The Dungeon Master Workshop Advice for new DM's continued - Creating Encounters

If the three pillars of play were to be ranked by a group of one thousand players, I expect (if not put good money on) the fact that out of, exploration, social and combat encounters, combat is the one that players most enjoy.

Which is weird to me.

Social encounters allow the players to be creative with their roleplaying, conjuring ideas out of thin air, to allow them to advance with the story. Maybe with a few rolls, but the main thing most DM's are looking for is the roleplaying of the PC's to shine through in these moments. Equally, in exploration-based encounters, you are relying on your improvisation with your skills to try and twist the odds in your favor, you use the help action, you insist that as a wizard who has read a cornucopia of books, you should know how this trap works and beg for the chance to try to disarm it when the rogue has rolled two natural ones, and the party is ALWAYS stealthed .....even if it's for no apparent reason.

Combat on the other hand, almost seems to take this creative freedom away, it restricts you to the actions available to you for a  6 six second round, and while bold moves are possible and certainly encouraged ( around my table at least) the bold strokes of the players paint brush, seemed to be moved and marred by the direction of the rules. The quandary of hits points, saving throws and damage dice are discussed, and all the while constantly thinking of defensive and offense strategy to deal with the task at hand. This is why I think that combat is the most loved of all the three pillars by the majority of players.

It's here that the game becomes more like a game, you can win and you can lose, you can come out of combat living, or needing to roll a new character, letting the kingdom crumble of saving the day. It's a visible visceral thing, when you fight in combat you risk all the work you have done on your character, all the memories you have forged together and that comes down to just one or two rolls.

So after a couple of people wanted to know how I make my combat encounters, let's answer this together, so we don't have a TPK on session one......unless that's your plan.

How do you determine size/difficulty of engagements? How do you make the enemies use their heads (target weak armored PCs) and not make players feel like the DM is targeting them?

Ok...so let's start with the elephant in the room, and no I don't mean Percy riding on the back of a Wild shaped Keyleth. For many people out there, new to the art of dungeon mastering, you could be fooled into thinking the CR system presented to you in the dungeons masters guide and the monster manual could be the right way to go when creating encounters. I know some DMs use this method of encounter design, however to me the encounters this method creates seem to be either be, entirely underwhelming and usually gets smoked, or it creates encounters that are far too difficult due to the fact that the CR system of labeling creatures in the Monster Manual underestimates powerful abilities that creatures have and their effect on a party .

For example, on page 23 of the Monster Manual, we find the "Banshee". This creature has the "Wail" ability meaning once-per-day it can scream in horrifying pain and if anyone within 30ft can hear it fails a Constitution Saving throw of 13, they drop to 0 hit points. It's a CR 4 creature, there are parties of level 7-9 characters that would struggle against this kind of ability, and one random encounter in a graveyard could lead to a disappointing TPK for your party. But this doesn't just extend to mid-level creatures, let's look right at the lower scale, in the published starter adventure for DnD 5th edition "The Lost Mines of Phandelva"  , the first "Boss" battle that you face, is the leader of the goblin raiders Klarg, a bugbear with two goblin guards and a pet wolf . Bugbears have the "brute" trait attached to them, meaning whenever they roll for the damage they add an addition damage dice to the overall damage, this means that Klarg has the potential of doing anywhere from 4 points of damage to 20 points of damage, not including crits and the sneak attack ability he also has. This Is enough to not only reduce a PC to zero hit point but to also instantly kill them with one strike, granted that regular bugbears can only make one attack per-round, however, this still seems to be far too powerful for a party of 3-4, level 1 adventures to be facing with hit points that could be a max of 16 and a minimum of 6. In defense of Wizards of the coast, because I am aware I may have been ripping into their system for a good 200 words. The CR system does stand up to test in other published material that they have released, such as "Volo's guide to Monsters" in which a CR 11 creature can stand its ground against a party of level 11 characters and create some tension, another book in which this is also true is the book "Tome of beast" by Kobold press , which I would highly recommend to anyone looking for an expand monster choice.

I also have an issue with the number of encounters the DMG seems to recommend per-adventuring day. It recommends somewhere in the region of 6-8 medium to hard encounters per-adventuring day.  Medium encounters are described as "usually having one or two scary moments for the players, but the characters should emerge victorious with no casualties. One or more of them might need to use a healing resource" and a hard encounter is described as an "encounter that could go badly for the adventures. Weaker characters might get taken out in the fight, and there's a slim chance that one or more of the characters might die" This to me seems like far too many of these kinds of encounters for one group to deal with in one adventuring day, this to me would detract far to much from the gravitas that combat, that can be offered as an important storytelling tool within your campaign, I would typically go for a max of 3-4 medium to hard encounters, and maybe even a deadly one.

While I may not agree with the number of encounters that the DMG recommends, or how to come up with the number the of enemies you should use for one encounter and I certainly don't agree with the classification of CR ratings for creatures that you find in the monster manual. I do agree with is the description of what the DMG calls "Easy" "Medium" "Hard" and "Deadly" encounters. You can find the descriptions on page 82 of the DMG but in essence, in an "Easy" encounter the pcs will pretty much always win, "Medium" they should always win but they will get there hearts racing a tad, "Hard" encounters should offer a challenge to your players with one of your weaker players going to zero hit points and "Deadly" encounters should be just that, potentially deadly for at least one or two members. You as a DM  will learn to gauge the power level of your table over time. By starting with what you believe to be an "Easy" encounter, judging how well your players do, by how many hit points they lose, how many times they get hit, how many times your players hit the enemies, the response from your players and how long in rounds it takes to defeat the adversary, you'll start to get an idea of what are good enemies to out against your players. You'll be surprised by the results that you get from this, what you thought would be an "Easy" encounter is actually a "Medium", a "Deadly" encounter could turn out to be a cakewalk and what you really thought was a "Medium" encounter against a large pack of Gnolls against a party of level 5 adventures turns out to be a seriously "Deadly" encounter and lead to the death on a Monk in my party. It was right at the beginning of my DMing carrier, but you learn what is "Deadly" and what is "Easy" fairly quickly.

Now you're probably reading this and going "Jack that's nice advice and all, but there's no actual advice on making an encounter" fine you got me, BUT I was getting to that point.

When creating encounter I tend to lean on the more challenging side of things, I like my party to face difficult challenges in the name of a story. Even if they're not meant to win every combat, I never outright make it impossible, there should always be a chance for them to succeed.

So how do I choose how many enemies I should use? Well, I tend to take a few things into account when I choose the adversary, how many hit points does it have? whats it armor class? , how maneuverable is it? how much damage can it do in comparison to my PC's health? and other such aspects, if you don't like an aspect you can always increase or lower them.  Once you've done some testing and established where your parties power level lies and their abilities, you should be able to think of some suitable encounters that fit your story.

Now to choose the quantity,  I usually start with and an equal amount of adversaries to the size of the party, this means that however many actions my players take there will be an equal number of actions my enemies will have. Then we can increase the number of NPC's to use against the party to increase the difficulty, leading to more situations for the party to try and solve. Don't go crazy with this, however, the addition of too many NPC's can turn a nice easy battle, into a steamrolling slog of a fight that could be the end of one of your player's characters, so beware.

What you could also do at this stage is instead of just increasing or decreasing the number of creatures, is to instead keep an equal number of creatures, but increase the power of one of your creatures, they could be the orc leader, the arch-mage or the head cultist. Doing this, while creating the main focus for fire, allows your other NPC's to apply pressure on your party or even distract your party away from the main threat.

Especially with having a leader figure in mind when creating encounters we can start to play with the idea of your parties adversaries making an intelligent decision about who to target within the party.

A clan of wondering Orges wouldn't have much of a mind to attack the Cleric and spellcasters first and then work their way down to the front line fighters from there. However, it is fair to assume, that an individual with many years of adventures/campaigning underneath their belts would know which members of your party to systematically pick off first. This is also true of Arch-mages and Head Cultists who have enough knowledge to know this , however, the best way I have found to make this seem less like you as the Dungeon Master are purposely picking on the healers and spellcasters of your group (or indeed any for that matter) is to include dialog in combat of the leader individuals openly ordering the attack of certain individual . This informs the party that they are dealing with tactically experienced enemies and it's also ( or should ) justify in the mind of the PC's the tactical concentration of fire towards certain players. As long as the players feel like its the NPC focusing fire and not the DM you should be fine, you'll know they understand when they are attacked by the 3rd NPC in a row and you can hear them whisper under there breath "F^$@ THAT MAKES SENSE BUT WHY!?".

Thanks for reading guys! Please go on to the main blog page and read some more of my articles, you guys have been amazing and I'd love to hear from you on what you think, and if you have a topic you'd like me to write please leave it in the comments section down below. Don't forget to go on to the Cardboard Arcade YouTube channel and watch my show "Fantasy Folder" where I talk about more problems that face us as Dungeons masters.

Thanks for reading guys and until next time.

Bye!