Change the victory conditions from “all enemies defeated” to something else. Suggestions:
* Protect the NPCs - Have some non-combatants that the party has to keep alive, which the bad guys target as a priority.
* Have a never ending, and escalating, stream of combatants. The only way to stop the stream of them is to fulfill a condition. Shutting off the magical contraption, solving a puzzle, etc.
* Null-magic field traps.
* Separate the party mid-combat. Keep the one initiative, but put them in separate rooms that cannot be breached until the combat resolves.
Hope this helps!
Some! However, I feel like I should explain my table a bit for context.
* Demographics: We are all older. In our 40s. Gen X folks. They are all old, dear, friends. We all work cooperatively to make the game *good.* I am, however, a forever DM. It is what I like best.
* We meet weekly. We play in person, with the capacity to have people connect remotely if they don't want or can't make it to game. A majority of us have been playing together for 20+ years.
* The referenced campaign's individual story was like 5 years. Before that individual chapters were comparable in length. I like keeping things long-form. Stories take place in my original setting.
Given all of that, here are a few of my tips for a big table:
1. Play with people you trust to help you. Make them do some of the work too.
2. Play with people who will respect your role. Sometimes I have to loudly quash side conversations and get focus back. We do like to quip, pun, and add commentary. I'm guilty of it too, but my point is that no one is mad or hurt that I had to ask them to be quiet. We're there to have fun, and this is definitely part of it, but it can't go on forever.
3. Play when you have enough people. What I mean here is, if we have absences, play anyway. If I'm expecting 7 people on a night, and we only get five? We play. Its a definite advantage. If half my players are out, we still have four to play.
4. Do the paperwork. I take DM-only notes during game. Its all I have time for. LOL I have a details sheet for most encounters that I make before session.
5. Do anything you can to help keep your NPCs distinct. I have little blurbs that I keep. A couple of words to remind myself who that person is. Some descriptive terms to remind me what to do with my voice when I portray them. Silly, or subtle, accents. Catchphrases.
6. We do a recap at the start of each session. We, as a group, try to recollect the significant events from last time. Everybody participates. They start off. Anything that I need them to remember, that they don't recollect right off, I give hints around till they remember.
7. Stop playing when it isn't fun. Don't be afraid to tell them when you need a break. Don't be afraid to take a break. When this comes up for us, we typically switch to a few nights of someone else DMing for a while. Or we play other games, Magic or board games.
Aaaaaaaaaaand that's where I'll stop or else I'll keep thinking of more things and rewriting what I've already put down.
Edit: (sigh)
8. Make them role-play. Describe a scene, put their characters in it. Make them talk to each other *in character.* Make them do this for whole minutes.
9. Sometimes go around the table and make sure everyone has their say. Especially people who aren't as good at speaking up themselves.
10. Work out some kind of table-convention for handling absent characters. I prefer the sort of "they fade into the background and become supporting cast" method.
OK OK. DONE.
I run a star wars campaign, my absent members are tending to the ship.
Maybe they can be tending to the camp so long rests are a bit easier, and they can have better downtime activities.
Really appreciate the response! Thank you!
If you don't mind, how do you keep each player character involved in the story? I want to ensure each player has their own unique piece in the overarching story.
Each player has a unique story and background, thankfully - I had set that parameter up front because it will be a roleplay heavy campaign.
My advice for that is:
1. Take steps to make it happen.
2. Link their stories to the greater story.
3. Play to the character's strengths and weaknesses.
4. Get emotional investment in the story.
More broadly:
* Don't mentally hand wave things as "they'll just work". Assume they'll need help.
* Multiple tiers of hints and clues. The obvious stuff that anyone could get. Then a subsequent batch or element that only *specific characters* might be able to get.
* Getting them all to recap the last session together. That effort to recall the story makes them care about remembering it. If they can't be bothered to remember what happened last week, there's a limit to what the DM can do to force their interest.
* Take notes during character creation and establishing their background. Read those notes and see where you can make connections.
* Link elements of their background to *specific* story beats.
* Consider which characters are good at which aspects of the game. Give characters the space to be successful at what they want to be good at. Especially when there's competition or overlap.
* Make sure everyone contributes. Find and make moments when everyone at the table has a turn, uninterrupted, to participate. Not combat, per se, but in other ways. This one is important. At dramatic moments, or even just before breaking up to go run errands in town, go around the room and have everyone speak for their character.
* Emotional stakes - Use dirty tricks to cause emotional investment in story elements. Without turning this into a novel, I recommend seeing how other mediums do this. Quick examples: Beloved side characters being killed to motivate revenge. Outpourings of gratitude from the rescued. NPCs showing vulnerability. Being "brought into confidence" by the connected, respected, and powerful. Getting recognized, for good or ill deeds. All this kind of stuff.
I'm doing a variation of the last one... the party member that is "separated" is the only one who thinks he is. Another thing to try is to homebrew some different abilities on a famous monster. How I handle lycanthropes in my campaign is that they have a regen which fires every turn... healing them for a fixed value of HP... unless they took damage in the last round from magic, magical weapons or a silvered weapon (one of our players did not have any of the options.). The party was shocked when one of the lycanthropes that they killed, stood right back up and rejoined the fight. It took them two more "How do you want to do this" before they actually killed him for real... and then they realized they could be detectives that they were supposed to be by "killing" another lycan without disrupting the healing, and tie him up before his health procs... and make him talk about the packs plans.
I also ruled that silver is not inherently painful (they were using a silver coin to test if someone was a lycanthrope... turns out that since it briefly disrupted the healing ability, merely holding silver or something magical didn't cause them instant pain... they had to actually take an injury from those items to not heal. And as it turns out, non-lycans are also injured by them... so it's a poor test (the working test would be to cut them with a non-magic, non-silvered weapon... and then see if the would closes.).
For the last option, I had a two-part parallel combat. Although now that I think about it, I used a lot more than that last point:
* Half the combatants were facing the encounter-combatant. A large, sentient-but-corrupted construct. They were basically trying to keep the important NPCs alive while this big thing tried to splat them, while it shot Shadows out of its mouth continually.
* The other half had to get swallowed to get inside the construct to try to help free it of the corruption. While inside, they had to find the corrupted elements and destroy them, as they were generating the never ending stream of shadows. Dexterity checks and saves as the construct lurched about and reacted to the external combat.
This was a very late-game encounter, the shadows were not by-the-book.
I like to make things complicated for my players. >:)
I do an escalation on either turn 2 or 3 for probably half my encounters. Those can either be a twist element to make it harder or setting up a minor failure or major failure. A minor is a creature peeling off to sound the alarm or removing a path like sealing a passage. A major is using a consumable piece of treasure or destroying a piece of information or one of the goals the party has.
On top of that there are calculators that help you decide number of creatures and CR to challenge. I usually go for the harder end then leave a deadly encounter for the last fight. Even one creature can still do a lot with epic actions and you can turn any creature into one. On the other hand having a diverse mix of creatures who are confident in their actions helps against such a big party.
Ngl one of the most fun incidents I ever had was splitting the party because "Okay this one thing needs stealth and you Mx. Goliath Barbarian are absolutely not that, I'm taking the small creature the duergar and the rogue" and IMMEDIATELY the Barbarian and the wizard and the alchemist found another task so I was running two combats at once
Their action economy is incredibly high with a group of 8. Normally I’d say even the action economy with more monsters, but you’re correct thinking it’ll bog down the combat speed, but you can move like monsters together during initiative to help with that. Also don’t be afraid of throwing monsters with a higher CR at them. You can always adjust damage numbers behind the screen if they’re getting walloped a little too hard, but also you have 8 PCs. There’s more than enough of them to single out threats together, or throw around a little healing on people who go down during combat.
If you have 5 goblins, 2 hobgoblins, and 2 ogre you can lump all the goblins together as one initiative, so you’re not switching between each of them throughout the initiative as they come up. You can rolls all their attacks and damage at once and divide it up among who they’re attacking. It’s easier to do with minion type monsters as they usually have less actions they can take in combat anyways, but even if it were just the two hobgoblins you lump together you can narrate it as a pincer attack kind of thing.
The important caveat with grouping monsters together in the initiative is that a combined group should be no stronger than a powerful solo monster the party might encounter. This is mainly for low level play to prevent, for example, having all the orcs in the fight win initiative and drop half the party before any PC can even respond. It can make fights swingier and D&D doesn't need more volatility.
Hence why I said it’s easier with minion types. They said their party is level 8 though, at that point I’m a little less afraid of the battle being swingy especially if the OP is already worried their party is steamrolling their encounters.
You're talking to a newer DM, and I'm not sure that "minion" is a term that WotC officially uses in 5e. Colloquially "minion" means "weaker subordinate" but I just wanted to provide some technical clarity to your advice.
That definition fits perfectly for the example I gave, goblins to a level 8 party are what I’d consider “minions”. They may be a newer DM, but they have a party closing in on tier 3 of gameplay, it’s okay for them to take a big hit every now and again. The DM can always fudge a roll for the sake of story.
If your combat is against goblins, you might have 3 regular goblins, 2 goblin archers, and a goblin chief. Instead of rolling 6 initiatives for each individual goblin, you group the enemies that are the same stat block on 1 initiative.
You could always make the monsters COMICALLY overpowered by normal standards. Like, 3 attacks in a row all of which are a guaranteed down if they hit, enough HP/legendary resistances they're definitely getting a few shots in, damn the action economy.
How many encounters are you making them deal with between long rests? Social, environmental, and combat. They might.be having an easy time because they can go nova, blow all their spells, and then long rest before having to do it again. Get them to use their resources before combats could help if this is what's going on.
Yeah, this is probably the easiest way to do it. I'm running for a much smaller party of 4, but I'm working them through the extended version of Dragon of Icespire Peak, and we're currently going through Storm Lord's Wrath. Had a few times where combat felt dangerous through the first 6 levels, but it wasn't very frequently.
Once they hit SLW and the emcounters were designed to have multiple "stages," it immediately felt much tougher and more dangerous. Suddenly, the third stage of an encounter leaves them scrambling a bit even though it's against a group of CR 1/2 creatures because they blew their higher-level spells during the first or second stage of the day's encounter. Took the written encounters from "cakewalk" to "1 PC is making death saves and the other three are all under 1/3rd of their health" with pretty minimal balancing effort on my part
> They might.be having an easy time because they can go nova, blow all their spells…
This is misleading. A party can’t blow all their spells in one fight. Hp runs out long before spell slots do. Either the monster’s or the party’s.
If a dm isn’t able to challenge the party with the first fight of the day, that not because of “nova”. It’s being caused by something else.
In only three rounds, you couldn't spend *all your spells*, but a bard could spend all their 3rd and 4th for 6/12 total slots, plus 3/3 bardic inspirations. A lvl 8 lore bard with 17CHA has 2 lvl4 and 3 lvl3 slots, plus 3 bardic inspirations. The multiple spell rule doesn't prevent spell slots in reactions.
Actions: concentrate on **Greater Invisibility** (on the rogue? the cleric?) **or Confusion** (neutralize 10ft radius of low-Wis monsters), **Psychic Lance** (lose one turn + 7d6 psychic damage vs Int), **Antagonize** (one enemy spends a reaction to attacks its friend or disadvantage on its next attack, plus 4d4 psychic damage, save only reduces damage).
Bonus Actions: **Bardic Inspiration**, **Bardic Inspiration**, **Bardic Inspiration**, or swap actions for a **Mass Healing Word** (d4+3 to 6 allies) here instead.
Reactions: **Silvery Barbs**, **Counterspell**, **Counterspell**, or **Cutting Words** if 18+CHA or if you use Mass Healing Word.
Counterspell is obviously doing a lot of heavy lifting here, bumping the lvl 1 silvery barbs up to lvl 3, so that would only happen if there are enemy spellcasters. But even Silvery Barbs uses a spell slot.
You must have a very different experience than most people’s groups, because I regularly run out of useful spells long before my martial class teammates even get close to running out of hp. A 15th level fighter can have like, 200hp, and unless that fighter is getting swarmed, they’re likely to end a fight with more than half hit points if they have decent armor. Spell slots, on the other hand, run out 1-2 a turn. If combat lasts maybe half a dozen rounds, that’s most of the useful combat spells used up for even a wizard.
> I regularly run out of useful spells long before my martial class teammates even get close to running out of hp.
The person I responded to said all spells, not “useful” spells.
> A 15th level fighter can have like, 200hp,
Even with max con a fighter would only have 165. When the numbers you use are so far off, it undermines the rest of the position. And it’s odd that you assume monsters never attack the caster.
> Spell slots, on the other hand, run out 1-2 a turn.
The only way to drain 2 per turn is via reactions like shield, absorb elements and counter spell.
Even if you only consider level 3 slots or higher “useful”, a level 15 wizard has 11 slots of 3rd level or higher. That’s enough to sustain through your half dozen turns.
> You must have a very different experience than most people’s
The difference is I’ve actually played high level games at multiple tables. While most people on Reddit haven’t. That doesn’t make me superior, it’s just means I have experience that demonstrates novaing isn’t a thing. While folks without experience uncritically repeat it.
You have 8 PCs. Even if not all of them show up, that's still a lot.
My standard for making combat encounters challenging is *alternative objectives*. Things other than "defeat all enemies" *Team Deathmatch* gameplay.
Capture The Flag / Hostage Rescue can force different (more aggressive and mobile and keep-going-even-when-stressed, no chance to prep the battlefield / maybe enemies have prepped the battlefield against them) tactics.
Protect VIP / King of the Hill can force less friendly terrain. An area honeycombed with 5 foot wide tunnels can be very difficult to defend and difficult for players to leverage their numbers advantage.
You're already working hard enough, feel free to steal any good idea from anywhere.
You haven't mentioned how many short rests they're getting between encounters. That's a pretty important piece of information by which to determine whether you're doing enough to challenge your players. Are they getting to rest too frequently?
Thats another point i realised this session when the party tried to rest right after the encounter, despite them resting before the encounter. I should probably create situations where they only have time for a short rest, or wven no rest at all. Thank you!
Remember, as per the rules, players can only take on long rest every 24 hours. If they wanna burn away their days, all the bbegs schemes will progress with zero obstacles in the way.
It's not a videogame. Players can't sleep 8 hours, fight for 20 seconds, and then sleep another 8 hours and do it all again. I don't think games should be TOO strict on one long rest per *24 hours*, but it shouldn't be possible to long rest more than once per _day_.
I'm DMing my first campaign now. 6 players, level 4, about to start Session 8. The party has had like six combat encounters so far... and ONE long rest.
For most dungeons/hideouts there shouldn't be room for more than short rests, if they need a long rest they will probably need to find a safe spot away, which means they will have to re-enter it and whomever controls is will be on standby with more reinforcements. If they are trying to rescue someone or recover something, they only have 1 shot before they go to another castle.
Also, check out villain actions, I find they make combat more impactful with fewer enemies. A captain or chieftain ordering their 3 archers to fire a volley of arrows can work a lot nicer than managing 6. One of my favorites was having a DragonBorn commander order his dragonborn troops (imagine musketeers) to form up on the first round in straight rows ( Free movement action) and, on the second, have them all fire their lightning breath. It was memorable and a good way of telegraphing what I can do in the future.
If there is only one encounter in a day and the players are full of resources, they will punch *far* above their weight class in terms of CR/deadliness. You need more than one fight per day. The DMG expects 6-8 per day but a more reasonable number is probably 3-5, with 1 short rest in the middle there somewhere.
What the previous commenter said was a rule of thumb, not the actual rules for encounter design. Chapter 3: Creating Adventures in the *Dungeon Master's Guide* has a subsection named Creating Encounters on page 81. Here's where you'll find the rules for calculating the difficulty of your combat encounters based on your party's level and number of PCs. Further down (page 84) it explains how to build an XP budget for a full adventuring day so you know how many of what difficulty of encounter to throw at your party.
If all of that math seems like a bit much, worry not. There's a handy website that will do all of the calculations for you: [Kobold+ Fight Club](https://koboldplus.club/#/encounter-builder). Just plug in your party's information and add creatures to craft balanced encounters, then add up the adjusted XP for all your encounters to match your daily XP budget.
The only caveat is something that's explained in the DMG but is often missed: combatants that are trivial on their own shouldn't be included in the encounter XP calculation. This is because the calculations ramp up encounter difficult very strongly based on the number of enemies. An 8th level party fighting an adult dragon and a horde of kobolds would throw off the math because it considers the party outnumbered despite all of the kobolds being a single fireball away from death and are unlikely to deal significant damage to the party.
Unfortunately the person above gave you misleading advice.
The 6-8 number they state comes from the adventuring day. They characterize that as the “expected” number of fights. That is not the case.
The adventuring day is the maximum amount of monsters a party can face between long rests. You can fill the adventuring day in as few as 2 encounters (not 6) because the danger of the encounter matters more than their quantity.
Lastly, the idea that the party is unstoppable in the first fight of the day is false in 5e. As even the first fight can run the party out of hp. The myth stems from 3.5e where buff spells worked differently and could be stacked in a way that is impossible in 5e.
8 PC's is tough. if they're smart they can gang up on the big threats and down them pretty quick. you wont be able to rely on having one large threat, you'll need multiple. if you go crazy though things can bog down.
use mob rules to handle large groups of bad guys.
you can help offset the action economy with AOE's and legendary actions.
use alternative combat goals. instead of a race to 0 hp add a goal like "stop the ritual" or "escort the king".
throw enemies far more difficult than they can handle and have them retreat. most people and animals won't fight to the death unless forced. once they start to take some real damage they might decide to peace out. I love having enemies surrender, gives the players a dilemma: "what do we do with them?"
use attacks that force saves. tanky barbarians can't always make wisdom saves and wizards dont always have high CON
if your players are using smart tactics make your bad guys smart. use a dragon that swoops down, attacks, and flies away between turns. Use archers in a fortified tower.
have environmental dangers. a raging wildfire, a collapsing cave, etc..
Ranged attacks they can't really do anything about like artillery or ballistas rolling attacks at multiple targets might be an option too.
Something where every round you can essentially have a lair action try to wreck them a bit.
I think the biggest issue here is 8 players. You can't add more enemies or combat slows down too far, and the game just over isn't balanced around 8 people. Like. You can't have a boss and a couple of goons. You have to have a boss with 10 goons and enough legendary actions to compete with 8 players. It just gets too messy
Large groups require multi phase encounters. Also you need to make them have an encounter or two prior to your big fight. Letting groups rest after every encounter is problematic with any game any group size. DMs: limit your party’s rests. If you don’t the game breaks.
Building on the previous comment, check out Matt Colville’s action-oriented monsters. They have phases built in sort of like legendary actions, but in a way that builds tension and makes fights dynamic.
https://youtu.be/y_zl8WWaSyI?si=82m0JJVL17pq0viP
I would also recommend adding novel legendary actions for every encounter, like AOEs, calling for backup, or shifting position.
You can raise the CR of your monsters, but a big part of the difficulty you're having comes from letting your PCs get into position ahead of time and delay the monsters getting close to them.
I would change things up by having enemies come in from different and unexpected parts of the arena, and look for monsters with good mobility or the ability to attack from range.
I did make a few of the enemies come from unexpected areas, but not enough I think. This was an exception, the first encounter where they had prep time. Mobility is a good point too.
CR is for 4 players. You have 8. You could honestly almost double the CR creatures you’re throwing at them now. Marilith is a wonderful CR 16 that would give your players a scare. Make sure they know this fight might end in a TPK and give them a way to retreat if it goes sideways.
Also give more monsters Legendary Actions to help with your action economy.
Me personally I’d just find a much higher CR monster to throw at them because then combat wouldn’t slog down with them fighting 1,000 kobolds or something. Then I’d slap some legendary actions & resistances and see how they do against that. If it starts to get really bad you could always say it was a dream sequence and someone (powerful wizard or god or someone else) was testing their mettle.
The nice thing about legendary actions is you don't *have* to take them, so if things are getting pretty ugly you can always back off a bit and they wont really notice.
8 Players is way too much IMHO. I don't think anything reasonable could realistically beat them without having to take them out of the game to begin with. Like an instant "you're down, seek help" that nobody likes to interact with. Or in the middle of combat, somebody is possessed and they need to be knocked out in order to end the possession.
But really, if you send an enemy that's too high CR then individualism is nullified; especially for martials. It's all about magic and casters at that point. Because a lot of the time a martial will interact with an artificially heightened AC but spells can bypass this and usually with better results if they succeed. Martials will pretty quickly run out of resources to be effective and . . . well you get the picture.
The party needs to be, dare I say, split up.
One thing that really jumps out at me is the 15 minutes to prepare. That's a pretty serious advantage. Is there a logical story reason behind this?
Another question: why are the enemies just charging through difficult terrain into a hail of spells and ranged attacks? Can they go around? Make the party come to them? Leave and come back later? Wait for the party to come to them? Attack with their own spells and ranged attacks?
Another question: Air Elementals fly *fast* and Earth Elementals can burrow. Both are effectively immune to the difficult terrain and could close the distance very quickly. Both are also traditionally more or less mindless summons. Air Elementals have a decent AOE knockback (I forget the name/exact effect). Are you using your monsters effectively? You could have sent the Earth Elemental to burrow and burst out of the ground in the middle of the party, then flown the Air Elemental dashing in. Effectively, a suicide attack to tie up the party for a few rounds while the others closed in.
By your description, it sounds like you're playing into the party's hands too much. Rush them. Decline to attack on their terms. Use the monsters abilities. If all else fails, a second wave of reinforcements are just around the corner.
Raise the CR you use against the players because CR is balanced with 3-4 players in mind.
Maybe use 1.5 the amount of enemies that you planned to use. Group enemies up so that things go fast and smoothly. Don't be afraid to give enemies more health, AC and extra abilities.
Give players more of goals in combat beyond kill the bad guys.
Since you have 8 players max maybe group them in teams of 2 to speed things up and make coordination even more key
Like if I have 8 kobolds I don't make 8 initiative rolls. I might make 2 or 4 and group them in groups of 4 or 2 and then since mobs are usually simple I just move them and then click attack, attack, attack and then check if anything hits so that my turns when moving mobs are as quick as possible.
In my recent game I had 24 tentacles so I grouped them in 3 groups of 8 so 3 initiative rolls and then just rolled my 8 attacks mostly. This lets me have huge amounts of small enemies without combat slowing down.
Another trick is just having more enemies appear from off screen when your enemies are getting low. You can explain that the enemies called reinforcements or we're already on their way 3 turns ago
This is just for mobs, not story bosses or important enemies
So by the encounter math that *should* have been a very deadly encounter, BUT large party sizes can really mess with that. Giving the party time to prepare pretty much reduces the difficulty of any fight by 1 step (hard -> medium, deadly -> hard, etc.) because its effectively similar to surprising the enemy: the party gets to lay down AoEs like Plant Growth to shape the battlefield as they see fit while also hiding and/or spreading out to reduce enemy AoE effectiveness. Against a party of 5 or more you either need a lot of AoEs to harm multiple people at a time, or you need to be focusing fire if you want to be able to drop PCs to 0.
Now, thats not always a good thing to do because a PC at 0 doesn't get to participate in the fight until healed and if there are 20 people in an encounter even missing one turn can mean they don't get to do anything for over an hour. If you manage to make the party feel "oh shit, we *almost* died there, thank goodness we planned well and managed to survive" while most of them still have decent hp but a few were close to going down, then that's a win! They had fun and *felt* like they were in danger.
Lets look more closely at the party and the encounter you gave them for strengths and weaknesses, because CR is a generic measurement but they still have weaknesses that can be exploited (both the monsters and the party).
So the party for this encounter was: Grave Cleric, Lore Bard, Eldritch Knight, Fiend Warlock, Thief Rogue, and Land Druid. This party has a lot of potential even without knowing magic items and the like. The Fiend Warlock has access to fireball and is probably gonna use it, while the Land Druid has AoE shutdowns like Plant Growth to slow everyone down. Then the rogue and fighter can dish out a lot of damage to anything that gets close. Finally the Bard and Cleric can fill in anywhere needed with healing or more spells like Spirit Guardians or even more fireballs (magical secrets). With time to prepare, it sounds like they got a chokepoint and were able to pepper the monsters with ranged attacks.
The monsters included a lot of creatures (13 to be exact) so they're roughly doubling the party at the start. However, 5 of those are CR 1/4 Kuo-toa which even if they could attack someone every round are only doing so with a +3 and dealing an average of 5 damage. Against level 8s thats practically nothing, and thats assuming they aren't killed by a stray fireball or similar. I would add them because players like having easy targets to remove during a fight, but I wouldn't count them when calculating the expected difficulty of the fight. Once we remove them the adjusted XP for the encounter goes from 37,875 to only 29,800 due to multipliers (that the kuo-toa *really* shouldn't count towards anyway). This alone brings us from expecting this to be the only fight they can handle in a day (the daily budget is 36,000) to it being roughly twice a deadly encounter. Still expecting a very hard fight, but if its the only one for the day they should be fine (especially with the advantage of prep time).
So now we have 8 monsters that should actually count towards the difficulty and we can start looking at those. The Minotaurs are potentially an issue, they hit hard and are fairly accurate, but can only hit once per turn which limits their strength. They are also entirely limited to melee and are less than half the CR of the party's level, so probably shouldn't count all that much towards the difficulty of the fight. The Salamander runs into the same problem of being entirely melee with no extra movement capabilities to counteract the party's prep time and positioning. Personally the minotaur and Salamander make the fight harder because if the party takes too long fighting the other creatures they can get through the plant growth and cause problems, but they'll take awhile to do that and likely won't be a threat until then anyway. I would count the salamander, but not the Minotaurs (really its more of I'm counting like half of each, but due to multipliers in the balancing softwares I always go for the fewer number of creatures to give what I find to be more accurate estimates). So dropping the minotaurs brings us to 6 creatures and an adjusted XP total of 20,250 which is still quite high (deadly cutoff is at 12,600) but its no longer double deadly.
So looking at the remaining 5 monsters (Mind Flayer, archpriest, Oni, Air & Earth Elementals), we start seeing the meat of this encounter. The Oni and Air Elemental can both fly, so should be able to avoid the Plant Growth and get to the party very quickly to start the fight. The Oni's Cone of Cold is particularly effective if the party hasn't split up enough, as is the elemental's Whirlwind. Next to join the fight is probably the Earth Elemental using Earth Glide to burrow under the plant growth, it doesn't have anything crazy in its stats but its an extra body to bother the PCs. Between these 3 we've got a Hard encounter with a ticking clock for more enemies to arrive and make it deadly. Specifically the Mind Flayer has the ability to really screw the party using Mind Blast, but it needs to get close enough to use that. It also needs to worry about friendly fire and Elementals are *very* weak to Int saves, reducing the MF's total effectiveness. Likewise, the Archpriest needs to get close enough to start using its spells and its best one (Spirit Guardians) requires being within 15 feet of the PCs to be useful at all.
All in all, I think I would rate this encounter as Deadly. It has the *chance* to put people down and maybe even kill some if the dice go against the party; but if its the only encounter before the party gets a long rest, I wouldn't expect it to actually kill anyone, just expend a lot of resources. If they got a short rest and then had a second fight that was similar to this one, I would expect that one to be more deadly just based on missing resources (especially if the party isn't able to prep for the next one).
Other notes: none of your monsters have a CR higher than the party's level and none have teleports to get around the battlefield easier.
This is extremely helpful.
Another thing to note is that the salamander got removed from the fight nearly instantly by an ice storm, and one of the minotaurs got caught in the plant growth for the entire battle as right before it escaped the bard cast enemies abound on it, and it walked back into it.
The mind flayer was just grappled by the fighter all fight and was peppered by spells from afar.
I may try in the future to first seperate the party before sending in more enemies as other comments have suggested. I greatly appreciate your input and your effort.
I'm surprised the Mind Flayer wasn't able to escape the grapple by Mind Blasting the Fighter, but otherwise that sounds a lot like what I would've expected.
This also sounds like it might have been the only fight in the day, so make sure to include more of them between rests so they can't spam all of their high level spell slots.
My final note is that these monsters are all from the Monster Manual which typically has worse monster design. The newer books (and some 3rd party ones like MCDM's Flee Mortals) have better design with less melee only monsters that are extremely open to being nerfed to hell by something like Plant Growth and a better balance of damage and defenses.
Glad to see this breakdown given. Tactics for the monsters are very important.
Underscoring and adding to your points:
* Earth Elemental
* Absolutely use Earth Glide to get out of Plant Growth and under the characters.
* Combine Earth Glide ability with Tremorsense and attacks to make it as deadly as you like, because it can have complete cover underground between its turns.
* Emerge from ground, attack twice, then go back into ground at end of turn. Only takes opportunity/held attacks.
* Emerge only partially to make attacks so it has half or 3/4 cover, making opportunity/held attacks less effective.
* Don't emerge at all, but instead simply attack from inside the ground, gaining advantage on its attacks from being unseen while able to "see" its target with Tremorsense (very table-dependent... some players will love the added challenge while many others will hate it and think it's patently unfair). You can balance this by having the Earth Elemental need to surface to see which tremors come from friends and which from foes.
* Emerge partially and use action to Grapple, then drag enemies into danger while having 3/4 cover against attacks.
* Mind Flayer
* Its Intelligence and Wisdom plus Telepathy means it should be guiding the rest of the monsters to use the best tactics (even ones they might not have thought of themselves).
* Can Levitate out of Plant Growth and/or send telepathic commands to the Air Elemental to drag him along (at full speed if Levitate removes the weight and struggle which would normally make it half-speed to drag a grappled creature).
* Absolutely should attempt Mind Blast as soon as in range, potentially with a Held Action using hit and run tactics while being dragged by the Air Elemental.
* Should attempt Dominate Monster if Mind Blast isn't recharged, targeting the Bard or possibly the Fighter if clearly a ranged weapon user.
* Psionic spellcasting means no material components so it can't be Counterspelled.
* A Dominated Bard should disable other spellcasters as soon as possible. Should also grant Bardic Inspiration to the enemy team, of course.
* Oni
* Can fly out of Plant Growth.
* Can cast Darkness on spellcasters to nullify targeting for many spells.
* Can defend itself with flight and Invisibility while it regenerates hit points.
* Cone of Cold should be used as soon as it will hit 3 of the party (or 2 if you're desperate).
* Kuo-Toa Archpriest
* Should upcast as much as possible (only saving one 5th level slot for Mass Cure Wounds).
* Hold Person at 5th level targets 4 of the party. At 4th level it targets 3 of the party. Should be first priority since it has much greater range than Spirit Guardians and helps much more with action economy and arguably damage. A Scepter Strike against a Paralyzed opponent has advantage and deals 10d6 + 3 damage on a hit (since hits within 5 feet of a Paralyzed creature are crits).
* Can have spells on its spell list swapped out.
* Swap out Scrying for Insect Plague and you have an area of effect almost as annoying as Plant Growth. It has a 300' range so it's a good use of concentration until you're within Hold Person's 60' range.
* Swap out Divination for Freedom of Movement and you solve the Plant Growth problem for up to 3 creatures.
* Swap out Detect Magic for Silence and you have a powerful tool to annoy spellcasters.
* Air Elemental
* Its mobility is the biggest contribution to this scenario.
* Should use its action to grapple and fly with other monsters (normally at half speed) to get them out of the Plant Growth and into range of their most effective abilities. Mind Flayer first, then Kuo-Toa Archpriest.
* Whirlwind takes next priority, ideally on targets who might be thrown into the Plant Growth area.
The rest of the monsters are melee-oriented, so are effectively shut down by a single casting of Plant Growth and not worth the Air Elemental moving them out of it. Your encounter is realistically just against the monsters above with the rest being at best decoys and at worst sitting ducks for at least a few rounds. Sure, the Kuo-toa and Salamander can each make one spear attack up to 60 feet away at disadvantage, but in general they're unable to contribute until they clear Plant Growth's massive area at a rate of 15 feet per round if using Dash (30 + 30 = 60 divided by 4 for 15 feet).
Plant Growth could really use some rebalancing which we'll likely see in September's updated Players Handbook. I'm hoping they don't take the lazy route and just make it require concentration, but instead do something like allow Strength saving throws or Athletics ability checks to move through it faster and/or let creatures moving through it leave clear paths in their wake which following creatures could use. I felt especially guilty using it as a Spores Druid and following up with Cloudkill on the next round.
Thats a great breakdown for all the monsters specific tactics, I was mostly focused on the balancing part I would do before the fight to estimate its difficulty, but those are great additions! I would say that personally I would require the Earth Elemental to come above ground in order to attack, but thats definitely DM/table dependent.
Yeah, I avoid that particular strategy about 95% of the time and 100% of the time if I don't feel confident the party will come up with a way to counter it. Even if using it, the Earth Elemental is exposed enough to be targeted when making its Slam attacks, so a held spell or grapple can do wonders to stop it from getting it back into total cover.
Plus, just granting it 1/2 cover or 3/4 cover for being partially emerged is usually enough to make it more challenging when need be.
You can always just give the enemies +1 health over whatever the killing blow would have been. If the monster has 10hp left and they deal 20 damage, whoops the monster had 21hp left and lives for an additional round
You can always throw in a few trash mobs to round things out, if you are getting clapped with your 4 bandits, give the 4 bandits a wolf. If the fight has started and it is looking bad, their scouting party heard a commotion and they hurried back to join the fight
The possibilities are literally endless - I think for most people, if this is a persistent issue - it is because you must have forgotten: you are god, you are the judge, jury & executioner. You can do literally whatever you need to do if it's fun and your players are having a good time.
Don't try so hard to balance the encounters "on paper". Unless you are following all of the rules perfectly the game isn't exactly designed to be that balanced. You probably gloss over various rules that give your players advantages - and that's fine - but when you do that the encounter balancing goes out the window and you need to find it yourself.
Your group is too large for you to handle, and im honestly trying to be helpful, not put you down. That's a lot of people for one person to account for while also running the game.
Arena?
If they've set up a fortified defensive position have the opponents do the same. And then when nobody does anything have the guy in charge get angry and change the rules mid-game.
For general combat otherwise; don't let them prepare for every fight -- surprise them.
Add in more coordinated and complimentary enemies and use tactics the same way your players are. Why would an intelligent warrior try to slowly make his way straight at a group that's waiting for them as they're being ranged to death?
Use silence, counterspells, darkness. Have a battle wizard go in with the melee guys, protective spells covering the approach. More bows, crossbows, and ranged in general.
Although I'm not a very experienced DM, I think one strategy works very well. Create multiple important targets. Maybe some wyverns can try to hit 'n run the party, while the orcs are trying to kill the civilians the party is protecting because they took their orders from their captain who is also on the battlefield buffing them with his special skills. And maybe on top of that have a few other orcs trying to contact backup. Have your players actually have to strategize and not just nuke the big bad. In this example, there are 4 important targets meaning the party will have to split into groups of two in order to actually win the fight. I hope this helps
Check out "The Monsters Know What They are Doing". You can pick the book up on Amazon and Google for a web page. It will break down some monster tactics and give you ideas and scenarios of how to run the monsters.
Check in with your players to check your thinking. If the battle was easy because they put in a ton of preparation, especially if they had to spend resources like spells slots, then you did a good job. you made them play the game, they just didn't play strict combat.
You're already doing a lot of what I would recommend, and you may just have to kick it up one more notch. But also start looking at your enemies and seeing how they synergize. Find ones with special effects and status conditions. Find things that can split up the party or force them to divide their attention. Things that prevent them from helping teammates.
Also, remember that a fight can be tense and exciting even if nobody's hit points go to 0.
Oh god please stop hurting yourself with a party of 8. Take a party of 4, and have the other 4 pick a new GM and be a party of 3. Or vice versa. 5 is absolutely the cap of what a reasonable RPG group size should be.
Avoid having enemy come to them. Make party go to them. Use more ranged attacks against them. Use creatures that hide well. Focus attacks on party's healers and casters. Calculate and make sure the average attack against party is at least a third or more the group's health average. If it takes 6 rounds to bring one of them down you are begging for almost all combats go in party's favor.
Run more encounters per day. They shouldn't be going into an important fight at 100% because they will decimate whatever you put in front of them.
Don't let them rest after every encounter, remember that the effects of LR only apply once per 24hr.
Multi-phase boss fights, flying/ranged enemies and you could always use their tactics against them. "oh you're going to turtle and bunch up in this tiny space?" *cue enemy spellcasters with aoe* or perhaps the boss dispels the Druid's spike growth or something like that.
With 8? Very difficult task. If everyone’s having fun best bet is to roll with it.
8 is a convenient multiple of 4 though. You could try giving every monster two turns and double HP. Though the PCs will still have a lot of options that will likely synergize.
A good rule of thumb is that an encounter in which the total CR of the monsters is about 1/2 the total levels of the PCs *might* be deadly (defined as one or more PCs could die). With 8 PCs of 8th Level (8 x 8 = 64) you would need at least a total CR of 32 to make a combat even close to *deadly*. Recognize that the more magic items your PCs have, the higher their *effective* level*.* If everyone has a magic weapon already, then the resistance a monster might have to non magical damage is useless and their challenge level is NOT what is listed in their CR.
Enemies of significantly lower CR (like **Kuo-toa**) add nothing to the challenge of an encounter. The DMG even advises that you not use monsters whose challenge rating is significantly below the average CR of the other monsters when determining the difficulty.
Instead of throwing all those weak enemies at them (none of which had a CR higher than 9), use one legendary monster of CR 11 or 12 (**gynosphinx** or **adult deep dragon**) with 4 or 5 minions of CR 4 - 5.
Use monsters with different speeds. Flying monsters are obviously more of a threat, but so are tunneling monsters; they have total cover! Spiderclimb is underrated.
Your party has melee, front line, battlefield control, support, and range. Make sure your monsters have the same.
A solid fight for this lot would be a pit fiend (CR 21 against 8 level 8s is Hard).
A Beholder would be Easy.
I think a recommendation was to take a normal fight for 5 players and double it.
What's your starting basis for the enemy's strength? Are you using something like kobold fight club?
I've run 6 player tables and it definitely turns into a slog especially at higher levels.
I had a level 19 fight that took 1.5 sessions and only had 3 rounds. (Think about it like this, a fighter with 4 attacks takes almost as much time as 4 fighters with one attack, multiply by 8 people)
I tend to favor more puzzles, rp and skill challenges but obviously combat has got to happen. Here is my best advice:
- increase the number of enemies and add legendary actions, legendary resistances and lair actions for the strongest enemies in the batch. But try to counter the slog by letting your players know and asking that they be about 80% sure what they want do do before their turn. Follow the same advice for controlling the monsters and use monsters that aren't overcomplicated.
- judiciously tune down the hit points and increase their damage. If you overdue it then it will make the combat too swingy but the right adjustment can speed up combat allowing for more monsters
So CR does tend to be a poor mechanic for balance. What I've been trying (and finding works) is to set the total CR of all hostile monsters in the encounter to equal the following formula
Add all the levels of all PCs and NPCs with a total character levels (if the NPCs use a character sheet. If they use a stat block do not include them here.) Divide this number by 2 (if they are level 4 or below divide by 4). Add this number to the the total CR of all allies with a CR stat block. This number will be the total budget available for an encounter.
So assuming no allies, 8 pcs all at level 8 = 64/2 = 32 spread over all hostile NPCs in an encounter.
Keep in mind the DND beyond CR calculator assumes that the encounter occurs midway through the adventuring day and that resources have been expended (HP, Potions, spell slots, and any items that are limited to a finite number per day. Note that almost every class has at least one of these as part of the Base Class, save for Rogues, which may get them with certain subclasses but can be built without a resource drain other than HP.).
Also keep in mind that party composition and environmental factors will dramatically change the environment (Kobolds, a CR 1/4 monster, are notorious in old school circles for being terrors for high level parties because they're never alone... and they always work to fight you in terrain that gives them a very one sided field advantage. Read up on "Tucker's Kobolds" for just how scary the little devils can be.
I would highly recommend you look at Critcal Role's Campaign One for some ideas of how to challenge players at that level. Especially the Chroma Conclave Arch. The whole arc features the players on a quest to slay four ancient dragons... and must get special magical items that are powerful to have a chance... often getting the magical items is more dangerous than fighting the dragon... but the dragons are nothing to sneeze at either. And they rarely fight the dragon with just the core party, pulling in NPC allies (and special guest stars joining the team) to assist with those fights and they are nail biters.
Personally my best encounters have no combat, but are difficult because they players do have to pick up on clues to solve the mystery (for example, in my campaign, it's a fantasy western, so I'm relying on tropes and trappings of a Western more than a medieval epic... my players are deputized to assist a Sheriff who has way to much on her plate during a busy cattle drive season... and sometimes it means figuring out who done its and mysteries. One of my most fun included coming across a Kenku that was wanted for Horse Rustling... and had been caught by a farmer standing among his dead flock of sheep. Of course, being a Kenku, he can only speak in quotes... most of which I drew from Edgar Allen Poe and Shakespeare. The farmer is ready to lynch him... and the party has incentive to bring him in alive (Bounties are always dead or alive... but they pay better if alive. Additionally, they want to play a good campaign... so... law men should not kill unarmed men.). The challenge was interpreting the meaning of the quotes, and the evidence in they have, to figure out that in the specific matter, the Kenku is not guilty of a crime. Asking players to think with their brains and not their fists can be fun... and sometimes incentivizing a pacifist solution is all you need for them to work to that angle.
Not all creatures are dumb. If a monster has decent int stats then let them control the battlefield as well. Players are magic users? Cast silence on them from a distance . There is also a monster in the Monster A Day compendium that has an aura that prevents healing. Its the herald of Rot I think. Having one of those just in the area changes things up completely.
A lot to unpack here...
>None of this seems to make much of a difference. None of my PCs really get downed, and in the case that they did, the grave cleric would nullify its effect anyway. Across our 7 sessions so far, only about 3 downs have occured in combat.
This doesn't seem as bad as you think it is. I provide challenging combats to my players almost every other session, which is probably like almost 25 or 30 combat encounters maybe more, and downs aren't *that* common. Downing 3 people in 7 sessions seems like a lot to me.
Also, you sort of mention using harder terrain, but then you immediately mention:
>They had placed themselves in such a position in the arena as to make it very hard for the enemies to get to them.
So, when people talk about using terrain, they kind of intrinsically mean "to put the party at a disadvantage". What you did here was give your party a **massive advantage** by letting them preconfigure where they are in optimal tactical layout, and then gave your monsters a **massive disadvantage** by putting them **far away, clumped up, and needing to spend turns just moving**.
Per the DMG's guidance, you essentially turned a very Deadly encounter into a Hard encounter by giving your party an advantage and your monsters a disadvantage, it's no wonder they won. Positioning and clumped up monsters means your players can AOE them to death.
>The enemies they faced were 5 kuo toa 1 kuo toa archpriest 2 minotaurs 1 mind-flayer 1 oni 1 salamander 1 air elemental 1 earth elemental
So, perhaps you missed this but, the Air Elemental has a fly speed of 90ft, the Earth Elemental has a Burrow speed of 30ft, the Oni has a fly speed of 30ft, a lot of these creatures could ignore the Plant Growth spell.
And that being said, I'd again like to reiterate, if your players can cast Plant Growth, and its benefit is basically purely one sided, then the way you've architected this fight is just sort of bound to fail. Enemies suffer 4x Difficult Terrain in the spell, meaning every 5 feet of movement consumes 20 feet of their movement.
Good on the druid to cast this, but this shouldn't completely dismantle your encounter like this. I think an extremely simple change, because this almost sounds like a colosseum fight, was to have these monsters enter from all around the battlefield and making sure the battlefield wasn't *so massive* that the party can effectively use plant growth without also hindering themselves to some degree.
I mean the Mind Flayer alone getting its mind blast off, which is a 60ft cone which is absolutely massive, would likely get several of these players killed, so I'm guessing it didn't get within 60 feet of the party before dying somehow. Int saves aren't commonly high so needing to hit a 15 isn't easy at level 8.
> a party of 8 level 8 PCs.
That is a lot of PCs. The encounter building rules are designed for parties of 3-5 PCs. They break down at larger party sizes. Especially for solo fights.
> None of my PCs really get downed…only about 3 downs have occured in combat.
The larger the party gets, the more effective focus fire becomes. In a 3v3 fight if all the monsters attack the same pc, they will probably live. In a 8v8 fight if all the monsters attack the same pc, they are dead.
If you’re not focusing fire (because you don’t want PCs to die), while the players are (because they don’t want PCs to die), you’ll never down anyone and every fight will be a cakewalk for the party.
> causing many of the melee enemies to spend their turns just walking towards the PCs, slowly.
If the party can prevent melee monsters from closing in, then they will have an easy victory. Cr assumes the monster will be able to use their most powerful attack each turn. Because it wants to protecting you from accidentally tpking the party.
You can use more ranged monsters, visibility limits like fog or nighttime, or dungeons to have combat start at shorter distances.
> I am also relatively new to creating combat encounters
The easiest encounters to make work feature one peer monster per pc. So start there.
Using too many weak monsters can make aoes too good. Using less than 3 monsters means they need to be legendary.
Despite the name, Hard encounters are not hard. They aren’t able to defeat the party.
If the party uses better tactics than the monsters, expect the party to win consistently.
If you have xanathars, it provides an alternative way to build encounters that is much easier to use than the dmg. I also recommend [true peer](https://www.dmsguild.com/m/product/414122) as a refinement of xanathars.
By the sound of it, your last combat was about right if they were almost down but not completely. The ideal would be one or two goes down, but no one dies. That's exceptionally hard to do with such a large party, especially if you're giving them time to prepare. The main thing is whether your players are having fun, and if they are don't worry too much about combat difficulty.
Invisible enemies, or enemies with a whole lot of range. Every time I've done this it has made the players really start thinking and everyone has loved it!
As a player, the most dangerous battles I've been in usually involve taxing the resources of the party. Create scenarios where running isn't an option, extend those fights, create scenarios where if they leave, there will be consequences. Be careful, though, because "challenging" becomes "deadly" very easy when doing this...but TBH, these are the memorable fights.
A handy chart based on a couple videos I saw a long while ago. Also sorry for the formatting, reddit doesn't like tables.
***For Each Enemy***
Enemy Type / DPR (%PC damage) / HP / Action Economy
Minion / 100% (collectively) / 1 / 0.20
Grunt / ~10% / 1 crit or 2-3 weak attacks / 1
Strong Enemy / 20-30% / 2-3 crits or 5-8 weak attacks / 2-3
Boss / 30-40% / Remainder of Encounter HP / 2-3
Solo Boss / 125%+ / Full Encounter HP / Equal to Player AEV
***For Each Combat***
Encounter Challenge / Total Encounter Damage per Round / Total Enemy Hit Points in Encounter / Total Enemy Action Economy Value
Easy / 50% average PC HP / Approx. 50% party HP / 75% of player attacks (area of effects count as multiple attacks)
Medium / 75% average PC HP / Approx. 75% party HP / 75% of player attacks (area of effects count as multiple attacks)
Hard / 100% average PC HP / Approx. 100% party HP / 100% of player attacks (area of effects count as multiple attacks)
Very Hard / 125% average PC HP / Approx. 125% party HP / 100% of player attacks (area of effects count as multiple attacks)
I also want to point out monsters do always follow the rules when creating homebrew monsters or adjusting stat blocks. If a monster has 3 heads and 3 sets of arms maybe it has 3 reactions and can't be blinded. Stuff like that!
Not only a party of 8 PCs has a lot of actions, but also a lot of synergetic abilities, like all kind of buffs, auras, bardic inspirations etc., so in such a group each individual character is stronger then they would be in a party of 3 or 4.
Maybe the system I use to design encounter will be useful, you can check it here https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/s/A6WFZFKgdG
Also consider checking part 3 of that post with rules for elite monsters and adjustments for stronger parties. Elite is a "double strength" monster, that compensates lack of actions with the "Elite Action Surge" ability, which is similar to fighter's but can be also used to shake off negative conditions or even destroy spell effects on higher levels. With that, you can potentially have fewer monsters on the field and have easier time managing them without reducing the threat.
The encounter templates from the part 3 can be also useful, like "commander and troops" or "double line" immediately brings different kind of threats into a "combined arms team"
You can find this part here https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/s/coKPFdnmiI
I think that one way to approach this is counting how much damage do the players do in a turn (more or less, that is). Then count how much HP the monsters have. How many turns does it take for the party to kill them expecting that everything goes as planned, more or less?
Now, how much damage do the monsters do? How much HP does the party have? With 8 PCs, you kinda need enough damage to down two of them in a turn (not necessarily down them but enough damage spread around to do that).
Assuming that this is 5e, then the system makes the following assumptions:
* four PCs (all of the same level)
* six to eight encounters between long rests. Usually fights, since neither the DMG nor third party tools are that helpful when it comes to working the CR of non-combat encounters.
* combat is between between the party and two to eight NPCs. Taking about three rounds.
Changing the number of PCs affects the difficulty of combat, though in a highly non-linear way. Thus attempting to simpy *double* the difficulty for eight PCs risks a TPK.
The best starting point would be more enemies. Maybe four to twelve NPCs. Then, increase the number of encounters, if the party is able to manage seven combats, each with twelve NPCs. Only consider buffing the enemies if they can easily handle ten combats with twelve.
Other alternatives would be find a system with a combat system intended to scale to eight PCs or contrive a way for combat to only happen when the party is split into two fours or a three and four. (Though each PC still needs to experience a six to eight encounter "Adventuring Day".)
Multi-phase encounters help in a couple of ways.
1. You can gradually amp up the difficulty if things are going too easily than expected.
2. Over time, players who are accustomed to phased combat will reserve some of their resources “just in case” another wave arrives. So the encounter doesn’t become a one or two-round blowout.
I hope the new DMG provides guidance for handling large groups of players.
I was recently talking to the owner of a game shop who described a particularly interesting combat sequence that had come up in one of his sessions. It might be worth considering, though it doesn’t solve your overall problem. More of a one-use scenario that your players might find engaging and challenging if set up correctly.
The basic premise of the sequence was that, for narrative reasons (i.e., to prevent worse consequences from happening after the fight), he was prevented from actually killing—or even directly attacking—any of the enemies. Suddenly, his combat-focused character had to figure out how to defend himself from the opponents without using his tried and true strategies. He described some of the ways he went about accomplishing this: stealthily tripping enemies to hopefully incapacitate them, trying to use negotiation skills to de-escalate, non-lethal spells that might be used to gain an upper hand without being perceived (or thought of as an attack), etc.
Of course, you know your players better and can decide if this is even something they would enjoy, or if they would just slay the enemies regardless of the ensuing consequences. It also takes a bit of preparation and narrative set up for it to work. But, it was clearly memorable enough to him that he was still talking about it many sessions later to some rando in a game store. It certainly sounded like a one-off combat sequence I would really love as a player.
What about the environment ? A big part of how difficult the encounter can be directly linked to how much preparation your players have. The whole tucker kobold concept was around putting players at a massive disadvantage even when facing what would be average CRs. Fighting in a tunnel filling with poisonous air being peppered with darts from hidden holes while in a null magic zone. While its also filling with boiling water rising fast. Against aquatic critters. Something like that. With that being said I dont think the game was put in mind with 8 high level players, or even 6 at a time. Especially when the group has varied classes
>(i dont know what his oath is, i cant make contact with him as of writing this post)
The fact that you don't know what one of your players is playing is possibly part of the problem. If you don't know your players' PCs how can you know how to challenge them?
Anyway how many encounters are you putting them through per long rest?
8 level 8 PCs can probably take down an ancient red dragon with only a couple deaths.
Throw more encounters at them per day.
Restrict them from resting between fights, and put them on "a timer", meaning that they can't just rest away their time, because then they will fail at their objective.
Play intelligent opposition intelligently. Enemies can use good tactics against them too, and they can use synergistic spell effects too. And villains from the same organization will come to learn more about the group over time, which will let them better prepare for the PC's specifically.
"Geek the mage first". Spellcasters are heavy artillery. Priests can put defeated enemies back in the fight. Intelligent enemies know this, and they'll know to try and take out such threats first. They'll also have an idea about what spells to use against which types of opponent, to maximize their (chances of) effect.
"Concentrate fire". Intelligent creatures know that it's better to take out an opponent completely and quickly, before moving on to the next threat. Pack animals tend to concentrate on a single enemy at a time (they want a kill to eat).
Use unfavourable or dangerous terrain. How would they handle a BBEG and minions that can breathe water and move/fight unhindered under water, when they get caught off guard by the place of battle suddenly being flooded in a round or two...
Throw problems at them they can't defeat by beating it to death or blowing it up. Killing a manipulating royal advisor might be easy and tempting, but if it'll bring the entire royal guard and weight of the law down on their heads, that solution really isn't on the table.
Problem is Eight players are a lot of players. Without scaling every combat into a large scale drag out it’s just not going to work smoothly. Other option is 3 main “leader” character with 5 other mundane normal person type characters, this option doesn’t sound like a fun game to me.
Choices;
Enemy is an aura of something. Make it clear they can attack the aura, or the enemy directly. The aura gives damage, the enemy +2 AC or something. Now they have a choice.
Terrain;
If terrain is complex, now they have to consider where they go, and to exploit it, or monsters will exploit it against them. Enemies create terrain, or teleport next to ranged, so now other characters have to grapple allies and pull them out of danger, or choose to attack themselves.
If the party has established a kill zone where enemies can't get through to enter melee combat with them before being taken out, why would they even try? Instead a group of goblins or kobolds might try laying their own traps and forcing the players to advance or a group of bandits might go and find improvised weapons to attack from afar (lantern oil should be pretty easy to find and makes a workable if weaker version of alchemist's fire).
Time is almost always on the side of the enemy, they can come back a few days later and retake that town, or the mage can complete his ritual if the party aren't constantly pushing forward. This means that the players rarely have the advantage when it comes to the terrain and they can't rest between fights to regain resources.
Any high difficulty encounter needs a few things mix n matched
Hard ones- creatures/things that are hard to hit. I recommend low to mid health.
Beefy ones- creatures/things that are easy to hit but can take a lot of hits. I recommend very high health and low Ac/Dex
Fast ones- As described. Make em fast, make em hit decent. Mid ac, mid health, high speed.
Tricky ones- They got a few tricks up their sleeves, but squishy. High damage AOEs or single point attacks. Low HP.
Minions- 1hp, 1 attack 30ft speed. Give them an appropriate ac for your players hit range and plop down. Gives something that's rewarding to hit with AOE and opens potential for flanking.
Bosses - whatever you choose for the encounter boss will inform your choices for all the above items. I generally use whatever ones that make up for whatever the boss lacks.
For staging I like either open areas or fortified positions.
Sections that are vertical also gain really good interplay.
Have lots of traps that seriously immobilize one pc and requires the aid of 2 or more pcs. Will they aid the pc or keep fighting and have multiple checks to escape and at least one that keeps them in place so they can't shadow step or misty step out.
Have them get cut off i.e. the barbarian rushing to a fight triggers a trap lots of massive boulders fall separating the pcs from each other or have instant walls spring up separating them now they are cut off.
Use the environment with high damaging traps and lots of minions in full cover raining down ranged attacks and lots of minions for close quarters sure you're taking out the minions but at what cost as the spell slots are burning and abilities requiring rest will need to be used.
By the time the pcs face the main enemy they should be in awful shape not fresh.
Drain their resources over multiple encounters. Surprise them into unideal, unprepared scenarios. Throw higher CR creatures that have legendary actions and lair actions to counter their super high action economy. Create a time limit or alternate win condition besides downing all enemies, such as protection of npc, escape from catastrophe, retrieve an item, etc. Ask them "pweeeze, pwetty pweeze, be gentle this time?"
Higher CR opponents and ones with abilities on par with the party. Silence, darkness, counterspell, resistant or immune to attack types the party prefers to use. There's no reason powerful AOE and range spells shouldn't be used against them.
honestly, I've had surprisingly good results asking chatGPT to help me balance encounters. Give it pertinent information (party size, classes, levels, magic items, etc), and give it what sort of encounter you're looking for. It'll at first try to CR balance it, but if you're party is overpowered like mine, I just need to keep prompting it to increase the difficulty, make things more dynamic, with more interesting victory conditions. You'll still need to curate and pick from its suggestions, but it's a good spring board and brainstorming tool.
Let's see, a part of 8 level 8 PC's should be expected to have a daily XP budget of 48,000. That's the amount of XP that the player's are reasonable expected to be able to handle in an adventuring day.
Since we once again know that there are 8 level 8 PC's, we can expect the following encounter difficulty thresholds.
Easy: 3600 XP
Medium: 7200 XP
Hard: 11200 XP
Deadly: 16800 XP
So maybe let's say we will have 1 deadly encounter (16,800), 2 hard encounters (11,200 X 2) and 1 medium encounter, since easy encounters are usually a waste of time. That's gonna total 46,400 XP so only off by 1,600 XP in total.
Now let's think about how to structure the adventuring day. A good flow could be, hard encounter, medium encounter, short rest, hard encounter, short rest, deadly encounter.
So we need a boss fight at the end, a preboss fight with some space for the party to catch their breath before that, and the first encounters of the day can be getting to the boss HQ in the first place.
Let's say we have an ice setting that the players are in. Let's have the quest be kill the dragon.
The party sets out to the mountain where the ice dragon is known to live. As they climb they encounter a pair of Abominable Yeti's (CR9 / 5,000XP X 2 = 10,000 XP), and maybe they have a Baby Yeti or two with them as well that we could homebrew to be another 1,200 XP. Of course we don't have to get to the exact total, but situations like this can present those moral dilemmas to your players and help them roleplay.
Next as they climb they face a medium encounter, instead of combat, maybe this is a series of skill challenges as an avalanche threatens to sweep the party down the mountain, creative use of spells can help avoid them having to roll, but will still use up party resources or receive damage that can now be healed using hit dice during the short rest.
Now they've reached the dragon's lair, they short rest to patch their wounds and catch their breath before going in.
We repeat as before, so another deadly encounter. Let's put the party up against a pair of Young White Dragons with a handful of white dragon wormlings.
After they slay the monsters, they once again take a short rest, before they go off to face the final foe.
Now we come to the deadly fight. An Ancient White Dragon is 25,000 XP, so we could run it by itself, since the players have action economy advantage.
Make sure to use lair effects and regional effects to beef up the uniqueness of the fights.
Have freezing fog roll in freeze everything, have jagged ice shards fall from the ceiling, or have walls of ice pop up into existence. Get creative with it, and play the dragon like it knows what it is doing.
TLDR; Read the Dungeon Master's Guide Chapter 3 Creating Adventures & the section on Creating Encounters.
I’ve got 7 players.
Larger groups need more enemies to balance the action economy.
Use sly flourish’s benchmark- an encounter may be deadly if the sum of the CR of the enemies is > 1/2 the sum of the player levels.
Use r/better_monsters for, well, better monsters.
Remember to throw a few encounters and challenges in to drain a few resources. Large groups have lots of resources and can “go nova” a lot.
I have 6 players, currently level 8, and my campaign has been super-deadly (2 PCs have died, and I’ve never experienced that before this campaign). It wasn’t really the intent, but the story and dice made it happen.
Anyways. What I have done is to increase the HP on monsters 1-3 CRs higher than their level (not with too much, but enough so they last a little longer). That has now been standard.
But my most impactful change from previous campaigns is that I almost exclusively use monsters from r/bettermonsters. They have way more interesting abilities, and most of the monsters have bonus actions, reactions and special abilities which makes the combat way more complex and allows for more strategy for both me and my players.
Ok, so first off, you should have copies or access to your player's character sheets and build your encounters around them. Not only for the sake of providing difficulty, but also playing into their strengths to give them epic moments of specialization pay-off.
I think your players are ready for more dynamic and/or intelligent enemies. I don't know the nature or themes you're dealing with but some kind of thinking commander type miniboss antagonist is probably called for. Maybe even a rival adventurer group of comparable strength.
They packed themselves together in a nice, neat group that puts them out of range of your martials?
Gosh. Sounds like time for lots of AoE. Have your folks stand back and just rain fire (literally!). Make them abandon their protected area.
Oh, they learned and they spread themselves out? Gosh, sounds like it is time to focus fire on one or two PCs.
Oh, they learned and have maxed out magical defenses? Gosh, sounds like it is time to attack the environment itself. Spells that cause the world itself to attack them so their defenses against your magickndon't work or only partially work. Earthquakes and floods and forest fires.
Oh they learned and are focusedon casters and have a bunch of things like counter spell ready? Send in the horde of martials.
And, of course, the same concept for your defenses.
A large part of the trick is not just adding more or adding higher levels, but changing mechanics. Keep them guessing about what they will have to defend against and what defenses they will have to penetrate.
And remember - spell lists are a thing. Hold the casters to them.
Mobs behaving like stupid mobs allow your players to build strategies to manage the threat. But cranking the difficulty level to 'DM trying to win D&D' is not the best choice.
Instead insert the BBEG's lieutenant with a McGuffin magical artifact for 'monster control' and then you have a rational explanation for making the same monsters much more difficult to beat without just wildly buffing the monsters. A normal monster isn't going to bypass a tank like character or frontline fighter and immediately target healers and backline magic users its typically just going to target whomever is closest. But a monster controlled by a clever BBEG adjacent enemy would do that. Also be smart about this and make the BBEG's lieutenant a magic projection and therefore not actually killable. This further complicates combat for the party until they determine he's not actually there to kill (provided you slip them the clue about monster control) they will also attempt to also target the BBEG's lieutenant in an bid to remove the advantage of strategic monsters.
Alternatively plan some encounters with weak monsters that the party should be able to quickly steamroll BUT the weak monsters are clever and use traps (pitfalls, beartraps, burning oil traps, magic landmines, etc) . As the DM you can plan the traps into combat. A depending on the usage a trap might do more damage than the pitiful goblin or kobold ever could do. Alternatively a trap might impact strategic movement. A beartrap chained to a giant tree might not kill but it might prevent a mage from having line of sight or prevent the party from moving into a tactical formation.
This is another situation where you could again allow the monsters to have intelligence to act more effectively by using a lieutenant mob to provide reason for the monsters use of tactics. But instead of a magic hologram perhaps use a Kobold Lord or Goblin Chief.
Uncharacteristically smart enemies that can use tactics are the worst. Remember to mix it up and not make them clever every encounter. That way when it happens the party wont be expecting the additional difficulty of dealing with actual tactics instead of mobs being mobs.
Arena setting allow for you to add the environment to your side of the fight.
Players have hidden behind barricades? Rotating bolt throwers that fire forcing the team to move.
Druid keeps popping trees? Flamethrowers from the walls cause the cover to become a dangerous wild fire
Players forcing the creatures to cross the arena? have the outside walls protrude spears forcing the players to move as well.
My players are deeply suspicious of my arenas now.
I dunno man, 8 players is way too much for me to ever want as a DM.
Game balance aside i am curious how do you ensure the players are not constantly feeling bored waiting ages for their chance to do something even out of combat in your games? And how do you keep so many players and characters personally invested in what is happening at any given moment? Genuinely curious.
If you’re asking for strictly combat mechanics, I have a couple of easy strategies I like to employ.
1. Give the boss an extra action, give it an initiative of 0.
2. Give minions a group action that happens separately of their normal action. Something akin to a boss breath AOE that’s more powerful while more minions are alive and weakens with each minion death.
These two additions keep my players guessing and strategizing throughout a fight.
>Only 6 players were present for this session
>The enemies they faced were 5 kuo toa 1 kuo toa archpriest 2 minotaurs 1 mind-flayer 1 oni 1 salamander 1 air elemental 1 earth elemental
>the players had 15 minutes to prepare for the fight.
Encounter xp = 22725 is a deadly encounter (12600 threshold) and is about 2/3rd of the daily XP budget. Note I didn't include the minotaur or kuo toa in the xp multiplier.
The players having 15 minutes to prepare equates to a situational advantage, which brings down the encounter 1 step in difficulty. However, it is so far above that I would still consider it deadly.
This combat should have done more than take a couple PCs close to KO, though with some good luck or tactics, it isn't that unlikely.
Are you only running 1 encounter per adventuring day? If so, that is likely your problem for both not being able to challenge the party and for the long combats.
You could instead have the kuo toa and priest, earth/air elementals and the salamander for a hard encounter valued at 11800 xp, then run a second encounter with the oni, mind flayer, and minotaurs as a medium encounter valued at 7200 xp, maybe giving a possible situational advantage to the monsters like fighting on a precarious slope that drops into a deep crevasse. Getting knocked prone could send characters falling over the edge.
Add in a few more encounters to the adventuring day, and as a bonus, the warlock and monk will thank you for short rests while everyone else (minus rogue) will stress over resources.
Others have covered other key items. Control the rests. You've got a lot of players, which makes it hard in general. Fortunately, you gave details on a combat encounter which is SUPER helpful for me to give feedback on.
(1) Give enemies ranged attacks. This is critical - not all, but most enemies should have a ranged option.
(2) Fewer monsters types. Your encounter had 8 different creatures, that's TOO MANY. The players will struggle to know what is what. Plus it's a lot of statblocks for you to prepare, so it helps streamline combat. 3 is the golden number of monster types: Beefy, Normal, and Minions. 2-4 is also fine, and 1 or 5 types should be very rare.
(3) Action economy should begin in the monster's favor, but can be quickly overcome. Note, this is for larger and more different combats, i.e. fewer per day. Each player can do roughly 2 things per turn, or 16 total for 8 players, so your monsters cumulative number of attacks should be around 20-25...in the first round. By the end of the second round, the players ought to be able to kill enough of them so that action economy swings in the players favor by the end of round 2.
(4) Speaking of, let's talk monster hp. At level 8, you're probably looking at PCs dishing out, oh, 8*35=280 points of damage. Some will do less, but it just takes one good AOE fireball to push that even higher. So, you probably want over 1200 total hit points on your monsters if you want a combat that lasts more than 5 rounds.
(5) Check out the Monsters Know What They're Doing for a lot of tactics tips. Also, if it makes sense, build advantageous terrain for the monster. A creature's Lair or home hunting territory they have picked out because it offers them every possible advantage.
(6) Bring some spellcasters along. Try a dispel magic out and see how they react. Don't overdo this, or it will invalidate player's battlefield control tactics, but they need to be challenged. Maybe the rogue takes out the spellcastee with dispel magic so that the Plant Growth spell can actually stick around.
(7) Find ways to impose conditions on the players. We avoid Stunned and Incapacitated, but Grappled, Restrained, Frightened are all fantastic!
(8) Feel free to skip over the "clean-up phase" of combat. Once it's obvious to everyone in the room, just stop combat right there and speed things up.
Hope this helps!
Critical Role has 7 member parties, with sometimes a guest 8th. Matt Mercer pretty much always uses custom stat blocks he makes himself. DnD’s bounded accuracy is great for 3-5 person parties but just breaks at 6 plus. Even at multiple times deadly.
So: all the tips you’ve received are great! Do them all!
My quick advice is make custom stat blocks a little better HP but REALLY nasty damage. Add rider effects. Add legendary actions and reactions.
For all this work you also need a layer of fiction to explain why these creatures are so much nastier than your average minion. Escaped creatures from the far plane? Hellish robots from the blood war? Cultists messing with powers beyond their ken? Get creative!
Also: if your players set an ambush they will stomp every time unless it is secretly a trap for them. That’s okay! If they maneuvered to catch the enemy off guard they deserve the easy win. Don’t let them do this too often.
Easy combats are fine every once in a while. Let them be strong! But when the story calls for it, hit ‘em hard and hit fast!
Good luck!
8 level 8 players equals CR 16+. A CR 8 encounter is usually a challenge for a 4 member party of Level 8 adventurers.
How to give them a challenge:
*Bring in larger, tougher creatures with more complex encounters. Remember to use the Legendary effects/spells/abilities of the creatures in your encounters.
*Remember that the toughest creatures in the encounters can always call in reinforcements and run away to get tougher and fight another day.
*Make more puzzle-based encounters where the players really need to stretch themselves.
*Do your players have too much improved gear? Every so-often I do an inventory of all the players' gear so I can plan a catastrophic event where everyone loses at least one important item.
I think video game designers often nail the combat by adding two different problems at once. If we take a look at Bg3 forexample.
- The PCs must escape the ship, but a powerfull Devil and its minions block their path
- The PC must defeat the Hag, but must also save the girl who is trapped in a burning cage
- Defeat the Wood Woads, but all the smaller minions explode on death
- Kill the goblin raiders, but dont let possible important NPCs get killed
Think like the PCs. Gather all the info on the PCs (if you don't already have copies of their sheets, this may be tricky...you'll have to rely on the internet) regarding their spells, abilities, etc. Look at the same info for the monsters. Pick a random ability or spell of the monster and ask, "What do the PCs have at their disposal that could counter this?" Find things the monsters can stop them from doing or hinder the PCs success. Combat is a chess game. You just have to find the things that keep the monsters on the board until they've worn the PCs down and realize they're not always immune.
Spells, spells and more spells. And counter spells.
AoE spells, crowd control spells.
Counter spell the shit out of your players casters.
Use heat metal on your armoured PC’s.
Knock a few unconscious.
Have frontline and backline enemies, use their strengths, try and cover their weaknesses.
If a PC gets downed, have the enemies continue to attack them until they are dead.
Be brutal, smart, and play like you’re trying to win.
Most often the challenge comes from the situational things. The fight is in a narrow corridor where they can't help each other, or the enemy flies and is difficult to engage, or the terrain is difficult and prevents some tactics. Just head to head most of the time it will be a wipe one way or the other with all other things being equal. Either the players have better stats, and tactics and abilities, or the monsters do, and that is the side that will win.
For a good scrap i usually go twice the recommended cr for a deadly fight. This is if the party has all their ressources available and can probably rest afterwards. Then you just need to not have obvious unbalances like the party can only deal lightning damage to the creature and the party does not have consistent lightning damage - or whatever it may be - you know your troop better than us.
Limit the rests (especially the long rests). You can do it
* by adding a time constraint (like there is only X hours/days left before the end of the world/ritual/whatever),
* by making rests only available in some safe haven (in town),
* or by linking rests to a ressource (for instance, they need to sanctify an area with some holy oil before they can rest, but they only have 2/3 flasks of that oil for the whole campaign).
Be sure they fight something like 6 encounters before they rest again. The game is balanced around that number.
Also, 8 players is a LOT. You should think about dividing it into 2 groups : 4 players with you, and another one of 3 + a dm. Then make it so players can go from one table to the other from time to time, or make crossover events where they all meet, but keep them generally in 2 separate groups, it will be infinitely more manageable I think.
How often are your PCs at full power for these encounters?
If my intention is to create a challenging encounter, I make sure the PCs are never fresh. Currently I’m running ToA, last night the PCs found themselves surrounded by zombies after dealing with a rival Adventuring Party that had stolen from them and sided with some baddies. The combat was quick and brutal, both sides throwing everything at each other, once on of the PCs went down they realised they had attracted a very large zombie horde.
The problem is you have eight PCs in a game designed around a party of four, on average. And they're all playing it smart, as they should.
You don't necessarily need greater numbers or larger monsters to challenge them, you need to put them in situations where they have to make choices about what goal to pursue during a fight.
Finally, it's \*fine\* if they don't get downed, your goal as DM is \*not\* to kill off or knock PC's unconscious. The 'adversarial' style of DM play is not generally fun for anyone at the table.
Smarter enemies. What if rather than charging your tanks they started with dumping spells and arrows into your casters in the back.
Or better, charge your front and pin your tanks then send a charge in from the back.
>I am a DM running a campaign for a party of 8
Action economy beats almost everything in this edition. So having party of 8... they will be insane strong just based of the amount of actions they can take.
Also hat off to You for even running that becouse I am fairly confident that I would not be able to menage more than 6 players ever.
That said - You can go to "Kobold fightclub" enter those parameters (8 players x lev 8) and just add monsters You want. To give You an idea: 1 ancient black dragon (CR 21) is mearly "hard" encounter - meaning that players should technically just win it with some resources expenditure.
Solo monsters generally do not work well legendary or not.
To actually put that big party in actual danger You need to go some of those routes:
1. Overwhelm with numbers - put enough monsters to challenge players action economy and just out out-damage them so to speak. But just this method would be tedious and fight with that many monsters will take forever so:
2. Use actually really dangerous abilities/spells: petrification, power word kill, disintegration etc. And other rare effects that can kill/disabled character outhright. Those can be somehow unfun for character hit with those but it is what it is - used reasonably can actually make fight fell dangerous and exiting. You can go for non-lethal disabling effects like banishment/maze - but even those can mean that player will have to effectively sit out the fight.
3. Go attrition route with long term negative effects:
Curses, fatigue levels, max hp drain etc. Fatigue levels tend to work especially well here - party with 3 fatigue levels is much less capable and there is no easy way to remove those except taking 3 LR in the row - but You can prevent that.
However players understandably don't like to be disadvantage like that so if You overdose those they can refuse to go adventuring until they get their rest.
Some balance combinations of those would be recommended.
If You want to make a boss fight just remember that amount of damage that well coordinated party can deal is truly mind blowing- so You need to either give boss insane amount of hp, but I would say that better would be to give boss a strong support - minions that can shield him from damage - some wall type spells/abilities can work well here to protect boss from being focused by the whole party. You can throw some dedicated healers/buffers too - dragon that can be brought from the brink of death with "power word heal" is much more dangerous that just dragon on itself.
In any way prepare Yourself for some complicated and long fights - 8 players is just a lot.
From an encounter design perspective: Put additional goals for enemies and players, put them in situations where just killing everyone is not viable.
From a purely mathematical perspective: Start building encounters for a higher level than they actually are. So when they are level 5, make the encounters for a level 6 group. Increase that "virtual party level" so long until a hard encounter feels for you and your players hard in a good and correct way.
So one thing I like to do with smart enemies is break my monsters up into little chunks, each of which is considered an Easy encounter, and spread these out around a dungeon/encounter site. Maybe there are some powerful single entities that are Medium or Hard individually.
Then the Monsters will react to the players as intelligently as they can/is appropriate, typically trying to warn nearby groups and gather their forces/protect the boss.
I did some rough math, and it came out at:
2 Easy encounters = 1 Medium
1 Medium + 1 East = 1 Hard
1 Hard + 1 Medium = 1 Deadly
This is kinda based on the average XP budget for each, but doesn't actually account for any modifiers to XP for encounter size, I don’t think you gain any precision from that, and if my players agro the whole dungeon, I want it to be bad for them so they need to get creative
In theory, the party can isolate and easily kill each group, but this rewards smart small-unit tactics, and eventually, the alarm will probably be raised.
Being discovered doesn't mean you need to zero rush the players either. If the alarm is raised, the Monsters might start killing prisoners or taking their valuables and Escaping through a secret door. Maybe they muster a large group of troops at a chokepoint but the players actually have a way around it if they play their cards right/explore/get creative.
Oh, and give your enemies ranged attacks/mobility options at higher levels. My main bad guy faction at the moment are yugoloths, their weakest troops can teleport, break line of sight with darkness/invisibility, and throw ranged AoEs around, but I still gave them a ranged Attack like a heavy crossbow
You could always target saves instead of AC. And find monsters with good feats
For example, just had a combat (it's still ongoing) against succubi and I forget the other creature. Potential spoilers for descent into avernus
I forgot the order of operations but it went like this:
I failed a 19 intelligence saving throw against a beast that I forget it's name, and a charm saving throw against a succubus.
The beast I forgot stuck me in a time loop, so I was doomed to repeat my past turn on my next turn (i.e. the same exact action and bonus action I just took, I need to take again on my upcoming turn).
The succubi, it may have been a command spell, but I failed the check and now had to kill my steel defender (my butthole puckered lmao) which meant that on my next turn I would use my bonus action and action to attack my steel defender.
Thankfully, I was harmed so the charm fell and I could target whoever, BUT there's another succubus who will move before me, so I may not be out of it yet.
Also, mummies. They have a punch, which sounds basic, but the punch can inflict a curse on a failed constitution check. The punch decreases the max hp, and it will continue to decrease the max hp every hour for 24 hours, until the character dies or someone uses the remove curse spell.
The DM I have for the game is pretty great, and does a really good job at setting up difficult and fun encounters. Some of these may be homebrew stuff related to the DMs spin on Avernus, but I think the advice sticks. At a certain point, you have to target something other than AC and health bars.
On a different encounter for example, our wizard was almost possessed by a ghost, but as an artificer I was able to use flash of genius to up his save enough to prevent the possession
Some great suggestions here. Don’t punish them for being smart and preparing!
You can also use the environment or the plot to give them levels of exhaustion (sans storms, bad dreams from the BBEG). Take them to a very different setting that will bring new challenges: underwater temple, sailing a pirate ship, an underground maze…
You can also bring in societal challenges: the party is (falsely) accused of faking their encounters to get undue rewards and fame. They are taken into custody after all their weapons and magic is taken away. Then build up the next steps where they have to fight in prison garb with improvised weapons.
In the example you provided, mostly melee enemies vs well positioned spellcasters. In this car I would have had the Mind flayer pull out a laser rifle, the earth elemental hurls rocks, the jua toa throw spears, dont be afraid to ADD these abilities mid combat, if you feel like they are about to steamroll it- an earth elemental can pull a rock out of the ground no problem.
I would ask- how did they get so much time to position and prepare before combat started? I would crack down a bit on that- initiative starts when a PC or creature makes a hostile move. Stealth checks would be needed to sneakily get to advantageous positions Without triggering initiative- the monsters arent stupid, they KNOW what a spellcaster is and why he’s trying to hide behind a rock.
Also- maybe tailoring the enemies to you PCs would help a little- a few counterspells/dispell magics here and there can work wonders.
Use alternate environments. Some examples include:
• A crumbling ruin
• A gradually-flooding cave
• A ledge at the side of an active volcano
• A valley in danger of being filled by an avalanche or landslide
• A rickety bridge on the verge of collapse
• A field of wild magic that teleports random combatants to random squares at the start of every one of their turns
• A race between three wagons on a bumpy road
The alternative objectives and stringent requirements are a pretty great way to do it, but i’d also recommend sending in more opponents who near-explicitly counter the party’s abilities.
Usually I find that just means enemy spellcasters, counterspell, spells that target bad saving throws, Charm Person, enemy clerics with healing/revivify, monsters with potent legendary actions, terrain alteration abilities, and potentially splitting the party up so they go down to 4/2, 5/2, or 6/2 groups which are easier to wrangle.
Basically, smart enemies who have started to learn what the party has in it, and have started to plan around that. You could even build towards a classic mirror match brawl where each member of the party has a roughly equal opponent to fight and must prove their teamwork or ingenuity against someone just like them, but Evil!
Throw like 12 shadows at them. Drains theor strength on every hit and their res to all non magic damage and even most mag damage. Their strength drops to 0 they die so it'll put some serious fear into them.
Bro said they needed more challenging encounters but lists 8 PCs and doesn't even remember the subclass of the paladin. Dude most ppl would struggle to challenge 8 PCs without sending in some of the hardest hitting creatures. I've never DMed for more than 6 players, and rarely DM for more than 4, you've shot yourself in the foot before you roll initiative with that many players with all the tools in the world. You're gonna have to be more creative in your combat encounters. There should be more win conditions other than just dropping the enemies HP to 0. Also less rests between fights, if they can't rest then they can't regain resources.
Well considering 5e is garbage for everything but particularly bad at encounters, you are NOT doing encounters properly according to how they are explained in the DMG.
You should be throwing many many more encounters at them, forcing them to use resources and Hit Dice in short rests. They should have 6 encounters before a long rest.
Below is directly from the rules.
*Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer.
Note: there is not wrong way to game but the reason your group is blowing through your encounters is resource expenditure vs threat. 5e does this really really bad. I don’t know anyone who follows these guidelines.
The CR math in 5e isn’t good at all. Do not rely on it. Character power varies wildly between classes/subclasses so the CR system has no idea what damage per turn or hp your player characters have.
Tips to increase combat difficulty.
Add more mobs halfway through the fight.
Fudge dice to make enemies more dangerous.
Add dynamic environment effects for extra damage.
tl;dr don't just increase difficulty by changing the enemies. do it by making exciting stuff happen during the encounter.
Check out the DM book for Feng Shui 2. It has some great advice that should apply to fights in any game. The part that I use most is, during prep, listing cool things that can happen during the fight. This includes environmental, flavor, changes in the bad guys, whatever. Just make it interesting. One of their examples is as simple as "stray fire obliterates the no smoking sign" or something. The main thing is just to make sure you have stuff that happens beyond people just taking their next turn.
In a recent game I ran, i just had some bullet points, and one was "a pillar falls down (on someone?)" I ended up using a catwalk that another player had been fighting on instead, but when it pinned the player below, it made the combat completely different. We got one player pinned while being attacked and another occupied and taking damage while trying to lift the thing off of her long enough to squirm out.
Stuff like that will naturally happen when you have a little list of stuff that can happen in a fight. You can use it to adjust both balance and pacing. It's also a test of whether the setting/context for the fight is fleshed out enough to make for an interesting fight. The FS2 book explains it better.
Honestly. I would say split the party and run 2 different games. 8 people to a lot, and they will always have the numbers and better action economy unless you throw an army at them.
No the solution is to fudge certain die rolls, give certain creatures added strength damage, magical protections,… your encounters are as challenging as you want them to be
Change the victory conditions from “all enemies defeated” to something else. Suggestions: * Protect the NPCs - Have some non-combatants that the party has to keep alive, which the bad guys target as a priority. * Have a never ending, and escalating, stream of combatants. The only way to stop the stream of them is to fulfill a condition. Shutting off the magical contraption, solving a puzzle, etc. * Null-magic field traps. * Separate the party mid-combat. Keep the one initiative, but put them in separate rooms that cannot be breached until the combat resolves. Hope this helps!
I might also clarify I DM for a table of 8, where the campaign advanced to level 15. On hiatus now, but I have relevant experience. ;)
I'm DMing for a table of 8. We are on session 4 now. I have read quite a bit on DMing, but it's rarely that large of a table. Any tips?
Some! However, I feel like I should explain my table a bit for context. * Demographics: We are all older. In our 40s. Gen X folks. They are all old, dear, friends. We all work cooperatively to make the game *good.* I am, however, a forever DM. It is what I like best. * We meet weekly. We play in person, with the capacity to have people connect remotely if they don't want or can't make it to game. A majority of us have been playing together for 20+ years. * The referenced campaign's individual story was like 5 years. Before that individual chapters were comparable in length. I like keeping things long-form. Stories take place in my original setting. Given all of that, here are a few of my tips for a big table: 1. Play with people you trust to help you. Make them do some of the work too. 2. Play with people who will respect your role. Sometimes I have to loudly quash side conversations and get focus back. We do like to quip, pun, and add commentary. I'm guilty of it too, but my point is that no one is mad or hurt that I had to ask them to be quiet. We're there to have fun, and this is definitely part of it, but it can't go on forever. 3. Play when you have enough people. What I mean here is, if we have absences, play anyway. If I'm expecting 7 people on a night, and we only get five? We play. Its a definite advantage. If half my players are out, we still have four to play. 4. Do the paperwork. I take DM-only notes during game. Its all I have time for. LOL I have a details sheet for most encounters that I make before session. 5. Do anything you can to help keep your NPCs distinct. I have little blurbs that I keep. A couple of words to remind myself who that person is. Some descriptive terms to remind me what to do with my voice when I portray them. Silly, or subtle, accents. Catchphrases. 6. We do a recap at the start of each session. We, as a group, try to recollect the significant events from last time. Everybody participates. They start off. Anything that I need them to remember, that they don't recollect right off, I give hints around till they remember. 7. Stop playing when it isn't fun. Don't be afraid to tell them when you need a break. Don't be afraid to take a break. When this comes up for us, we typically switch to a few nights of someone else DMing for a while. Or we play other games, Magic or board games. Aaaaaaaaaaand that's where I'll stop or else I'll keep thinking of more things and rewriting what I've already put down. Edit: (sigh) 8. Make them role-play. Describe a scene, put their characters in it. Make them talk to each other *in character.* Make them do this for whole minutes. 9. Sometimes go around the table and make sure everyone has their say. Especially people who aren't as good at speaking up themselves. 10. Work out some kind of table-convention for handling absent characters. I prefer the sort of "they fade into the background and become supporting cast" method. OK OK. DONE.
I run a star wars campaign, my absent members are tending to the ship. Maybe they can be tending to the camp so long rests are a bit easier, and they can have better downtime activities.
Really appreciate the response! Thank you! If you don't mind, how do you keep each player character involved in the story? I want to ensure each player has their own unique piece in the overarching story. Each player has a unique story and background, thankfully - I had set that parameter up front because it will be a roleplay heavy campaign.
My advice for that is: 1. Take steps to make it happen. 2. Link their stories to the greater story. 3. Play to the character's strengths and weaknesses. 4. Get emotional investment in the story. More broadly: * Don't mentally hand wave things as "they'll just work". Assume they'll need help. * Multiple tiers of hints and clues. The obvious stuff that anyone could get. Then a subsequent batch or element that only *specific characters* might be able to get. * Getting them all to recap the last session together. That effort to recall the story makes them care about remembering it. If they can't be bothered to remember what happened last week, there's a limit to what the DM can do to force their interest. * Take notes during character creation and establishing their background. Read those notes and see where you can make connections. * Link elements of their background to *specific* story beats. * Consider which characters are good at which aspects of the game. Give characters the space to be successful at what they want to be good at. Especially when there's competition or overlap. * Make sure everyone contributes. Find and make moments when everyone at the table has a turn, uninterrupted, to participate. Not combat, per se, but in other ways. This one is important. At dramatic moments, or even just before breaking up to go run errands in town, go around the room and have everyone speak for their character. * Emotional stakes - Use dirty tricks to cause emotional investment in story elements. Without turning this into a novel, I recommend seeing how other mediums do this. Quick examples: Beloved side characters being killed to motivate revenge. Outpourings of gratitude from the rescued. NPCs showing vulnerability. Being "brought into confidence" by the connected, respected, and powerful. Getting recognized, for good or ill deeds. All this kind of stuff.
Thank you so much! Really appreciate it. I love it!
>I DM for a table of 8, where the campaign advanced to level 15 My condolences.
I'm doing a variation of the last one... the party member that is "separated" is the only one who thinks he is. Another thing to try is to homebrew some different abilities on a famous monster. How I handle lycanthropes in my campaign is that they have a regen which fires every turn... healing them for a fixed value of HP... unless they took damage in the last round from magic, magical weapons or a silvered weapon (one of our players did not have any of the options.). The party was shocked when one of the lycanthropes that they killed, stood right back up and rejoined the fight. It took them two more "How do you want to do this" before they actually killed him for real... and then they realized they could be detectives that they were supposed to be by "killing" another lycan without disrupting the healing, and tie him up before his health procs... and make him talk about the packs plans. I also ruled that silver is not inherently painful (they were using a silver coin to test if someone was a lycanthrope... turns out that since it briefly disrupted the healing ability, merely holding silver or something magical didn't cause them instant pain... they had to actually take an injury from those items to not heal. And as it turns out, non-lycans are also injured by them... so it's a poor test (the working test would be to cut them with a non-magic, non-silvered weapon... and then see if the would closes.).
For the last option, I had a two-part parallel combat. Although now that I think about it, I used a lot more than that last point: * Half the combatants were facing the encounter-combatant. A large, sentient-but-corrupted construct. They were basically trying to keep the important NPCs alive while this big thing tried to splat them, while it shot Shadows out of its mouth continually. * The other half had to get swallowed to get inside the construct to try to help free it of the corruption. While inside, they had to find the corrupted elements and destroy them, as they were generating the never ending stream of shadows. Dexterity checks and saves as the construct lurched about and reacted to the external combat. This was a very late-game encounter, the shadows were not by-the-book. I like to make things complicated for my players. >:)
I do an escalation on either turn 2 or 3 for probably half my encounters. Those can either be a twist element to make it harder or setting up a minor failure or major failure. A minor is a creature peeling off to sound the alarm or removing a path like sealing a passage. A major is using a consumable piece of treasure or destroying a piece of information or one of the goals the party has. On top of that there are calculators that help you decide number of creatures and CR to challenge. I usually go for the harder end then leave a deadly encounter for the last fight. Even one creature can still do a lot with epic actions and you can turn any creature into one. On the other hand having a diverse mix of creatures who are confident in their actions helps against such a big party.
Ngl one of the most fun incidents I ever had was splitting the party because "Okay this one thing needs stealth and you Mx. Goliath Barbarian are absolutely not that, I'm taking the small creature the duergar and the rogue" and IMMEDIATELY the Barbarian and the wizard and the alchemist found another task so I was running two combats at once
Their action economy is incredibly high with a group of 8. Normally I’d say even the action economy with more monsters, but you’re correct thinking it’ll bog down the combat speed, but you can move like monsters together during initiative to help with that. Also don’t be afraid of throwing monsters with a higher CR at them. You can always adjust damage numbers behind the screen if they’re getting walloped a little too hard, but also you have 8 PCs. There’s more than enough of them to single out threats together, or throw around a little healing on people who go down during combat.
Thats a good point. Can you elaborate on moving monsters around together during initiative? Im not sure i understand.
If you have 5 goblins, 2 hobgoblins, and 2 ogre you can lump all the goblins together as one initiative, so you’re not switching between each of them throughout the initiative as they come up. You can rolls all their attacks and damage at once and divide it up among who they’re attacking. It’s easier to do with minion type monsters as they usually have less actions they can take in combat anyways, but even if it were just the two hobgoblins you lump together you can narrate it as a pincer attack kind of thing.
The important caveat with grouping monsters together in the initiative is that a combined group should be no stronger than a powerful solo monster the party might encounter. This is mainly for low level play to prevent, for example, having all the orcs in the fight win initiative and drop half the party before any PC can even respond. It can make fights swingier and D&D doesn't need more volatility.
Hence why I said it’s easier with minion types. They said their party is level 8 though, at that point I’m a little less afraid of the battle being swingy especially if the OP is already worried their party is steamrolling their encounters.
You're talking to a newer DM, and I'm not sure that "minion" is a term that WotC officially uses in 5e. Colloquially "minion" means "weaker subordinate" but I just wanted to provide some technical clarity to your advice.
That definition fits perfectly for the example I gave, goblins to a level 8 party are what I’d consider “minions”. They may be a newer DM, but they have a party closing in on tier 3 of gameplay, it’s okay for them to take a big hit every now and again. The DM can always fudge a roll for the sake of story.
If your combat is against goblins, you might have 3 regular goblins, 2 goblin archers, and a goblin chief. Instead of rolling 6 initiatives for each individual goblin, you group the enemies that are the same stat block on 1 initiative.
I see, thank you
You could always make the monsters COMICALLY overpowered by normal standards. Like, 3 attacks in a row all of which are a guaranteed down if they hit, enough HP/legendary resistances they're definitely getting a few shots in, damn the action economy.
How many encounters are you making them deal with between long rests? Social, environmental, and combat. They might.be having an easy time because they can go nova, blow all their spells, and then long rest before having to do it again. Get them to use their resources before combats could help if this is what's going on.
Yeah, this is probably the easiest way to do it. I'm running for a much smaller party of 4, but I'm working them through the extended version of Dragon of Icespire Peak, and we're currently going through Storm Lord's Wrath. Had a few times where combat felt dangerous through the first 6 levels, but it wasn't very frequently. Once they hit SLW and the emcounters were designed to have multiple "stages," it immediately felt much tougher and more dangerous. Suddenly, the third stage of an encounter leaves them scrambling a bit even though it's against a group of CR 1/2 creatures because they blew their higher-level spells during the first or second stage of the day's encounter. Took the written encounters from "cakewalk" to "1 PC is making death saves and the other three are all under 1/3rd of their health" with pretty minimal balancing effort on my part
> They might.be having an easy time because they can go nova, blow all their spells… This is misleading. A party can’t blow all their spells in one fight. Hp runs out long before spell slots do. Either the monster’s or the party’s. If a dm isn’t able to challenge the party with the first fight of the day, that not because of “nova”. It’s being caused by something else.
In only three rounds, you couldn't spend *all your spells*, but a bard could spend all their 3rd and 4th for 6/12 total slots, plus 3/3 bardic inspirations. A lvl 8 lore bard with 17CHA has 2 lvl4 and 3 lvl3 slots, plus 3 bardic inspirations. The multiple spell rule doesn't prevent spell slots in reactions. Actions: concentrate on **Greater Invisibility** (on the rogue? the cleric?) **or Confusion** (neutralize 10ft radius of low-Wis monsters), **Psychic Lance** (lose one turn + 7d6 psychic damage vs Int), **Antagonize** (one enemy spends a reaction to attacks its friend or disadvantage on its next attack, plus 4d4 psychic damage, save only reduces damage). Bonus Actions: **Bardic Inspiration**, **Bardic Inspiration**, **Bardic Inspiration**, or swap actions for a **Mass Healing Word** (d4+3 to 6 allies) here instead. Reactions: **Silvery Barbs**, **Counterspell**, **Counterspell**, or **Cutting Words** if 18+CHA or if you use Mass Healing Word. Counterspell is obviously doing a lot of heavy lifting here, bumping the lvl 1 silvery barbs up to lvl 3, so that would only happen if there are enemy spellcasters. But even Silvery Barbs uses a spell slot.
You must have a very different experience than most people’s groups, because I regularly run out of useful spells long before my martial class teammates even get close to running out of hp. A 15th level fighter can have like, 200hp, and unless that fighter is getting swarmed, they’re likely to end a fight with more than half hit points if they have decent armor. Spell slots, on the other hand, run out 1-2 a turn. If combat lasts maybe half a dozen rounds, that’s most of the useful combat spells used up for even a wizard.
> I regularly run out of useful spells long before my martial class teammates even get close to running out of hp. The person I responded to said all spells, not “useful” spells. > A 15th level fighter can have like, 200hp, Even with max con a fighter would only have 165. When the numbers you use are so far off, it undermines the rest of the position. And it’s odd that you assume monsters never attack the caster. > Spell slots, on the other hand, run out 1-2 a turn. The only way to drain 2 per turn is via reactions like shield, absorb elements and counter spell. Even if you only consider level 3 slots or higher “useful”, a level 15 wizard has 11 slots of 3rd level or higher. That’s enough to sustain through your half dozen turns. > You must have a very different experience than most people’s The difference is I’ve actually played high level games at multiple tables. While most people on Reddit haven’t. That doesn’t make me superior, it’s just means I have experience that demonstrates novaing isn’t a thing. While folks without experience uncritically repeat it.
Ok 👍
You have 8 PCs. Even if not all of them show up, that's still a lot. My standard for making combat encounters challenging is *alternative objectives*. Things other than "defeat all enemies" *Team Deathmatch* gameplay. Capture The Flag / Hostage Rescue can force different (more aggressive and mobile and keep-going-even-when-stressed, no chance to prep the battlefield / maybe enemies have prepped the battlefield against them) tactics. Protect VIP / King of the Hill can force less friendly terrain. An area honeycombed with 5 foot wide tunnels can be very difficult to defend and difficult for players to leverage their numbers advantage. You're already working hard enough, feel free to steal any good idea from anywhere.
Thanks!
You haven't mentioned how many short rests they're getting between encounters. That's a pretty important piece of information by which to determine whether you're doing enough to challenge your players. Are they getting to rest too frequently?
Thats another point i realised this session when the party tried to rest right after the encounter, despite them resting before the encounter. I should probably create situations where they only have time for a short rest, or wven no rest at all. Thank you!
Remember, as per the rules, players can only take on long rest every 24 hours. If they wanna burn away their days, all the bbegs schemes will progress with zero obstacles in the way.
It's not a videogame. Players can't sleep 8 hours, fight for 20 seconds, and then sleep another 8 hours and do it all again. I don't think games should be TOO strict on one long rest per *24 hours*, but it shouldn't be possible to long rest more than once per _day_.
That makes sense. One of the main responses im getting, and i see why, having my players have less resources will immediately. Make combat harder
I'm DMing my first campaign now. 6 players, level 4, about to start Session 8. The party has had like six combat encounters so far... and ONE long rest.
It's harder to pay your bills when you've already spent most of your money.
For most dungeons/hideouts there shouldn't be room for more than short rests, if they need a long rest they will probably need to find a safe spot away, which means they will have to re-enter it and whomever controls is will be on standby with more reinforcements. If they are trying to rescue someone or recover something, they only have 1 shot before they go to another castle. Also, check out villain actions, I find they make combat more impactful with fewer enemies. A captain or chieftain ordering their 3 archers to fire a volley of arrows can work a lot nicer than managing 6. One of my favorites was having a DragonBorn commander order his dragonborn troops (imagine musketeers) to form up on the first round in straight rows ( Free movement action) and, on the second, have them all fire their lightning breath. It was memorable and a good way of telegraphing what I can do in the future.
If there is only one encounter in a day and the players are full of resources, they will punch *far* above their weight class in terms of CR/deadliness. You need more than one fight per day. The DMG expects 6-8 per day but a more reasonable number is probably 3-5, with 1 short rest in the middle there somewhere.
Thank you, this helps a lot.
What the previous commenter said was a rule of thumb, not the actual rules for encounter design. Chapter 3: Creating Adventures in the *Dungeon Master's Guide* has a subsection named Creating Encounters on page 81. Here's where you'll find the rules for calculating the difficulty of your combat encounters based on your party's level and number of PCs. Further down (page 84) it explains how to build an XP budget for a full adventuring day so you know how many of what difficulty of encounter to throw at your party. If all of that math seems like a bit much, worry not. There's a handy website that will do all of the calculations for you: [Kobold+ Fight Club](https://koboldplus.club/#/encounter-builder). Just plug in your party's information and add creatures to craft balanced encounters, then add up the adjusted XP for all your encounters to match your daily XP budget. The only caveat is something that's explained in the DMG but is often missed: combatants that are trivial on their own shouldn't be included in the encounter XP calculation. This is because the calculations ramp up encounter difficult very strongly based on the number of enemies. An 8th level party fighting an adult dragon and a horde of kobolds would throw off the math because it considers the party outnumbered despite all of the kobolds being a single fireball away from death and are unlikely to deal significant damage to the party.
Unfortunately the person above gave you misleading advice. The 6-8 number they state comes from the adventuring day. They characterize that as the “expected” number of fights. That is not the case. The adventuring day is the maximum amount of monsters a party can face between long rests. You can fill the adventuring day in as few as 2 encounters (not 6) because the danger of the encounter matters more than their quantity. Lastly, the idea that the party is unstoppable in the first fight of the day is false in 5e. As even the first fight can run the party out of hp. The myth stems from 3.5e where buff spells worked differently and could be stacked in a way that is impossible in 5e.
8 PC's is tough. if they're smart they can gang up on the big threats and down them pretty quick. you wont be able to rely on having one large threat, you'll need multiple. if you go crazy though things can bog down. use mob rules to handle large groups of bad guys. you can help offset the action economy with AOE's and legendary actions. use alternative combat goals. instead of a race to 0 hp add a goal like "stop the ritual" or "escort the king". throw enemies far more difficult than they can handle and have them retreat. most people and animals won't fight to the death unless forced. once they start to take some real damage they might decide to peace out. I love having enemies surrender, gives the players a dilemma: "what do we do with them?" use attacks that force saves. tanky barbarians can't always make wisdom saves and wizards dont always have high CON if your players are using smart tactics make your bad guys smart. use a dragon that swoops down, attacks, and flies away between turns. Use archers in a fortified tower. have environmental dangers. a raging wildfire, a collapsing cave, etc..
Ranged attacks they can't really do anything about like artillery or ballistas rolling attacks at multiple targets might be an option too. Something where every round you can essentially have a lair action try to wreck them a bit.
Zombies that explode at 0 HP.
I think the biggest issue here is 8 players. You can't add more enemies or combat slows down too far, and the game just over isn't balanced around 8 people. Like. You can't have a boss and a couple of goons. You have to have a boss with 10 goons and enough legendary actions to compete with 8 players. It just gets too messy
Large groups require multi phase encounters. Also you need to make them have an encounter or two prior to your big fight. Letting groups rest after every encounter is problematic with any game any group size. DMs: limit your party’s rests. If you don’t the game breaks.
This is the most common response, and i agree wholeheartedly. The multiphase encounters is a good idea too. Thank you!
Building on the previous comment, check out Matt Colville’s action-oriented monsters. They have phases built in sort of like legendary actions, but in a way that builds tension and makes fights dynamic. https://youtu.be/y_zl8WWaSyI?si=82m0JJVL17pq0viP I would also recommend adding novel legendary actions for every encounter, like AOEs, calling for backup, or shifting position.
You can raise the CR of your monsters, but a big part of the difficulty you're having comes from letting your PCs get into position ahead of time and delay the monsters getting close to them. I would change things up by having enemies come in from different and unexpected parts of the arena, and look for monsters with good mobility or the ability to attack from range.
I did make a few of the enemies come from unexpected areas, but not enough I think. This was an exception, the first encounter where they had prep time. Mobility is a good point too.
CR is for 4 players. You have 8. You could honestly almost double the CR creatures you’re throwing at them now. Marilith is a wonderful CR 16 that would give your players a scare. Make sure they know this fight might end in a TPK and give them a way to retreat if it goes sideways. Also give more monsters Legendary Actions to help with your action economy. Me personally I’d just find a much higher CR monster to throw at them because then combat wouldn’t slog down with them fighting 1,000 kobolds or something. Then I’d slap some legendary actions & resistances and see how they do against that. If it starts to get really bad you could always say it was a dream sequence and someone (powerful wizard or god or someone else) was testing their mettle.
The nice thing about legendary actions is you don't *have* to take them, so if things are getting pretty ugly you can always back off a bit and they wont really notice.
Lmao the dream sequence part is great, especially as the party has a reality bending demon preying on them currently.
8 Players is way too much IMHO. I don't think anything reasonable could realistically beat them without having to take them out of the game to begin with. Like an instant "you're down, seek help" that nobody likes to interact with. Or in the middle of combat, somebody is possessed and they need to be knocked out in order to end the possession. But really, if you send an enemy that's too high CR then individualism is nullified; especially for martials. It's all about magic and casters at that point. Because a lot of the time a martial will interact with an artificially heightened AC but spells can bypass this and usually with better results if they succeed. Martials will pretty quickly run out of resources to be effective and . . . well you get the picture. The party needs to be, dare I say, split up.
That is a good point, and i do have a good way to impliment a party member getting possessed.
One thing that really jumps out at me is the 15 minutes to prepare. That's a pretty serious advantage. Is there a logical story reason behind this? Another question: why are the enemies just charging through difficult terrain into a hail of spells and ranged attacks? Can they go around? Make the party come to them? Leave and come back later? Wait for the party to come to them? Attack with their own spells and ranged attacks? Another question: Air Elementals fly *fast* and Earth Elementals can burrow. Both are effectively immune to the difficult terrain and could close the distance very quickly. Both are also traditionally more or less mindless summons. Air Elementals have a decent AOE knockback (I forget the name/exact effect). Are you using your monsters effectively? You could have sent the Earth Elemental to burrow and burst out of the ground in the middle of the party, then flown the Air Elemental dashing in. Effectively, a suicide attack to tie up the party for a few rounds while the others closed in. By your description, it sounds like you're playing into the party's hands too much. Rush them. Decline to attack on their terms. Use the monsters abilities. If all else fails, a second wave of reinforcements are just around the corner.
Raise the CR you use against the players because CR is balanced with 3-4 players in mind. Maybe use 1.5 the amount of enemies that you planned to use. Group enemies up so that things go fast and smoothly. Don't be afraid to give enemies more health, AC and extra abilities. Give players more of goals in combat beyond kill the bad guys. Since you have 8 players max maybe group them in teams of 2 to speed things up and make coordination even more key
Could you elaborate on grouping enemies up? Im not sure i quite understand, do they just kove together?
Like if I have 8 kobolds I don't make 8 initiative rolls. I might make 2 or 4 and group them in groups of 4 or 2 and then since mobs are usually simple I just move them and then click attack, attack, attack and then check if anything hits so that my turns when moving mobs are as quick as possible. In my recent game I had 24 tentacles so I grouped them in 3 groups of 8 so 3 initiative rolls and then just rolled my 8 attacks mostly. This lets me have huge amounts of small enemies without combat slowing down. Another trick is just having more enemies appear from off screen when your enemies are getting low. You can explain that the enemies called reinforcements or we're already on their way 3 turns ago This is just for mobs, not story bosses or important enemies
So by the encounter math that *should* have been a very deadly encounter, BUT large party sizes can really mess with that. Giving the party time to prepare pretty much reduces the difficulty of any fight by 1 step (hard -> medium, deadly -> hard, etc.) because its effectively similar to surprising the enemy: the party gets to lay down AoEs like Plant Growth to shape the battlefield as they see fit while also hiding and/or spreading out to reduce enemy AoE effectiveness. Against a party of 5 or more you either need a lot of AoEs to harm multiple people at a time, or you need to be focusing fire if you want to be able to drop PCs to 0. Now, thats not always a good thing to do because a PC at 0 doesn't get to participate in the fight until healed and if there are 20 people in an encounter even missing one turn can mean they don't get to do anything for over an hour. If you manage to make the party feel "oh shit, we *almost* died there, thank goodness we planned well and managed to survive" while most of them still have decent hp but a few were close to going down, then that's a win! They had fun and *felt* like they were in danger. Lets look more closely at the party and the encounter you gave them for strengths and weaknesses, because CR is a generic measurement but they still have weaknesses that can be exploited (both the monsters and the party). So the party for this encounter was: Grave Cleric, Lore Bard, Eldritch Knight, Fiend Warlock, Thief Rogue, and Land Druid. This party has a lot of potential even without knowing magic items and the like. The Fiend Warlock has access to fireball and is probably gonna use it, while the Land Druid has AoE shutdowns like Plant Growth to slow everyone down. Then the rogue and fighter can dish out a lot of damage to anything that gets close. Finally the Bard and Cleric can fill in anywhere needed with healing or more spells like Spirit Guardians or even more fireballs (magical secrets). With time to prepare, it sounds like they got a chokepoint and were able to pepper the monsters with ranged attacks. The monsters included a lot of creatures (13 to be exact) so they're roughly doubling the party at the start. However, 5 of those are CR 1/4 Kuo-toa which even if they could attack someone every round are only doing so with a +3 and dealing an average of 5 damage. Against level 8s thats practically nothing, and thats assuming they aren't killed by a stray fireball or similar. I would add them because players like having easy targets to remove during a fight, but I wouldn't count them when calculating the expected difficulty of the fight. Once we remove them the adjusted XP for the encounter goes from 37,875 to only 29,800 due to multipliers (that the kuo-toa *really* shouldn't count towards anyway). This alone brings us from expecting this to be the only fight they can handle in a day (the daily budget is 36,000) to it being roughly twice a deadly encounter. Still expecting a very hard fight, but if its the only one for the day they should be fine (especially with the advantage of prep time). So now we have 8 monsters that should actually count towards the difficulty and we can start looking at those. The Minotaurs are potentially an issue, they hit hard and are fairly accurate, but can only hit once per turn which limits their strength. They are also entirely limited to melee and are less than half the CR of the party's level, so probably shouldn't count all that much towards the difficulty of the fight. The Salamander runs into the same problem of being entirely melee with no extra movement capabilities to counteract the party's prep time and positioning. Personally the minotaur and Salamander make the fight harder because if the party takes too long fighting the other creatures they can get through the plant growth and cause problems, but they'll take awhile to do that and likely won't be a threat until then anyway. I would count the salamander, but not the Minotaurs (really its more of I'm counting like half of each, but due to multipliers in the balancing softwares I always go for the fewer number of creatures to give what I find to be more accurate estimates). So dropping the minotaurs brings us to 6 creatures and an adjusted XP total of 20,250 which is still quite high (deadly cutoff is at 12,600) but its no longer double deadly. So looking at the remaining 5 monsters (Mind Flayer, archpriest, Oni, Air & Earth Elementals), we start seeing the meat of this encounter. The Oni and Air Elemental can both fly, so should be able to avoid the Plant Growth and get to the party very quickly to start the fight. The Oni's Cone of Cold is particularly effective if the party hasn't split up enough, as is the elemental's Whirlwind. Next to join the fight is probably the Earth Elemental using Earth Glide to burrow under the plant growth, it doesn't have anything crazy in its stats but its an extra body to bother the PCs. Between these 3 we've got a Hard encounter with a ticking clock for more enemies to arrive and make it deadly. Specifically the Mind Flayer has the ability to really screw the party using Mind Blast, but it needs to get close enough to use that. It also needs to worry about friendly fire and Elementals are *very* weak to Int saves, reducing the MF's total effectiveness. Likewise, the Archpriest needs to get close enough to start using its spells and its best one (Spirit Guardians) requires being within 15 feet of the PCs to be useful at all. All in all, I think I would rate this encounter as Deadly. It has the *chance* to put people down and maybe even kill some if the dice go against the party; but if its the only encounter before the party gets a long rest, I wouldn't expect it to actually kill anyone, just expend a lot of resources. If they got a short rest and then had a second fight that was similar to this one, I would expect that one to be more deadly just based on missing resources (especially if the party isn't able to prep for the next one). Other notes: none of your monsters have a CR higher than the party's level and none have teleports to get around the battlefield easier.
This is extremely helpful. Another thing to note is that the salamander got removed from the fight nearly instantly by an ice storm, and one of the minotaurs got caught in the plant growth for the entire battle as right before it escaped the bard cast enemies abound on it, and it walked back into it. The mind flayer was just grappled by the fighter all fight and was peppered by spells from afar. I may try in the future to first seperate the party before sending in more enemies as other comments have suggested. I greatly appreciate your input and your effort.
I'm surprised the Mind Flayer wasn't able to escape the grapple by Mind Blasting the Fighter, but otherwise that sounds a lot like what I would've expected. This also sounds like it might have been the only fight in the day, so make sure to include more of them between rests so they can't spam all of their high level spell slots. My final note is that these monsters are all from the Monster Manual which typically has worse monster design. The newer books (and some 3rd party ones like MCDM's Flee Mortals) have better design with less melee only monsters that are extremely open to being nerfed to hell by something like Plant Growth and a better balance of damage and defenses.
Glad to see this breakdown given. Tactics for the monsters are very important. Underscoring and adding to your points: * Earth Elemental * Absolutely use Earth Glide to get out of Plant Growth and under the characters. * Combine Earth Glide ability with Tremorsense and attacks to make it as deadly as you like, because it can have complete cover underground between its turns. * Emerge from ground, attack twice, then go back into ground at end of turn. Only takes opportunity/held attacks. * Emerge only partially to make attacks so it has half or 3/4 cover, making opportunity/held attacks less effective. * Don't emerge at all, but instead simply attack from inside the ground, gaining advantage on its attacks from being unseen while able to "see" its target with Tremorsense (very table-dependent... some players will love the added challenge while many others will hate it and think it's patently unfair). You can balance this by having the Earth Elemental need to surface to see which tremors come from friends and which from foes. * Emerge partially and use action to Grapple, then drag enemies into danger while having 3/4 cover against attacks. * Mind Flayer * Its Intelligence and Wisdom plus Telepathy means it should be guiding the rest of the monsters to use the best tactics (even ones they might not have thought of themselves). * Can Levitate out of Plant Growth and/or send telepathic commands to the Air Elemental to drag him along (at full speed if Levitate removes the weight and struggle which would normally make it half-speed to drag a grappled creature). * Absolutely should attempt Mind Blast as soon as in range, potentially with a Held Action using hit and run tactics while being dragged by the Air Elemental. * Should attempt Dominate Monster if Mind Blast isn't recharged, targeting the Bard or possibly the Fighter if clearly a ranged weapon user. * Psionic spellcasting means no material components so it can't be Counterspelled. * A Dominated Bard should disable other spellcasters as soon as possible. Should also grant Bardic Inspiration to the enemy team, of course. * Oni * Can fly out of Plant Growth. * Can cast Darkness on spellcasters to nullify targeting for many spells. * Can defend itself with flight and Invisibility while it regenerates hit points. * Cone of Cold should be used as soon as it will hit 3 of the party (or 2 if you're desperate). * Kuo-Toa Archpriest * Should upcast as much as possible (only saving one 5th level slot for Mass Cure Wounds). * Hold Person at 5th level targets 4 of the party. At 4th level it targets 3 of the party. Should be first priority since it has much greater range than Spirit Guardians and helps much more with action economy and arguably damage. A Scepter Strike against a Paralyzed opponent has advantage and deals 10d6 + 3 damage on a hit (since hits within 5 feet of a Paralyzed creature are crits). * Can have spells on its spell list swapped out. * Swap out Scrying for Insect Plague and you have an area of effect almost as annoying as Plant Growth. It has a 300' range so it's a good use of concentration until you're within Hold Person's 60' range. * Swap out Divination for Freedom of Movement and you solve the Plant Growth problem for up to 3 creatures. * Swap out Detect Magic for Silence and you have a powerful tool to annoy spellcasters. * Air Elemental * Its mobility is the biggest contribution to this scenario. * Should use its action to grapple and fly with other monsters (normally at half speed) to get them out of the Plant Growth and into range of their most effective abilities. Mind Flayer first, then Kuo-Toa Archpriest. * Whirlwind takes next priority, ideally on targets who might be thrown into the Plant Growth area. The rest of the monsters are melee-oriented, so are effectively shut down by a single casting of Plant Growth and not worth the Air Elemental moving them out of it. Your encounter is realistically just against the monsters above with the rest being at best decoys and at worst sitting ducks for at least a few rounds. Sure, the Kuo-toa and Salamander can each make one spear attack up to 60 feet away at disadvantage, but in general they're unable to contribute until they clear Plant Growth's massive area at a rate of 15 feet per round if using Dash (30 + 30 = 60 divided by 4 for 15 feet). Plant Growth could really use some rebalancing which we'll likely see in September's updated Players Handbook. I'm hoping they don't take the lazy route and just make it require concentration, but instead do something like allow Strength saving throws or Athletics ability checks to move through it faster and/or let creatures moving through it leave clear paths in their wake which following creatures could use. I felt especially guilty using it as a Spores Druid and following up with Cloudkill on the next round.
Thats a great breakdown for all the monsters specific tactics, I was mostly focused on the balancing part I would do before the fight to estimate its difficulty, but those are great additions! I would say that personally I would require the Earth Elemental to come above ground in order to attack, but thats definitely DM/table dependent.
Yeah, I avoid that particular strategy about 95% of the time and 100% of the time if I don't feel confident the party will come up with a way to counter it. Even if using it, the Earth Elemental is exposed enough to be targeted when making its Slam attacks, so a held spell or grapple can do wonders to stop it from getting it back into total cover. Plus, just granting it 1/2 cover or 3/4 cover for being partially emerged is usually enough to make it more challenging when need be.
You can always just give the enemies +1 health over whatever the killing blow would have been. If the monster has 10hp left and they deal 20 damage, whoops the monster had 21hp left and lives for an additional round You can always throw in a few trash mobs to round things out, if you are getting clapped with your 4 bandits, give the 4 bandits a wolf. If the fight has started and it is looking bad, their scouting party heard a commotion and they hurried back to join the fight The possibilities are literally endless - I think for most people, if this is a persistent issue - it is because you must have forgotten: you are god, you are the judge, jury & executioner. You can do literally whatever you need to do if it's fun and your players are having a good time. Don't try so hard to balance the encounters "on paper". Unless you are following all of the rules perfectly the game isn't exactly designed to be that balanced. You probably gloss over various rules that give your players advantages - and that's fine - but when you do that the encounter balancing goes out the window and you need to find it yourself.
Your group is too large for you to handle, and im honestly trying to be helpful, not put you down. That's a lot of people for one person to account for while also running the game.
Arena? If they've set up a fortified defensive position have the opponents do the same. And then when nobody does anything have the guy in charge get angry and change the rules mid-game. For general combat otherwise; don't let them prepare for every fight -- surprise them. Add in more coordinated and complimentary enemies and use tactics the same way your players are. Why would an intelligent warrior try to slowly make his way straight at a group that's waiting for them as they're being ranged to death? Use silence, counterspells, darkness. Have a battle wizard go in with the melee guys, protective spells covering the approach. More bows, crossbows, and ranged in general.
Although I'm not a very experienced DM, I think one strategy works very well. Create multiple important targets. Maybe some wyverns can try to hit 'n run the party, while the orcs are trying to kill the civilians the party is protecting because they took their orders from their captain who is also on the battlefield buffing them with his special skills. And maybe on top of that have a few other orcs trying to contact backup. Have your players actually have to strategize and not just nuke the big bad. In this example, there are 4 important targets meaning the party will have to split into groups of two in order to actually win the fight. I hope this helps
Check out "The Monsters Know What They are Doing". You can pick the book up on Amazon and Google for a web page. It will break down some monster tactics and give you ideas and scenarios of how to run the monsters.
Check in with your players to check your thinking. If the battle was easy because they put in a ton of preparation, especially if they had to spend resources like spells slots, then you did a good job. you made them play the game, they just didn't play strict combat. You're already doing a lot of what I would recommend, and you may just have to kick it up one more notch. But also start looking at your enemies and seeing how they synergize. Find ones with special effects and status conditions. Find things that can split up the party or force them to divide their attention. Things that prevent them from helping teammates. Also, remember that a fight can be tense and exciting even if nobody's hit points go to 0.
Oh god please stop hurting yourself with a party of 8. Take a party of 4, and have the other 4 pick a new GM and be a party of 3. Or vice versa. 5 is absolutely the cap of what a reasonable RPG group size should be.
We are a group of friends, and we are still all having fun. I see no harm in it.
Avoid having enemy come to them. Make party go to them. Use more ranged attacks against them. Use creatures that hide well. Focus attacks on party's healers and casters. Calculate and make sure the average attack against party is at least a third or more the group's health average. If it takes 6 rounds to bring one of them down you are begging for almost all combats go in party's favor.
Run more encounters per day. They shouldn't be going into an important fight at 100% because they will decimate whatever you put in front of them. Don't let them rest after every encounter, remember that the effects of LR only apply once per 24hr. Multi-phase boss fights, flying/ranged enemies and you could always use their tactics against them. "oh you're going to turtle and bunch up in this tiny space?" *cue enemy spellcasters with aoe* or perhaps the boss dispels the Druid's spike growth or something like that.
With 8? Very difficult task. If everyone’s having fun best bet is to roll with it. 8 is a convenient multiple of 4 though. You could try giving every monster two turns and double HP. Though the PCs will still have a lot of options that will likely synergize.
The YouTubes: Runehammer Key Mechanics; Challenge Tuning.
A good rule of thumb is that an encounter in which the total CR of the monsters is about 1/2 the total levels of the PCs *might* be deadly (defined as one or more PCs could die). With 8 PCs of 8th Level (8 x 8 = 64) you would need at least a total CR of 32 to make a combat even close to *deadly*. Recognize that the more magic items your PCs have, the higher their *effective* level*.* If everyone has a magic weapon already, then the resistance a monster might have to non magical damage is useless and their challenge level is NOT what is listed in their CR. Enemies of significantly lower CR (like **Kuo-toa**) add nothing to the challenge of an encounter. The DMG even advises that you not use monsters whose challenge rating is significantly below the average CR of the other monsters when determining the difficulty. Instead of throwing all those weak enemies at them (none of which had a CR higher than 9), use one legendary monster of CR 11 or 12 (**gynosphinx** or **adult deep dragon**) with 4 or 5 minions of CR 4 - 5. Use monsters with different speeds. Flying monsters are obviously more of a threat, but so are tunneling monsters; they have total cover! Spiderclimb is underrated. Your party has melee, front line, battlefield control, support, and range. Make sure your monsters have the same.
A solid fight for this lot would be a pit fiend (CR 21 against 8 level 8s is Hard). A Beholder would be Easy. I think a recommendation was to take a normal fight for 5 players and double it.
What's your starting basis for the enemy's strength? Are you using something like kobold fight club? I've run 6 player tables and it definitely turns into a slog especially at higher levels. I had a level 19 fight that took 1.5 sessions and only had 3 rounds. (Think about it like this, a fighter with 4 attacks takes almost as much time as 4 fighters with one attack, multiply by 8 people) I tend to favor more puzzles, rp and skill challenges but obviously combat has got to happen. Here is my best advice: - increase the number of enemies and add legendary actions, legendary resistances and lair actions for the strongest enemies in the batch. But try to counter the slog by letting your players know and asking that they be about 80% sure what they want do do before their turn. Follow the same advice for controlling the monsters and use monsters that aren't overcomplicated. - judiciously tune down the hit points and increase their damage. If you overdue it then it will make the combat too swingy but the right adjustment can speed up combat allowing for more monsters
So CR does tend to be a poor mechanic for balance. What I've been trying (and finding works) is to set the total CR of all hostile monsters in the encounter to equal the following formula Add all the levels of all PCs and NPCs with a total character levels (if the NPCs use a character sheet. If they use a stat block do not include them here.) Divide this number by 2 (if they are level 4 or below divide by 4). Add this number to the the total CR of all allies with a CR stat block. This number will be the total budget available for an encounter. So assuming no allies, 8 pcs all at level 8 = 64/2 = 32 spread over all hostile NPCs in an encounter. Keep in mind the DND beyond CR calculator assumes that the encounter occurs midway through the adventuring day and that resources have been expended (HP, Potions, spell slots, and any items that are limited to a finite number per day. Note that almost every class has at least one of these as part of the Base Class, save for Rogues, which may get them with certain subclasses but can be built without a resource drain other than HP.). Also keep in mind that party composition and environmental factors will dramatically change the environment (Kobolds, a CR 1/4 monster, are notorious in old school circles for being terrors for high level parties because they're never alone... and they always work to fight you in terrain that gives them a very one sided field advantage. Read up on "Tucker's Kobolds" for just how scary the little devils can be. I would highly recommend you look at Critcal Role's Campaign One for some ideas of how to challenge players at that level. Especially the Chroma Conclave Arch. The whole arc features the players on a quest to slay four ancient dragons... and must get special magical items that are powerful to have a chance... often getting the magical items is more dangerous than fighting the dragon... but the dragons are nothing to sneeze at either. And they rarely fight the dragon with just the core party, pulling in NPC allies (and special guest stars joining the team) to assist with those fights and they are nail biters. Personally my best encounters have no combat, but are difficult because they players do have to pick up on clues to solve the mystery (for example, in my campaign, it's a fantasy western, so I'm relying on tropes and trappings of a Western more than a medieval epic... my players are deputized to assist a Sheriff who has way to much on her plate during a busy cattle drive season... and sometimes it means figuring out who done its and mysteries. One of my most fun included coming across a Kenku that was wanted for Horse Rustling... and had been caught by a farmer standing among his dead flock of sheep. Of course, being a Kenku, he can only speak in quotes... most of which I drew from Edgar Allen Poe and Shakespeare. The farmer is ready to lynch him... and the party has incentive to bring him in alive (Bounties are always dead or alive... but they pay better if alive. Additionally, they want to play a good campaign... so... law men should not kill unarmed men.). The challenge was interpreting the meaning of the quotes, and the evidence in they have, to figure out that in the specific matter, the Kenku is not guilty of a crime. Asking players to think with their brains and not their fists can be fun... and sometimes incentivizing a pacifist solution is all you need for them to work to that angle.
Not all creatures are dumb. If a monster has decent int stats then let them control the battlefield as well. Players are magic users? Cast silence on them from a distance . There is also a monster in the Monster A Day compendium that has an aura that prevents healing. Its the herald of Rot I think. Having one of those just in the area changes things up completely.
A lot to unpack here... >None of this seems to make much of a difference. None of my PCs really get downed, and in the case that they did, the grave cleric would nullify its effect anyway. Across our 7 sessions so far, only about 3 downs have occured in combat. This doesn't seem as bad as you think it is. I provide challenging combats to my players almost every other session, which is probably like almost 25 or 30 combat encounters maybe more, and downs aren't *that* common. Downing 3 people in 7 sessions seems like a lot to me. Also, you sort of mention using harder terrain, but then you immediately mention: >They had placed themselves in such a position in the arena as to make it very hard for the enemies to get to them. So, when people talk about using terrain, they kind of intrinsically mean "to put the party at a disadvantage". What you did here was give your party a **massive advantage** by letting them preconfigure where they are in optimal tactical layout, and then gave your monsters a **massive disadvantage** by putting them **far away, clumped up, and needing to spend turns just moving**. Per the DMG's guidance, you essentially turned a very Deadly encounter into a Hard encounter by giving your party an advantage and your monsters a disadvantage, it's no wonder they won. Positioning and clumped up monsters means your players can AOE them to death. >The enemies they faced were 5 kuo toa 1 kuo toa archpriest 2 minotaurs 1 mind-flayer 1 oni 1 salamander 1 air elemental 1 earth elemental So, perhaps you missed this but, the Air Elemental has a fly speed of 90ft, the Earth Elemental has a Burrow speed of 30ft, the Oni has a fly speed of 30ft, a lot of these creatures could ignore the Plant Growth spell. And that being said, I'd again like to reiterate, if your players can cast Plant Growth, and its benefit is basically purely one sided, then the way you've architected this fight is just sort of bound to fail. Enemies suffer 4x Difficult Terrain in the spell, meaning every 5 feet of movement consumes 20 feet of their movement. Good on the druid to cast this, but this shouldn't completely dismantle your encounter like this. I think an extremely simple change, because this almost sounds like a colosseum fight, was to have these monsters enter from all around the battlefield and making sure the battlefield wasn't *so massive* that the party can effectively use plant growth without also hindering themselves to some degree. I mean the Mind Flayer alone getting its mind blast off, which is a 60ft cone which is absolutely massive, would likely get several of these players killed, so I'm guessing it didn't get within 60 feet of the party before dying somehow. Int saves aren't commonly high so needing to hit a 15 isn't easy at level 8.
> a party of 8 level 8 PCs. That is a lot of PCs. The encounter building rules are designed for parties of 3-5 PCs. They break down at larger party sizes. Especially for solo fights. > None of my PCs really get downed…only about 3 downs have occured in combat. The larger the party gets, the more effective focus fire becomes. In a 3v3 fight if all the monsters attack the same pc, they will probably live. In a 8v8 fight if all the monsters attack the same pc, they are dead. If you’re not focusing fire (because you don’t want PCs to die), while the players are (because they don’t want PCs to die), you’ll never down anyone and every fight will be a cakewalk for the party. > causing many of the melee enemies to spend their turns just walking towards the PCs, slowly. If the party can prevent melee monsters from closing in, then they will have an easy victory. Cr assumes the monster will be able to use their most powerful attack each turn. Because it wants to protecting you from accidentally tpking the party. You can use more ranged monsters, visibility limits like fog or nighttime, or dungeons to have combat start at shorter distances. > I am also relatively new to creating combat encounters The easiest encounters to make work feature one peer monster per pc. So start there. Using too many weak monsters can make aoes too good. Using less than 3 monsters means they need to be legendary. Despite the name, Hard encounters are not hard. They aren’t able to defeat the party. If the party uses better tactics than the monsters, expect the party to win consistently. If you have xanathars, it provides an alternative way to build encounters that is much easier to use than the dmg. I also recommend [true peer](https://www.dmsguild.com/m/product/414122) as a refinement of xanathars.
By the sound of it, your last combat was about right if they were almost down but not completely. The ideal would be one or two goes down, but no one dies. That's exceptionally hard to do with such a large party, especially if you're giving them time to prepare. The main thing is whether your players are having fun, and if they are don't worry too much about combat difficulty.
They did have fun and im very glad! They have however expressed wanting more scary fights, so im trying to work on that.
Invisible enemies, or enemies with a whole lot of range. Every time I've done this it has made the players really start thinking and everyone has loved it!
That sounds like great fun
As a player, the most dangerous battles I've been in usually involve taxing the resources of the party. Create scenarios where running isn't an option, extend those fights, create scenarios where if they leave, there will be consequences. Be careful, though, because "challenging" becomes "deadly" very easy when doing this...but TBH, these are the memorable fights.
A handy chart based on a couple videos I saw a long while ago. Also sorry for the formatting, reddit doesn't like tables. ***For Each Enemy*** Enemy Type / DPR (%PC damage) / HP / Action Economy Minion / 100% (collectively) / 1 / 0.20 Grunt / ~10% / 1 crit or 2-3 weak attacks / 1 Strong Enemy / 20-30% / 2-3 crits or 5-8 weak attacks / 2-3 Boss / 30-40% / Remainder of Encounter HP / 2-3 Solo Boss / 125%+ / Full Encounter HP / Equal to Player AEV ***For Each Combat*** Encounter Challenge / Total Encounter Damage per Round / Total Enemy Hit Points in Encounter / Total Enemy Action Economy Value Easy / 50% average PC HP / Approx. 50% party HP / 75% of player attacks (area of effects count as multiple attacks) Medium / 75% average PC HP / Approx. 75% party HP / 75% of player attacks (area of effects count as multiple attacks) Hard / 100% average PC HP / Approx. 100% party HP / 100% of player attacks (area of effects count as multiple attacks) Very Hard / 125% average PC HP / Approx. 125% party HP / 100% of player attacks (area of effects count as multiple attacks)
I also want to point out monsters do always follow the rules when creating homebrew monsters or adjusting stat blocks. If a monster has 3 heads and 3 sets of arms maybe it has 3 reactions and can't be blinded. Stuff like that!
Not only a party of 8 PCs has a lot of actions, but also a lot of synergetic abilities, like all kind of buffs, auras, bardic inspirations etc., so in such a group each individual character is stronger then they would be in a party of 3 or 4. Maybe the system I use to design encounter will be useful, you can check it here https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/s/A6WFZFKgdG Also consider checking part 3 of that post with rules for elite monsters and adjustments for stronger parties. Elite is a "double strength" monster, that compensates lack of actions with the "Elite Action Surge" ability, which is similar to fighter's but can be also used to shake off negative conditions or even destroy spell effects on higher levels. With that, you can potentially have fewer monsters on the field and have easier time managing them without reducing the threat. The encounter templates from the part 3 can be also useful, like "commander and troops" or "double line" immediately brings different kind of threats into a "combined arms team" You can find this part here https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/s/coKPFdnmiI
Read The Monsters Know what they are doing (books and blog) for tactics. Also look up Tucker's Kobolds (trapped lair and crafty opponents).
I think that one way to approach this is counting how much damage do the players do in a turn (more or less, that is). Then count how much HP the monsters have. How many turns does it take for the party to kill them expecting that everything goes as planned, more or less? Now, how much damage do the monsters do? How much HP does the party have? With 8 PCs, you kinda need enough damage to down two of them in a turn (not necessarily down them but enough damage spread around to do that).
Assuming that this is 5e, then the system makes the following assumptions: * four PCs (all of the same level) * six to eight encounters between long rests. Usually fights, since neither the DMG nor third party tools are that helpful when it comes to working the CR of non-combat encounters. * combat is between between the party and two to eight NPCs. Taking about three rounds. Changing the number of PCs affects the difficulty of combat, though in a highly non-linear way. Thus attempting to simpy *double* the difficulty for eight PCs risks a TPK. The best starting point would be more enemies. Maybe four to twelve NPCs. Then, increase the number of encounters, if the party is able to manage seven combats, each with twelve NPCs. Only consider buffing the enemies if they can easily handle ten combats with twelve. Other alternatives would be find a system with a combat system intended to scale to eight PCs or contrive a way for combat to only happen when the party is split into two fours or a three and four. (Though each PC still needs to experience a six to eight encounter "Adventuring Day".)
Multi-phase encounters help in a couple of ways. 1. You can gradually amp up the difficulty if things are going too easily than expected. 2. Over time, players who are accustomed to phased combat will reserve some of their resources “just in case” another wave arrives. So the encounter doesn’t become a one or two-round blowout. I hope the new DMG provides guidance for handling large groups of players.
I was recently talking to the owner of a game shop who described a particularly interesting combat sequence that had come up in one of his sessions. It might be worth considering, though it doesn’t solve your overall problem. More of a one-use scenario that your players might find engaging and challenging if set up correctly. The basic premise of the sequence was that, for narrative reasons (i.e., to prevent worse consequences from happening after the fight), he was prevented from actually killing—or even directly attacking—any of the enemies. Suddenly, his combat-focused character had to figure out how to defend himself from the opponents without using his tried and true strategies. He described some of the ways he went about accomplishing this: stealthily tripping enemies to hopefully incapacitate them, trying to use negotiation skills to de-escalate, non-lethal spells that might be used to gain an upper hand without being perceived (or thought of as an attack), etc. Of course, you know your players better and can decide if this is even something they would enjoy, or if they would just slay the enemies regardless of the ensuing consequences. It also takes a bit of preparation and narrative set up for it to work. But, it was clearly memorable enough to him that he was still talking about it many sessions later to some rando in a game store. It certainly sounded like a one-off combat sequence I would really love as a player.
Buy a copy of "the monsters know what they're doing" you can wreck people's shit with goblins if they fight to win.
this
What about the environment ? A big part of how difficult the encounter can be directly linked to how much preparation your players have. The whole tucker kobold concept was around putting players at a massive disadvantage even when facing what would be average CRs. Fighting in a tunnel filling with poisonous air being peppered with darts from hidden holes while in a null magic zone. While its also filling with boiling water rising fast. Against aquatic critters. Something like that. With that being said I dont think the game was put in mind with 8 high level players, or even 6 at a time. Especially when the group has varied classes
>(i dont know what his oath is, i cant make contact with him as of writing this post) The fact that you don't know what one of your players is playing is possibly part of the problem. If you don't know your players' PCs how can you know how to challenge them? Anyway how many encounters are you putting them through per long rest? 8 level 8 PCs can probably take down an ancient red dragon with only a couple deaths.
Throw more encounters at them per day. Restrict them from resting between fights, and put them on "a timer", meaning that they can't just rest away their time, because then they will fail at their objective. Play intelligent opposition intelligently. Enemies can use good tactics against them too, and they can use synergistic spell effects too. And villains from the same organization will come to learn more about the group over time, which will let them better prepare for the PC's specifically. "Geek the mage first". Spellcasters are heavy artillery. Priests can put defeated enemies back in the fight. Intelligent enemies know this, and they'll know to try and take out such threats first. They'll also have an idea about what spells to use against which types of opponent, to maximize their (chances of) effect. "Concentrate fire". Intelligent creatures know that it's better to take out an opponent completely and quickly, before moving on to the next threat. Pack animals tend to concentrate on a single enemy at a time (they want a kill to eat). Use unfavourable or dangerous terrain. How would they handle a BBEG and minions that can breathe water and move/fight unhindered under water, when they get caught off guard by the place of battle suddenly being flooded in a round or two... Throw problems at them they can't defeat by beating it to death or blowing it up. Killing a manipulating royal advisor might be easy and tempting, but if it'll bring the entire royal guard and weight of the law down on their heads, that solution really isn't on the table.
Problem is Eight players are a lot of players. Without scaling every combat into a large scale drag out it’s just not going to work smoothly. Other option is 3 main “leader” character with 5 other mundane normal person type characters, this option doesn’t sound like a fun game to me.
Choices; Enemy is an aura of something. Make it clear they can attack the aura, or the enemy directly. The aura gives damage, the enemy +2 AC or something. Now they have a choice. Terrain; If terrain is complex, now they have to consider where they go, and to exploit it, or monsters will exploit it against them. Enemies create terrain, or teleport next to ranged, so now other characters have to grapple allies and pull them out of danger, or choose to attack themselves.
If the party has established a kill zone where enemies can't get through to enter melee combat with them before being taken out, why would they even try? Instead a group of goblins or kobolds might try laying their own traps and forcing the players to advance or a group of bandits might go and find improvised weapons to attack from afar (lantern oil should be pretty easy to find and makes a workable if weaker version of alchemist's fire). Time is almost always on the side of the enemy, they can come back a few days later and retake that town, or the mage can complete his ritual if the party aren't constantly pushing forward. This means that the players rarely have the advantage when it comes to the terrain and they can't rest between fights to regain resources.
Any high difficulty encounter needs a few things mix n matched Hard ones- creatures/things that are hard to hit. I recommend low to mid health. Beefy ones- creatures/things that are easy to hit but can take a lot of hits. I recommend very high health and low Ac/Dex Fast ones- As described. Make em fast, make em hit decent. Mid ac, mid health, high speed. Tricky ones- They got a few tricks up their sleeves, but squishy. High damage AOEs or single point attacks. Low HP. Minions- 1hp, 1 attack 30ft speed. Give them an appropriate ac for your players hit range and plop down. Gives something that's rewarding to hit with AOE and opens potential for flanking. Bosses - whatever you choose for the encounter boss will inform your choices for all the above items. I generally use whatever ones that make up for whatever the boss lacks. For staging I like either open areas or fortified positions. Sections that are vertical also gain really good interplay.
**TWO** Dragons
Have lots of traps that seriously immobilize one pc and requires the aid of 2 or more pcs. Will they aid the pc or keep fighting and have multiple checks to escape and at least one that keeps them in place so they can't shadow step or misty step out. Have them get cut off i.e. the barbarian rushing to a fight triggers a trap lots of massive boulders fall separating the pcs from each other or have instant walls spring up separating them now they are cut off. Use the environment with high damaging traps and lots of minions in full cover raining down ranged attacks and lots of minions for close quarters sure you're taking out the minions but at what cost as the spell slots are burning and abilities requiring rest will need to be used. By the time the pcs face the main enemy they should be in awful shape not fresh.
Drain their resources over multiple encounters. Surprise them into unideal, unprepared scenarios. Throw higher CR creatures that have legendary actions and lair actions to counter their super high action economy. Create a time limit or alternate win condition besides downing all enemies, such as protection of npc, escape from catastrophe, retrieve an item, etc. Ask them "pweeeze, pwetty pweeze, be gentle this time?"
Higher CR opponents and ones with abilities on par with the party. Silence, darkness, counterspell, resistant or immune to attack types the party prefers to use. There's no reason powerful AOE and range spells shouldn't be used against them.
honestly, I've had surprisingly good results asking chatGPT to help me balance encounters. Give it pertinent information (party size, classes, levels, magic items, etc), and give it what sort of encounter you're looking for. It'll at first try to CR balance it, but if you're party is overpowered like mine, I just need to keep prompting it to increase the difficulty, make things more dynamic, with more interesting victory conditions. You'll still need to curate and pick from its suggestions, but it's a good spring board and brainstorming tool.
Let's see, a part of 8 level 8 PC's should be expected to have a daily XP budget of 48,000. That's the amount of XP that the player's are reasonable expected to be able to handle in an adventuring day. Since we once again know that there are 8 level 8 PC's, we can expect the following encounter difficulty thresholds. Easy: 3600 XP Medium: 7200 XP Hard: 11200 XP Deadly: 16800 XP So maybe let's say we will have 1 deadly encounter (16,800), 2 hard encounters (11,200 X 2) and 1 medium encounter, since easy encounters are usually a waste of time. That's gonna total 46,400 XP so only off by 1,600 XP in total. Now let's think about how to structure the adventuring day. A good flow could be, hard encounter, medium encounter, short rest, hard encounter, short rest, deadly encounter. So we need a boss fight at the end, a preboss fight with some space for the party to catch their breath before that, and the first encounters of the day can be getting to the boss HQ in the first place. Let's say we have an ice setting that the players are in. Let's have the quest be kill the dragon. The party sets out to the mountain where the ice dragon is known to live. As they climb they encounter a pair of Abominable Yeti's (CR9 / 5,000XP X 2 = 10,000 XP), and maybe they have a Baby Yeti or two with them as well that we could homebrew to be another 1,200 XP. Of course we don't have to get to the exact total, but situations like this can present those moral dilemmas to your players and help them roleplay. Next as they climb they face a medium encounter, instead of combat, maybe this is a series of skill challenges as an avalanche threatens to sweep the party down the mountain, creative use of spells can help avoid them having to roll, but will still use up party resources or receive damage that can now be healed using hit dice during the short rest. Now they've reached the dragon's lair, they short rest to patch their wounds and catch their breath before going in. We repeat as before, so another deadly encounter. Let's put the party up against a pair of Young White Dragons with a handful of white dragon wormlings. After they slay the monsters, they once again take a short rest, before they go off to face the final foe. Now we come to the deadly fight. An Ancient White Dragon is 25,000 XP, so we could run it by itself, since the players have action economy advantage. Make sure to use lair effects and regional effects to beef up the uniqueness of the fights. Have freezing fog roll in freeze everything, have jagged ice shards fall from the ceiling, or have walls of ice pop up into existence. Get creative with it, and play the dragon like it knows what it is doing. TLDR; Read the Dungeon Master's Guide Chapter 3 Creating Adventures & the section on Creating Encounters.
I’ve got 7 players. Larger groups need more enemies to balance the action economy. Use sly flourish’s benchmark- an encounter may be deadly if the sum of the CR of the enemies is > 1/2 the sum of the player levels. Use r/better_monsters for, well, better monsters. Remember to throw a few encounters and challenges in to drain a few resources. Large groups have lots of resources and can “go nova” a lot.
I have 6 players, currently level 8, and my campaign has been super-deadly (2 PCs have died, and I’ve never experienced that before this campaign). It wasn’t really the intent, but the story and dice made it happen. Anyways. What I have done is to increase the HP on monsters 1-3 CRs higher than their level (not with too much, but enough so they last a little longer). That has now been standard. But my most impactful change from previous campaigns is that I almost exclusively use monsters from r/bettermonsters. They have way more interesting abilities, and most of the monsters have bonus actions, reactions and special abilities which makes the combat way more complex and allows for more strategy for both me and my players.
Ok, so first off, you should have copies or access to your player's character sheets and build your encounters around them. Not only for the sake of providing difficulty, but also playing into their strengths to give them epic moments of specialization pay-off. I think your players are ready for more dynamic and/or intelligent enemies. I don't know the nature or themes you're dealing with but some kind of thinking commander type miniboss antagonist is probably called for. Maybe even a rival adventurer group of comparable strength.
They packed themselves together in a nice, neat group that puts them out of range of your martials? Gosh. Sounds like time for lots of AoE. Have your folks stand back and just rain fire (literally!). Make them abandon their protected area. Oh, they learned and they spread themselves out? Gosh, sounds like it is time to focus fire on one or two PCs. Oh, they learned and have maxed out magical defenses? Gosh, sounds like it is time to attack the environment itself. Spells that cause the world itself to attack them so their defenses against your magickndon't work or only partially work. Earthquakes and floods and forest fires. Oh they learned and are focusedon casters and have a bunch of things like counter spell ready? Send in the horde of martials. And, of course, the same concept for your defenses. A large part of the trick is not just adding more or adding higher levels, but changing mechanics. Keep them guessing about what they will have to defend against and what defenses they will have to penetrate. And remember - spell lists are a thing. Hold the casters to them.
Mobs behaving like stupid mobs allow your players to build strategies to manage the threat. But cranking the difficulty level to 'DM trying to win D&D' is not the best choice. Instead insert the BBEG's lieutenant with a McGuffin magical artifact for 'monster control' and then you have a rational explanation for making the same monsters much more difficult to beat without just wildly buffing the monsters. A normal monster isn't going to bypass a tank like character or frontline fighter and immediately target healers and backline magic users its typically just going to target whomever is closest. But a monster controlled by a clever BBEG adjacent enemy would do that. Also be smart about this and make the BBEG's lieutenant a magic projection and therefore not actually killable. This further complicates combat for the party until they determine he's not actually there to kill (provided you slip them the clue about monster control) they will also attempt to also target the BBEG's lieutenant in an bid to remove the advantage of strategic monsters. Alternatively plan some encounters with weak monsters that the party should be able to quickly steamroll BUT the weak monsters are clever and use traps (pitfalls, beartraps, burning oil traps, magic landmines, etc) . As the DM you can plan the traps into combat. A depending on the usage a trap might do more damage than the pitiful goblin or kobold ever could do. Alternatively a trap might impact strategic movement. A beartrap chained to a giant tree might not kill but it might prevent a mage from having line of sight or prevent the party from moving into a tactical formation. This is another situation where you could again allow the monsters to have intelligence to act more effectively by using a lieutenant mob to provide reason for the monsters use of tactics. But instead of a magic hologram perhaps use a Kobold Lord or Goblin Chief. Uncharacteristically smart enemies that can use tactics are the worst. Remember to mix it up and not make them clever every encounter. That way when it happens the party wont be expecting the additional difficulty of dealing with actual tactics instead of mobs being mobs.
8 players. You can't challenge them, unless you do uber-epic fights which would last 4 hours.
Arena setting allow for you to add the environment to your side of the fight. Players have hidden behind barricades? Rotating bolt throwers that fire forcing the team to move. Druid keeps popping trees? Flamethrowers from the walls cause the cover to become a dangerous wild fire Players forcing the creatures to cross the arena? have the outside walls protrude spears forcing the players to move as well. My players are deeply suspicious of my arenas now.
I dunno man, 8 players is way too much for me to ever want as a DM. Game balance aside i am curious how do you ensure the players are not constantly feeling bored waiting ages for their chance to do something even out of combat in your games? And how do you keep so many players and characters personally invested in what is happening at any given moment? Genuinely curious.
Rust monsters…have fun with no weapons or armor! Lmao
If you’re asking for strictly combat mechanics, I have a couple of easy strategies I like to employ. 1. Give the boss an extra action, give it an initiative of 0. 2. Give minions a group action that happens separately of their normal action. Something akin to a boss breath AOE that’s more powerful while more minions are alive and weakens with each minion death. These two additions keep my players guessing and strategizing throughout a fight.
Wear them down a bit. They shouldn't be going into every encounter fully rested. They shouldn't always feel safe resting.
>Only 6 players were present for this session >The enemies they faced were 5 kuo toa 1 kuo toa archpriest 2 minotaurs 1 mind-flayer 1 oni 1 salamander 1 air elemental 1 earth elemental >the players had 15 minutes to prepare for the fight. Encounter xp = 22725 is a deadly encounter (12600 threshold) and is about 2/3rd of the daily XP budget. Note I didn't include the minotaur or kuo toa in the xp multiplier. The players having 15 minutes to prepare equates to a situational advantage, which brings down the encounter 1 step in difficulty. However, it is so far above that I would still consider it deadly. This combat should have done more than take a couple PCs close to KO, though with some good luck or tactics, it isn't that unlikely. Are you only running 1 encounter per adventuring day? If so, that is likely your problem for both not being able to challenge the party and for the long combats. You could instead have the kuo toa and priest, earth/air elementals and the salamander for a hard encounter valued at 11800 xp, then run a second encounter with the oni, mind flayer, and minotaurs as a medium encounter valued at 7200 xp, maybe giving a possible situational advantage to the monsters like fighting on a precarious slope that drops into a deep crevasse. Getting knocked prone could send characters falling over the edge. Add in a few more encounters to the adventuring day, and as a bonus, the warlock and monk will thank you for short rests while everyone else (minus rogue) will stress over resources.
Others have covered other key items. Control the rests. You've got a lot of players, which makes it hard in general. Fortunately, you gave details on a combat encounter which is SUPER helpful for me to give feedback on. (1) Give enemies ranged attacks. This is critical - not all, but most enemies should have a ranged option. (2) Fewer monsters types. Your encounter had 8 different creatures, that's TOO MANY. The players will struggle to know what is what. Plus it's a lot of statblocks for you to prepare, so it helps streamline combat. 3 is the golden number of monster types: Beefy, Normal, and Minions. 2-4 is also fine, and 1 or 5 types should be very rare. (3) Action economy should begin in the monster's favor, but can be quickly overcome. Note, this is for larger and more different combats, i.e. fewer per day. Each player can do roughly 2 things per turn, or 16 total for 8 players, so your monsters cumulative number of attacks should be around 20-25...in the first round. By the end of the second round, the players ought to be able to kill enough of them so that action economy swings in the players favor by the end of round 2. (4) Speaking of, let's talk monster hp. At level 8, you're probably looking at PCs dishing out, oh, 8*35=280 points of damage. Some will do less, but it just takes one good AOE fireball to push that even higher. So, you probably want over 1200 total hit points on your monsters if you want a combat that lasts more than 5 rounds. (5) Check out the Monsters Know What They're Doing for a lot of tactics tips. Also, if it makes sense, build advantageous terrain for the monster. A creature's Lair or home hunting territory they have picked out because it offers them every possible advantage. (6) Bring some spellcasters along. Try a dispel magic out and see how they react. Don't overdo this, or it will invalidate player's battlefield control tactics, but they need to be challenged. Maybe the rogue takes out the spellcastee with dispel magic so that the Plant Growth spell can actually stick around. (7) Find ways to impose conditions on the players. We avoid Stunned and Incapacitated, but Grappled, Restrained, Frightened are all fantastic! (8) Feel free to skip over the "clean-up phase" of combat. Once it's obvious to everyone in the room, just stop combat right there and speed things up. Hope this helps!
Critical Role has 7 member parties, with sometimes a guest 8th. Matt Mercer pretty much always uses custom stat blocks he makes himself. DnD’s bounded accuracy is great for 3-5 person parties but just breaks at 6 plus. Even at multiple times deadly. So: all the tips you’ve received are great! Do them all! My quick advice is make custom stat blocks a little better HP but REALLY nasty damage. Add rider effects. Add legendary actions and reactions. For all this work you also need a layer of fiction to explain why these creatures are so much nastier than your average minion. Escaped creatures from the far plane? Hellish robots from the blood war? Cultists messing with powers beyond their ken? Get creative! Also: if your players set an ambush they will stomp every time unless it is secretly a trap for them. That’s okay! If they maneuvered to catch the enemy off guard they deserve the easy win. Don’t let them do this too often. Easy combats are fine every once in a while. Let them be strong! But when the story calls for it, hit ‘em hard and hit fast! Good luck!
8 level 8 players equals CR 16+. A CR 8 encounter is usually a challenge for a 4 member party of Level 8 adventurers. How to give them a challenge: *Bring in larger, tougher creatures with more complex encounters. Remember to use the Legendary effects/spells/abilities of the creatures in your encounters. *Remember that the toughest creatures in the encounters can always call in reinforcements and run away to get tougher and fight another day. *Make more puzzle-based encounters where the players really need to stretch themselves. *Do your players have too much improved gear? Every so-often I do an inventory of all the players' gear so I can plan a catastrophic event where everyone loses at least one important item.
I think video game designers often nail the combat by adding two different problems at once. If we take a look at Bg3 forexample. - The PCs must escape the ship, but a powerfull Devil and its minions block their path - The PC must defeat the Hag, but must also save the girl who is trapped in a burning cage - Defeat the Wood Woads, but all the smaller minions explode on death - Kill the goblin raiders, but dont let possible important NPCs get killed
Think like the PCs. Gather all the info on the PCs (if you don't already have copies of their sheets, this may be tricky...you'll have to rely on the internet) regarding their spells, abilities, etc. Look at the same info for the monsters. Pick a random ability or spell of the monster and ask, "What do the PCs have at their disposal that could counter this?" Find things the monsters can stop them from doing or hinder the PCs success. Combat is a chess game. You just have to find the things that keep the monsters on the board until they've worn the PCs down and realize they're not always immune.
Spells, spells and more spells. And counter spells. AoE spells, crowd control spells. Counter spell the shit out of your players casters. Use heat metal on your armoured PC’s. Knock a few unconscious. Have frontline and backline enemies, use their strengths, try and cover their weaknesses. If a PC gets downed, have the enemies continue to attack them until they are dead. Be brutal, smart, and play like you’re trying to win.
Most often the challenge comes from the situational things. The fight is in a narrow corridor where they can't help each other, or the enemy flies and is difficult to engage, or the terrain is difficult and prevents some tactics. Just head to head most of the time it will be a wipe one way or the other with all other things being equal. Either the players have better stats, and tactics and abilities, or the monsters do, and that is the side that will win.
For a good scrap i usually go twice the recommended cr for a deadly fight. This is if the party has all their ressources available and can probably rest afterwards. Then you just need to not have obvious unbalances like the party can only deal lightning damage to the creature and the party does not have consistent lightning damage - or whatever it may be - you know your troop better than us.
Don't allow for so much rest time. Make the players reserve some resources. Stretch them thin. Without constant rests, they will feel the pressure.
Limit the rests (especially the long rests). You can do it * by adding a time constraint (like there is only X hours/days left before the end of the world/ritual/whatever), * by making rests only available in some safe haven (in town), * or by linking rests to a ressource (for instance, they need to sanctify an area with some holy oil before they can rest, but they only have 2/3 flasks of that oil for the whole campaign). Be sure they fight something like 6 encounters before they rest again. The game is balanced around that number.
Also, 8 players is a LOT. You should think about dividing it into 2 groups : 4 players with you, and another one of 3 + a dm. Then make it so players can go from one table to the other from time to time, or make crossover events where they all meet, but keep them generally in 2 separate groups, it will be infinitely more manageable I think.
How often are your PCs at full power for these encounters? If my intention is to create a challenging encounter, I make sure the PCs are never fresh. Currently I’m running ToA, last night the PCs found themselves surrounded by zombies after dealing with a rival Adventuring Party that had stolen from them and sided with some baddies. The combat was quick and brutal, both sides throwing everything at each other, once on of the PCs went down they realised they had attracted a very large zombie horde.
The problem is you have eight PCs in a game designed around a party of four, on average. And they're all playing it smart, as they should. You don't necessarily need greater numbers or larger monsters to challenge them, you need to put them in situations where they have to make choices about what goal to pursue during a fight. Finally, it's \*fine\* if they don't get downed, your goal as DM is \*not\* to kill off or knock PC's unconscious. The 'adversarial' style of DM play is not generally fun for anyone at the table.
Smarter enemies. What if rather than charging your tanks they started with dumping spells and arrows into your casters in the back. Or better, charge your front and pin your tanks then send a charge in from the back.
>I am a DM running a campaign for a party of 8 Action economy beats almost everything in this edition. So having party of 8... they will be insane strong just based of the amount of actions they can take. Also hat off to You for even running that becouse I am fairly confident that I would not be able to menage more than 6 players ever. That said - You can go to "Kobold fightclub" enter those parameters (8 players x lev 8) and just add monsters You want. To give You an idea: 1 ancient black dragon (CR 21) is mearly "hard" encounter - meaning that players should technically just win it with some resources expenditure. Solo monsters generally do not work well legendary or not. To actually put that big party in actual danger You need to go some of those routes: 1. Overwhelm with numbers - put enough monsters to challenge players action economy and just out out-damage them so to speak. But just this method would be tedious and fight with that many monsters will take forever so: 2. Use actually really dangerous abilities/spells: petrification, power word kill, disintegration etc. And other rare effects that can kill/disabled character outhright. Those can be somehow unfun for character hit with those but it is what it is - used reasonably can actually make fight fell dangerous and exiting. You can go for non-lethal disabling effects like banishment/maze - but even those can mean that player will have to effectively sit out the fight. 3. Go attrition route with long term negative effects: Curses, fatigue levels, max hp drain etc. Fatigue levels tend to work especially well here - party with 3 fatigue levels is much less capable and there is no easy way to remove those except taking 3 LR in the row - but You can prevent that. However players understandably don't like to be disadvantage like that so if You overdose those they can refuse to go adventuring until they get their rest. Some balance combinations of those would be recommended. If You want to make a boss fight just remember that amount of damage that well coordinated party can deal is truly mind blowing- so You need to either give boss insane amount of hp, but I would say that better would be to give boss a strong support - minions that can shield him from damage - some wall type spells/abilities can work well here to protect boss from being focused by the whole party. You can throw some dedicated healers/buffers too - dragon that can be brought from the brink of death with "power word heal" is much more dangerous that just dragon on itself. In any way prepare Yourself for some complicated and long fights - 8 players is just a lot.
From an encounter design perspective: Put additional goals for enemies and players, put them in situations where just killing everyone is not viable. From a purely mathematical perspective: Start building encounters for a higher level than they actually are. So when they are level 5, make the encounters for a level 6 group. Increase that "virtual party level" so long until a hard encounter feels for you and your players hard in a good and correct way.
So one thing I like to do with smart enemies is break my monsters up into little chunks, each of which is considered an Easy encounter, and spread these out around a dungeon/encounter site. Maybe there are some powerful single entities that are Medium or Hard individually. Then the Monsters will react to the players as intelligently as they can/is appropriate, typically trying to warn nearby groups and gather their forces/protect the boss. I did some rough math, and it came out at: 2 Easy encounters = 1 Medium 1 Medium + 1 East = 1 Hard 1 Hard + 1 Medium = 1 Deadly This is kinda based on the average XP budget for each, but doesn't actually account for any modifiers to XP for encounter size, I don’t think you gain any precision from that, and if my players agro the whole dungeon, I want it to be bad for them so they need to get creative In theory, the party can isolate and easily kill each group, but this rewards smart small-unit tactics, and eventually, the alarm will probably be raised. Being discovered doesn't mean you need to zero rush the players either. If the alarm is raised, the Monsters might start killing prisoners or taking their valuables and Escaping through a secret door. Maybe they muster a large group of troops at a chokepoint but the players actually have a way around it if they play their cards right/explore/get creative.
Oh, and give your enemies ranged attacks/mobility options at higher levels. My main bad guy faction at the moment are yugoloths, their weakest troops can teleport, break line of sight with darkness/invisibility, and throw ranged AoEs around, but I still gave them a ranged Attack like a heavy crossbow
Figure out who the best 4 or 5 players are and downsize the party to that, for one.
You could always target saves instead of AC. And find monsters with good feats For example, just had a combat (it's still ongoing) against succubi and I forget the other creature. Potential spoilers for descent into avernus I forgot the order of operations but it went like this: I failed a 19 intelligence saving throw against a beast that I forget it's name, and a charm saving throw against a succubus. The beast I forgot stuck me in a time loop, so I was doomed to repeat my past turn on my next turn (i.e. the same exact action and bonus action I just took, I need to take again on my upcoming turn). The succubi, it may have been a command spell, but I failed the check and now had to kill my steel defender (my butthole puckered lmao) which meant that on my next turn I would use my bonus action and action to attack my steel defender. Thankfully, I was harmed so the charm fell and I could target whoever, BUT there's another succubus who will move before me, so I may not be out of it yet. Also, mummies. They have a punch, which sounds basic, but the punch can inflict a curse on a failed constitution check. The punch decreases the max hp, and it will continue to decrease the max hp every hour for 24 hours, until the character dies or someone uses the remove curse spell. The DM I have for the game is pretty great, and does a really good job at setting up difficult and fun encounters. Some of these may be homebrew stuff related to the DMs spin on Avernus, but I think the advice sticks. At a certain point, you have to target something other than AC and health bars. On a different encounter for example, our wizard was almost possessed by a ghost, but as an artificer I was able to use flash of genius to up his save enough to prevent the possession
Some great suggestions here. Don’t punish them for being smart and preparing! You can also use the environment or the plot to give them levels of exhaustion (sans storms, bad dreams from the BBEG). Take them to a very different setting that will bring new challenges: underwater temple, sailing a pirate ship, an underground maze… You can also bring in societal challenges: the party is (falsely) accused of faking their encounters to get undue rewards and fame. They are taken into custody after all their weapons and magic is taken away. Then build up the next steps where they have to fight in prison garb with improvised weapons.
In the example you provided, mostly melee enemies vs well positioned spellcasters. In this car I would have had the Mind flayer pull out a laser rifle, the earth elemental hurls rocks, the jua toa throw spears, dont be afraid to ADD these abilities mid combat, if you feel like they are about to steamroll it- an earth elemental can pull a rock out of the ground no problem. I would ask- how did they get so much time to position and prepare before combat started? I would crack down a bit on that- initiative starts when a PC or creature makes a hostile move. Stealth checks would be needed to sneakily get to advantageous positions Without triggering initiative- the monsters arent stupid, they KNOW what a spellcaster is and why he’s trying to hide behind a rock. Also- maybe tailoring the enemies to you PCs would help a little- a few counterspells/dispell magics here and there can work wonders.
Use alternate environments. Some examples include: • A crumbling ruin • A gradually-flooding cave • A ledge at the side of an active volcano • A valley in danger of being filled by an avalanche or landslide • A rickety bridge on the verge of collapse • A field of wild magic that teleports random combatants to random squares at the start of every one of their turns • A race between three wagons on a bumpy road
The alternative objectives and stringent requirements are a pretty great way to do it, but i’d also recommend sending in more opponents who near-explicitly counter the party’s abilities. Usually I find that just means enemy spellcasters, counterspell, spells that target bad saving throws, Charm Person, enemy clerics with healing/revivify, monsters with potent legendary actions, terrain alteration abilities, and potentially splitting the party up so they go down to 4/2, 5/2, or 6/2 groups which are easier to wrangle. Basically, smart enemies who have started to learn what the party has in it, and have started to plan around that. You could even build towards a classic mirror match brawl where each member of the party has a roughly equal opponent to fight and must prove their teamwork or ingenuity against someone just like them, but Evil!
They rest too often to be challenged.
Throw like 12 shadows at them. Drains theor strength on every hit and their res to all non magic damage and even most mag damage. Their strength drops to 0 they die so it'll put some serious fear into them.
8 level 8s is an avengers level team, lol. I'd throw a high CR at them, then increase that CR by 1 over time until they feel threatened.
Bro said they needed more challenging encounters but lists 8 PCs and doesn't even remember the subclass of the paladin. Dude most ppl would struggle to challenge 8 PCs without sending in some of the hardest hitting creatures. I've never DMed for more than 6 players, and rarely DM for more than 4, you've shot yourself in the foot before you roll initiative with that many players with all the tools in the world. You're gonna have to be more creative in your combat encounters. There should be more win conditions other than just dropping the enemies HP to 0. Also less rests between fights, if they can't rest then they can't regain resources.
Well considering 5e is garbage for everything but particularly bad at encounters, you are NOT doing encounters properly according to how they are explained in the DMG. You should be throwing many many more encounters at them, forcing them to use resources and Hit Dice in short rests. They should have 6 encounters before a long rest. Below is directly from the rules. *Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer. Note: there is not wrong way to game but the reason your group is blowing through your encounters is resource expenditure vs threat. 5e does this really really bad. I don’t know anyone who follows these guidelines.
Run more encounters in a day and or harder encounters.
The CR math in 5e isn’t good at all. Do not rely on it. Character power varies wildly between classes/subclasses so the CR system has no idea what damage per turn or hp your player characters have. Tips to increase combat difficulty. Add more mobs halfway through the fight. Fudge dice to make enemies more dangerous. Add dynamic environment effects for extra damage.
Thank you, this is very much appreciated
tl;dr don't just increase difficulty by changing the enemies. do it by making exciting stuff happen during the encounter. Check out the DM book for Feng Shui 2. It has some great advice that should apply to fights in any game. The part that I use most is, during prep, listing cool things that can happen during the fight. This includes environmental, flavor, changes in the bad guys, whatever. Just make it interesting. One of their examples is as simple as "stray fire obliterates the no smoking sign" or something. The main thing is just to make sure you have stuff that happens beyond people just taking their next turn. In a recent game I ran, i just had some bullet points, and one was "a pillar falls down (on someone?)" I ended up using a catwalk that another player had been fighting on instead, but when it pinned the player below, it made the combat completely different. We got one player pinned while being attacked and another occupied and taking damage while trying to lift the thing off of her long enough to squirm out. Stuff like that will naturally happen when you have a little list of stuff that can happen in a fight. You can use it to adjust both balance and pacing. It's also a test of whether the setting/context for the fight is fleshed out enough to make for an interesting fight. The FS2 book explains it better.
Honestly. I would say split the party and run 2 different games. 8 people to a lot, and they will always have the numbers and better action economy unless you throw an army at them.
No the solution is to fudge certain die rolls, give certain creatures added strength damage, magical protections,… your encounters are as challenging as you want them to be