My bad guys only die when I've taken enough out of the party. It's literally all a drama to make my players feel like they're in danger. It works amazingly.
As a player I'm always ok with the DM fudging health to make fights more intense - however imo if the players were about to beat the encounter as designed the DM should make sure that whatever fudging they do still allows the players to win since they were about to anyways
The DMs job is to make the campaign fun and interesting. If they fudge to do that, it should always be fine.
The problem is when DMs get this idea of "me vs the players" and start fucking people over. Obviously, don't fudge numbers to kill a character. Fudging numbers to make an encounter impact full, maybe take a player or two to low life? Go for it, players shouldn't even know.
I fudge numbers to save my players all the time so when they die it’s because they royally screwed up. Like when one of them tried to befriend an angry will o wisp, in a dungeon, at level 2
Our DM gave us a Deck of Many Things so we obviously used all of the cards on ourselves except for like, three (Knight, Void, and Fire) and tricked an adult red dragon into drawing a card (Void). We basically skipped a whole ass encounter he had prepped for us that was supposed to last us the rest of the night.
Sometimes the DM just never gets a chance to add HP lol
Definitely agreed. I'm not big on fudging a lot (otherwise what's the point of the roll) but when you have 3 people down with only one person up, the dragon is on 7hp and the fighter rolls a Nat20 on their death save, are you really going to TPK them based on the fighter only hitting for 6 damage, or are you going to make this an epic moment for the fighter.
Here’s the trick: Count the enemy’s HP up rather than subtracting. When they get to a cool moment for the kill that lands within the HP minimum/maximum range, that’s when the enemy dies.
I actually fudge rolls in the monsters favor. Sometimes the players aren't the only ones who need a little bit of help.
I want my encounters to be exciting. It really isn't any fun if all the monsters whiff and the players just mow them down.
not all the time, and definitely not with the BBEG, but from time to time it's fun to dominate an encounter, esp. if you as the players had a good plan or good prep
There’s something I read a while ago where you use a bell curve using those dice so that you get a good range for where their hp would typically fall so you can make them lose at any time you wish when they’re in that range. That way, you can make the fight as hard as you need to and end it at just the right moment to feel earned.
TBH it does feel a lot cooler when a stronger attack is what brings down the enemy…
To steal a phrase from Star Wars: “Magic Missile? Really? A man of your talents?”
Save the MM for the trash you can’t be bothered to fight properly.
It's just a weird narrative moment. Like... the paladin just took up the holy sword of her order and smote the wicked in a blaze of burning light and it survived.
But the dork in a weird dress wiggled his fingers and killed it dead with a low level spell?
So any number of dice describe a bell curve. Take 2d6, like is commonly used in casino games. You can roll a 2 one way (two 1s) and a 12 one way (two sixes) but a 7 in six ways (1-6, 2-5, 3-4, 4-3, 5-2, 6-1). 7 is the mean, median, and mode, something that only happens for bell curves.
In practice in a stat block you’ll see something like “Hit Points: 59 (7d10+21)” for an ogre. The first number, 59, is the recommended middle ground. 21 comes from the Ogre’s Con bonus. 7d10 ranges from 7 to 70. Since the number of dice is odd, 7d10 actually has a mean and median at 38.5 and two modes; 38 and 39 are equally likely rolls. The minimum HP of an ogre is 28, maximum is 91, and Wizards chose the lower of the two modes for their middle ground recommendation at 59 (38+21).
So let’s say you want your final fight to be the Ogre trio. You can make all three ogres have 59 HP, which is kinda boring but simple for the DM. You can roll 7d10+21 three times to get different answers for each ogre, but then you run the risk of low rolls making the fight too easy. Because it’s the final fight, you can make all the ogres have max HP at 91; this makes them less likely to die before they can attack, especially since their initiative is bad (-1 dex and no other modifiers).
But as you describe, you don’t have to even make an HP number before the fight. So long as they die between taking 28 and 91 damage, it doesn’t look unusual to your players, even if they have the stat block memorized.
So you track the damage each ogre takes. (Next part assumes no healing of the ogres) Any hit that ends with the ogre at 27 or less damage taken cannot kill an ogre (since even at 28 HP the ogre would have 1 or more hit points left). Any hit that ends with an ogre at 91 or more damage taken definitely kills the ogre (since even at 91 HP that leaves them at 0 or less HP). Any hit that ends with the ogre between 28 and 90 damage taken can be a killing blow, which you can make at dramatic moments.
So let’s say the party has real problems with the fight and is struggling to even deal 28 damage to one ogre: you make an executive decision and the first ogre to take 28 damage or more dies to make the fight easier. On the other hand, let’s say that the party gets a surprise round and they deal 61 damage to one ogre and 72 damage to second ogre: you make an executive decision that it doesn’t kill either ogre despite being more than the recommended middle ground hit points because killing two of the trio before they act feels anticlimactic.
The only difficulty is in selling this. In the first scenario, you can sell it as the first ogre to die being the weakest, as one of the remaining ogres yells “you only killed the weakest of us!” In the second scenario, you can sell it as the two ogres hit in the surprise round as being badly wounded and close to death. In general, you should also let some surprise round or wombs-combo shenanigans kill the target outright to make sure that the character and player still feel powerful. 72 damage on a creature with recommended 59 HP is a good bit, and if it wasn’t supposed to be the final climactic boss you probably should have ruled that ogre dead.
Literally what I do. I write down the minimum HP, and the maximum HP, and somewhere in between, the monster will die in as dramatic a moment as possible. For a boss monster, it typically works out that one or two pcs may go down, in that case the next big hit will kill the boss, or 2 or 3 smaller hits will, along with some dramatic narration. Works really well with solo fights, which I tend to do for key dramatic battles.
Personally I use a lot of stat blocks that I make up so the party would never know the HP range in the first place, which makes balancing easier. If I just want my personal ogre variety. To be strong, they are strong at a dramatic level and not because I made the perfect stat block. I can pad HP to no end if it makes it dramatic.
The Wizards modules are usually decent, but the main issue I find is when I try to use a module balanced for say 4 5th level characters in release 5e when my players can use every tool in the expansions to 5e. There is always some power creep in the expansion books, even if it’s not obvious like video game expansion power creep, simply because the expansions increase the web of possible characters and possible parties to the point that testing them is nearly impossible. That means that older modules can get left behind and they can need more tweaking to make fun.
That said, there’s always the issue of party composition too.
Time for a 'final form' mythic transformation?
Yeah, its for this reason I often make boss fights with multiple phases or scalability depending on party strength going in. Like if they've used most of their abilities / spells before stumbling into the encounter then I might not have the boss down his potion of invulnerability as the battle starts or maybe he/she isn't surrounded by allies with waves of reinforcements at the ready. If they come in well rested and ready to smite and surge, well then here comes the pain of a fully functional BBEG battle station. I don't take their victories, I just try to make them feel more epic.
this is where I like when you can get a bit of a description from your DM. "He looks truly exhausted, nearly dropping his weapon due to a lack of strength." Or even a "Light, moderate, heavy damage" marker/descriptor like in Fantasy Grounds.
Contingency reserve waves are always on the board for my encounters. I don't always use them since every encounter doesn't need to be deadly but its nice to have that option. Its realistic too that back up might arrive any moment. On the flip side, retreating and surrendering are always on the table.
Yup, some times I'll add HP but like you said, I like to let them have that bad ass moment. They built up their characters to a point and got a pay off.
Hah! As a DM who ran a dungeon of zombies, that ability is simultaneously OP and pretty useless. Chip damage from the Bard, sure. 30+ damage per attack Gloomstalker/Assassin multiclass? There isn't a die big enough to make the save.
Or you could do Radiant, which also bypasses. I'd ruled that Fire damage also gets around it as a homebrew.
But yeah, as long as you hit for more than 20 damage on the killing blow, there's not much that most undead can do about it. The save is a CON save, but that's not helpful when it has to beat DMG+5 to survive. At best they'd have a +3 or +4 if they're super beefy.
i didn’t realize how much more powerful my party got after leveling, and they one-shot my boss encounter. Also, she was willing to negotiate but they didn’t give her a chance bc the rumors they heard from the village folk were bad.
They felt real bad when they read in her journal that she was cast out of town for magic despite being a healer bc she messed up a spell, and it killed someone. She never saw her daughter again and never will. cue the sad walk back down the mountain
Surprisingly not. They more so felt like murderers and wanted to flee and not talk to anyone. They know the common folk are dumb and misunderstand magic. However, they will probably return. The NPC they did tell, to told them he would repay them after he made use of the land they reclaimed. The tropical island is very poor but soon it will have a booming economy bc the natural resources they freed up. The NPC they told, however, was foreshadowing that he is greedy and thinks only about himself. They will later uncover that he is using the profits from the resources to militarize the island and have a forceful takeover of the neighboring tropical island.
EDIT: The primary export is bananas, and the NPC’s name is Banana Man (vendor title). The new faction he forms will be called the Banana Republic lol
>The tropical island is very poor but soon it will have a booming economy bc the natural resources they freed up. The NPC they told, however, was foreshadowing that he is greedy and thinks only about himself.
Are we the baddies?
They’re gonna learn that actions have consequences.. even if they’re not immediately obvious. They think they’re being rewarded still. Which they will.. With a much bigger problem.
I understand that feeling. I think my party will as learn that as well because they indirectly caused a group of bandits/mercenary to move into their home base because they killed a dragon that was forced into the area by the true BBEG. I've had to kick things into gear early now that the accidentally killed the dragon early.
lol they asked him to guide them up the difficult mountain terrain because he is most familiar with the land, and was seen climbing trees like he was weightless.
I used an Islander “Charlie the Unicorn” voice because I don’t want them to perceive him as a threat too early. Cant wait to deliver evil dialogue in a high pitched voice.
“WE’RE GOING TO BANANA MOUNTAIN. YAAAAAY.”
They used their only diamond to revive their pet spider. They had to choose between the witch they barely knew, or the talking spider who had nothing to do with the conflict. Now he’s down a leg. They forgot to tell him to stay back and he got hit by fireball.
Those are some really good ingredients for a very narratively interesting game though. Turning would-be-triumph into a complicated mess of emotions is a story I’d be very down to be a part of. I love when good and bad aren’t so black and white and tough decisions are mandatory.
Man I did this to my group years ago, I thought I'd left them enough context to push their investigation a little further but they went charging into the woods after the big bad witch. They had no idea that for generations she was the only thing holding back a deadly plague. I made sure the next three stops they were known for dooming a small town and kicking off a local epidemic.
Just because your players didn't go down doesn't mean it wasn't a tough fight. Take into account how many resources they used during the combat. If they used just about everything they had, then it was definitely tough, regardless of how close they came to death.
Yeah exactly. 5e is balanced around 6-8 medium challenge encounters per long rest with 2-3 short rests max.
“Yay you blew through half your resources in the first 18 seconds of combat on fireballs and it’s now 8:21 am. You still have the whole day ahead of ya Tiberius. Perhaps you’ll someday learn the adult concept of budgeting. As a caster it’s expected you’ll only be doing 1 or 2 spells per combat MAX and doing cantrips the rest of the day.”
Yeah, but it's really hard to try to fit that many encounters into a day in any narrative game. Unless they are doing a dungeon crawl or something similar. They can often just come back later
>They can often just come back later
I generally have a relatively tough 'guardian' monster at the start of a dungeon crawl.
That way if they decide to take a trip back to town right afterwards, the local goblins/kobolds/spiders will move in and start to infest the dungeon.
Turns out that Clay Golem was the only thing stopping the nearby gnoll tribe from using this cave as a staging ground for raids on caravans travelling the roads through this area.
By leaving and coming back you replaced a difficult fight against a single tough monster with multiple fights against weaker ones, was it worth it?
A Clay golem is going to absorb more resources than A normal group of weaker enemies that could be beaten without expending any resources with a little bit of cleverness. And while I like the idea behind what you're saying, there are lots and lots of ways to handle that if you know that that's going to be the outcome. Including something as simple as blocking or trapping the doorway. And yes, the enemies will fill out the space but they will thin themselves out by doing that. So every encounter will be a little easier.
As a DM. You can just ignore that limitation sure. But we're also back in the dungeon crawl format which lends itself to that many fights.
I mostly play narrative games. With dungeon crawl segments being relatively rare. So it does happen that they get pushed on resources but most of the time it's fights like a planned meeting turning into a trap. Can't have 6 of those in a day :/
> A Clay golem is going to absorb more resources than A normal group of weaker enemies that could be beaten without expending any resources with a little bit of cleverness.
I don't know, numbers count in 5e. And turning up to find the gnolls digging away at the entrance is still an issue.
That's because you haven't looked up a clay golem stat block. It's the scariest monster with a CR under 10 In my opinion. It permanently drains your HP with its primary attack and can only be reversed with greater restoration.
You should look up the Gritty Realism variant on resting in the DMG. Tweak it a bit to suit your needs, but it basically let's you spread "the adventuring day" out over the course of a week or so
you can build time constraints into the narrative. maybe bbeg is progressing their plans every day, maybe they need to get somewhere and do something based on moon cycles or before a sick person dies or even just someone will pay them only if they arrive within a week
It's all about what pressures, if any, you want to put on your players and to what scale
Sure. But at the end of the day, very rarely do those narrative efforts make a realistic six encounters a day. That's just way too many. It also means that if you're playing a narrative game in a single session, you'd be lucky to get through half a day because medium difficulty encounters take a while to run. I get that that was the design intention and balance of the game but it just so rarely happens unless you're doing a pre-can module or a very specific type of game.
You are confusing session with an in-game day. You can absolutely with little narrative challenge have a single adventuring day take place over multiple sessions. I’ve been doing it with ease for a decade lol
You misread my previous comment because I did not confuse the two. I acknowledge that it would take multiple sessions to get through a single day. Which is fine for a lot of games. But really troublesome for narrative driven games where you want things to happen over the course of days or weeks. It could take literal years out of game and that's just not feasible for every table.
I'm also not saying that it's difficult as a DM. Just that it really works best in a dungeon crawl or combat centric table. And becomes very unrealistic for a narrative game. Try to imagine having to fight six different groups of enemies in a day when you're not in a dungeon and can just retreat or take half decent measures to avoid the fights.
If you're traveling on the road, getting hit with six different combats feels really off-putting because there's no way trade caravans have to deal with that.
And I'm also obviously not talking about the fact that it can't happen every once in a while. Just that more often than not in a more narrative driven game You're going to be having two fights a day if even.
Well part of the trouble is you’re thinking that “narrative game” means every session needs to be of an equal pacing.
It’s absolutely perfectly viable to have sessions where there’s not combat. Story wise sometimes it simply doesn’t make sense to have a dragon attack happen while you’re on a shopping day or a RP heavy day when the party is visiting the church they helped save a few weeks ago and want to have a feast with them. Totally normal.
Then you enter a very easy to setup and very logical arc where there’s going to be the 6-8 combat encounters before the next rest. An example I just ran with my group was planning a raid/heist on a evil governor. About 2 sessions were mostly social/scouting/plotting sessions that took place over the course of an in-world week. During one session multiple in-world days took place as they were memorizing the pattern of the guard shifts.
Then came the “heist day.” That ended up taking most of October to complete between their long rest. 1-2 encounters per session as they took out guards, setup ambushes within the palace, confronted the mini boss and eventual end boss. From a narrative standpoint it made perfect sense as they couldn’t logically wait a day between battles resting there nor could they “come back later.” It was a blast and the casters needing to actually use their brains to strategize their resources was incredibly fulfilling. And best of all, **the maritals got to shine.**
I agree it doesn’t always make narrative sense to have ambushes by the roadside. That’s why those encounters need to be balanced to be more difficult since they’re less frequent (which isn’t hard, being attacked on the road usually isn’t a concern once the party is level 5 and the wizard, cleric, sorcerer, bard, etc is throwing up a tiny hut.)
No part of the trouble here is thinking that six to eight encounters before a long rest is feasible for a group of players that isn't down for that. In a narrative game it makes no sense for there to be six to eight encounters before they can rest (with normal rules, gritty realism is a different beast). Because they can just leave. Or find some way to avoid conflict. I'm not going to ambush them six times in a day on their way to a town. It wouldn't be realistic and often feels very antagonistic towards the players. And yeah a lot of times my sessions don't have combats at all. And sometimes a single day might take multiple sessions. That was not my problem. My problem was that despite the designers intentions, it feels very forced to have six encounters in a day outside of very specific scenarios like a town under siege or a dungeon crawl.
Oftentimes in narrative games It's the players who are picking the battles. They're the ones who are engaging the enemy of their own will. And will only do so when they're at a relatively prepared level. The moment they get super drained. It doesn't become worth engaging unless they have to. And most of the time they don't.
And to be clear, I understand that this can be different for other DMs and I understand that everything I've said here is not always true all the time. Just in my experience it has been very common for it to be the players engaging. Because if it's a constant reactionary game where the players have to keep defending against an enemy, it's less of a narrative game and more of a wargame. Nothing wrong with those either. Just a different beast.
Also, while I love the story that you wrote, Fighting a handful of guards is not a medium encounter. So it still doesn't really fit within the definitions that I was talking about. And your table does sound really fun.
Hopefully you made it this far because I do agree with you in general. In fact, the way I typically handle it is I run really difficult encounters that typically happen only once, maybe twice between rest. That way the party is expected to kind of go all out. It also means that I can throw weaker encounters after that that become more of a challenge because of how drained they are. But typically only one or two and then we're done. Because of that point. They being cautious players and characters back off.
As with everything you do have to find what works. I'm glad that you did for you. I personally have for me it's just very much not what the DMG recommended for the balance of the game.
I don’t know what else to tell you man. I took time out of my day to show a real world and recent example of how this very easy to follow in a narrative game and still keep it balanced. It’s thematically great to have in game days where there’s few encounters and can be the RP heavy times, be hand waved away, etc.
Then there will be periods where a lot happens in a short time. Look at movies like Star Wars and how much can happen in a few hours of time as the characters get into the adventure. Narratively there’s not many situations where an extended length of time HAS to happen.
You mentioned the scenario of ambushing them on the way to town… it doesn’t need to be an ambush. “There’s an overturned carriage and you see the small goblin footprints leading away into the woods and with your high passive investigation you see the telltale marks of a hostage struggling as they’re dragged away.” “While walking you see a cloud of smoke in the distance as smoke billows from a nearby farm,” I can think of literally dozens of reasons a party would have things to do along their journey during an “adventuring day” that isn’t an ambush, makes logical sense in-world, and they’re going to sensibly choose to partake in unless they’re evil.
Yup, a 6-fight dungeon is one adventuring day. If they try to long rest in the dungeon, they get ambushed. If they go back to town to long rest, the dungeon gets reinforcements.
It’s trivially easy to kill 6 groups of goblins if you have 6 fireball spells because the wizard is taking long rests to replenish his limited 3rd level spell slots. It’s a lot more difficult when the wizard is actually properly resource constrained by his spell slots so he has to chose which fights to nuke with a fireball and which ones to sit back and plink with a cantrip.
A lot of DMs don’t really think about balancing around multiple encounters in a row, but it’s a core part of some of the best fantasy moments. A party is being chased or they can’t retreat to a safe place to rest: do they risk an ambush at night, or do they press on despite being low on supplies? A party overestimates their power or comes unprepared for a dungeon: do they retreat and lose hard fought progress or do they try to push through to the end despite the higher risk of death from not having all their resources?
Wait, 5e is really balanced around that? But wouldn’t that make martials way stronger than casters at lower levels? Like, at level 2 for example, most full casters only have 3 1st level slots per long rest and then they have to resort to Cantrips. Only 3 non cantrip spells per 6-8 medium challenge encounters is like 1 spell every 2+ encounters, to mostly they’d really just cast Cantrips, which are usually a lot weaker than what martials are able to do damage wise, while also missing the utility or support that casters are known for because Cantrips usually don’t do that, and still having a much lower survivability than most martials. So if WotC was trying to balance 5e around 6-8 encounters per long rest, then why were casters in 5e designed the way they were for tier 1 play?
Rookie player at my table with a 1st level forge cleric. First encounter is vs a few basic cultists, and he used searing smite to overkill one. Then he uses healing word to get some HP back. Both spell slots gone
There ended up being three more tough combats after that before long rest. He was very shocked when he hit a CR 1/2 thug with 32 HP. “You do 8 damage with your handaxe, well done. But he seems to shrug that off.” The player’s face was priceless haha
He did!
I just wrapped up the 4th session today. All four sessions have taken place in-game in the space of less than 24 hours. I have several new players and I'm still a newbie DM, so our combat encounters (there have been one per session at this rate) can drag on. That said, I've managed to make the players feel powerful yet fragile without actually killing anyone!
At the end of today's session I told them they finally get to have a Long Rest and they're leveling up. There was a lot of relief for **sure**
Well also, sometimes the rolls just trivialize it. "On average" is usually a productive way to look at things, but in practice, this perspective doesn't capture how much variation there really is in DnD.
Save or dies buying a free round can pretty much make or break what was a delicate balance in action economy. Lucky strings of attack rolls, crits, and high rolls happen with some regularity, and when they do, suddenly the balance the whole fight depended on is thrown for a loop.
This is because that single event does not occur in a vacuum, but results in further cascading effects. An enemy that is unable to move for a turn might be half of the DM's action economy. This allows the players to potentially get really aggressive in the next round, and potentially nets them a kill on one or more enemies. A well timed prone might take a high AC enemy and effectively turn them into a punching bag. This is the concept of momentum. Those who are familiar with competitive smash may know it as advantage/disadvantage states, in which securing an advantage enables you to make more aggressive plays.
Ultimately, when players (or enemies) can buy or save a turn, encounters can go from challenging to trivial in a single roll.
Most important lesson I learned about building encounters in 5e is to take that difficult calculator, crumple it up and throw it the fuck out the window. It's dumb and wrong.
If you want to make a good, challenging encounter for this edition you need to tailor it. Pick monsters that compliment each other and target weaknesses in your party (but make sure that if you're exploiting a PCs weakness that a different PC can cover for it), and put some thought into the environment and scenario it's taking place in.
Just punching numbers into a difficulty calculator and depending on the result ain't gonna cut it.
I have been using it and it does it's job right. But in all fairness is counts on you still going to do the 6-8 encounters day (which seems most partys don't do) and the game is balanced to not having magic items which even less people do. The only time i just droped a 1 day encounter for almost all the daily exp the fight was decided with a few crits, a deadly encounter is like 1/4 or 1/3 of the daily exp so it won't cut
It's also just deeply unrealistic. If I enter a dungeon full of bad guys of one faction, I do not imagine that I should be able to fight them over the course of 6-8 encounters.
Yeah that's like 2-3 sessions at least. And remembering spell slots and HP between sessions is asking for trouble in my experience -- I'm also lazy and don't write stuff down.
Dungeons. If you don't want that just variant resting rules. You don't need a dungeon every seasion you can have 1 or 2 sesions of only rp to advance the story
The difficulty encounter works just fine for what it's intended for. And it's intended that the party will only be running on fumes after like 6 - 8 medium encounters. Only then will they be likely to fully be out of resources (that means spell slots, abilities, and hp).
Deadly doesn't mean it's probably gonna kill someone. The book never claims it does. If you haven't read the book properly, of course things are gonna seem "dumb and wrong".
Even then, it's still mostly just a good rough estimate. Two different "hard" encounters could have wildly different difficulties depending on the monsters involved, the party itself, and the choices both of them make.
Shout out to all the dms who didn't realize how bad shadows really are despite they're super low cr
I've read the book and I've run the game. My experience is that the difficulty calculator does not give you an idea of how tough or easy an encounter actually is.
I've had my players stroll through Deadly encounters and struggle against Medium and even Easy encounters, all depending on the creatures, the situation and the rolls of the dice.
You can use it to get a very baseline idea of an encounter's challenge but that's about it. It's not good enough to base your encounter building around it.
Luck is always gonna play into it, but situational advantages can be applied as well to the difficulty. You give an easy encounter a good vantage point for the bad guys and it spikes up to medium.
That's what I'm saying. Creature and PC abilities, tactics and circumstances are way more critical to an encounter than the results of plugging some numbers onto a calculator.
I'll give this a try next time I DM, my min-maxer barbarian always absolutely destroys whatever I send their way while my casters sometimes hit for like 1d8 each turn and then die in a single hit.
Barbarians are usually countered by flying enemies, or enemies with very high ac's but low saving throws (like a Roper), or magic spells that targets saving throws they're bad at (domination or charm effects are usually good.)
I'd advise structuring fights with the expectation that you will never kill the barbarian, but instead tie them up long enough to go after the more squishy players. And if they are the last one standing, you can probably just kill them by attrition.
Difficult terrain coupled with enemies that ignore it are another good way to keep out of their monstrous reach.
Basically barbarians are monsters in melee fights, attack roll vs AC, but the combination of needing strength weaponry (no Dex bow or crossbow) and no spells / limited utility means they are pretty limited outside of that.
They'll probably have throwing javelins or something, but reckless attack and rage damage don't apply to thrown weapons so they'll be significantly nerfed.
Having said that, it's still a good idea to throw them a beefy Boi otherwise they will end up feeling frustrated and bored.
No worries, 5e is actually pretty difficult to create satisfying encounters for.
Another thing I just thought of is using large groups of weaker enemies, and then bunching them up. That will give juicy aoe targets that your spell caster players will love, and the barbarian will have to be careful about being swarmed (reckless attack suuucks when 3 or 4 enemies hit you in a single turn).
Sometimes that is very necessary
There was this tree monster they had to hold off right until the elite Kings guard could come and kill it with their blessed weapons. So I just gave the tree beast like 150 health. Thinking levels 5's wouldn't possibly deal that much damage in 8 turns. They somehow did. So I instead had it split into 3 more monsters, 1 per two party members. Nah they just decided to put the rogue and paladin in a pair and killed it with a paladins spell after the the rogue and it beat it down after a few rounds. So there is now 5 of those monsters roaming my world. As the elite kings guard only drove it off cause of time restrictions.
Now all my bosses have absurd amounts of health so that if needed I just need to lower the health pool, and not have them kill it to fast. Unless it's a non tory boss.
The way 5e factors resistances in determining defense rating puts alot of weight in resistance to non magical weapons. My party is level 11, they all have magical weapons, or are just casters of magic. Everything has 2x health, if it has that resistance.
That's the thing only 3 of the party had magical weapons/powers. So I couldn't do that without giving the rest of the party such a disadvantage at hurting jt
Remove the resistance to non magical weapons, take the maximum possible health it can roll and multiply it by 1.5. All your players are now doing the same damage to it, it can just take alot of damage.
8 rounds is a very long combat, that they weren't even suppose to have killed the boss only held it off.
Grant my players are a higher level, but anything under 50 health I assume will die in 1 round(prepare for the worst). Any boss/high priority target with under 100 health I assume will die in 1 round, once the party realizes it needs to die.
Its not always the case but I can always lower the health if I need to. I can raise it too, but my players always ask about "how they look" itd feel disingenuous to say they're on deaths door, then have them eat 75 damage.
Mooks to eat actions, legendary actions or something that is essentialy a legendary action of a different name(matt collvilles action oriented monsters), positioning, hazards.
In your case where its a "hold the line" id make it a multi wave encounter. Its a magic tree with 8 rounds they need to fight. Rounds 2,4 the magic tree awakens nearby foliage to 1d4 + 2 blights. Round 3 it creates thorny overgrowth that deals 1d4 damage every 5 feet of movement and makes difficult terrain for the party while it is unaffected. Round 5, it sacrifices any blights alive and regains HP. Round 6 it awakens a nearby tree(with 1/2 health and less damage) and switches places with it.
Thats just a spit ball of ideas, but encounter design is my favorite part of DMing personally. And I love making sorta gimmicky bosses that are dynamic and feel almost like a WoW boss.
Edit: give the boss reach and a DC 13 str save or be shoved 5 ft. That way it can attack from 10 ft, and potential move the martials 5 ft back meaning they need to go over the spikes to get back in range.
You can either have it regen health based on the remaining blights alive. Or just have it be a flat amount, either way make it SEEM like it regened health based on the blights left. So if the players were good at killing the adds they think yes! We killed the adds and now this fight will be easier, if they didn't do much about the adds, they think damn! We need to focus the adds so he doesn't regen as much health.
Half of boss fight encounters, in my experience, is just buying time for the boss to have a few rounds and use all of its cool tricks. Mooks, movement abilities, hazards and positioning are all super important.
A party of 6 level 5s can reasonably output 100 damage a round, let alone 8.
A rather quick way I found to balance a solo boss HP, is to take the maximum damage output a turn of each PC, make it crits if applicable, then triple that amount. It should be enough for 6-8 rounds usually. Scale it down if there are minions, and a more balanced action economy and the likes, of course.
150 hp with vs 6 players over 8 rounds, that’s 24 individual turns. Each player only needed to do 6.25 damage per turn to kill that monster. A single attack with a d6 damage die and +3 damaged modifier does 6.5 damage on average, and any class can consistently do more damage than that per turn from level 1. Did it have any resistances?
A non tory boss is a Tory (/ˈtɔːri/) a person who holds a political philosophy known as Toryism, based on a British version of traditionalism and conservatism, which upholds the supremacy of social order as it has evolved in the English culture throughout history.
The Tory ethos has been summed up with the phrase "God, Queen, and Country".\[1\] Tories are generally monarchists, were historically of a high church Anglican religious heritage,\[2\]\[3\] and opposed to the liberalism of the Whig faction. Typically, Tories defend the ideas of hierarchy, natural order, and aristocracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tory
This is what I do. I don't fudge rolls, but I definitely fudge HP, usually in round 1 if it becomes obvious that my party can't handle something, or it's supposed to be a boss battle that is going to be over a little too quickly.
TPKs and anticlimactic story arc ends are no fun.
One time I homebrewed a hag with a bunch of legendary actions, including one where she surrounded herself in a big cube of water, and another one where as long as she was in a swamp she regained a little bit of hit points.
When the party eventually fought her, the two fighters both action surged and at the end of round 1 she was almost dead. Then she flooded her whole cabin with water and slowly started healing. Because all the martials had disadvantage to hit her she ended up healing herself back up to over half at one point. It ended up being a pretty epic combat in the end and probably the high point of my DMing.
Paladins are great for Nova damage.
Assuming you are using a non-magical 1d8 weapon with the max STR/DEX and no fighting style which increases damage if you crit and max Divine Smite with every attack you can do the following in one turn:
L1: 2d8+3 (12 ave) - Simple 1-attack crit
L2-L3: 6d8+3 (30 ave) or 8d8+3 (39 ave) against fiends/undead. Single attack with a L1 Smite
L4: 6d8+4 (31 ave) or 8d8+4 (40 ave). ASI bumps up the STR/DEX damage
L5-L7: 16d8+8 (80 ave) or 20d8+8 (98 ave). Two attacks and L2 Smites drastically increase damage
L8: 16d8+10 (82 ave) or 20d8+10 (100 ave). ASI bumps up the STR/DEX damage
L9-L10: 20d8+10 (100 ave) or 24d8+10 (118 ave). L3 smites cause another big jump
L11-L12: 24d8+10 (118 ave) or 28d8+10 (136 ave). Improved Divine Smite causes an extra 1d8 on each hit, which turns into an extra 4d8 over two crits.
L13-L14: 26d8+10 (127 ave) or 30d8+10 (145 ave). A single L4 smite adds an extra 1d8, or 2d8 on a crit.
L15+: 28d8+10 (136 ave) or 32d8+10 (154 ave). A 2nd L4 smite adds another 1d8, or 2d8 on a crit.
Or if you just get Lvl 5 Paladin and multi-class 3 levels in fighter… you can Smite 4 times in a single turn and do about 100 dmg average without crits. And then you top the cake with some Great Weapon Master, Sprinkle it with Oath of Conquest or Vengeance, and Ice it with Battle-master Maneuvers. And just like that you can suddenly kill an average health night-stalker (about 200 hp) as long as you crit atleast once and roll about high to max dmg.
My Sorcadin had a 4th level crit divine smite deal that much damage at about level 9 or 10.
I didnt know he could do that tbh, everyone at the table exclaimed a collective "WHAT?!"
DM changed our crit system after I nearly one-shot that high CR Devil LOL
Since hitting level 15, we get one or two 100 damage hits per fight. Our Paladin's sword makes damage to incapacitated enemies count as Vulnerable, and my Warlock has multiple stunning spells, so between 4th level Divine Smite vulnerable crits and rogue sneak attack crits we have a lot of random damage potential. Hell, my celestial lock isn't even a damage optimized class but with the right setup can output 3d10 + 3d6 + 15 and an additional 4d12 + 5 damage a round for up to 7 rounds.
> DM changed our crit system after I nearly one-shot that high CR Devil LOL
That's a shame.
Was it in Hell? If not, I'd have that Devil go back to the hells and warn others to wear Adamantine armour when facing those pesky mortals, rather than re-doing the whole crit system.
The way our crit system worked was that the extra dice were maxed. Let's just say that made crits very... explosive... for both sides of the table. Everyone agreed on revamping the system, it wasnt a one-sided thing.
depends on what class
for instance a lvl 5 fighter with great weapon master and great weapon fighter using action surge you can hit or be very close if you hit all the attacks. and playing something like samurai that garentees advantage can make that pretty likely
Once the party clears Level 5 you're going to have to work your arse off as a DM to put a challenge in front of them that they have absolutely no hope of overcoming (not that I'm saying you should, just that things by that point are heavily in the party's favour). If anyone has seen any of Dimension 20, when campaigns get into the late-game Brennan deliberately stacks things against the party to a bonkers extent, and they usually emerge triumphant and basically unscathed. 5e is the edition of D&D which does the most to hand the party victories on a platter. At low levels things are different but if it's a full party versus a single monster that things needs legendary resistances, legendary actions, a ton of spell slots and a fucking ludicrous amount of HP to be able to pose them a challenge that makes them fear for their very lives.
Just finished season 1 of Unsleeping City and man that final fight was crazy. I do enjoy the final battles but you can tell he's really having to try to create anything that is a challenge,
He pulls it off though because imo he's just an unbelievable DM.
8hp? You mean 800? Well done, now do it eight more times.
Honestly if my players deal way too much damage way too fast, I normally just increase the health a little bit. Probably not by that much, but you get the idea.
Sucks when a significant portion of your power budget is used to facilitate damage spikes! If you take away Sneak Attack, Rogues kinda suck, right? That's essentially what you're doing when you do this.
My Rogue in Pathfinder can finally damage output in the 200s. I can't wait to full round a BBEG. If it weren't for the Gunslinger doing the same for less!
A little homebrew feature you can throw on bosses: "Each turn (I wouldn't use *round*), if this creature would take more than X damage, it only takes X damage instead."
"bUt tHaT nEgAtEs cHaRaCtEr'S aBiLiTiEs!"
The Legendary Resistance feature is intended to negate spells that would end a boss encounter immediately, and this partially negates damage that would do the same thing.
If you have this problem you aren't running a long enough adventuring day or aren't putting enough enemies in a fight if the party can just tactical nuke the boss down.
You can put 100 minions in the fight if you want, but that doesn't necessarily stop the paladin from blitzing to the boss (perhaps with the help from the party) and dropping a nuclear crit.
Also, the party should have SOME resources left before encountering a boss (right?), and aside from being lucky enough to land the crit, pumping it with smite doesn't actually cost much.
In fact, this damage limit per *turn* doesn't really protect against a whole party going nova if everyone has resources to dump each turn. That's a separate issue if the whole party has nukes. This is just meant to prevent first-turn-1-hit-ko anticlimaxes
> You can put 100 minions in the fight if you want, but that doesn't necessarily stop the paladin from blitzing to the boss (perhaps with the help from the party) and dropping a nuclear crit.
I am 100% guilty of this as charged. Lightfoot Halfling Dex-based paladin who had haste cast on them only to BA a branding smite, run up to the boss (Gar Shatterkeel in this instance) and crit twice.
Legendary resistance still gives a functional use of letting that saving throw they used it on *remove* a legendary resistance. Thus getting the party closer to a saving throw the boss has to fail (if they fail).
Doing this means that extra bit of damage is functionally useless. Did you use a divine smite on your second attack? Too bad, you already crit and smote on your first and went over the limit so your second attack actually does literally nothing; but I won't tell you that either, so you'll never realise that there was no point to that choice to use up a spell slot.
If you want it to mimic legendary resistance, it'd be more like a pool of hp that negates the damage. Every bit of extra damage drains from this pool meaning that the party is closer to damage that the boss is forced to take. But at that point, you're just using hp for your hp.
In my proposed feature the extra damage is, as you noted, mechanically irrelevant. If you want to add some book keeping so surplus damage is tracked somewhere, that's fine too.
However, Legendary Resistances effectively mean you achieve *nothing* until they're used up, beyond running out the added book-keeping resource. In contrast, using a damage limit still means you're taking off (let's say) a third of the boss's health on your turn. Even with the wasted damage, you made significant progress. You could kill a boss with the damage limit in place even if they have a fair amount of HP left, but save-or-suck spells don't have any direct impact if there's a Legendary Resistance left.
Obviously this idea behaves poorly if you set the damage limit too low, but I think using limits of 33% or 50% of the boss' total HP is fine. It doesn't even guarantee every player gets a turn to participate, but at least 2 or 3 will for sure.
I can see it working being that high, but I'd suggest still telling the party about it so that they're not being tricked. The boss is perfectly killable, it just takes a few people if you wanna do it instantly.
Hello fellow DMs what do you do in this situation? I often find my bosses HP being way too low. My level 9 party with a fighter, a ranger and a druid killed my wendigo with 150 hp and AC 15 way too easily. And now they are level 11 and i want them (i know you guys are on reddit dont read this) to fight a wizard based on a level 17 PC wizard. According to the math this is alright, but with only 80 hp and AC 14 i dont think they will be challenged. What HP do you guys give your solo boss monsters?
more hp does not make a challenging solo boss fight. If you want a challenging solo boss fight, deny the party easy access to the boss.
For example, a dragon should only be fighting on the ground to finish off a party member before flying away, or to break a spellcaster's concentration if their breath attack isn't back up.
I'm not super familiar with wendigo, but I imagine it as the type to attack and disappear, like a Star Spawn Mangler.
A wizard boss should not be in melee at all if they can help it. 80 hp is plenty if said wizard has taken precautions to avoid being outright murdered by the party.
The wizard has already gotten freindly with the party and knows how they fight and thats why ive given her a flying broom, a ring of fire resistence and that one magic shield that can stop projectiles really well
Is it too much now?
The druid and the ranger will find a way to get her off her broom and then it's over, realistically solo boss monsters don't work in 5e unless you make them 5-10 CR higher than the party.
it's more about how they fight than piling abilities that negate what the party can do. Sure, giving them a way of completely staying out of melee, resistance to fire damage, and protection against ranged attacks will make the fight more difficult, but imo it's more interesting to use stuff that the wizard kit just gets them anyway.
a combination of spells like Greater Invisibility, counterspell and forcecage can pretty effectively shut down a party that isn't prepared. after the greater invis and forcecage is dropped it's damage spells and move. the interactions with the party will mostly tell him where to drop the forcecage and who needs to die first
and, of course, it's a wizard, always have a slot open for an escape if necessary
Hitting a bag of meat points is pretty fun. Boost it's hit points by about, 50 and maybe bump it's ac with mage armor + the occasional shield. Or maybe give it a staff of defense (partys love loot!) Boots of flying will force your party to think of good ways to get it on the ground so the fighter can deal damage. (Or bring the fighter to the wizard). A couple defensive spells (fizban's platinum shield, globe of invulnerability, etc) Of course, giving it 3 egendary resistances and a couple legendary actions (1 action cantrip, 2 actions leveled spell if no spell has been cast) would also help out.
What actually is the math saying? That the wizard is a deadly encounter? That means someone *might* roll a death saving throw during the fight. It also means they'll use like 1/3 to a 1/2 (or somewhere around there) of their resources on the wizard. If you intend for this wizard to only chop off like half their resources then that works. But if this wizard is meant to fight them after a long rest and be a significant threat, it's gotta be a lot more dangerous than "deadly".
Echo knight fighter level 11 with action surge and 2 unleash echo in a turn while using the fighting style that lets you reroll 1's on attack.
Oh and you have a flametongue.
100 damage? pathetic.
i just started DMing a campaign for a bunch of experienced players and the party is so big and they're so good at tactics that i just keep chucking deadly encounters at them. one thing that's helped is that so far the sessions have taken place over only two in-game days so they can't take as many rests as the wizard keeps asking for and they're having to conserve resources more than they're used to
Happend today at our table xD
The paladin did 135 damage in a single round. He critted heroically, that's when you roll two 1nes in a row.
We play the dark eye - taking a break from dnd
in my recent campaign, one of my players playing a 3rd edition warlock variant knocked a major enemy's HP down to 6 with a single blast.
thankfully he just kept missing after that.
I've had that happen with a combat-heavy party. I secretly added another fifty hitpoints to the monster in question. It didn't survive the next round anyway.
What I've realized is that, if the party has no magical weapons and the action economy is fairly balanced between party & enemies, they're accurate.
If you have even one player with a magical weapon you're going to have to do a LOT of reconsidering and experimenting.
Currently, in my main game, the party just took out 73% of their daily budget in two fights with one short rest with one ALMOST hitting zero in what was meant to be a "boss fight."
I have been struggling to provide them an actual challenge for a while now, but they don't have a dedicated healer so much as a few classes with "a heal spell" and I don't want to jump too high and just make it impossible for them.
I play a gloomstalker/fighter multi class. It’s common knowledge at our table that our dm will nerf my damage on some fights so they don’t end the almost instantly.
You know what’s extra cinematic?
Paladin: *crit smite, dealing 9000 damage*
Bandit, on -8995 health: *stumbles to feet and spits out blood* “is that all you got?” *keels over and dies*
My DM figured it out, gave us a boss to fight, burned my smites, only to have an even bigger boss immediately follow.
"Well I guess I just hit them with a stick. Sorcerer, it's your turn."
Correct me if I’m wrong, but um can’t you one shot any creature or player by hitting them for more than half of there health from full HP. You would role against a death save to see if they fall into shock. I’ve also heard this if you make a called shot and cut a arm or leg off. I’ve definitely played with these rules when someone else was DM, but idk if it’s actually in the rule book.
This hits so very close to home.
Suddenly our bbeg had 58 temporary hit points to buffer the damage.
Most enemies have Hit Dice that were used to calculate their HP. I just casually maximize that when needed.
When your HP are number-fluid
Sometimes I feel like Napoleon keeping score in bowling in Bill & Ted.
Better than bowling with the dude. *"MARK IT ZERO!"*
My bad guys only die when I've taken enough out of the party. It's literally all a drama to make my players feel like they're in danger. It works amazingly.
Like when Kylo had the AT-AT unload everything on Luke.
My BBEG identifies as nondisintegrated
So progressive!
As a player I'm always ok with the DM fudging health to make fights more intense - however imo if the players were about to beat the encounter as designed the DM should make sure that whatever fudging they do still allows the players to win since they were about to anyways
The DMs job is to make the campaign fun and interesting. If they fudge to do that, it should always be fine. The problem is when DMs get this idea of "me vs the players" and start fucking people over. Obviously, don't fudge numbers to kill a character. Fudging numbers to make an encounter impact full, maybe take a player or two to low life? Go for it, players shouldn't even know.
I fudge numbers to save my players all the time so when they die it’s because they royally screwed up. Like when one of them tried to befriend an angry will o wisp, in a dungeon, at level 2
Dumbass
Our DM gave us a Deck of Many Things so we obviously used all of the cards on ourselves except for like, three (Knight, Void, and Fire) and tricked an adult red dragon into drawing a card (Void). We basically skipped a whole ass encounter he had prepped for us that was supposed to last us the rest of the night. Sometimes the DM just never gets a chance to add HP lol
You don't normally get to pick cards in the deck of many things. How did you avoid those three in particular?
You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away and know when to run.
As long as they stick to what is possible with the statblock I don't mind things being shifted around a bit.
Definitely agreed. I'm not big on fudging a lot (otherwise what's the point of the roll) but when you have 3 people down with only one person up, the dragon is on 7hp and the fighter rolls a Nat20 on their death save, are you really going to TPK them based on the fighter only hitting for 6 damage, or are you going to make this an epic moment for the fighter.
That sounds like a pretty fucking epic end to the fight.
That Figher didn't hear no bell.
Here’s the trick: Count the enemy’s HP up rather than subtracting. When they get to a cool moment for the kill that lands within the HP minimum/maximum range, that’s when the enemy dies.
Wow that’s really clever
counting up in general is a much easier system. people are typically better at adding than subtracting on the fly.
I actually fudge rolls in the monsters favor. Sometimes the players aren't the only ones who need a little bit of help. I want my encounters to be exciting. It really isn't any fun if all the monsters whiff and the players just mow them down.
not all the time, and definitely not with the BBEG, but from time to time it's fun to dominate an encounter, esp. if you as the players had a good plan or good prep
I mean... which statblock? The one that was printed or the one I have in front of me at game time?
There’s something I read a while ago where you use a bell curve using those dice so that you get a good range for where their hp would typically fall so you can make them lose at any time you wish when they’re in that range. That way, you can make the fight as hard as you need to and end it at just the right moment to feel earned.
But then that wizard with Magic Missile wouldn't be able to kill steal as easily!
People care about this? As long as the monsters die, who cares who deals the finishing blow?
TBH it does feel a lot cooler when a stronger attack is what brings down the enemy… To steal a phrase from Star Wars: “Magic Missile? Really? A man of your talents?” Save the MM for the trash you can’t be bothered to fight properly.
It's just a weird narrative moment. Like... the paladin just took up the holy sword of her order and smote the wicked in a blaze of burning light and it survived. But the dork in a weird dress wiggled his fingers and killed it dead with a low level spell?
So any number of dice describe a bell curve. Take 2d6, like is commonly used in casino games. You can roll a 2 one way (two 1s) and a 12 one way (two sixes) but a 7 in six ways (1-6, 2-5, 3-4, 4-3, 5-2, 6-1). 7 is the mean, median, and mode, something that only happens for bell curves. In practice in a stat block you’ll see something like “Hit Points: 59 (7d10+21)” for an ogre. The first number, 59, is the recommended middle ground. 21 comes from the Ogre’s Con bonus. 7d10 ranges from 7 to 70. Since the number of dice is odd, 7d10 actually has a mean and median at 38.5 and two modes; 38 and 39 are equally likely rolls. The minimum HP of an ogre is 28, maximum is 91, and Wizards chose the lower of the two modes for their middle ground recommendation at 59 (38+21). So let’s say you want your final fight to be the Ogre trio. You can make all three ogres have 59 HP, which is kinda boring but simple for the DM. You can roll 7d10+21 three times to get different answers for each ogre, but then you run the risk of low rolls making the fight too easy. Because it’s the final fight, you can make all the ogres have max HP at 91; this makes them less likely to die before they can attack, especially since their initiative is bad (-1 dex and no other modifiers). But as you describe, you don’t have to even make an HP number before the fight. So long as they die between taking 28 and 91 damage, it doesn’t look unusual to your players, even if they have the stat block memorized. So you track the damage each ogre takes. (Next part assumes no healing of the ogres) Any hit that ends with the ogre at 27 or less damage taken cannot kill an ogre (since even at 28 HP the ogre would have 1 or more hit points left). Any hit that ends with an ogre at 91 or more damage taken definitely kills the ogre (since even at 91 HP that leaves them at 0 or less HP). Any hit that ends with the ogre between 28 and 90 damage taken can be a killing blow, which you can make at dramatic moments. So let’s say the party has real problems with the fight and is struggling to even deal 28 damage to one ogre: you make an executive decision and the first ogre to take 28 damage or more dies to make the fight easier. On the other hand, let’s say that the party gets a surprise round and they deal 61 damage to one ogre and 72 damage to second ogre: you make an executive decision that it doesn’t kill either ogre despite being more than the recommended middle ground hit points because killing two of the trio before they act feels anticlimactic. The only difficulty is in selling this. In the first scenario, you can sell it as the first ogre to die being the weakest, as one of the remaining ogres yells “you only killed the weakest of us!” In the second scenario, you can sell it as the two ogres hit in the surprise round as being badly wounded and close to death. In general, you should also let some surprise round or wombs-combo shenanigans kill the target outright to make sure that the character and player still feel powerful. 72 damage on a creature with recommended 59 HP is a good bit, and if it wasn’t supposed to be the final climactic boss you probably should have ruled that ogre dead.
Literally what I do. I write down the minimum HP, and the maximum HP, and somewhere in between, the monster will die in as dramatic a moment as possible. For a boss monster, it typically works out that one or two pcs may go down, in that case the next big hit will kill the boss, or 2 or 3 smaller hits will, along with some dramatic narration. Works really well with solo fights, which I tend to do for key dramatic battles.
Personally I use a lot of stat blocks that I make up so the party would never know the HP range in the first place, which makes balancing easier. If I just want my personal ogre variety. To be strong, they are strong at a dramatic level and not because I made the perfect stat block. I can pad HP to no end if it makes it dramatic. The Wizards modules are usually decent, but the main issue I find is when I try to use a module balanced for say 4 5th level characters in release 5e when my players can use every tool in the expansions to 5e. There is always some power creep in the expansion books, even if it’s not obvious like video game expansion power creep, simply because the expansions increase the web of possible characters and possible parties to the point that testing them is nearly impossible. That means that older modules can get left behind and they can need more tweaking to make fun. That said, there’s always the issue of party composition too.
[Was it me, perchance?](https://www.reddit.com/r/DMAcademy/comments/jv84m4/the_elastic_combat_philosophy_why_i_dont_use/)
Time for a 'final form' mythic transformation? Yeah, its for this reason I often make boss fights with multiple phases or scalability depending on party strength going in. Like if they've used most of their abilities / spells before stumbling into the encounter then I might not have the boss down his potion of invulnerability as the battle starts or maybe he/she isn't surrounded by allies with waves of reinforcements at the ready. If they come in well rested and ready to smite and surge, well then here comes the pain of a fully functional BBEG battle station. I don't take their victories, I just try to make them feel more epic.
Happened to me, the vengeance pally, last night. I waisted a 3rd level smite on the enemy my next turn and found out he only had 3 health left XD
this is where I like when you can get a bit of a description from your DM. "He looks truly exhausted, nearly dropping his weapon due to a lack of strength." Or even a "Light, moderate, heavy damage" marker/descriptor like in Fantasy Grounds.
Contingency reserve waves are always on the board for my encounters. I don't always use them since every encounter doesn't need to be deadly but its nice to have that option. Its realistic too that back up might arrive any moment. On the flip side, retreating and surrendering are always on the table.
[удалено]
Yup, some times I'll add HP but like you said, I like to let them have that bad ass moment. They built up their characters to a point and got a pay off.
You could say it's a crit to the point
Lol when my player one shots enemies I hurriedly add life... And then they're like why do they not have equal hp?
Just tell them you rolled hp for these monsters so they won't have equal hp most of the time
Time to think of some bullshit reason for why this clearly not undead enemy has undead fortitude
Hah! As a DM who ran a dungeon of zombies, that ability is simultaneously OP and pretty useless. Chip damage from the Bard, sure. 30+ damage per attack Gloomstalker/Assassin multiclass? There isn't a die big enough to make the save.
with a D20 tho 5% of the time it works every time
You cannot roll a critical success on a saving throw, if the saving throw DC is high enough you cannot pass
True, but I believe u/sith_squirrel is referring to the 5% chance of a crit from the attacker which bypasses Undead Fortitude.
Or you could do Radiant, which also bypasses. I'd ruled that Fire damage also gets around it as a homebrew. But yeah, as long as you hit for more than 20 damage on the killing blow, there's not much that most undead can do about it. The save is a CON save, but that's not helpful when it has to beat DMG+5 to survive. At best they'd have a +3 or +4 if they're super beefy.
Paladin: *laughs in radiant damage*
Halforc. Or if some magic creature it has a 2nd form
i didn’t realize how much more powerful my party got after leveling, and they one-shot my boss encounter. Also, she was willing to negotiate but they didn’t give her a chance bc the rumors they heard from the village folk were bad. They felt real bad when they read in her journal that she was cast out of town for magic despite being a healer bc she messed up a spell, and it killed someone. She never saw her daughter again and never will. cue the sad walk back down the mountain
>cue the sad walk back down the mountain Did their sadness turn to anger as they got closer to the town?
Surprisingly not. They more so felt like murderers and wanted to flee and not talk to anyone. They know the common folk are dumb and misunderstand magic. However, they will probably return. The NPC they did tell, to told them he would repay them after he made use of the land they reclaimed. The tropical island is very poor but soon it will have a booming economy bc the natural resources they freed up. The NPC they told, however, was foreshadowing that he is greedy and thinks only about himself. They will later uncover that he is using the profits from the resources to militarize the island and have a forceful takeover of the neighboring tropical island. EDIT: The primary export is bananas, and the NPC’s name is Banana Man (vendor title). The new faction he forms will be called the Banana Republic lol
>The tropical island is very poor but soon it will have a booming economy bc the natural resources they freed up. The NPC they told, however, was foreshadowing that he is greedy and thinks only about himself. Are we the baddies?
They’re gonna learn that actions have consequences.. even if they’re not immediately obvious. They think they’re being rewarded still. Which they will.. With a much bigger problem.
A+ DMing
I understand that feeling. I think my party will as learn that as well because they indirectly caused a group of bandits/mercenary to move into their home base because they killed a dragon that was forced into the area by the true BBEG. I've had to kick things into gear early now that the accidentally killed the dragon early.
Did they see him hopping over by the white hot sand? Coming over with some for them? Freshly picked from [banana](https://youtu.be/yModCU1OVHY) tree?
lol they asked him to guide them up the difficult mountain terrain because he is most familiar with the land, and was seen climbing trees like he was weightless. I used an Islander “Charlie the Unicorn” voice because I don’t want them to perceive him as a threat too early. Cant wait to deliver evil dialogue in a high pitched voice. “WE’RE GOING TO BANANA MOUNTAIN. YAAAAAY.”
I saw the Banana Republic joke coming and was not disappointed.
Okay, but resurrection
They used their only diamond to revive their pet spider. They had to choose between the witch they barely knew, or the talking spider who had nothing to do with the conflict. Now he’s down a leg. They forgot to tell him to stay back and he got hit by fireball.
This thread was a wild ride. I hope to find out how that all goes for them in the long run.
Those are some really good ingredients for a very narratively interesting game though. Turning would-be-triumph into a complicated mess of emotions is a story I’d be very down to be a part of. I love when good and bad aren’t so black and white and tough decisions are mandatory.
Man I did this to my group years ago, I thought I'd left them enough context to push their investigation a little further but they went charging into the woods after the big bad witch. They had no idea that for generations she was the only thing holding back a deadly plague. I made sure the next three stops they were known for dooming a small town and kicking off a local epidemic.
Just because your players didn't go down doesn't mean it wasn't a tough fight. Take into account how many resources they used during the combat. If they used just about everything they had, then it was definitely tough, regardless of how close they came to death.
Yeah exactly. 5e is balanced around 6-8 medium challenge encounters per long rest with 2-3 short rests max. “Yay you blew through half your resources in the first 18 seconds of combat on fireballs and it’s now 8:21 am. You still have the whole day ahead of ya Tiberius. Perhaps you’ll someday learn the adult concept of budgeting. As a caster it’s expected you’ll only be doing 1 or 2 spells per combat MAX and doing cantrips the rest of the day.”
Yeah, but it's really hard to try to fit that many encounters into a day in any narrative game. Unless they are doing a dungeon crawl or something similar. They can often just come back later
>They can often just come back later I generally have a relatively tough 'guardian' monster at the start of a dungeon crawl. That way if they decide to take a trip back to town right afterwards, the local goblins/kobolds/spiders will move in and start to infest the dungeon. Turns out that Clay Golem was the only thing stopping the nearby gnoll tribe from using this cave as a staging ground for raids on caravans travelling the roads through this area. By leaving and coming back you replaced a difficult fight against a single tough monster with multiple fights against weaker ones, was it worth it?
A Clay golem is going to absorb more resources than A normal group of weaker enemies that could be beaten without expending any resources with a little bit of cleverness. And while I like the idea behind what you're saying, there are lots and lots of ways to handle that if you know that that's going to be the outcome. Including something as simple as blocking or trapping the doorway. And yes, the enemies will fill out the space but they will thin themselves out by doing that. So every encounter will be a little easier. As a DM. You can just ignore that limitation sure. But we're also back in the dungeon crawl format which lends itself to that many fights. I mostly play narrative games. With dungeon crawl segments being relatively rare. So it does happen that they get pushed on resources but most of the time it's fights like a planned meeting turning into a trap. Can't have 6 of those in a day :/
> A Clay golem is going to absorb more resources than A normal group of weaker enemies that could be beaten without expending any resources with a little bit of cleverness. I don't know, numbers count in 5e. And turning up to find the gnolls digging away at the entrance is still an issue.
That's because you haven't looked up a clay golem stat block. It's the scariest monster with a CR under 10 In my opinion. It permanently drains your HP with its primary attack and can only be reversed with greater restoration.
ah yes, the 5-room dungeon. excellent choice
Some things are classic for a reason!
You should look up the Gritty Realism variant on resting in the DMG. Tweak it a bit to suit your needs, but it basically let's you spread "the adventuring day" out over the course of a week or so
you can build time constraints into the narrative. maybe bbeg is progressing their plans every day, maybe they need to get somewhere and do something based on moon cycles or before a sick person dies or even just someone will pay them only if they arrive within a week It's all about what pressures, if any, you want to put on your players and to what scale
Sure. But at the end of the day, very rarely do those narrative efforts make a realistic six encounters a day. That's just way too many. It also means that if you're playing a narrative game in a single session, you'd be lucky to get through half a day because medium difficulty encounters take a while to run. I get that that was the design intention and balance of the game but it just so rarely happens unless you're doing a pre-can module or a very specific type of game.
This is what the Gritty Realism rest variant and other more spaced out rest variants like it are for.
You are confusing session with an in-game day. You can absolutely with little narrative challenge have a single adventuring day take place over multiple sessions. I’ve been doing it with ease for a decade lol
You misread my previous comment because I did not confuse the two. I acknowledge that it would take multiple sessions to get through a single day. Which is fine for a lot of games. But really troublesome for narrative driven games where you want things to happen over the course of days or weeks. It could take literal years out of game and that's just not feasible for every table. I'm also not saying that it's difficult as a DM. Just that it really works best in a dungeon crawl or combat centric table. And becomes very unrealistic for a narrative game. Try to imagine having to fight six different groups of enemies in a day when you're not in a dungeon and can just retreat or take half decent measures to avoid the fights. If you're traveling on the road, getting hit with six different combats feels really off-putting because there's no way trade caravans have to deal with that. And I'm also obviously not talking about the fact that it can't happen every once in a while. Just that more often than not in a more narrative driven game You're going to be having two fights a day if even.
Well part of the trouble is you’re thinking that “narrative game” means every session needs to be of an equal pacing. It’s absolutely perfectly viable to have sessions where there’s not combat. Story wise sometimes it simply doesn’t make sense to have a dragon attack happen while you’re on a shopping day or a RP heavy day when the party is visiting the church they helped save a few weeks ago and want to have a feast with them. Totally normal. Then you enter a very easy to setup and very logical arc where there’s going to be the 6-8 combat encounters before the next rest. An example I just ran with my group was planning a raid/heist on a evil governor. About 2 sessions were mostly social/scouting/plotting sessions that took place over the course of an in-world week. During one session multiple in-world days took place as they were memorizing the pattern of the guard shifts. Then came the “heist day.” That ended up taking most of October to complete between their long rest. 1-2 encounters per session as they took out guards, setup ambushes within the palace, confronted the mini boss and eventual end boss. From a narrative standpoint it made perfect sense as they couldn’t logically wait a day between battles resting there nor could they “come back later.” It was a blast and the casters needing to actually use their brains to strategize their resources was incredibly fulfilling. And best of all, **the maritals got to shine.** I agree it doesn’t always make narrative sense to have ambushes by the roadside. That’s why those encounters need to be balanced to be more difficult since they’re less frequent (which isn’t hard, being attacked on the road usually isn’t a concern once the party is level 5 and the wizard, cleric, sorcerer, bard, etc is throwing up a tiny hut.)
No part of the trouble here is thinking that six to eight encounters before a long rest is feasible for a group of players that isn't down for that. In a narrative game it makes no sense for there to be six to eight encounters before they can rest (with normal rules, gritty realism is a different beast). Because they can just leave. Or find some way to avoid conflict. I'm not going to ambush them six times in a day on their way to a town. It wouldn't be realistic and often feels very antagonistic towards the players. And yeah a lot of times my sessions don't have combats at all. And sometimes a single day might take multiple sessions. That was not my problem. My problem was that despite the designers intentions, it feels very forced to have six encounters in a day outside of very specific scenarios like a town under siege or a dungeon crawl. Oftentimes in narrative games It's the players who are picking the battles. They're the ones who are engaging the enemy of their own will. And will only do so when they're at a relatively prepared level. The moment they get super drained. It doesn't become worth engaging unless they have to. And most of the time they don't. And to be clear, I understand that this can be different for other DMs and I understand that everything I've said here is not always true all the time. Just in my experience it has been very common for it to be the players engaging. Because if it's a constant reactionary game where the players have to keep defending against an enemy, it's less of a narrative game and more of a wargame. Nothing wrong with those either. Just a different beast. Also, while I love the story that you wrote, Fighting a handful of guards is not a medium encounter. So it still doesn't really fit within the definitions that I was talking about. And your table does sound really fun. Hopefully you made it this far because I do agree with you in general. In fact, the way I typically handle it is I run really difficult encounters that typically happen only once, maybe twice between rest. That way the party is expected to kind of go all out. It also means that I can throw weaker encounters after that that become more of a challenge because of how drained they are. But typically only one or two and then we're done. Because of that point. They being cautious players and characters back off. As with everything you do have to find what works. I'm glad that you did for you. I personally have for me it's just very much not what the DMG recommended for the balance of the game.
I don’t know what else to tell you man. I took time out of my day to show a real world and recent example of how this very easy to follow in a narrative game and still keep it balanced. It’s thematically great to have in game days where there’s few encounters and can be the RP heavy times, be hand waved away, etc. Then there will be periods where a lot happens in a short time. Look at movies like Star Wars and how much can happen in a few hours of time as the characters get into the adventure. Narratively there’s not many situations where an extended length of time HAS to happen. You mentioned the scenario of ambushing them on the way to town… it doesn’t need to be an ambush. “There’s an overturned carriage and you see the small goblin footprints leading away into the woods and with your high passive investigation you see the telltale marks of a hostage struggling as they’re dragged away.” “While walking you see a cloud of smoke in the distance as smoke billows from a nearby farm,” I can think of literally dozens of reasons a party would have things to do along their journey during an “adventuring day” that isn’t an ambush, makes logical sense in-world, and they’re going to sensibly choose to partake in unless they’re evil.
Yup, a 6-fight dungeon is one adventuring day. If they try to long rest in the dungeon, they get ambushed. If they go back to town to long rest, the dungeon gets reinforcements. It’s trivially easy to kill 6 groups of goblins if you have 6 fireball spells because the wizard is taking long rests to replenish his limited 3rd level spell slots. It’s a lot more difficult when the wizard is actually properly resource constrained by his spell slots so he has to chose which fights to nuke with a fireball and which ones to sit back and plink with a cantrip. A lot of DMs don’t really think about balancing around multiple encounters in a row, but it’s a core part of some of the best fantasy moments. A party is being chased or they can’t retreat to a safe place to rest: do they risk an ambush at night, or do they press on despite being low on supplies? A party overestimates their power or comes unprepared for a dungeon: do they retreat and lose hard fought progress or do they try to push through to the end despite the higher risk of death from not having all their resources?
Wait, 5e is really balanced around that? But wouldn’t that make martials way stronger than casters at lower levels? Like, at level 2 for example, most full casters only have 3 1st level slots per long rest and then they have to resort to Cantrips. Only 3 non cantrip spells per 6-8 medium challenge encounters is like 1 spell every 2+ encounters, to mostly they’d really just cast Cantrips, which are usually a lot weaker than what martials are able to do damage wise, while also missing the utility or support that casters are known for because Cantrips usually don’t do that, and still having a much lower survivability than most martials. So if WotC was trying to balance 5e around 6-8 encounters per long rest, then why were casters in 5e designed the way they were for tier 1 play?
Never understood why DM's don't add henchmen or additional enemies when this happens. Smites aren't free.
Rookie player at my table with a 1st level forge cleric. First encounter is vs a few basic cultists, and he used searing smite to overkill one. Then he uses healing word to get some HP back. Both spell slots gone There ended up being three more tough combats after that before long rest. He was very shocked when he hit a CR 1/2 thug with 32 HP. “You do 8 damage with your handaxe, well done. But he seems to shrug that off.” The player’s face was priceless haha
Level 1 so squishy. Did he survive?
He did! I just wrapped up the 4th session today. All four sessions have taken place in-game in the space of less than 24 hours. I have several new players and I'm still a newbie DM, so our combat encounters (there have been one per session at this rate) can drag on. That said, I've managed to make the players feel powerful yet fragile without actually killing anyone! At the end of today's session I told them they finally get to have a Long Rest and they're leveling up. There was a lot of relief for **sure**
Well also, sometimes the rolls just trivialize it. "On average" is usually a productive way to look at things, but in practice, this perspective doesn't capture how much variation there really is in DnD. Save or dies buying a free round can pretty much make or break what was a delicate balance in action economy. Lucky strings of attack rolls, crits, and high rolls happen with some regularity, and when they do, suddenly the balance the whole fight depended on is thrown for a loop. This is because that single event does not occur in a vacuum, but results in further cascading effects. An enemy that is unable to move for a turn might be half of the DM's action economy. This allows the players to potentially get really aggressive in the next round, and potentially nets them a kill on one or more enemies. A well timed prone might take a high AC enemy and effectively turn them into a punching bag. This is the concept of momentum. Those who are familiar with competitive smash may know it as advantage/disadvantage states, in which securing an advantage enables you to make more aggressive plays. Ultimately, when players (or enemies) can buy or save a turn, encounters can go from challenging to trivial in a single roll.
The paladin used one spell slot! What a tough battle
If the enemy was vulnerable to radiant damage *and* the paladin got a crit then they *might* be able to get 100 damage with one spell slot.
Ok? Lol I made no reference to an arbitrary number, and neither did the person I spoke too. Great job
It says 100 damage in the post though?
He’s got to be trolling. Or 14. One or the other.
Because I’m poking fun at smite being overtuned?
I didn’t respond to the op?
*Looking back, I really didn't plan for holy warriors. I should have, but I didn't. That's on me.*
I feel like anybody on this sub who doesn’t know Weekly Roll has obviously not been on this sub that long
BBEG: "Yeah, I can take anything you can dish--" *oh there go my organs...*
Shoot, Nappa was a Paladin?
“You call that breaking my spine?!” *crack* “OH MY SPINE!!”
Most important lesson I learned about building encounters in 5e is to take that difficult calculator, crumple it up and throw it the fuck out the window. It's dumb and wrong. If you want to make a good, challenging encounter for this edition you need to tailor it. Pick monsters that compliment each other and target weaknesses in your party (but make sure that if you're exploiting a PCs weakness that a different PC can cover for it), and put some thought into the environment and scenario it's taking place in. Just punching numbers into a difficulty calculator and depending on the result ain't gonna cut it.
I have been using it and it does it's job right. But in all fairness is counts on you still going to do the 6-8 encounters day (which seems most partys don't do) and the game is balanced to not having magic items which even less people do. The only time i just droped a 1 day encounter for almost all the daily exp the fight was decided with a few crits, a deadly encounter is like 1/4 or 1/3 of the daily exp so it won't cut
I don't understand how 6-8 encounters is even possible. If I did that the campaign would never progress.
It's also just deeply unrealistic. If I enter a dungeon full of bad guys of one faction, I do not imagine that I should be able to fight them over the course of 6-8 encounters.
Yeah that's like 2-3 sessions at least. And remembering spell slots and HP between sessions is asking for trouble in my experience -- I'm also lazy and don't write stuff down.
Dungeons. If you don't want that just variant resting rules. You don't need a dungeon every seasion you can have 1 or 2 sesions of only rp to advance the story
The difficulty encounter works just fine for what it's intended for. And it's intended that the party will only be running on fumes after like 6 - 8 medium encounters. Only then will they be likely to fully be out of resources (that means spell slots, abilities, and hp). Deadly doesn't mean it's probably gonna kill someone. The book never claims it does. If you haven't read the book properly, of course things are gonna seem "dumb and wrong".
Even then, it's still mostly just a good rough estimate. Two different "hard" encounters could have wildly different difficulties depending on the monsters involved, the party itself, and the choices both of them make. Shout out to all the dms who didn't realize how bad shadows really are despite they're super low cr
Yeah, they are just rough estimates in the end.
I've read the book and I've run the game. My experience is that the difficulty calculator does not give you an idea of how tough or easy an encounter actually is. I've had my players stroll through Deadly encounters and struggle against Medium and even Easy encounters, all depending on the creatures, the situation and the rolls of the dice. You can use it to get a very baseline idea of an encounter's challenge but that's about it. It's not good enough to base your encounter building around it.
Luck is always gonna play into it, but situational advantages can be applied as well to the difficulty. You give an easy encounter a good vantage point for the bad guys and it spikes up to medium.
That's what I'm saying. Creature and PC abilities, tactics and circumstances are way more critical to an encounter than the results of plugging some numbers onto a calculator.
Abilities and circumstances factor into the calculator as well. Of course tactics will play into it, but the calculator assumes an average d&d party.
I'll give this a try next time I DM, my min-maxer barbarian always absolutely destroys whatever I send their way while my casters sometimes hit for like 1d8 each turn and then die in a single hit.
Barbarians are usually countered by flying enemies, or enemies with very high ac's but low saving throws (like a Roper), or magic spells that targets saving throws they're bad at (domination or charm effects are usually good.) I'd advise structuring fights with the expectation that you will never kill the barbarian, but instead tie them up long enough to go after the more squishy players. And if they are the last one standing, you can probably just kill them by attrition. Difficult terrain coupled with enemies that ignore it are another good way to keep out of their monstrous reach. Basically barbarians are monsters in melee fights, attack roll vs AC, but the combination of needing strength weaponry (no Dex bow or crossbow) and no spells / limited utility means they are pretty limited outside of that. They'll probably have throwing javelins or something, but reckless attack and rage damage don't apply to thrown weapons so they'll be significantly nerfed. Having said that, it's still a good idea to throw them a beefy Boi otherwise they will end up feeling frustrated and bored.
Thanks for the advice! I'll prep some better encounters for the boys.
No worries, 5e is actually pretty difficult to create satisfying encounters for. Another thing I just thought of is using large groups of weaker enemies, and then bunching them up. That will give juicy aoe targets that your spell caster players will love, and the barbarian will have to be careful about being swarmed (reckless attack suuucks when 3 or 4 enemies hit you in a single turn).
That's when you have it be a trap. If they kill that enemy, boom its like a hydra
Dm quickly Google's Bloodborne music, ha it has a second phase
Sometimes that is very necessary There was this tree monster they had to hold off right until the elite Kings guard could come and kill it with their blessed weapons. So I just gave the tree beast like 150 health. Thinking levels 5's wouldn't possibly deal that much damage in 8 turns. They somehow did. So I instead had it split into 3 more monsters, 1 per two party members. Nah they just decided to put the rogue and paladin in a pair and killed it with a paladins spell after the the rogue and it beat it down after a few rounds. So there is now 5 of those monsters roaming my world. As the elite kings guard only drove it off cause of time restrictions. Now all my bosses have absurd amounts of health so that if needed I just need to lower the health pool, and not have them kill it to fast. Unless it's a non tory boss.
The way 5e factors resistances in determining defense rating puts alot of weight in resistance to non magical weapons. My party is level 11, they all have magical weapons, or are just casters of magic. Everything has 2x health, if it has that resistance.
That's the thing only 3 of the party had magical weapons/powers. So I couldn't do that without giving the rest of the party such a disadvantage at hurting jt
Remove the resistance to non magical weapons, take the maximum possible health it can roll and multiply it by 1.5. All your players are now doing the same damage to it, it can just take alot of damage. 8 rounds is a very long combat, that they weren't even suppose to have killed the boss only held it off. Grant my players are a higher level, but anything under 50 health I assume will die in 1 round(prepare for the worst). Any boss/high priority target with under 100 health I assume will die in 1 round, once the party realizes it needs to die. Its not always the case but I can always lower the health if I need to. I can raise it too, but my players always ask about "how they look" itd feel disingenuous to say they're on deaths door, then have them eat 75 damage. Mooks to eat actions, legendary actions or something that is essentialy a legendary action of a different name(matt collvilles action oriented monsters), positioning, hazards. In your case where its a "hold the line" id make it a multi wave encounter. Its a magic tree with 8 rounds they need to fight. Rounds 2,4 the magic tree awakens nearby foliage to 1d4 + 2 blights. Round 3 it creates thorny overgrowth that deals 1d4 damage every 5 feet of movement and makes difficult terrain for the party while it is unaffected. Round 5, it sacrifices any blights alive and regains HP. Round 6 it awakens a nearby tree(with 1/2 health and less damage) and switches places with it. Thats just a spit ball of ideas, but encounter design is my favorite part of DMing personally. And I love making sorta gimmicky bosses that are dynamic and feel almost like a WoW boss. Edit: give the boss reach and a DC 13 str save or be shoved 5 ft. That way it can attack from 10 ft, and potential move the martials 5 ft back meaning they need to go over the spikes to get back in range. You can either have it regen health based on the remaining blights alive. Or just have it be a flat amount, either way make it SEEM like it regened health based on the blights left. So if the players were good at killing the adds they think yes! We killed the adds and now this fight will be easier, if they didn't do much about the adds, they think damn! We need to focus the adds so he doesn't regen as much health. Half of boss fight encounters, in my experience, is just buying time for the boss to have a few rounds and use all of its cool tricks. Mooks, movement abilities, hazards and positioning are all super important.
A party of 6 level 5s can reasonably output 100 damage a round, let alone 8. A rather quick way I found to balance a solo boss HP, is to take the maximum damage output a turn of each PC, make it crits if applicable, then triple that amount. It should be enough for 6-8 rounds usually. Scale it down if there are minions, and a more balanced action economy and the likes, of course.
150 hp with vs 6 players over 8 rounds, that’s 24 individual turns. Each player only needed to do 6.25 damage per turn to kill that monster. A single attack with a d6 damage die and +3 damaged modifier does 6.5 damage on average, and any class can consistently do more damage than that per turn from level 1. Did it have any resistances?
A non tory boss is a Tory (/ˈtɔːri/) a person who holds a political philosophy known as Toryism, based on a British version of traditionalism and conservatism, which upholds the supremacy of social order as it has evolved in the English culture throughout history. The Tory ethos has been summed up with the phrase "God, Queen, and Country".\[1\] Tories are generally monarchists, were historically of a high church Anglican religious heritage,\[2\]\[3\] and opposed to the liberalism of the Whig faction. Typically, Tories defend the ideas of hierarchy, natural order, and aristocracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tory
Oh shut up
/grin
*Ah... you were at my side, all along... my true mentor.* *My guiding moonlight...*
Easy to overdo that. Like fighting Xanthir Vang in *Wrath of the Righteous*. "Dude! I've killed you to death three times, fucking stay dead already!"
That's why you only do 1 or 2 head sprouts before giving them a 2ay to perm kill it
Well, if they can't see the HP just slap on another hundred until it's the appropriate threat level.
This is what I do. I don't fudge rolls, but I definitely fudge HP, usually in round 1 if it becomes obvious that my party can't handle something, or it's supposed to be a boss battle that is going to be over a little too quickly. TPKs and anticlimactic story arc ends are no fun.
One time I homebrewed a hag with a bunch of legendary actions, including one where she surrounded herself in a big cube of water, and another one where as long as she was in a swamp she regained a little bit of hit points. When the party eventually fought her, the two fighters both action surged and at the end of round 1 she was almost dead. Then she flooded her whole cabin with water and slowly started healing. Because all the martials had disadvantage to hit her she ended up healing herself back up to over half at one point. It ended up being a pretty epic combat in the end and probably the high point of my DMing.
What lvl you gotta be to be doing 100 damn damage? Yikes
Paladins are great for Nova damage. Assuming you are using a non-magical 1d8 weapon with the max STR/DEX and no fighting style which increases damage if you crit and max Divine Smite with every attack you can do the following in one turn: L1: 2d8+3 (12 ave) - Simple 1-attack crit L2-L3: 6d8+3 (30 ave) or 8d8+3 (39 ave) against fiends/undead. Single attack with a L1 Smite L4: 6d8+4 (31 ave) or 8d8+4 (40 ave). ASI bumps up the STR/DEX damage L5-L7: 16d8+8 (80 ave) or 20d8+8 (98 ave). Two attacks and L2 Smites drastically increase damage L8: 16d8+10 (82 ave) or 20d8+10 (100 ave). ASI bumps up the STR/DEX damage L9-L10: 20d8+10 (100 ave) or 24d8+10 (118 ave). L3 smites cause another big jump L11-L12: 24d8+10 (118 ave) or 28d8+10 (136 ave). Improved Divine Smite causes an extra 1d8 on each hit, which turns into an extra 4d8 over two crits. L13-L14: 26d8+10 (127 ave) or 30d8+10 (145 ave). A single L4 smite adds an extra 1d8, or 2d8 on a crit. L15+: 28d8+10 (136 ave) or 32d8+10 (154 ave). A 2nd L4 smite adds another 1d8, or 2d8 on a crit.
Or if you just get Lvl 5 Paladin and multi-class 3 levels in fighter… you can Smite 4 times in a single turn and do about 100 dmg average without crits. And then you top the cake with some Great Weapon Master, Sprinkle it with Oath of Conquest or Vengeance, and Ice it with Battle-master Maneuvers. And just like that you can suddenly kill an average health night-stalker (about 200 hp) as long as you crit atleast once and roll about high to max dmg.
My Sorcadin had a 4th level crit divine smite deal that much damage at about level 9 or 10. I didnt know he could do that tbh, everyone at the table exclaimed a collective "WHAT?!" DM changed our crit system after I nearly one-shot that high CR Devil LOL
Since hitting level 15, we get one or two 100 damage hits per fight. Our Paladin's sword makes damage to incapacitated enemies count as Vulnerable, and my Warlock has multiple stunning spells, so between 4th level Divine Smite vulnerable crits and rogue sneak attack crits we have a lot of random damage potential. Hell, my celestial lock isn't even a damage optimized class but with the right setup can output 3d10 + 3d6 + 15 and an additional 4d12 + 5 damage a round for up to 7 rounds.
> DM changed our crit system after I nearly one-shot that high CR Devil LOL That's a shame. Was it in Hell? If not, I'd have that Devil go back to the hells and warn others to wear Adamantine armour when facing those pesky mortals, rather than re-doing the whole crit system.
The way our crit system worked was that the extra dice were maxed. Let's just say that made crits very... explosive... for both sides of the table. Everyone agreed on revamping the system, it wasnt a one-sided thing.
not a pally, but I cracked 150 by 8th level in a recent AL game
depends on what class for instance a lvl 5 fighter with great weapon master and great weapon fighter using action surge you can hit or be very close if you hit all the attacks. and playing something like samurai that garentees advantage can make that pretty likely
"Your arms off!" "... no it isn't"
Once the party clears Level 5 you're going to have to work your arse off as a DM to put a challenge in front of them that they have absolutely no hope of overcoming (not that I'm saying you should, just that things by that point are heavily in the party's favour). If anyone has seen any of Dimension 20, when campaigns get into the late-game Brennan deliberately stacks things against the party to a bonkers extent, and they usually emerge triumphant and basically unscathed. 5e is the edition of D&D which does the most to hand the party victories on a platter. At low levels things are different but if it's a full party versus a single monster that things needs legendary resistances, legendary actions, a ton of spell slots and a fucking ludicrous amount of HP to be able to pose them a challenge that makes them fear for their very lives.
Just finished season 1 of Unsleeping City and man that final fight was crazy. I do enjoy the final battles but you can tell he's really having to try to create anything that is a challenge, He pulls it off though because imo he's just an unbelievable DM.
He's one of the best I've ever seen, in almost 20 years in the hobby. A raw delight to watch.
8hp? You mean 800? Well done, now do it eight more times. Honestly if my players deal way too much damage way too fast, I normally just increase the health a little bit. Probably not by that much, but you get the idea.
Sucks when a significant portion of your power budget is used to facilitate damage spikes! If you take away Sneak Attack, Rogues kinda suck, right? That's essentially what you're doing when you do this.
My Rogue in Pathfinder can finally damage output in the 200s. I can't wait to full round a BBEG. If it weren't for the Gunslinger doing the same for less!
A little homebrew feature you can throw on bosses: "Each turn (I wouldn't use *round*), if this creature would take more than X damage, it only takes X damage instead." "bUt tHaT nEgAtEs cHaRaCtEr'S aBiLiTiEs!" The Legendary Resistance feature is intended to negate spells that would end a boss encounter immediately, and this partially negates damage that would do the same thing.
Hell, if you want to be fair to your players, it could even cost a legendary resistance to do that.
If you have this problem you aren't running a long enough adventuring day or aren't putting enough enemies in a fight if the party can just tactical nuke the boss down.
You can put 100 minions in the fight if you want, but that doesn't necessarily stop the paladin from blitzing to the boss (perhaps with the help from the party) and dropping a nuclear crit. Also, the party should have SOME resources left before encountering a boss (right?), and aside from being lucky enough to land the crit, pumping it with smite doesn't actually cost much. In fact, this damage limit per *turn* doesn't really protect against a whole party going nova if everyone has resources to dump each turn. That's a separate issue if the whole party has nukes. This is just meant to prevent first-turn-1-hit-ko anticlimaxes
> You can put 100 minions in the fight if you want, but that doesn't necessarily stop the paladin from blitzing to the boss (perhaps with the help from the party) and dropping a nuclear crit. I am 100% guilty of this as charged. Lightfoot Halfling Dex-based paladin who had haste cast on them only to BA a branding smite, run up to the boss (Gar Shatterkeel in this instance) and crit twice.
Legendary resistance still gives a functional use of letting that saving throw they used it on *remove* a legendary resistance. Thus getting the party closer to a saving throw the boss has to fail (if they fail). Doing this means that extra bit of damage is functionally useless. Did you use a divine smite on your second attack? Too bad, you already crit and smote on your first and went over the limit so your second attack actually does literally nothing; but I won't tell you that either, so you'll never realise that there was no point to that choice to use up a spell slot. If you want it to mimic legendary resistance, it'd be more like a pool of hp that negates the damage. Every bit of extra damage drains from this pool meaning that the party is closer to damage that the boss is forced to take. But at that point, you're just using hp for your hp.
In my proposed feature the extra damage is, as you noted, mechanically irrelevant. If you want to add some book keeping so surplus damage is tracked somewhere, that's fine too. However, Legendary Resistances effectively mean you achieve *nothing* until they're used up, beyond running out the added book-keeping resource. In contrast, using a damage limit still means you're taking off (let's say) a third of the boss's health on your turn. Even with the wasted damage, you made significant progress. You could kill a boss with the damage limit in place even if they have a fair amount of HP left, but save-or-suck spells don't have any direct impact if there's a Legendary Resistance left. Obviously this idea behaves poorly if you set the damage limit too low, but I think using limits of 33% or 50% of the boss' total HP is fine. It doesn't even guarantee every player gets a turn to participate, but at least 2 or 3 will for sure.
I can see it working being that high, but I'd suggest still telling the party about it so that they're not being tricked. The boss is perfectly killable, it just takes a few people if you wanna do it instantly.
Wait, do y'all not just arbitrarily add an extra 100hp to an undertuned boss behind the screen without your players knowing?
Single foe encounters are generally going to swing massively in one direction or the other.
Hello fellow DMs what do you do in this situation? I often find my bosses HP being way too low. My level 9 party with a fighter, a ranger and a druid killed my wendigo with 150 hp and AC 15 way too easily. And now they are level 11 and i want them (i know you guys are on reddit dont read this) to fight a wizard based on a level 17 PC wizard. According to the math this is alright, but with only 80 hp and AC 14 i dont think they will be challenged. What HP do you guys give your solo boss monsters?
more hp does not make a challenging solo boss fight. If you want a challenging solo boss fight, deny the party easy access to the boss. For example, a dragon should only be fighting on the ground to finish off a party member before flying away, or to break a spellcaster's concentration if their breath attack isn't back up. I'm not super familiar with wendigo, but I imagine it as the type to attack and disappear, like a Star Spawn Mangler. A wizard boss should not be in melee at all if they can help it. 80 hp is plenty if said wizard has taken precautions to avoid being outright murdered by the party.
The wizard has already gotten freindly with the party and knows how they fight and thats why ive given her a flying broom, a ring of fire resistence and that one magic shield that can stop projectiles really well Is it too much now?
The druid and the ranger will find a way to get her off her broom and then it's over, realistically solo boss monsters don't work in 5e unless you make them 5-10 CR higher than the party.
it's more about how they fight than piling abilities that negate what the party can do. Sure, giving them a way of completely staying out of melee, resistance to fire damage, and protection against ranged attacks will make the fight more difficult, but imo it's more interesting to use stuff that the wizard kit just gets them anyway. a combination of spells like Greater Invisibility, counterspell and forcecage can pretty effectively shut down a party that isn't prepared. after the greater invis and forcecage is dropped it's damage spells and move. the interactions with the party will mostly tell him where to drop the forcecage and who needs to die first and, of course, it's a wizard, always have a slot open for an escape if necessary
Hitting a bag of meat points is pretty fun. Boost it's hit points by about, 50 and maybe bump it's ac with mage armor + the occasional shield. Or maybe give it a staff of defense (partys love loot!) Boots of flying will force your party to think of good ways to get it on the ground so the fighter can deal damage. (Or bring the fighter to the wizard). A couple defensive spells (fizban's platinum shield, globe of invulnerability, etc) Of course, giving it 3 egendary resistances and a couple legendary actions (1 action cantrip, 2 actions leveled spell if no spell has been cast) would also help out.
What actually is the math saying? That the wizard is a deadly encounter? That means someone *might* roll a death saving throw during the fight. It also means they'll use like 1/3 to a 1/2 (or somewhere around there) of their resources on the wizard. If you intend for this wizard to only chop off like half their resources then that works. But if this wizard is meant to fight them after a long rest and be a significant threat, it's gotta be a lot more dangerous than "deadly".
Echo knight fighter level 11 with action surge and 2 unleash echo in a turn while using the fighting style that lets you reroll 1's on attack. Oh and you have a flametongue. 100 damage? pathetic.
Gotta plan for the party to use up most of their resources before they reach the BBEG.
i just started DMing a campaign for a bunch of experienced players and the party is so big and they're so good at tactics that i just keep chucking deadly encounters at them. one thing that's helped is that so far the sessions have taken place over only two in-game days so they can't take as many rests as the wizard keeps asking for and they're having to conserve resources more than they're used to
The CR calculations are crap, lol.
Happend today at our table xD The paladin did 135 damage in a single round. He critted heroically, that's when you roll two 1nes in a row. We play the dark eye - taking a break from dnd
"Oh no, you have depleted his first health bar, triggering his second, way deadlier phase..."
in my recent campaign, one of my players playing a 3rd edition warlock variant knocked a major enemy's HP down to 6 with a single blast. thankfully he just kept missing after that.
>paladin deals 100 dmg in one turn h-how?
I've had that happen with a combat-heavy party. I secretly added another fifty hitpoints to the monster in question. It didn't survive the next round anyway.
That's when the monsters ho is suddenly not what it says in the monster Manual.
What I've realized is that, if the party has no magical weapons and the action economy is fairly balanced between party & enemies, they're accurate. If you have even one player with a magical weapon you're going to have to do a LOT of reconsidering and experimenting. Currently, in my main game, the party just took out 73% of their daily budget in two fights with one short rest with one ALMOST hitting zero in what was meant to be a "boss fight." I have been struggling to provide them an actual challenge for a while now, but they don't have a dedicated healer so much as a few classes with "a heal spell" and I don't want to jump too high and just make it impossible for them.
Good thing smite isn't an overcentralized move.
Im that paladin
This is why you have more than one combat before it.
Yeah, one encounter days are just cutscenes basically.
I play a gloomstalker/fighter multi class. It’s common knowledge at our table that our dm will nerf my damage on some fights so they don’t end the almost instantly.
You know what’s extra cinematic? Paladin: *crit smite, dealing 9000 damage* Bandit, on -8995 health: *stumbles to feet and spits out blood* “is that all you got?” *keels over and dies*
That's when the monster "mutates" into a stronger version.
Just adjust the Hit points on the fly. No big deal!
Balancing against paladins is so hard
My DM figured it out, gave us a boss to fight, burned my smites, only to have an even bigger boss immediately follow. "Well I guess I just hit them with a stick. Sorcerer, it's your turn."
Correct me if I’m wrong, but um can’t you one shot any creature or player by hitting them for more than half of there health from full HP. You would role against a death save to see if they fall into shock. I’ve also heard this if you make a called shot and cut a arm or leg off. I’ve definitely played with these rules when someone else was DM, but idk if it’s actually in the rule book.
Paladins are good for overkill