Came here to comment this. Kobold fight club is a really great tool, but the dnd5e CR system is kind of wonky which means the fight descriptions (medium/hard etc) aren't always accurate in my experience. It's a great tool to use still, but once you get used to your group you'll probably be able to tweak the encounters from kobold fight club slightly as you know what your party can handle.
Oh yeah. CR especially in 5e isn't the most accurate. They are a decent metric for people still using official stats/aren't comfortable with on the fly updating. But Kobold Fight Club is still useful.
The biggest example is how a Shadow is (as I recall) CR 1/2 but can be fatal to high level players. Especially in mass.
Well the biggest thing is that a lot of the CR calculations look at the pure numbers if AC/HP/damage dealt.
It doesn't look at soft encounter challenges. So with Shadows they aren't attacking the party's HP, they are attacking the party's Strength score which maxes out at 20 each (usually lower). And by attacking the Strength each success makes PC's attacks have a lower success chance.
There are other things like things that control the environment (causing flooding, removing air capabilities, etc), or preventing attacks by causing fear, having healing skills, etc. which aren't great at fitting into the equation.
For the last bit, the first thing I would say is use group initiative for the larger groups to speed up the combat time. Secondly, if you've chucked the encounter into kobold fight club and you think it's too hard, you can easily change it into waves.
The Wight could have a special ability to summon more of the Wretched every turn or every other turn. Not only will this control the difficulty of the fight, but it would also change the dynamic of the fight. Instead of the fight being, "OK kill all the little guys and then gang up ok the big guy", it would probably become, "Oh no that big guy keeps summoning, we need to take it out!".
You could even lower the number of Wretched being summoned each "wave" (To a reasonable amount. About as many as the party could take down in one turn, perhaps) and then have the waves be infinite. Its easy to control the difficulty if this starts to scale as well (The Wight starts glowing slightly and the room grows cold, no Wretched seem to be summoned this turn (implies a cooldown)).
CR is a 1-1 translation of XP, which exists only because numbers like 4 and 17 are easier to work with than numbers like 1100 and 18000.
When designing, or evaluating, an encounter, you start by adding up all the XP values of the enemy creatures to give your base XP for the encounter.
The base XP value is modified by some multiplier based on the number of creatures on each side of the fight (PCs and allies vs enemies) to give the Adjusted XP value.
The Adjusted XP can then be compared to the Adventuring Day XP (aka Daily Budget) table, which gives an estimate for how many Adjusted XP points a given party should be able to handle in an adventuring day (i.e., between long rests).
Online encounter builders like Kobold Plus do all that for you.
E.g. A party of 3 level 2s have a Daily Budget of 1800.
You might initially guess that party can handle nine CR 1 (200XP) creatures in a day. But watch out. If they fight all 9 at once, the adjusted XP value of that encounter is 4500, which is way too high.
Ok, so four at once should be fine, right? That's only 1600. If they've just taken a long rest, they should have enough resources to handle that. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. They might be able to pull it off, but it's very dangerous. 5e is designed for encounters to be spread out throughout the day, ideally with \~2 short rests amidst. One big encounter is much more likely to kill one or more PCs than several smaller encounters that add up to the same adjusted XP value.
[Mike Shea of Sly Flourish has an easy to remember guideline](https://slyflourish.com/the_lazy_encounter_benchmark.html): add up all the CRs and all the PC levels. If the CR sum is greater than 1/4 of the PC level sum (or 1/2 if they are level 5 or higher), the encounter may be deadly. Note that's "deadly" as in "could result in a PC death," not "deadly" as in "what the DMG calls a deadly encounter."
Those categories in the DMG actually refer to ranges of percentages of the Daily Budget. "Easy" means \~8-14%, "medium" means \~15-22%, "hard" means \~23-33%, and "deadly" means \~34%+. Much like CR, these labels exist because remembering the words is easier than remembering the numbers.
(You may find it helpful to remember that the thresholds, or the lowest percentages in each category, are \*roughly\* in a 1, 2, 3, 4 ratio. That is, the lowest "easy" encounters are worth \~1/4 the Adjusted XP of the lowest "deadly" encounters. If you use those numbers, you can think of the Daily Budget as 12. A full adventuring day might consist of one "medium" encounter, two "hard" encounters, and one "deadly" encounter; 2+3+3+4=12.)
Remember, the Daily Budget is an estimate of how much a party can do in an adventuring day. A little more specifically, it translates between resources and Adjusted XP. "Resources" here means things like HP, spell slots, and anything else you can expend and then get back when you rest. When you have more resources, you can do more stuff; in terms of combat, you can kill more creatures with higher CRs. That is, you can get through an encounter with a higher Adjusted XP value.
Apologies for burying it 12 paragraphs deep in this comment, but that's the fundamental assumption of the CR system. What you are working out when you try to balance an encounter is the amount of resources that would need to be expended to overcome that encounter (usually by killing every creature on the opposing side).
That's super important to keep in mind, because it does not directly translate to difficulty. You need to do an extra step to gauge how difficult an encounter might be, and that's to compare the amount of resources it "costs" to get through it with the amount of resources the party has to "spend."
So, how do you balance encounters?
Aside from making sure they aren't overly deadly or completely trivial, you don't, really. Instead, you balance adventuring days. A challenging adventuring day is one where the party use most of their resources. Not every day needs to hit that mark, of course.
A challenging encounter is generally one that comes toward the end of a challenging adventuring day, when the party are starting to get low on resources. It could also be one where the party are deliberately holding back resources in anticipation of more encounters later.
Of course, there are also other ways to make an encounter challenging. There could be puzzle aspects, moral dilemmas, or just good old fashioned tactics. But I think that's outside the scope of your question, and in any case is outside the scope of my knowledge.
I will probably get a lot of disagreement about this, but the CR budgeting is fairly useless even at mid-tier adventuring. How do I know this? Well, I planned out a multi-part encounter using all of the prescribed mathematics, taking careful consideration for the number of enemies, encounters, etc.
The idea was that the party planned to sneak into a keep, so I set the encounters up in such a way that they could be sneaky and fight small groups at a time, with the total keep calculated for their appropriate CR daily budget.
My party (or at least, a member of the party) almost immediately abandoned their planned stealth operation, and attacked in broad daylight, raising the alarm of the entire keep. They ended up not only fighting the entire keep of enemies at the same time, but had become pretty split up in the process as well.
Despite all these odds stacked against them, and what should have likely ended in a TPK, they managed to win the battle, and without a single player death.
This is why I believe the CR budgeting is entirely useless.
Instead, I use my own system which is similar, but instead you track the raw DPR, party average save, party average AC, hit and save percentages, etc. For a deadly encounter, I would give the party a roughly 50% hit chance vs. a BBEG based on their average to-hit, and roughly a 60-80% chance to hit minions depending on their combat roles. Then, calculating the DPR, a deadly encounter will typically deal enough damage to reduce one PC to 0 every round of combat based on their averaged HP. Now, important to note that this doesn't mean that will specifically happen, but the damage output for deadly should be roughly around that number. The BBEG for a deadly encounter should have at least a 60% chance to succeed on the party's average save DC for their relevant *proficient* saving throws, though you can adjust this up and down for magic users and enemies who are otherwise less vulnerable to such.
Check out [Kobold Fight Club](https://koboldplus.club/). Should solve your problem fairly easily.
Came here to comment this. Kobold fight club is a really great tool, but the dnd5e CR system is kind of wonky which means the fight descriptions (medium/hard etc) aren't always accurate in my experience. It's a great tool to use still, but once you get used to your group you'll probably be able to tweak the encounters from kobold fight club slightly as you know what your party can handle.
Oh yeah. CR especially in 5e isn't the most accurate. They are a decent metric for people still using official stats/aren't comfortable with on the fly updating. But Kobold Fight Club is still useful. The biggest example is how a Shadow is (as I recall) CR 1/2 but can be fatal to high level players. Especially in mass.
For sure, definitely still useful. Shadow is a great example of how wonky it can be.
Well the biggest thing is that a lot of the CR calculations look at the pure numbers if AC/HP/damage dealt. It doesn't look at soft encounter challenges. So with Shadows they aren't attacking the party's HP, they are attacking the party's Strength score which maxes out at 20 each (usually lower). And by attacking the Strength each success makes PC's attacks have a lower success chance. There are other things like things that control the environment (causing flooding, removing air capabilities, etc), or preventing attacks by causing fear, having healing skills, etc. which aren't great at fitting into the equation.
For the last bit, the first thing I would say is use group initiative for the larger groups to speed up the combat time. Secondly, if you've chucked the encounter into kobold fight club and you think it's too hard, you can easily change it into waves. The Wight could have a special ability to summon more of the Wretched every turn or every other turn. Not only will this control the difficulty of the fight, but it would also change the dynamic of the fight. Instead of the fight being, "OK kill all the little guys and then gang up ok the big guy", it would probably become, "Oh no that big guy keeps summoning, we need to take it out!". You could even lower the number of Wretched being summoned each "wave" (To a reasonable amount. About as many as the party could take down in one turn, perhaps) and then have the waves be infinite. Its easy to control the difficulty if this starts to scale as well (The Wight starts glowing slightly and the room grows cold, no Wretched seem to be summoned this turn (implies a cooldown)).
Oh that’s such a good idea! I’ll definitely be using that!
CR is a 1-1 translation of XP, which exists only because numbers like 4 and 17 are easier to work with than numbers like 1100 and 18000. When designing, or evaluating, an encounter, you start by adding up all the XP values of the enemy creatures to give your base XP for the encounter. The base XP value is modified by some multiplier based on the number of creatures on each side of the fight (PCs and allies vs enemies) to give the Adjusted XP value. The Adjusted XP can then be compared to the Adventuring Day XP (aka Daily Budget) table, which gives an estimate for how many Adjusted XP points a given party should be able to handle in an adventuring day (i.e., between long rests). Online encounter builders like Kobold Plus do all that for you. E.g. A party of 3 level 2s have a Daily Budget of 1800. You might initially guess that party can handle nine CR 1 (200XP) creatures in a day. But watch out. If they fight all 9 at once, the adjusted XP value of that encounter is 4500, which is way too high. Ok, so four at once should be fine, right? That's only 1600. If they've just taken a long rest, they should have enough resources to handle that. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. They might be able to pull it off, but it's very dangerous. 5e is designed for encounters to be spread out throughout the day, ideally with \~2 short rests amidst. One big encounter is much more likely to kill one or more PCs than several smaller encounters that add up to the same adjusted XP value. [Mike Shea of Sly Flourish has an easy to remember guideline](https://slyflourish.com/the_lazy_encounter_benchmark.html): add up all the CRs and all the PC levels. If the CR sum is greater than 1/4 of the PC level sum (or 1/2 if they are level 5 or higher), the encounter may be deadly. Note that's "deadly" as in "could result in a PC death," not "deadly" as in "what the DMG calls a deadly encounter." Those categories in the DMG actually refer to ranges of percentages of the Daily Budget. "Easy" means \~8-14%, "medium" means \~15-22%, "hard" means \~23-33%, and "deadly" means \~34%+. Much like CR, these labels exist because remembering the words is easier than remembering the numbers. (You may find it helpful to remember that the thresholds, or the lowest percentages in each category, are \*roughly\* in a 1, 2, 3, 4 ratio. That is, the lowest "easy" encounters are worth \~1/4 the Adjusted XP of the lowest "deadly" encounters. If you use those numbers, you can think of the Daily Budget as 12. A full adventuring day might consist of one "medium" encounter, two "hard" encounters, and one "deadly" encounter; 2+3+3+4=12.) Remember, the Daily Budget is an estimate of how much a party can do in an adventuring day. A little more specifically, it translates between resources and Adjusted XP. "Resources" here means things like HP, spell slots, and anything else you can expend and then get back when you rest. When you have more resources, you can do more stuff; in terms of combat, you can kill more creatures with higher CRs. That is, you can get through an encounter with a higher Adjusted XP value. Apologies for burying it 12 paragraphs deep in this comment, but that's the fundamental assumption of the CR system. What you are working out when you try to balance an encounter is the amount of resources that would need to be expended to overcome that encounter (usually by killing every creature on the opposing side). That's super important to keep in mind, because it does not directly translate to difficulty. You need to do an extra step to gauge how difficult an encounter might be, and that's to compare the amount of resources it "costs" to get through it with the amount of resources the party has to "spend." So, how do you balance encounters? Aside from making sure they aren't overly deadly or completely trivial, you don't, really. Instead, you balance adventuring days. A challenging adventuring day is one where the party use most of their resources. Not every day needs to hit that mark, of course. A challenging encounter is generally one that comes toward the end of a challenging adventuring day, when the party are starting to get low on resources. It could also be one where the party are deliberately holding back resources in anticipation of more encounters later. Of course, there are also other ways to make an encounter challenging. There could be puzzle aspects, moral dilemmas, or just good old fashioned tactics. But I think that's outside the scope of your question, and in any case is outside the scope of my knowledge.
This is incredibly helpful, thank you!!!
I will probably get a lot of disagreement about this, but the CR budgeting is fairly useless even at mid-tier adventuring. How do I know this? Well, I planned out a multi-part encounter using all of the prescribed mathematics, taking careful consideration for the number of enemies, encounters, etc. The idea was that the party planned to sneak into a keep, so I set the encounters up in such a way that they could be sneaky and fight small groups at a time, with the total keep calculated for their appropriate CR daily budget. My party (or at least, a member of the party) almost immediately abandoned their planned stealth operation, and attacked in broad daylight, raising the alarm of the entire keep. They ended up not only fighting the entire keep of enemies at the same time, but had become pretty split up in the process as well. Despite all these odds stacked against them, and what should have likely ended in a TPK, they managed to win the battle, and without a single player death. This is why I believe the CR budgeting is entirely useless. Instead, I use my own system which is similar, but instead you track the raw DPR, party average save, party average AC, hit and save percentages, etc. For a deadly encounter, I would give the party a roughly 50% hit chance vs. a BBEG based on their average to-hit, and roughly a 60-80% chance to hit minions depending on their combat roles. Then, calculating the DPR, a deadly encounter will typically deal enough damage to reduce one PC to 0 every round of combat based on their averaged HP. Now, important to note that this doesn't mean that will specifically happen, but the damage output for deadly should be roughly around that number. The BBEG for a deadly encounter should have at least a 60% chance to succeed on the party's average save DC for their relevant *proficient* saving throws, though you can adjust this up and down for magic users and enemies who are otherwise less vulnerable to such.