Hi there, I'd like to dip my toes into DMing. I've already got a rough story outline in mind, but I struggle a bit with setting the difficulty of challenges faced by the party.
For example, I want the first enemy the party (all lvl. 1) encounters to be a damaged golem. How do I balance it posing a significant threat to ~5 players without making it an insurmountable challenge? I.e. its armour class, the amount of damage it deals, etc.
I'd appreciate any help.
5e tools has a full cr calculator on their site you could use that. either that or you can look at other creatures that could threaten an entire party solo and infere from there. Either that or reskin a monster.
>cr calculator
I think I tried that out some time but trying to scale things down seemed to really mess up the stats if memory serves so I'm kinda shying away from it.
Who are your PCs and what are their stengths/abilities/weaknesses? It’s very hard to balance encounters properly without considering these things.
If you’re new and your players aren’t too optimised use this table. It’s an average so you could have a golem that’s low health but hits hard.
This is actually useful, I never understood why and how some monsters are what levels
Like it says in the image the DMG has a similiar table but it's pretty shit.
I didn't know about this. I'll watch it myself thank you.
>the DMG has a simILIar table but it's pretty shit
>same fricking table, only with spell/ability DC and damage values that account for players getting basic defensive gear by level 5 and chance to survive 1 round of 5th level spells and full attacks instead of be dead when "cr appropriate" solo stomp by party (assuming it doesnt have 1.5 to 3 times the speed of the party like dragons) and the "range"/variance room is noted in the description going "you can reduce the monsters ac, but remember to keep its effective hits similar so increasing its hp or taking some above average value could be good for the benefit of the encounter" and "playtest to make sure the idea of the fight is represented by the stats well and that any features you add are appropriate"
And people wonder why 5e is the best selling ttrp when it allows even people that cant read to not be noobtrap walled.
Give it enough effective hit points to survive 2-4 rounds against the players (whose DPR you should have a pretty good idea of). Have it deal 1/2 of a PC's health per round with direct damage, give it a weaker ranged attack, and give it something that forces a saving throw.
So, probably 50HP, AC15, 2x 2d4 attacks at +3-4, at separate targets, and a Dex save ability that serves to yank someone from range to right in front of it. In general, you want to make keeping away more dangerous; something like a stomp which knocks down people next to it will encourage players staying away and turn the fight into a boring DPR check.
With that said, two malfunctioning golems will pretty much always be more entertaining than a solo.
A dude that goes by Treikos over on Youtube came up with his own little battle sim tool since he found CR unreliable for his own games. You can basically assemble your party in the tool (assuming you have characters to work off of) and it'll spit out some simple projections of how the PCs fair at the end of the fight. You might try using this to spitball a statblock. Although, as other posters have said, encounter design is going to come down to your party's actual composition at the end of the day.
Video explaining it here:
?si=RpxnPbposkC7cnBM
I tried to use this for my party and it fell pretty flat. It's too hard to add any reasonably complex parties to it and mine has 3/4 PCs multiclassing. It also is fairly bad at estimating how good or bad monsters are. Might be better for a different table but this is pretty useless to me unfortunately.
Usually for encounters I add the sum total of health that the party has, add what all of their weakest damage options(Cantrips, normal attack action) does(I like to highball, lowball, and get an average), and then I figure out what sort of damage they do with perfectly optimized play.
I then try to set the HP-AC distribution as such that they slay their opponent in 4-6 rounds optimally, or 10-15 rounds if they lowroll everything. Keep in mind that the higher the AC is, the more likely they'll miss, so this effectively increases the HP/round count of the encounter.
Once all that is done, figure out what you want the mechanics of the fight to be, and do an estimate of how many turns it would take for the encounter to defeat the party. Aim for sixteen or seventeen, so it's very close to losing with unoptimal play and bad luck, and very far if everybody plays perfectly and rolls high.
You can calculate the total health you want your encounter to be by taking the average damage of the group and multiplying it by the number of rounds you want combat to last. Then, you can distribute that health either entirely to the main opponent, or between him and any minions that are present or get summoned. You could also lower his HP but increase his damage per round if you want them to DPR race him. You can do the opposite if you want it to be a battle of attrition. Try and get a feel for how many rounds any given piece of CC or damage will take away from the party before they enter the failure-state range.
Encounters in 5e tend to last 3-5 turns, so for encounters you want to gauge the difficulty by how hurt the PCs will be by the end of it - if the PCs end up less hurt than you expected, it's either due to dice luck, tactics, and/or resource use, which is good. For a first encounter that isn't lethal, you'll want something that can hit decently hard, but not so hard as to kill outright. The average PC at 1st level has around 10 HP, give or take based on class. In 3 rounds you'd like a party to be about half-wounded to feel a bit of tension, but if the party is new any damage is scary, especially with such low healing resources.
Let's take a CR 1 creature close to what you're imagining already if possible.
>animated armor
Perfect, with 33 HP it should last a couple rounds against a 1st level party, but you gotta lower the AC, 18 is pretty high for tier 1. Drop it to 13, because it's a damaged golem and its body is already cracking. It hits for 5 damage twice a turn with +4 to hit, that's fine and by basic statistics means it should only be landing one hit. Increase its size to Large if you want, the HP should technically change but it isn't integral that it does. Make it immobile, break its legs so it can only crawl 5ft a turn.
Over 3 rounds it could hurt 3 players for 5 damage, which is alright for a tutorial fight. If it gets lucky, someone could even be downed, but if they act cleverly they could realize the golem can't move and will attack the thing from a distance. This is good: it will reward the players for paying attention and making good decisions. If it looks like they've discovered this and try to do that, and they have enough movement/space to evade it the entire time, narrate them to the end of the battle since the outcome is completely determined.
In future, a way to change up encounters is to give them conditions or exhaustion. An adult red dragon with four levels of exhaustion is a very different encounter than a fully powered one.
>3-5 turns
Meant rounds, I apologize.
13, but give it a barn door hooked to its body or something for half cover for total of 15 party can use against it or get advantage on the strength check if someone tries to shove it through use of leverage. Teaches positioning that way AND gives large target if op wants the broken legs idea implemented.
Lower AC, more HP. Nobody likes to constantly miss.
this
+ if you want to make the fight challenging, you'll have to make it feel challenging. I usually use insane amounts of HP for encounters that should feel challenging because it gives the players time to understand the threat they're facing, and it gives the players a feeling of relief and accomplishment when they finally brought down the big thing after spending a lot of their ressources.
Though, I'm a bit poisoned with a lot of powerful modern homebrew weaponry in our campaign, so maybe the 50 HP the other anon suggested is more appropriate.
Also consider giving the boss multiple, weak attacks, as opposed to one strong attack, or something with AoE. That way, the party has more time and opportunity to work together. After all, once a strong PC on the frontline dies due to a bad roll, the fight gets significantly harder for the remaining members.
Alternative to second part of this, you can scrap 50% of the physical resistances from monsters in the CR 3 to 11 range and replace them with damage reduction based on the proficiency or consitution of the monster with a material to overcome it (e.g. gricks rubbery skin layers being weak to splinters thus wooden weapons, preytons feathers soften when stuck by a weapon covered in blood due to their hormone activity when consuming humanoid hearts, ) and one additional resistance and weakness (not vulnerability, weakness like the water elementals partial freeze, where when struck by a type, for a round some effect is active).
It is more work, but if you run more than 2 medium encounters a day or have traditional dungeon crawls, it makes creatures feel closer to the players own resilience.
Abandon edition.
Seriously, the CR calculator the devs used is NOT the they put in the DMG.
You'll end up having to ad hoc things, it's not worth it.
Day the magic words to your group:
>I will DM, but we're playing 4e
You'll have to check and change the monster math if needed, using the standards given in the mm3, but after that, the game is the smoothest DnD, for the DM (unless your players optimize like crazy as a group, then anything goes... but that's for all editions)
>Seriously, the CR calculator the devs used is NOT the they put in the DMG.
>all on page 274 AND follows ranges for 90-95% of monsters with the remainder having gimmick features that the statistics state in the accompanied text or even in the gimmick feature itself
>also doesnt need to redo 80% of the monsters unlike playing the shitstain edition before it
Check the DMG. There's an entire section on creature and encounter design.
If that's not enough, then https://koboldplus.club/ plug in your players' levels and HP and tinker with stuff until you get the encounter difficulty you want.
I've been a DM for over 6 years, and I think two things are true:
- every once in a while, an encounter that's too easy can help the players play their characters. If you're always on the verge of dying from every enemy, you will never consider being merciful, or taking a risk. Every other encounter being easy is allowed and makes your players feel less like they're in a videogame.
- When it dawns on players that an encounter is about to take some or all of their lives, they'll start thinking of creative solutions and out of the box. If you want to make a hard encounter enjoyable, give the golem weaknesses that they can find out about mid-battle, give them environmental weapons that allow them to damage the golem by using skills other than their weapons, and maybe give them an escape route they can find mid-battle if they decide it's too much to handle (for example, for a slow and sluggish damaged golem, it might be impossible to enter a small tunnel, but the players could crawl through it)
Think back to your most fun experiences with difficult enemies in any context, what was the fun of it? The fun of it was the skill you, the player, had to use to defeat them. You don't need skill to say "I attack" until the enemy is dead, and if the enemy is simply unbeatable, you don't need skill either. Test your players skill in roleplaying their adventurers by forcing them to make up a creative solution to bring down an enemy.
Don't be afraid of making him tough enough to take a few punches. If you're scared that your golem might TPKO them, also consider simply not making him kill them. Either because he just knocks them unconscious at 0 HP, or because he simply doesn't check if they're dead when they lay down.
I'm currently DMing for a DnD party with 5 players, and I recommend giving the boss a large HP pool (100 or something), but making him easy to hit (AC 12-15 depending on how many fighters you have).
Don't bother with CR it doesn't work at all. The only edition whose encounter building budget wasn't totally fricked was 4e because that game had functional math.
It is a pointless endeavor to design balanced encounters like this.
If you wish to have a game with strong gamist influences emphasizing the skill of the players being the main factor towards victory, you create a large span of difficult encounters, and in various ways let the players decide themselves which place they wish to visit. For example, you have four different dungeons, which are all in the ballpark of what they could accomplish, but some of them are harder, one might be easier. And then also inside those dungeons, you present challenges which they can choose to take on, or retreat from, challenges which again, are in the ballpark, but more importantly vary drastically in challenge.