all the crystals. If one crystal was destroyed, the core would sacrifice some of its own hp to revive it. Because of the six attacks/round, the damage output ended up pretty high and forced the party to fight a bit more defensively. For reference, I had a party of paladin/barbarian/sorceress/cleric.
I feel like instead of having a system to preemptively balance out encounters, there should be a system to increase/decrease combat difficulty on the go, so if things are going too smoothly for the players you can pump difficulty up or pump it down if the players are getting destroyed. Maybe something like general-purpose legendary actions/resistances the DM and players can use like once of twice per day, on any character of the encounter, whenever their party's HP threshold goes below a certain number, or if there's a big gap between the players' vs monsters' HP values. That could represent those classic "rise up to the challenge in the face of death" moments.
To my group as 6 players, I discovered that the best way to increase the difficult is spread the players in the map/grid. A big threat in the other side of the map, with a lower level body guards, a reasonable melee in one direction with a small group with ranged. And a big (flash) enemy to finish the balance. But after considering magic itens heal, after certain point I make the encounters 1 or 2 level above the party.
Something I've learned from video games and from playing with my main DM who is himself a from software buff, is that it is incredibly valuable to STAGE combats. And then that gives you an easy to adjust, narratively impactful difficulty contour to a combat. Waves of lesser enemies that appear as needed and as logical, boss monsters that transition to different forms or behaviors as you delete hit points. Not exactly what you're talking about, but it is one way of achieving the drama without overdoing the difficulty and off effectively increasing the number of encounters without making it feel like a slog.
Guys this is about what CR is. CR13 means group of 4 players at 13th level can handle this. You are 3 people group and it lives 1.5 round. Imagine monster rolling high on initiative and focusing on 1 player for 2 turns. That player might die and that makes this a deadly encounter which means one or more PCs might die. I know CR is not 100% accurate but also its not that bad. Bonus tip: Keep in mid that in DMG or PHB it says that average encounter per day is 8 so PCs are like to use all of their recources at the end of the day. Extra Bonus Tip: CR cannot predict your party's magic items.
Honestly at first when you were going over the math I dissagreed with you until I realized your actual point to this video lol. Really great video with a lot of good points. I think the thing that will help in this case is for Wotc to rework the DMG to better emphasize other styles of play and how to run the game and what combat is really about cus you take this logic and put it on a newer DM who is maybe on their first campaign and feels like their monsters aren't doing enough and their party is level 12+ it makes high levels especially feel really daunting. This is something Wizards could really do to help Newer DMs as well as veterans who feel like high level isnt very well supported.
First of all great break down of the CR. I think the weirdest thing about the CR system is everyone has a different definition of "easy, medium, hard, and deadly" challenges. Looking for "drama" rather than "challenge" makes a lot more sense for dnd.
On the question of balancing combat encounters, a method I have been using recently to some notable success is just rolling randomly. If there is a random encounter I have planned(or I'm pre-planning a future encounter), I roll a d20, and that's the CR I pick or find a monster from. I have also been playing with rolling the d20 twice, a taking the result closer to the party's ECL. What this does is force the party to deal with encounters too tough for them, and well as giving them some relaxing fights they can take it easy on. And once I roll for the encounter, I can even adjust the situation to make the encounter more exciting, by giving the weak monsters a terrain advantage and surprise. Or by giving the party those same things against a powerful monster. The party starts to sometimes decide that running away and hiding are better options. Or sometimes they need to roleplay to get past the dragon guarding the bridge. And with options for resurrection, battlefield control, etc... many other classes get a chance to shine in various and unusual ways, ways that I couldn't even plan. In other words, the CR system is so broken that rolling randomly provides a more exciting gameplay experience.
Your idea of calculating the party's DPR is helpful. So when I chose a monster that is right for the story, I can just adjust the stats of the monster(s) to make the challenge is want for the game session. (i.e. HP, to-hit, dmg of the monster)
I have been DMing for a very long time. I have developed a feeling for encounters that would be fun and challenging. This has worked very well over the years. I set up introductory modules for first, second, and third level adventures for fifth edition using the encounter system in 5e. I have run these over 30 times. I have run these for new players just learning the game as well as to run games for veteran players for their newly created characters. Two factors not being mentioned here are that players make more of a difference than the characters they play, and how hard I, as DM, choose to play the monsters. Overall, I think the encounter system works ok for a starter, but I play the challenge relative to the player group's ability.
The tricky thing is that encounters are designed to whittle the characters down. That is, you are comparing one encounter when the characters are "full." But there should be several encounters per rest. Take your same encounter example and apply it to the characters three or four times to signify how many encounters they'll have between short rests...or six to eight times before a long rest.
This is my biggest pet peeve as a new DM (started in 2020). In my first campaign, using The Essentials kit, I upped the power of the dragon to Adult (CR 13) to make it more of of a later game threat. I had it confront the party (4 players at level 7) to toy with them a bit to build the tension. They killed it in two rounds. They rolled some really good crits, but it was an incredible let down. Luckily, everyone was on the same page that it was a "learning" campaign so I could
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"No, wait, challenge rating is fine! Just make sure you have 6-8 combat encounters per adventuring day!"
Yeah, that's the topic for the "other video" we alluded to in this one.
. . . Except not all encounters are combats, and the DMG just suggests 6-8 encounters with no specification on whether they are combats, puzzles, or negotiations.
@@sonofdeleniel007 Negotiations and puzzles are extremely unlikely to drain the same amount of resources as combat, or even any resources at all.
You cannot throw out how the game is balanced and then be upset that when you ignore how the game is balanced it doesn’t feel balanced.
@@Apfeljunge666, see my sessions last about 3-4 hours. I can get two combat encounters and the rest are social or exploration.
might as well drop on short rest taking vs. long rest taking in most groups too...
You guys hit the nail right in the head when you said you want an encounter with less than 5% chance of killing a character but feels like a 50/50.
Well that happens if the party is drained of resources. The issue with CR is the same reason most people agree Monk is the weakest class
i like the idea of a few quarter turn fights and i say quarter turn fights in that one of the charaters can easily dispatch the enemy be it a low lvl quick easy kill gives the party a sense of danger and waking into a dungeon but also not a big empty room with 10 enemies and 4 of those are at the end i would say push the number up to 30 or 40 and throw them at the party more with pacing and maybe give them the feeling of walking into a place of danger with enemies so i would have most of my fights at 0% chance of death with the big fight being closer to 45%. if i wanted to warn the party do not continue throw 10% chance at them and push it up faster before they get themselves in to deep they actually leave
I feel the biggest problem with a "system" is that level progression is bonkers. CR as a guide is a TPK machine in the first few levels and it's a joke after level 7-8.
The squishiness of first levels makes every fight an adrenaline rush. I ran LMoP once for a suboptimal, unlucky party and 2 PCs DIED on the first encounter. Without focus firing or any smart move by me. Just non-extreme luck.
I agree that it's an illusion. To me, fights should be easy and look hard and that's all on how the DM presents the fight.
@@lulospawn does that module really follow CR guidelines though?
@@tomraineofmagigor3499 monk is the weakest class straight up, it cannot keep up with damage at any level even constantly using flurry of blows, go watch treanttemple monks video about it and it explains in no uncertain terms just how bad the monk is
(The answer is that the monk is basically a useless class)
I feel like it's important to remember that a "Medium difficulty encounter" is one that doesn't have much chance of downing a party member and basically no chance of actually killing one. It's an encounter in which one or two party members MIGHT need to use healing resources.
See- this is why I watched this entire video saying “well, no shit?” the entire time.
The best part about "balancing" encounters will always be when you prepare an easy fight and your party gets their butts kicked for no apparent reason. It's almost the same with "easy" puzzles lol
I had a DM who ran an adventure back in 3.5 that involved a singular opponent, a rune hound across a bridge of ice or crystal. A party of 5, all decent players......and only the squishy wizard survived by the end (myself). Would've had to retreat too, but a pair of back-to-back crits right before fleeing with a pair of Icy Burst arrows finished the hound off, and I was able to stabilize two of the dying players. TLDR, some fights can be surprisingly challenging 😛
Yeah, I had a group of like 8 lvl 3 players fight against an animated carpet and I had multiple players go down before they killed this one CR ½ monster. That one combat that should have been a joke lasted over an hour.
Lol, yeah, sometimes
I threw a roper against the party. The simple act of making it a stalactite 30 feet in the air lowers its effective range from 50 to 40 feet, but instead makes it so where when party members break free, they take fall damage. A single CR5 monster devastated my level 7 party of 6, and it didn’t even have minions.
Lol. We've undoubtedly had nights like this : This should be an easy encounter. I rolled a 1. Uh, ok. And I rolled a 1. Um, ok. So I rolled a 3. Wow... so I rolled a nat 20...
I think it's interesting to hear Monty say this, because I've always assumed that Monty had some alternative way of calculating battle difficulty, as I've always thought he is strangely good and bringing battles to a razor's edge without actually killing characters.
I think a lot of that comes from experience as a DM and knowing his players. Like he said his players for Drakkenheim know the game well and he probably plans for that. If you put those encounters to brand new players they would probably die.
@@Xecryo I play a lot with players with different skills and level of knowledge.
I often use a lot of tricks like second waves, low health emergency buttons for NPC captains. Things the players can't see until I use them, so I can judge whether or not to use them, and they can make something feel dangerous, because then they're guessing "are there more, can he do it again?"
That’s experience and behind the scenes fudge. You’re a storyteller in that position, not a computer.
What I’ve learned from watching Monty in Drakkenheim is that a good DM does not kill the party they just consistently almost kill the party. They keep it tense both narratively and in combat.
I believe the trick to that is having a deep knowledge of tactics, and then making tactical mistakes when predicting that the players are going to fail.
This is the Search For the Holy Grail right here.
I’ve got experienced players, so I have to work to keep them guessing and challenged, they always out-perform the curve. I like mine to go a 4th round, to give them that unexpected sense of “They’re STILL up?!”
In my mind, I have three types of combat encounters.
There’s one where the combat isn’t the point of the encounter., it’s just there to spice up an investigation/exploration part of the campaign. It’s the MacGuffin/book/ clue they need to survive the encounter to find to get them (back?) onto the trail of the next plot point. I want to scuff them up a little bit, maybe knock off about a quarter of their HP. They can’t get their next clue without a little bit of a scuffle, right?
Then there’s the “It’s time for a fight for a fight’s sake!” This one’s gotta be a scrap. I want the party to be down to half HP, and down a bunch of resources, but I don’t want it to get deadly, unless the dice totally overrule me.
Then there’s a boss fight. I want them out of resources and down to about a quarter-HP by the end of it, with the chance we could lose somebody if they make a tactical error, or the dice decree it.
I always think about how an encounter affects the player-characters. They’re the ones playing the game. The monsters themselves are means to that end.
Again, I’ve got experienced players. They know when they’ve actually accomplished something by playing well and beating a tough challenge. I’m trying to give them that feeling.
Knowing nothing else…you sir, are a good dm with the correct attitude.
Love your style on this! Sometimes the planned scuffles go hard and sometimes the boss goes easy, but this attitude seems like it would be very rewarding for your players 😮
@@HandsomeDanVacationRentals I don’t even know about that, my friend. I’m the LEAST experienced at my table, and the one with no prior 5e DM experience. I just fell into it as the one with the most time to invest into it, thinking about it, etc. I try to keep it fun, and I’m lucky to have a table with good table dynamics, similar aesthetics, ideas about what’s “fun,” like that.
@@robcaboose510 Thanks, like I replied to the other comment, I’m the least experienced in our group at running 5e (I’d been away since 2e). But I have the time to invest. I have two weeks to prep a 2-1/2 hour session. I want my friends to win, & have fun, but I HAVE to referee a fair game, too. I always roll out in the open, never behind the screen. So, if I’ve driven myself appropriately crazy during the two weeks leading up to the session, I’ll hit the sweet spot on the encounter balance, and if the dice tell them “Tonite ain’t your night,” then that’s how it goes. 🤷🏼♂️
I just ran a very casual "Intro to D&D" 2-part one-shot for some coworkers, and I have to say, doing it your way is something I should have erred on rather than going too easy on them (which I absolutely did). An attitude like yours is something I will strive for in the future, and discussions like this video are a means to doing that with higher understanding.
I really like the way one of you put it when you said it's more about drama than anything else. Fights that feel like you did something awesome to get through them alive, even though in reality it was almost guaranteed you'd walk away unscathed. That gives longevity necessary to the campaign while also making things interesting moment to moment.
I think "deadly" should mean a decent chance of a TPK. Deadly encounters should be something that the party should try and avoid. Many players have the mindset that every encounter is beatable which easily leads to parties of murderhobos. The world of D&D should be a place that feels like it's a living, breathing world where pissing off the wrong person could get you killed.
Peasant: "Beware, adventurers! The cave on your path hides a terrible fire spitting monster!"
Lvl1 Monk: "I enter the cave"
DM: "As you approach the cave, a wave of fire coming from the darkness flows through you. You're now a dead pile of ashes, don't bother throwing dice"
Although I agree with your statement I fear many DM's fail to convey this in Session 0 or provide alternatives to combat.
@@irenewhitcomb1813 I do partly think it's an issue that 5th edition doesn't really provide many satisfying things outside of combat. Especially if you were playing a martial class like 99% of the time their class features are purely combat focused. Granted you could say that's where the sort of diversity of the party is supposed to come in but a lot of those classes that also have utility skills for things outside of combat are also really good in combat because most of their class features are combat oriented as well.
Deadly in the game just means there's a chance one or more characters might get knocked down to 0 (assuming a party with full resources). If you only want to do a single challenging encounter in a day, you might to do a double-Deadly or maybe even triple-Deadly encounter depending on the party's level and magic items. But if you follow the adventuring day mechanic and put a regular Deadly encounter at the end of the adventure when the party is down on their resources and health, that usually works out just fine.
The problem is, those 'deadly' encounters you want them avoiding are typically the boss encounters they need to defeat to complete their quest. So... if they avoid the deadly encounters, they are avoiding any of the hero questing they are playing the game for.
The fights that should be avoided are the ones that nickle and dime the party so they aren't entirely ready for the deadly boss encounter. However, how do you avoid those fights if they stand between you and the boss? My group likes to try to avoid them, but those attempt typically fail due to one person or another in heavy armor.
Eh, maybe the quest is to retrieve something or plant something, so it makes sense to avoid the fight. But, if the quest is 'stop this guy before he obliterates the city'... well, the party is going to have to face that fight.
What makes sense : "We just saw a dragon fly by. Let's not go poke that."
What doesn't make sense : "The dragon just promised to torch every village within 3 days flight before hitting the city... well, we'll we might lose one or two if we face the dragon so let him scorch this kingdom to the ground."
If your part seeks out battles outside those required for the quest, throw around some deadly ones for them to wander into. If your players turn murderhobo (solution to everything is combat), then yes give them the opportunity to punish themselves. I mean, if they are attacking citizens in a town then a sting might be made by the city to try and catch the group.
On the other hand, if your party is ignoring the quests and wandering off in search of monsters to hunt. Maybe a 'heroes campaign' isn't the right style for the group, and they should just be monster hunters clearing the area around the city. Or if they are attacking civilians, then it should become a villains campaign where they are eventually attacked on sight for approaching a city. (And in that case, part of the problem is that NPCs perish instantly if a PC sneezes on them.)
By all means, make a living world where there are deadly encounters everywhere... but the moment those deadly encounters become a threat to a city, it becomes a quest option, and thus the heroes are expected to deal with it. Unless, you have upfront told your players that a lot of things will happen and they aren't expected to resolve much, if any of them. They aren't the heroes saving the world, they're just above average citizens trying to survive their day to day lives. But you also need to be ready for the consequences of having a dragon siege Neverwinter for a year, since no one is able to fight it... what with there being no heroes. And also be ready for them never venturing far from the city since they'll probably lose one or two people just traveling to one of the villages... if the villages are still even there.
As a new dm, encounter balancing is the hardest part for me, even from official modules.
Unfortunately the encounters from official modules are generally really poor…I’ve had to rewrite pretty much every encounter for Curse of Strahd. The math here is what I’ve used. Give monsters and players a 55-65% chance to hit or save (looking at AC or saving throw numbers). Give enough effective hit points and damage to last a few rounds (between 2 and 4 depending. Using %chance to hit and such). And then don’t rely on the numbers to make it interesting. Use neat abilities, terrain, puzzles, weaknesses, narrative beats, alternative goals (not just kill them all), and enemy morale to make the encounter interesting.
Make sure your monsters have a similar number of actions per round as your party. Make sure you don’t have a monster that can kill a party member in one hit (unless you specifically choose that to be part of it)…yeah. There’s a lot of art to it more than science.
Yeah like the video I do not usually go by CR rating when balancing encounter, I use the DPS of the party vs the Health and DPS of the enemies consider how many attacks it will take to kill on or the other, special abilities included in offense and defense and determine it like that. I think CR is broken because just plopping a monster into the game with no thought of how they will interact with the party is quite useless for so many reasons
The cool thing about using official modules: it wont be your fault. 😂
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said we want drama in combats. That’s what we’re really after. My mind is now veering off to design encounters that are dramatic but don’t necessarily threaten the party (threats to others they care about, destruction of important things, even fighting a friend that is mind-controlled etc). It’s the possibility of failure that makes a great encounter, but failure can mean more than just the death of party members.
My personal DM experience is that the encounters that get the biggest reactions have moments that LOOK dangerous or dramatic even if they aren't mechanically that difficult. A monster that shrugs off an attack without flinching because it has good defenses comes off as more intimidating than one that hits harder but is easier to hit. An ogre that grapples and picks up a PC is more terrifying than one that does the more optimal trick of just swinging a club. The second monster that breaks invisibility to punch the Wizard from behind. The additional wave of minions that comes in from the flank after a round of fighting. The fact that the entire place is on fire, or the fight is on a very narrow ledge. In these cases, it doesn't matter if the thing's probably going down in a round - the players don't FEEL like everything is under control.
100% right
It would be a good idea to read the definition of CR from the DMG for context. I was surprised when I read it. CR means it is easy for a well-rested party of the corresponding level.
Challenge rating doesn't mean it's a difficult encounter for a party of 4 of the same level. On page 82 of the DMG, there's a table that's a part of a section on how much experience an adventurer can handle at different difficulties. Using 1 monster of a CR of the party level tends to get between a medium and hard encounter. Since I don't run 6-8 encounters a day (the recommendation comes from this section in the book), I tend to run exclusively hard to deadly encounters, which seems to balance out the campaign nicely. The combat obviously requires a little tweaking from just dropping monsters straight from the MM onto an open field, but overall I think the balance is fine.
the real formula is the Daily budget xp, you just can run 2 deadly+ encounters per day... but ppl dont do this, they dont even make 50% of total budget before a long rest and say "oh, 5e it is too easy".
@@claytoncardoso4538 Then maybe the expectations of THAT MANY encounters is unrealistic for the average DnD game. Either way, it means the CR system needs a redesign
@@shawnwolf5961 I don’t think 3-4 encounters (deadly difficulty) is a lot for an adventuring day. They don’t have to be combat, just scenarios that require the PCs to use 1/3 to 1/4 of their resources (or more) to resolve.
@@shawnwolf5961 average d&d game? bro, you can't fix something that people play wrong. The normal thing, since 2e, is to do the whole dungeon with only 1 day's resources.
If you play tabletop dnd like it's a baldurs gate pre-patch where you press rest at every corner... the problem is with you, not the system.
@@jefR6875 But the rules aren't 3-4 a day, it's 6-8. Most tables just don't have that much combat in one session. I think WotC assumed people would have a lot more combat (and maybe they did back when 5e first came out, idk). But for OneDND they need to rework their CR system, and I don't think there's any room to objectively disagree on that tbh.
Great watching this after chatting to you guys at PAX Unplugged! Fantastic stuff, definitely want to do something like this for my group as we have 5 players, 18th level characters, major magic items AND a dedicated healer who can output a LOT of healing.
Very much proves a lot of theories and gut feelings I've had over many years of DMing. VERY good video! Thanks guys!
Edit: Also, interesting how this related to the info from the core rules that assumes a party is fighting 8-10 encounters PER LONG REST. I know streamed games are different (3 hours, can't have 6 sessions in a row of combat it's too dull) but I don't think I've ever played in private games that have 8-10 encounters per long rest (and yeah I know encounters doesn't always mean combat encounter, but encounter = loss of resources/threat to the party).
Thanks Mark!
yeah 8-10 per long rest is legitimately insane even in the most intense dungeon crawl let alone anything less
Damn and I thought getting the players to do 4-5 in one day was hard. Getting them to do more than 5 encounters before a long rest seems very difficult.
@@TheJerbol It's very hard to tell from the rules if the assumed 10 encounters per long rest is 2 combats and 8 traps/social/puzzle encounters or 5 combats and 5 other encounters, or mainly combat encounters
Hi. Interesting discussion.
With 30 years of DnD on my back I think one important point was missed out: It is most relevant how smart your Monsters are.
Players usually identify the most critical opponent first and focus/boost their attacks accordingly. In return many encounters feature monsters that just dish out to next possible targets, thus spreading their damage and being less threatening.
However, if the DM has his monsters act smart, concentrate on what is most dangerous for them (e.g. cleric in case of Undead), then a fight may be much more difficult without changing any resources.
Cheers from Germany....
An additional point to consider, methinks: That table in the D&D Master book is meant to help when there is a less experienced player base on average.
There is a huge difference in efficiency when it comes to using combat capabilities between very experienced players and a group of beginners.
An experienced group knows exactly when to cast what, how to ensure getting advantage on attacks etc. while a less experienced group may not.
In consequence a specific monster may be more or less challenging without changing its stats.
To give an example: We are a long established team, about 4-5 players on a regular base. Some time ago one of the players got a new girlfriend and she decided to check out what that hobby is he is "wasting" his time one. In addition, my wife also decided to join in.
So we had two additional players adding power to the group which was compensated by our DM of course. But while our ladies combat moves were interesting, surprising and even funny, so adding to a nice experience, they made the group less efficient in general and some fights became intensive that would otherwise just have been a warm-up.
One thing to account with the CR is that a lot of the assumptions made are based on a 6 encounter advanturing day. I've never met a table that plays 6 encounter per adventuring day.
I don't think it's the core of the issue, but it does add to the problem a lot.
I think the core of the CR problem is that a lot of encounters are not decided by doing hit point damage, so DPR, AC and hit points should not be the focus of CR calculations.
@@rogerwilco2 The CR system has so many flaws. We could list them all day
In a large dungeon or something, my table could easily have six encounters. But that’s the exception, where it’s not feasible in-character for them to stop and find a safe place to rest once they start getting worn down. For general run of the mill playing, it’s unusual for them to have more than two in an adventuring day, because they’re running around the city or traveling through the wilderness, and their characters know their limits and have the freedom to head back to the inn or pitch camp at any time. So once any one character starts approaching the red line, the entire party is likely to ease off on the adventuring until they’ve completed a long rest.
To even complicate things further, another variable is the skill of the people playing in the game. I'm a newer DM that plays with a group of friends that have finished one campaign total, and their builds, use of abilities and strategy will not rival what your group of dedicated players and students of the game will achieve.
Great video. We are just starting Dragon Heist tomorrow and I've been binging you guys looking for tips, ideas and ways to make it awesome!
That's what I was about to say. The Devs rate the monsters according to what new DMs need to help them with new players.
CR was balanced into 6-8 encounters a day. But that’s not how most tables play. I think this is the core of the issue
This is part of the problem, but even with 6-8 encounters a day CR is still not accurate.
It doesn't help that most of the monsters themselves don't follow the rules of challenge rating. Take the ballgura my favorit punching bag for Cr and the guy has the same hit points as a Cr one creature. Without his reckless attack he also wouldn't ever hit the broadside of a barn. Yet he is Cr 5 which is higher than a banshee, and a few other monsters. He is less stronger than a Cr 2 sea hag or Cr 3 green hag. His resistance helps against spells except his saving throws and stats are so bad they are near garenteed to succeed anyway while counting his magic resistance. Dude is less intelligent than dumb brute monsters like ogres. He showcases a bunch if interesting in isolation mechanics but fails on every front while being an easy showcase of why Cr makes no sense.
I don't think it's the core of the issue, but it does add to the problem a lot.
I think the core of the CR problem is that a lot of encounters are not decided by doing hit point damage, so DPR, AC and hit points should not be the focus of CR calculations.
When played optional, assuming a wisdom of is enough understanding for utilizing basic tactics, a Barlgura cr comes from being effective with its ambush tactics. 5e description is horrible at describing their tactics, having two spells that let them walk towards the party, another to create diversions, and another to prevent movement in a area. They get deadly in Corrdinated groups or surprise one-on-multiples of one.
If not playing this way a Barlgura false onto a squishy cr 3. Do find demons damage resistant ably earns is money against blaster spellcasters that don’t understand the concept of diversity spell damage.
@@DungeonDudes It's not meant to be accurate, it's meant to be a guideline to work with in accordance with you.
I may have missed it, but I think a key thing to factor in as well is action economy, I always find it feels much more deadly having an enemy that hits 3/4/5 times than an enemy that maybe hits once or twice!
5% chance of death per encounter, over 100 encounters, gives each character starting at level 1 a 0.6% chance of seeing level 11.
So your average Curse of Strahd game
And thus in a 5 player game about 3% one of the characters at level 1 makes it to level 11.
This... This explains, why my last two big encounters (homebrewed, but based on close to cr constructs) made good encounters. The players felt the message and had some level of drama, while also feeling the needs to come up with solutions, with actions of desperations. I talk a lot with them regarding their change or if they see their chars change or develop in a direction, and I try to help them with that.
I have personally found in my campaigns that the second I surprise my players with anything, the combat gets significantly harder. Fighting insurmountable forces? They go seal team six on the baddies. Regular old zombies come up from the ground around the players? Nearly lose 2 of them. So personally, I would recommend finding ways to add a twist to the combat to force players to think on their feet a bit more. Definitely haven't checked the CR of anything I've used in a while though.
I agree. Encounters become considerably more difficult when you add other factors into the mix. Things like terrain, natural hazards (spike pits, lava, fast moving water, uneven terrain, etc), wandering monsters, surprise rounds and more. Monster tactics help a lot too. Multiple encounters across a single adventuring day is also important. If you don't wear down your party's resources, how do you expect them to find anything difficult?
Enemy waves is the best thing I've ever done as a DM, especially for deadly encounters. Start with the same amount of enemies as are in the party. So if you have 5 PC's, put 5 enemies in the combat. Unless every single character in the party is capable of instantly wiping out each enemy on their turns - you should have 1 or 2 remaining. Next round, add a couple more at the beginning of the initiative order - kind of like a lair action. Third round, add another 2-3 but make one of them a stronger enemy. Round 4, add a couple more weak ones, and by the fifth (they most assuredly wouldn't be able to kill all of them, by the end of every round) you bring out a boss or "boss" and with the remaining forces and a somewhat drained party - it becomes a very intense encounter. I have never done this were it wasn't nail biting and the best part is that it was only one combat encounter, but felt like 4-5. And if you feel the party is becoming overwhelmed - just don't bring in the next wave, and give it another round or 2.
The first one I did was with a bunch of Sahuagains and 5 Level 5 characters.
Round 1: 4 Sahuagins + 2 Sahuagin Champions
Round 2: 4 more Sahuagins show up
Round 3: 2 more Sahuagins show up.
Round 4: 1 more Champion shows up
Round 5: They were getting overwhelmed, so I didn't bring any this round and they were able to take out a few more.
Round 6: 1 Sahuagin Blademaster shows up, along with 2 more Sahuagins show
Then the next few rounds are them versus the Blademaster and the remaining enemies.
It works incredibly well, especially when Sahuagins are getting advantage on hurt enemies.
The time crunch, the spell management, the chaos, the numbers - it works incredibly well IMO, and works way better than just having 13 Sahuagin, 3 Sahuagin champions and 1 Blademaster all standing the same room and having to fight them all at once (which they would have lost).
All of this is gold and inspiring to newbie DMs. Thank you kindly!!
One side being collectively surprised is a huge swing in balance. I recently did what I expected to be a moderate to easy encounter, but the enemies killed it on their stealth rolls to set up an ambush and suddenly with a surprised party they were in a fight for their lives. Another one recently I surprised the party and an assassin-style NPC downed the tank in one turn. Conversely, if the party gets a surprise on the enemy, it usually becomes a cakewalk. One round of mostly unmitigated damage from one side has a massive effect in a math game like this.
When calculating your party's survivability, don't forget to add their Healing abilities.
To heal in any meaningful way you spend your action, so your dpr falls and then it compromises the math
@@joaosolreis3004 healing word has entered the chat.
@@johnsmith-fy8jo a Twilight cleric enters the chat, takes the microphone and shouts over everyone.
And rests
@@johnsmith-fy8jo 1d4 + spell casting isn't that meaningful. So much so that healing word is used only to bring dead people back to the combat, but it isn't used as a mean of reseting the party hp between fights
As highlighted, encounters are an art. Static balance/CR is a bit of an illusion at worst, starting point at best. Dice swing, and that's what makes it fun. In lieu of static pre-designs, I started thinking of encounters as KITS to give DMs flex. I aim for players to last 3 rounds, then tune encounters as-needed at/for the table. Monsters can call in backup.
This would be an amazing tool if it was a spreadsheet with all the MM monsters data in it. Where you could fill out HP, and damage output and it would spit out a list of monsters that met the parameters within a margin of error.
The amount of time and work this must have taken is no joke. Much respect for doing it for all of us
It’s been really fun to see how after they made a book they started to think a lot more critically about game design. It’s been fun to watch!
Writing that book really taught them a lot! It’s hard to know where your knowledge gaps are until you’ve had outside input like you would get creating a book.
Nah. It is well presented, but I assume anyone giving the PHB and DMG a casual read will realise this.
I know everyone in my group did.
We consider CR a joke.
But then most of the people I play with have a background in maths and physics, so maybe if you have a group of theatre trained actors, they will not.
@@rogerwilco2 yeah, so do I. What’s your point about math backgrounds? It still takes time to do all the math to present this. It’s not a 4 minute process. Of course we all already knew the challenge rating system was garbage. The community has been bitching about it for awhile. But it was nice to see some actual numbers that most of us simply have no time for, presented well, and demonstrating just how bad off it actually is.
I think you need a mix of combat types. Sometimes, your party needs to feel OP! Give them a low level encounter where the wizard AOE's an entire swarm, leaving the leader there to interrogate. Other combats need to have unique elements that are intended to counter the party's standard strategies. At the end, I always try to play my BBEG by-the-book, so when they die they know it was a fair fight *evil smile*
Pathfinder 2e literally has encounter budgets for varying difficulties.
Personally I always increase a monsters HP and run "deadly" encounters. Sometimes they last more than a few rounds but my players always feel like they are on the razor's edge. I always get comments about how much fun they have and how they felt like they were close to losing. Personally I don't worry about any of my players dying because death saves in 5E are so forgiving, even when a PC goes down there is a pretty good chance the Cleric will have a healing word to save them before they actually die. Unfortunately it's not a science just more of an intuition and reading the table.
I think this is how a lot of DMs play. This totally changes the value of a bunch of classes in the game and most of the combat magic items, and entirely changes the intentions of every mob in the game.
If the cleric has 10 healing spells and one fight … they can burn through spells like it’s nothing. Sure!
Now give them 6-8 fights in the day. Instead of 10 spell slots in that one fight they have less than one spell slot in each fight. Is the cleric going to heal someone? Will the cleric spend a spell slot out of combat knowing that’s one fewer spell to deal damage or heal with?
It becomes a different game. This other game? That’s the game they created. You’ve been playing something else with a book that looks similar.
A once per day magic item … and you do combat once per day. Yeah, neat. When you’re doing half a dozen combats per day using that magic item is a big deal! Changes the value of it entirely.
Also changes the value of anything that recharges on rest … ki points, warlock spell slots, superiority dice, action surge ….
I do it the same way.
Love this content. I would also try to include a factor for how intelligent the creatures are. Enemy tactics as controlled by the DM can seriously swing encounter difficulty.
Yea, a dozen kobolds in a cave with traps and good tactics can TPK nearly any party.
I know you guys are looking for a mathematical equation for this, but I typically like to have more creatures to add to the encounter on standby in case it's too easy and have something that my creatures would do to waste an action or 2 if the encounter is too hard. Example
I had a party face three stone Giants. If the encounter was too easy I was going to have more Giants come out of the nearby cave. If the encounter was too hard (Richard ended up being) I had one or two of the Giants waste their action vomiting because in this story they were addicted to eating acid from a nearby acid pool.
Fucking Richard, always getting in the way :'D
At CR 13, use the deadliest creature in D&D: the skeleton horde. For Cr 13, that's 50 skeletons. The most threatening encounters I've ever run involve lots of skeletons, and have been tense and savage and the players really felt in danger. The point being, action economy is king!
Hear, hear!
For a one-shot, I had an opening that started in media res with the BBEG already having won and his skeleton army already overrunning the city, and the party just needed to escape. These were regular skeletons-just for every one defeated, another took its place. It was incredibly dicey; almost lost a couple PCs in the very first scene. There's definitely something to be said for quantity over quality, provided you can run the scene smoothly without getting bogged down.
Great until your DM uses too small of a map and tidal wave go brrrrrt. Oopsie my level 6 wizard just did 300+ damage in one turn because your horde clumped a little too much (real story).
Another fun way to see the wonk of monsters CR is adding sidekick levels to them, some of these 1/2 CR creatures are not like the others and with only slight changes become lopsided easily.
Oh yeah, if a Shadow gets Sidekick levels it becomes an absolute UNIT. And Shadows by themselves are already more powerful than other CR 1/2 Monsters!!
The important thing you completely missed, is that with multiple bad guys in an encounter to beef up the enemy hit points, they will deal less damage to the players as combat rounds pass due to monster death. So if they're doing 70 damage, but a third of the monsters are killed at the end of the first round, now they're doing closer to 46 damage. The third round the monsters might only do another 23 damage.
I would love to see these theories put into playtesting - and putting that encounter into video format - and put it side by side with an encounter built in one of the popular CR calcs (like Kobolds fight club)
Great Video. A little on Probability math. All things being equal, with a 5% chance of dying, this is a 95% survival rate.
Should you survive the first combat, you have 95% survival on the second. So the survival rate of 2 combats together is 90.25% (.95*.95)
Three combats is 85.7375% etc.
Following this math down, the survival rate of 100 combats is 0.5921%
I usually feel if one or two characters are making death saves during a medium to deadly encounter, it went right.
@@Ti_Fire my monsters will focus fire.
@@jonathanhaynes9914that sounds like a literal meat grinder
@@ZetaMoolah ok, for clarity, I usually run a monthly one-shot. It will have an easy and hard encounter, or a deadly encounter. I like to have a mix of monsters and then the characters level up for the next month.
@@jonathanhaynes9914 I’m impressed you’ve found players who enjoy making death saves during medium encounters
@@lebeaumuni6247 it makes the combat feel threatening, I think and based on the feedback (anecdotes to be sure).
Just like to say this video helped a lot, as a new DM, planning my very first one shots and campaign a big worry for me was balancing encounters. This gave me so much to think about and a lot of tools i could take away to implement into my planning. So thanks guys 👍
You attack your players with an underpowered group of enemies, but then story tell your way into making the encounter appropriately hard to give the feeling of that razor's edge to your players. Have the enemies get a reinforcement; have something explode; have the environment suddenly intervene to impair your players. There are enough ways to buff the enemies during the encounter to make it feel consequential.
Subtle cast animate objects before your wizard can cast it.
Reinforcements are always a great tool, and allows you to bring more powerful enemies into play.
I also utilise a couple of simple tactics for intelligent monsters. If I have a bunch of archers then I will have one with a leadership role which can organise the archers to fire in synchronised volleys (becomes an aoe with a saving throw), this also speeds up the combat for the amount of creatures but also increases the damage output of those creatures.
I also have shield walls (gives cover to those in it when attacked from the front) and pike lines (gains polearm master reaction if attacked from the front).
^this
This. I think CR is just a guideline. DM has a number of ways to make it harder or easier when required. Like throwing something at a strong party to soften them up before the actual encounter. Doing these calculations like you would do for a PC RPG scripted encounter to determine if the difficulty is appropriate is kind of meaningless.
This was the best D&D video I watched in a while. Love you guys. Yeah, its really tough. I'm currently running an homebrew Theros-Setting and want the Characters to feel like heroes of greek myth. But heroics only come with danger. I almost gave up on challenge rating & just slap things there that fit the theme and are not OVERLY deadly. Adjust things during the combat as I go, thats what the DM screen is for. It aint easy.
When I want an encounter to look and feel harder than it is, I break out the hourglass. You get 30 seconds or suffer from panic, I roll on the confusion table. The phones go down, and everyone suddenly remembers what's on their spell list and in their inventories. I will sometimes do this for traps as well but that actually can be quite deadly so it's usually a very obvious trap or dangerous situation that gets it, like a burning building or something.
From Xanathar's we can see that the intended challenge rating of a solo monster for 3 x 13 lvl party is CR 15 legendary creature, not 13 normal. Adult Bronze/Green dragon doesn't have as much HP but it can fly, has legendary resistances and breaths stuff from afar. It is also a monster that most likely should have a lair to back it up. Not that it would be deadly in most cases, but I would say it would be a moderate challenge. This is also not considering the rather crazy off curve artifact weapon or other magical items that the party most likely has.
So, funny thing right: Paizo, for both Pathfinder first & second edition, & for Starfinder, actually remedy this issue. Instead of balancing CR to a party of 4, they created a chart that shows how CR should, roughly, be adjusted to your party size. The creatures in question are balanced under this CR gradient.
It also helps that in PF2E & Starfinder they've removed the RNG from health so that it's just a flat increase per level, which gives the GM more to work with on dealing damage to the players.
Just might have to take a look at how they manage monsters and combat. Somewhat familiar with character creation
Ahh...a fellow path player. I just started 5e this month and just picked up lvl 2. I love the simplicity of 5e however the challenge rating is bonkers hahaha. The bandit captain as CR 2 is crazy lol.
I dunno man, I DM'd for Pathfinder 1E years ago, and their CR system is pretty busted too. Didn't matter how I adjusted the encounters according to their charts, my party usually just steam-rolled most encounters even when I deliberately made them all deadly according to the CR charts. I even beefed up some of them with appropriate player class levels that, according to their charts, should have made the enemies way more dangerous - and it really didn't do much. My party put out so much damage, fights tended to rarely last more than a few rounds and they were rarely ever in actual danger - not the least of which because of the party Paladin.
@@Draeckon Rolls can still have a factor in it, & they did iron out a lot of issues from first to second edition.
I think the guideline gives a better idea of what to bounce off of, instead of a vague balance around a party of 4. It's not perfect; but it's better.
One of the things I noticed is that PCs have WAY more action economy than monsters.
My two fixes for the broken CR:
1) Maximize hp for monsters
2) Give them a number of feats equal to there PB, focusing mostly on action economy
For me, the hardest thing to consider is all the different abilities some monsters have that don't relate directly to damage, but can make encounters harder
This has definitely changed the way I will think about combat encounters and I think it will lead to being able to create encounters that are balanced in whatever way I want them to be.
3.5 was wild. You could have a character who existed as two different entities take levels in rogue, take knives that hit twice for every attack, and add hair knives for extra hits whilst the fighter does two attacks with the wizard playing rocket tag in the background, nuking everything xD challenge rating stood no chance haha
Also, it was a nightmare to calculate challenge rating for more than one creature or for a number of players different from four. As a DM, balancing encounters in 3.5 was almost impossible.
Not to mention that in 3.5, attack bonus vs monster AC made no sense at higher levels. If you wanted to give even a small kind of miss chance to the party fighter you had to artificially inflate AC, otherwise there was almost no point rolling the dice.
But then this could push AC out of the reach of any rogues or monks who tended to have a much lower attack by that time.
Plus, this meant if you wanted to challenge the party with humanoid you were basically forced to give the enemy mad magic items like +5 weapons and armour to even begin to make a challenge. Which of course the party would insist on looting, resulting in ridiculous situations like the party hauling dozens of +5 weapons and suits of plate mail around a dungeon!
And this doesn't even touch on the imbalance of high level spellcaster PCs!
@@PJRZ1 That mostly depend on the incredibly stupid way the "wealth" was managed and the fact that AC didn't go up with levels as attack did.
If you take as granted that a character would have a certain amount of wealth at a certain level, that says nothing about what kind of bonuses he would get from its items. Also, if you grant the players to always be able to buy what they could not find in loot, you will soon lose control over the amount of personalized bonuses each character would accumulate.
Another wrong assumption on the part of the developers was that buffer type characters would use their powers and spells mostly to buff their better suited companions, while reality has shown us that they will more gladly buff themselves so they can rob the job of the other players.
One last wrong assumption is that items will get consumed, destroyed, lost, stolen and, at some point, replaced by different ones. That's why the sunder, disarm and grappling maneuvers were in the game. That's why badly failing a save should have damaged the equipment too. That's why most of the magic items found during adventures should have been consumables.
Treasure tables in 2nd edition and earlier versions of the game were built so that permanent magic items were incredibly rare, and there was no market for them either.
But obviously, not many DMs actually went to the length of destroying or stealing the equipment of their players (the common excuse was that it is too much a hassle to apply all the rules).
And the really bad habit to start a campaign above first level added to the problem, since each character basically started already with a perfectly customized and highly efficient set of magic and mundane items, throwing the balance in the bin.
All this without even starting to address single items or effects which were highly exploitable in many situations.
I think this is a great start to make something more mathematically accurate. You would also need to consider the type of monster vs the types of characters. For example, you might have a high CR monster with great HP and DPR capabilities but if it is all dependent on being in melee and your players can create unfair ranged opportunities then that CR essentially turns into a CR 0. But if you have a monster that can fly or teleport or even turn invisible, that becomes a completely different challenge level.
Nice Vid, guys. In my Excel sheet, I calculate Party Total HP and also AVG HP (to answer the question of who might go down if focussed). I then calculate their Avg DPR, and their Burst DPR (for 1 round). Once I have those numbers, I then go to the monster side. I calculate amount of HP monsters require to last 1 round (aka "trash mobs"), 2 rounds (avg mobs), 3 rounds ("lieutenants") and 4 or more rounds (bosses) vs the party's avg DPR, and amount needed to survive their Burst DPR. Then I calculate monster damage by taking the Avg HP of the party and assigning DPR to the monsters as 0.1 x the Party Avg HP (for trash mobs), 0.2 (for avg monsters), 0.25 (for LT's) and 0.3 (for bosses). What I get is trash monsters who will only live a round and only deal 10% of a PC's health, or avg monsters which live 2 rounds and deal 20%x2 or 40% total, or LT's who live 3 rounds but deal 25%x3=75%, or bosses who live 4 rounds and who could deal 30%x4=120% of the Avg HP of the PCs (meaning, 1 goes down, or else 2 get really beat up). I then tweak the numbers up or down if I add special abilities to the monsters (flight, spellcasting, resistances, etc.) I can also use either the normal HP or Burst HP for the monster depending on if the PCs get there at the beginning of the day or end of the day (when their resources are depleted.)
I've been putting alot of thought into the subject of this video. I've created a spreadsheet for DPR calculations specifically to populate suggested statistics for a monster, in a similar way to the chart that they give you in the dmg. I'm going to test it out this week and see if it's a better representation of what a CR is supposed to do.
how'd this go? Care to share your shreadsheet?
@@bigmurph762 I feel like it actually went very well I'll share the link to it!
The thing I hate the most about the Challenge Rating is that there is no CR 29 creature.
CR29 is the friends we made along the way
Scheduling a regular game is CR 29
@@GeldarionTFS 😆 this guy knows what's up
I think another thing to consider is that the party should be having 4-6 encounters per day. Not each encounter has to be combat but I think part of the balance is also "how much of the party's resources are depleted per encounter?" It's why boss encounters are so tough to balance in 5e.
I think the other thing you might be not factoring in is how often you are encountering battles. Long rest -> Storm giant -> long rest is fine and a piece of cake. A storm giant in the middle of a blizzard with more encounters on the way....that is gonna be an issue. I think the CR ratings were built with a specific number of encounters in mind.
I typically like one big battle per rest instead of 5 stupid easy ones that drag out my session times, so yeah I can see why a CR13 wouldn't be sufficient. But if you are throwing 5 encounters per day, that action surge shouldn't even really be factored in, spell slots dwindle...etc...
There's no way to factor in resting, so no they don't consider it. Players are overpowered. There's only a select few of monsters that are overpowered, mainly with save or die abilities. They also never found a way to match the power of magic with melee damage, melee damage is a complete joke.
An extremely important point. The game itself factored in more encounters per day than the average table actually has. I think they counted on 4-5? Something like that. Typical table is 2-3
The DMG states an adventuring day is 6-8 rests and 2 short rests. That’s what the game is balanced for. Then people don’t do that … then people are concerned with the game not being balanced …. 🤣
Every D&D channel has a video like this.
“How come when I play the game exactly the way I want to instead of how I was told to do it the game isn’t as hard as I’d like it to be?”
Game design and balance is a complex topic.
There are variables you can change that will wildly impact the output.
@@wingedhussar2909 Eh, melee is generally not resource intensive and has more magic items that can combo off of it. A flametongue longsword averages 16 damage per hit at 20 STR, which puts it at 48 per round on a level 11 Fighter. And that’s completely unlimited and before you work in any additional damage bonuses. As a rule caster magic items have finite per day uses and don’t give anything like that kind of bonus damage
@@wingedhussar2909 Overpowered compared to what? DnD isn't a symmetrical game, such as a miniatures wargame where both sides have equal amont of troops at their disposal. The DM can always challenge the players by increasing the difficulty or number of enemies in an encounter. In fact, having an endless supply of monsters available to the DM is what *I'd* call overpowered 😄
It gets much worse when you start running the numbers and put the monsters through this rating system and you find that the example CR 13 monster may actually have an offensive CR of 16 and a defensive CR of 10, which will then average out to that CR 13.
As for a system for making more balanced encounters, I would recommend looking at Sly Flourish's "Lazy Encounter Benchmark" where your players are converted to monster CR and then you build an encounter based on total CR of the player party vs the monster total CR. It's a great system and I love using it.
Here's the basics of the LEB system.
Player Conversions
Levels 1-4, Player level x 0.25
Levels 5-10, level x 0.50
Levels 11-16, level x 0.75
Levels 17+, level x 1
Player Example: 1 @ level 4 (4 x 0.25 = 1), 3 @ level 3 (3 x 0.25 = 0.75 x 3 = 2.25), = 3.25 CR Party pool
Then subtract monster CRs from that total until you reach zero for a hard encounter, anything in the negative would be a deadly encounter.
Monster group 1:
CR 1 x 2 (2), CR 1/2 x 2 (3), CR 1/4 (3.25), total of 4 monster up against 4 players.
Monster Group 2:
CR 2 x 1 (2), CR 1/4 x 5 (3.25), total of 6 monsters to 4 players (1.5:1)
The problem with this video is that they do not take in account of the "adventuring day". The whole system is built around it, so not including the key assumption will make the whole system fall apart.
@@Cloud_Seeker This is pretty valid since as the adventuring day goes on, the players overall power (or CR from my later comments) will reduce while all monsters are always at the ready and 100%.
Guys, but did you check the chapter on calculating encounter difficulty? I dont believe 5e is CR od a monster is calculated for a party of 4. The CR is an abstract value you use to calculate the difficulty of the encounter, taking into account all monsters and all PC levels
It is based on 4.
A CR 5 monster is supposed to be a medium encounter for a 5th level party of 4. There's a section on calculating it for larger or smaller groups, which may be what you are thinking of
@@ADT1995 And the definition of a "medium encounter" is basically that a party might use some resources. Medium isn't "evenly matched" - medium is victory, with no casualties, and a character might be missing some hp.
A 50/50 encounter (IE, evenly matched) - way past deadly
@@rich63113 that's why I said "medium encounter" not "balanced encounter"
Despite the name medium means that the party will kick the monsters teeth in unless they are really low on resources
Thanks for bringing this up, I should have included it in my original comment
Personally my combats range from hard to >5x the deadly threshold just to keep players from obliterating everything.
@@ADT1995 Same. Anything below deadly is just a speedbump. At my table the party usually faces two or maybe three combat encounters between long rests, so I start from double deadly and go up from there.
Love your advice here and that you did the maths in a real campaign situation. Surprised at the results though. I thought they'd made it 2-3 rounds, not 1-2.
My big gripe with their encounter design is that their monsters' damage comes more from high damage on success than consistent but lower damage, so you can't really just say 'I'll just use a higher CR monster, since the average damage works out' because if you do that, you're not factoring in the variance.
I think a really good homebrew battle balance calculation system has to try to account for variance as well.
I'd be curious to see what the numbers look like if you balanced around Hard / Deadly encounters. By design, Deadly encounters are advertised as only having a chance of character death. The ones before then are undoubtedly going to be much lower risk then.
Honestly after level 10-14, every encounter needs to be deadly to make it worth the fight.
The “hard” and “deadly” encounters assume 6-8 encounters that day. That’s 5-7 other opportunities to diminish party resources … plus out of combat instances.
No one should be surprised that when you completely change class resources and magic resources that the expected challenge of a fight or a monster isn’t the same.
It’s like …. If I give you have as much salary as you have now and then talk to you about your disposable income … things will seem harder, right? But, if suddenly you have twice as much money as you make today you’ll have more disposable income. The same things won’t be as hard to buy.
Imagine you have 10 spells per day. And you have 1 fight per day.
Now imagine you have 10 spells per day and you have to get through 8 fights and also maybe have spells for non combat encounters …..
How excited is your cleric going to be to heal you when they have 3 fights left to go and have 2 spell slots left for all healing and also all offensive spells and also for any out of combat stuff?
Sounds like a different game, right? And, you can rest early … but we’re just gonna have to increase the odds of your rest being interrupted.
@@zero11010 I don't disagree. Though I think what they want out of Medium encounters sounds like what falls under the category of Deadly encounters according to WOTC at least. I normally do about the standard encounters per rest, but even when I don't using Deadly encounters generally seems to still be a challenge.
Man! I was looking for a solution to combat encounters. This is a good step stone, now I can balance things better. Thanks you! 😁
i'm pretty new to DM'ing, but i'm a sucker for liar actions
even with one of the first quests they did at LV 1 the monster had a liar action, giving them a sort of clock and diverting their attention making them think "do we clear the minions first, rush the boss, how fast do new minions come and in what ways?"
Lying monsters are the worst!
@@harmless6813 insight check please.
lair actions* 🙃
The solution I use is having monsters with scalable attributes.
You can justify it with the notion that same monsters are not clones, one maybe older, another maybe in the best shape, another is the dumb brother :)
So the HPs, the AC and every other attribute go from a range of X to a range of Y, and "coincidentally" the group is going to face the one that is not OP and also not a joke, according to what the DM finds appropriate.
Other than that, there is also the old trick of adding last minute minions who serve and help the boss.
Don't forget building terrain that allows the players to use strategy to survive & win.
Did you find a solution ? If so, is there a video ? Thanks for what you do for the community ❤️
Is that a ‘Dr.’ I see in front of Monty’s name? Congratulations! 🎉 What was your thesis on?
Excellent analysis.
Been running games for 37 years and have always lived by the philosophy of the difficulty of the encounter is based of the narrative.
- Is this supposed to be an epic battle where your players are fighting for their very lives, but they are mopping the floor with your baddies? Time to up the intensity and make adjustments on the fly.
- A routine combat encounter is wrecking your players? Milk the dramatic intensity, but make adjustments on the fly.
TL;DR - always be prepared to do what is necessary to make the story exciting for your players, make the stakes matter, and give them moments to be the heroes. You will never go wrong with this. You and your players will have gaming memories you talk about decades later.
Thank you for all your hard work Dungeon Dudes!
You should really include Jill and Joe more often. I love you guys but I think your videos could us their input as well.
We hope to in the future.
Thank you! I can imagine that it is not simple, balancing schedules and all. But they are a joy to watch in your campaign and I truly feel that they will add to your content, which is already excellent.
Because of all the player options and potential homebrew, you can never make one system that will reliably always count as an Easy or Medium encounter. When an Easy encounter is the 5th of a day, it may not be that easy. I feel almost no DM has 6-8 encounters in a day. Thats why we want the combats we DO have to make an impact. In that regard we need to up the ante. When I compare monsters from 3.5edition with monsters of general same build and same CR then you see that actually at very low CR's (1/8 up to CR 1) monsters in 5e are harder to kill than in 3.5. In 3.5 giant rats was the way to go at 1st level. If you put in 4 giant rats against a party in 5e you might end up with a TPK, (which happened). Then as CR increases monsters in 5e become weaker and weaker. After CR12 differences become big. This is also because of the Bounded Accuracy principle, I get that, but I do feel that WotC have been too cautious here. Creatures of CR12 and higher should be better than they are now. For a time I have solved this by actually using the 3.5 monsters in my 5e campaigns. But now I have build a system where I have given monsters Damage Reduction and it seems to work very nicely. If you want I can show the tables.
This is an amazing topic to begin to discuss and I'm excited to see it! Another important balancing factor is considering that maybe your party isn't super optimized either. For example, 2/3 campaigns that I have been in, have had one player that (while we recommend the strongest stuff), decides not to use that for character or personal reasons.
So to answer your question and how I have been running games;
A medium encounter should deplete at least a quarter of the characters' total resources including health, spell slots, feats, etc. (can be split in anyway, as long as the total is roughly a quarter) since you can string multiple medium encounters together that feels reasonable, a hard encounter should be about half the resources, and then a deadly encounter should require a minimum of 75% of their total resources, if not all of them to get out alive and successfully. I would try to make a boss take nearly everything if I could, but that's a razor's edge to walk with luck being a major factor, so I always like to leave a small variance of like 5-10% so that the luck going super badly won't kill the party... Completely.
A way I have put this into action for example is that my party of 3 level 7 characters (two of which are highly optimized, with the third being just solid) all fought against The Hungry, a CR 11 creature (with some environmental hazards). The fight was intended to be difficult and did indeed drop the tank to a quarter health, with the others being relatively unscathed as they used a lot of spells and resources.
I feel like a decent calculation help is that if it's a one versus party situation you can relatively safely use a creature with double the party's average level in CR and have it be a good boss fight. Knock the CR down one or two notches for a hard fight, one or two more for a medium, etc.
Anyway, sorry for the long comment and ramble. I really like this topic and I think if we can find a quick formula it would be amazing!
TL;DR: I used a creature a CR that was 4 greater than average party level for a solid hard encounter. I also feel that totalling up player health and enemy damage is a great basis for this new paper math formula we're looking for, and the missing component we need is 'how do we quickly and easily gauge party damage mitigation and damage dealing, including the majority of effects?'
I run a campaign for a 5-character part, all currently 14th level. I have found the best way to make combats dramatic and interesting is to introduce unfamiliar monsters (Kobold Press, Pathfinder, homebrew), and challenging/unusual terrains and environments. I also run the mobs at max HP. My players are smart, creative, and experienced, so I'm constantly on my toes. Using unknown and unusual creatures solves unconscious metagaming. On average, a character goes unconscious every three sessions, and most times, the players have told me they weren't sure they weren't going to make it through unscathed. Not every combat is deadly - and nor should they be - so resource management becomes a crucial factor.
Great video, guys. I appreciate your content and passion for the game!
This video is pretty cool. I ran the numbers on CR a while back and came to similar conclusions. I’m glad that you spelled out that the true purpose of encounter balancing is to bring out the right mix of drama and tension.
I think there were two key assumptions that didn't bear out that skewed challenge rating -
1) 6-8 combat encounters per day (this would force players to be very stingy with cooldowns, but no one does this because it's unwieldy at the table)
2) Low-magic setting (the 5e playtest was a low-magic setting, but once it launched it immediately became common to see everyone kitted out in basic magic gear by level 5)
Since neither of these things bore out, CR is greatly inflated vs realistic encounters. HOWEVER, there are a lot of weird standouts that punch above their CR - see shades, trolls (if players/characters don't know how to stop regen), and redcaps.
I think you're right in saying that there's no way to really boil down D&D encounters quantitatively. There are just too many non-DPS factors like CC, the weird popcorn healing, and sheer player ingenuity. Additionally, bounded accuracy means that focus firing a single target is incredibly deadly by just adding bodies to the field (i.e. the tyranny of action economy), but like you said you don't necessarily *want* to kill the players, just create dramatic tension. I think this is just better done with story telling and creative, non-DPS-check style encounters.
A good thought experiment for you guys, that I think might make a great video, would be to think about how to design non-combat encounters to match a CR-style system. These can be (ab)used liberally to drain player resources without them catching on before the big battle. These kinds of systems promote a much more narrative-driven game that isn't as well supported by the DMG, which could help enrich dungeon master toolkits.
This has genuinely been my journey as a dm for the past 17 years of running D&D and Pathfinder. Safe to say, it is a very delicate line to ride finding that medium and can very much agree a lot of the times not only calculating your party's capabilities Stat wise but also the extent of their abilities can stretch those numbers to make the challenge less viable than it would to take a cookie cutter example through the reference chart.
At one point I tested this out between multiple different groups I was running: similar compositions in party makeup, 5 members to each group, level 5 party, Town Square with 1 major raised platform, multiple assassins [3 ranged, 6 close range] 2 basilisks. Group 1 struggled to subdue the party, took 5-6 rounds, 2 casters dealt back and forth with the archers, martials did their best to defend them from the close range enemies until the party could come back together to deal with the basilisk problem, cleaned up the stragglers that tried getting away.... Party 2, same comp...... 2 rounds, the only real difference being the fighter of the party being a centaur instead of human, and defense style, flipped the entire counter on its head.
So with that in mind yes, I'd say even with it meaning extra prep time especially if you're looking to meet a certain urgency, it'd help you as a dm in leaps and bounds to take your party and possibly run the characters though scenarios yourself with even perhaps the strategies your familiar with the party using and throw in best/worst/and average possible outcomes to get a good idea on how the encounter may wear on the party's capabilities to see where things may lead.
Hi guys, this was one of my favorite discussions so far, love your content!! And as someone that's actually studying game design, this is a fascinating topic.
I've definitely felt this even as a "rookie" DM, having only run about 10 to 15 sessions, a "medium" encounter almost TPKs my party, while a "hard" encounter was a total breeze, and even though these were low level characters obviously, I feel like the dice play a major role in this, maybe the D20 is part of the issue, so maybe changing the system could help somehow, like in 2d6 you're more likely to land 6s, 7s, or 8s in total, maybe a system with 2d10s could be more balanced, altough tougher to get crits and epic fails.
But specifically for encounter balance, my best guess would be to have a Pokémon-ish type of system, where each individual monster has "strengths" and "weaknesses" and I don't mean just type of damage resistances and such, I mean: "This monster uses X attack that requires dexterity saving throws, so it has strength against a party with low dexterity" or "This monster has a ton of AoE, so it is effective against bigger parties, but weak to one beefy barbarian" or whatever. Tagging each monster with these types of "mechanical advantages" would help in telling when to use them, let's say if the monster has a few advantages against the average of the party, you could think the challenge rating goes up by 2 or 3, or something like that, I feel this would give a better idea of what to pit against your party for intriguing scenarios.
Brilliant minds think alike ^^
I'm currently tinkering on a high level oneshot because I found a couple high CR monsters I like. I made an experiment and asked both my potential players if they want to play at higher character level or rely on what they can potentially find as well as own skills and abilities, or if they want to go underleveled but have a choice of some magical gear as starting gear. Almost exactly 80% answered that they want a choice of magical gear.
I'm a strong believer that this, as well as combinations of races, classes and other stuff breaks the 'CR Formula' in a way that it's nearly impossible to make a one-fits all way of assigning CR. I usually try to learn what my teams strengths and weaknesses are and modulate based what can take advantage of what.
I arranged for an encounter with a Narzugon, his Nightmare mount, 2 hell hounds and 4 Bloodletters (my own creation). The party has a 3rd level Totem Barbarian/4th level Champion. A 5th level Gloomstalker Ranger/2nd level Rogue. A 7th level Moon Druid, 2-7th level sorcerers. 1 Divine Soul and 1Shadow, and a 7th level totem Barbarian.
This Is a full strength Narzugon from the Avernus campaign. I gave him the Polearm master feat and the Sentinel feat.
The Nightmare was downed as it flew in by the Ranger. The Ranger had another attack used against the Narzugon which forced her to make a CON save of 20 or be frightened of it. The Ranger failed 6 rounds in a row. So only the 3/4 BarFighter and Druid were able to attack it. The Shadow Sorcerer was able to Misty Step in and Thunderstep out causing the Narzugon full damage and the Druid and BarFighter half damage.
After 6 rounds of combat we had to quit since it was 2 AM.
Druid is down. BarFighter went down and came back at 1 HP (Half Orc). The Narzugon is down to 84 HP. 2 Bloodletters remain at full HP, which the 7th level Barbarian and Divine Soul Sorcerer were taking on, both those characters are at about half HP. Oddly enough the Gloomstalker is still full strength because she's at range, though she also took out both Hell hounds and the Nightmare by herself.
I know if I hadn't given the Narzugon feats, this fight would be over.
IMO balancing around "deadly" encounters is probably better than using straight CR. That is, your level 13 party of 3 should be fighting a CR 17 monster. The exception is at low level. An owl bear against a level 1 party of 6 has a realistic chance to become a TPK.
I feel like there are two important factors that need to be taken into account when trying to figure any of this kind of stuff out. The first one is that "killing" a player doesn't necessarily mean they're completely dead, just that they go down. Since having even 1 HP means they're fully functional this isn't actually that bad for the players. The second thing to keep in mind is those same players' play styles. Some parties are very cautious with their resources which can get them into trouble on lower level and counters, but others are more than happy to blow through those same resources and then figure out a way to sneak in a rest.
In my games with 0 HP you're dead, and with 1 HP you can barely walk and most of your abilities are compromised.
In my opinion that makes for a more challenging game and for a more epic while realistic narration.
Well thought out topic, thanks for the upload. I think one factor to consider in a quick calculation is the idea of the action economy in the game. A single strong enemy, in general, is at a sizable disadvantage to the party in terms of the action economy. Perhaps the monster's CR minus .5 per character in the party would give a more accurate value for the threat to the group. Or just an adjustment based on how outnumbered the group is comparatively, either monster or pc.
Very interesting discussion, and huge amount of work from you to calculate all of that ! I've had my first experience as DM a few weeks ago for a oneshot, and something I thought almost instantly after looking at some monsters is that CR kinda sucks haha. What I found was the best to balance a bit the mix between AoE/control and solo target damage output is to have different monsters. I feel like you would need 2 or 3 different monsters of different threat level. Though I had a party of 6, which gives the opportunity to have a good number of monsters, I still felt like that several low HP monsters, one or two medium HP and a "boss" is a good way to balance things out and to have a good encounter.
Great vid, Dudes! Maybe your most helpful ever for DM's. I have a party with 6 players that routinely shocks me at how easily they kill the monsters I send against them. Thank you!!👏👏👏🙏🙏🙏
"The player characters feel threatened, but maybe actually aren't." This is how I set up monsters (and their minions) in Monster of the Week. Part of the reason I moved away from 5e and towards MotW is that, when I do have combat, I don't need to work through a pile of expected damage outputs on the fly.
This is a really good starting point for a system. I think for a generalized system, we could talk about AC15DPR or AC20DPR, matching the AC15/20HP, representing the damage and health asked to correspond to AC 15 or 20.
Resource use could be accounted for using a factor, e.g. 2 for full spellcasters and 1.5 for other classes.
This might be my favorite video you guys have thrown out. Normally I'm not too concerned about number crunching but my players are up around level 16 now and their level 10-15 encounters and boss fights all went really...anti-climatically. I am really excited to try this system out and feel confident it will help balance things out.
CR is dodgy at low levels, broken at mid levels and practically unusable at high levels. Depending on your parties health, dps, utility and itemisation they can clear a supposedly appropriately level CR in one round and likely kill something much more dangerous with little effort. The proposed system is much more sensible. I normally just find an appropriate enemy and buff it considerably or give it friends. I have a friend who uses max hp for all monsters as starting point and buffs them further from there.
Just to say, one of the most important things that my longtime gm did when we were playing 3.5 was to let us all engage in a "non - canon" white room combat scenario for about 2 hours every 2-3 levels. He would place a monster that he felt should be relatively challenging to the party and we would see how our party could handle it (this was partly to see if our characters work the way we wanted after a the recent level up, so this was a window of opportunity to "take back" some of our decisions if it wasn't working as we wanted), this really gave everyone a really good understanding of just how everyone really worked, and how we could all try and set each other up for success in the combat. Once he felt he had a good understanding of the parties current capabilities we would then engage in a bit of free for all pvp, seeing how our characters held up vs each other for a bit of fun.
Edit: That group was very much into following the rules, and having Death be a very real and likely scenario. It has been very interesting trying to play with other groups ever since, because going so hard into it for several years, it made things so dramatic and meaningful. Doing courageous things mattered so much, as you were really risking your character to do them. It also really made you realize that a character dying was really just a chance for you to make new characters with other stories. But most groups I've found just, don't want to engage in such a cut throat playstyle, they are there to relax and have cool moments, they don't want to know what failing the roll to jump across the broken bridge will do, they just want it to succeed. Or to have a crossbow bolt crit succeed vs the rogue while they are disarming it, suddenly making things very dire as he also failed the poison DC check........ instead I often find DM's and players just kind of telling each other what happens, with rolls only mattering insofar as what numbers have they managed to crank out of their hits. Not saying that they don't miss or things like that, but if it is an important roll and it failed? Very few DMs will let it go beyond failing the quest, and most won't even allow that.
This is a game where people can spend 4 actions and spells to try to open a door and still fail.
There can be no fair balancing. Most times a combat felt challenging to me was because the monster was rolling to high and my party too low. While in a different day the same monster and enemy can be easily dealt with.
As much as I hate it on principle. An exciting combat would need to have adaptive difficulty and depending on how things were going the dm could modify the stats of the creature without the party noticing it.
This is fascinating. I've been watching D&D games for about four years but haven't been able to play much and I'm about to run my first one shot (hence why I'm here) and I had no idea this problem existed. This really helps me out.
I love all of your videos, but this is one of my favorites. As a math nerd and D&D fan, this is perfect for me.
I do agree that CR is silly. It's more of a way to assign a "level" to the monster more than an encounter building tool. To me, it seems more appropriate to assign a CR to a monster to determine its proficiency bonus and spell/ability DC are than a simple math tool for fights.
In one of my games, my party encountered a boss fight and seeing the math play out with dice rolls and modifiers (we play on Foundry and the DM has a lot of public rolls), I noticed this particular boss had a +11 to hit, and a +9 to damage. Turns out, my DM forgot to assign a CR when building the NPC in Foundry, so this NPC had the default proficiency bonus of +2. If my DM had assigned an appropriate CR to match this NPCs power level, that combat encounter would have likely ended in their favor rather than ours. A +11 to hit against our warforged armorer artificer's AC was often a miss (the DM did not roll very well that night). An appropriate CR would have made it look more like a +14 or +15 to hit, and I would be telling a story about our TPK instead.
Point being, if using online tools and/or VTTs, don't forget about CRs on your custom NPCs/monsters because it does make a difference, but not the kind that the DMG is referring to.
Something that I did recently was I did a 7 hour session by myself and took control of my PC's and simulated a swarm of enemies with multiple waves, and then also a "boss" fight with a higher CR creature and a few minions. It took absolutely forever but it helped me know how things were going to go. Once I ran the boss fight however it went worse than I thought quickly because I rolled a few crits, but that's besides the point
Hey guys, I love your videos! Even though I'm DM for shadowrun which has no CR, I feel your contemplations are relevant. From my perspective, challenge doesn't necessarily mean whether players can easily kill or survive an encounter. I think you need to look at the problem more holistically. If, for example, the mission is to free hostages, it doesn't really matter if the party could easily survive the encounter - it's still considered a failure even though all monsters are easily slain, if one survives long enough to kill the hostages. Even if player death is not on the table - everyone and everything else is. If the players may save their own skin, they still could lose their equipment, connections, relatives, reputation.. so even if a character could kill a single goblin in a single blow, a group of goblins could still be a challenge for a level 13 group if the mission isn't just about survival in combat.
Hello Kelly, hi Monty,
You present a very salient point: CR is not a glove which fits every party composition the same, and encounter-balancing would be better off being tailored to the individual party.
During the summer/fall I derived a few dozen formulas to (very) accurately calculate average damage, contingent on the attacker’s stats, the target’s AC or Saving Throw bonus and a bunch of other factors. The system has worked well for adjusting encounters in my own games so far.
Give me a holler if you’re interested in the some formulas, spreadsheets and PDFs. They include a lot of math and some neat graphs.
We had a good lesson in encounter balancing in our Strahd campaign a few months back. DM set up an encounter with a big inflated enemy designed to wipe the floor with us with little difficulty, scoff, and walk away disappointed.
The party (Hexblade Warlock [me], Ghostslayer Blood Hunter, Beast Barbarian, Artificer/Chronomancy Wizard) stumbled across a hunter on the way to Valaki. My Hexblade and he had a chat as we walked, I heard a sound and as I turned, the hunter attempted to strike me with his spear as half a dozen werewolves in wolf form burst from the woods. Roll initiative!
So, as stated, this was a "supposed to lose fight", setting up a reoccurring miniboss for the campaign. He was supposed to knock us all down in a few rounds, and leave us unconscious near the gate to Valaki. But instead we steamrolled the Alpha werewolf and his pack in just 4 rounds. Only one of us (me) even got hit because I 1v1ed the Alpha, and even then it was only once. Even his unique and monstrous transformation couldn't save him from the party. We consistently rolled 17s, 18s, 19s, and 20s, whereas the DM rolled
What I've noticed about this edition is that it's more about how many attacks the monsters are getting versus the party. If you have one monster, it gets one turn vs the party's 3-4.
The encounters that I've run in my current campaign that seem to be the deadliest/closest calls are the ones that have more turns than the party gets, even if it's a single monster.
Examples: I had a 6th level party go against three winter wolves... and a young white dragon, all in its lair. The wolves were at the start, the dragon joining in after the 2nd round. The half-orc cleric ended up using Relentless Endurance because of failing the save on the breath weapon, and everyone was badly hurt, but it rode that bleeding edge and they still talk about it over a year later.
I also did a homebrew monster with the same party at 9th level that was a crystalline core which had six other crystals around it (meant to be a boss fight). The core buffed/healed the crystals while they attacked, slaying the core destroyed all the crystals. If one crystal was destroyed, the core would sacrifice some of its own hp to revive it. Because of the six attacks/round, the damage output ended up pretty high and forced the party to fight a bit more defensively.
For reference, I had a party of paladin/barbarian/sorceress/cleric.
I feel like instead of having a system to preemptively balance out encounters, there should be a system to increase/decrease combat difficulty on the go, so if things are going too smoothly for the players you can pump difficulty up or pump it down if the players are getting destroyed.
Maybe something like general-purpose legendary actions/resistances the DM and players can use like once of twice per day, on any character of the encounter, whenever their party's HP threshold goes below a certain number, or if there's a big gap between the players' vs monsters' HP values. That could represent those classic "rise up to the challenge in the face of death" moments.
To my group as 6 players, I discovered that the best way to increase the difficult is spread the players in the map/grid. A big threat in the other side of the map, with a lower level body guards, a reasonable melee in one direction with a small group with ranged. And a big (flash) enemy to finish the balance.
But after considering magic itens heal, after certain point I make the encounters 1 or 2 level above the party.
Something I've learned from video games and from playing with my main DM who is himself a from software buff, is that it is incredibly valuable to STAGE combats. And then that gives you an easy to adjust, narratively impactful difficulty contour to a combat. Waves of lesser enemies that appear as needed and as logical, boss monsters that transition to different forms or behaviors as you delete hit points. Not exactly what you're talking about, but it is one way of achieving the drama without overdoing the difficulty and off effectively increasing the number of encounters without making it feel like a slog.
Guys this is about what CR is. CR13 means group of 4 players at 13th level can handle this. You are 3 people group and it lives 1.5 round. Imagine monster rolling high on initiative and focusing on 1 player for 2 turns. That player might die and that makes this a deadly encounter which means one or more PCs might die.
I know CR is not 100% accurate but also its not that bad.
Bonus tip: Keep in mid that in DMG or PHB it says that average encounter per day is 8 so PCs are like to use all of their recources at the end of the day.
Extra Bonus Tip: CR cannot predict your party's magic items.
Honestly at first when you were going over the math I dissagreed with you until I realized your actual point to this video lol. Really great video with a lot of good points. I think the thing that will help in this case is for Wotc to rework the DMG to better emphasize other styles of play and how to run the game and what combat is really about cus you take this logic and put it on a newer DM who is maybe on their first campaign and feels like their monsters aren't doing enough and their party is level 12+ it makes high levels especially feel really daunting. This is something Wizards could really do to help Newer DMs as well as veterans who feel like high level isnt very well supported.
First of all great break down of the CR. I think the weirdest thing about the CR system is everyone has a different definition of "easy, medium, hard, and deadly" challenges. Looking for "drama" rather than "challenge" makes a lot more sense for dnd.
On the question of balancing combat encounters, a method I have been using recently to some notable success is just rolling randomly. If there is a random encounter I have planned(or I'm pre-planning a future encounter), I roll a d20, and that's the CR I pick or find a monster from.
I have also been playing with rolling the d20 twice, a taking the result closer to the party's ECL.
What this does is force the party to deal with encounters too tough for them, and well as giving them some relaxing fights they can take it easy on. And once I roll for the encounter, I can even adjust the situation to make the encounter more exciting, by giving the weak monsters a terrain advantage and surprise. Or by giving the party those same things against a powerful monster.
The party starts to sometimes decide that running away and hiding are better options. Or sometimes they need to roleplay to get past the dragon guarding the bridge. And with options for resurrection, battlefield control, etc... many other classes get a chance to shine in various and unusual ways, ways that I couldn't even plan.
In other words, the CR system is so broken that rolling randomly provides a more exciting gameplay experience.
Your idea of calculating the party's DPR is helpful. So when I chose a monster that is right for the story, I can just adjust the stats of the monster(s) to make the challenge is want for the game session. (i.e. HP, to-hit, dmg of the monster)
I have been DMing for a very long time. I have developed a feeling for encounters that would be fun and challenging. This has worked very well over the years. I set up introductory modules for first, second, and third level adventures for fifth edition using the encounter system in 5e. I have run these over 30 times. I have run these for new players just learning the game as well as to run games for veteran players for their newly created characters. Two factors not being mentioned here are that players make more of a difference than the characters they play, and how hard I, as DM, choose to play the monsters. Overall, I think the encounter system works ok for a starter, but I play the challenge relative to the player group's ability.
The tricky thing is that encounters are designed to whittle the characters down. That is, you are comparing one encounter when the characters are "full." But there should be several encounters per rest. Take your same encounter example and apply it to the characters three or four times to signify how many encounters they'll have between short rests...or six to eight times before a long rest.
This is my biggest pet peeve as a new DM (started in 2020). In my first campaign, using The Essentials kit, I upped the power of the dragon to Adult (CR 13) to make it more of of a later game threat. I had it confront the party (4 players at level 7) to toy with them a bit to build the tension. They killed it in two rounds. They rolled some really good crits, but it was an incredible let down. Luckily, everyone was on the same page that it was a "learning" campaign so I could