#a barbarians hp is not just health theyre your fun points

[antlereed]

being a barbarian is being reckless by nature!!!! ive been waiting for ashton to nuke himself for ages now

[dndaddyissues]

im new to DMing, and while i seem to have gotten the hang of most things well, im super confused when it comes to running battles (especially when theyre my own monsters) how do i balance a battle? how do i tell how many enemies/how much health per enemy = fair for certain amounts of players? is there a chart or resource somewhere you know of, or is it all intuition? (bonus question: how long should normal and boss encounters last irl time wise?) thanks so much!

thanks for sending me this question! this answer is particularly huge… you have been warned. 

as usual, here’s the tl;dr:

- for an easy to moderate challenge, have the same (or fewer) number of enemies as there are players;

- for an advanced challenge, outnumber the players;

- lower your enemies’ AC to something that your players can hit 60-70% of the time;

- in exchange, buff your enemies’ HP;

- feel free to fudge hit points whenever you want;

- utilize the “minions” mechanic from 4th edition;

- for boss battles, introduce special bonus actions, reactions, and villain actions;

- combat usually lasts 3-4 rounds: plan accordingly;

- ask yourself: why is this combat happening? what narrative/dramatic and character stakes can i introduce?;

- and have fun!

i want to preface my answer by saying that i don’t enjoy easy combat – unless played for laughs/comedy, or used to foreshadow something plotwise (like a goblin scout’s death alerting the goblin horde at large), i hardly ever throw an easy combat encounter at my party.

so, the following advice is given with challenging the players in mind – either moderately, immensely, or impossibly. i guess i’m just a big sucker for jim murphy/matt colville-style DO OR DIE challenges. otherwise, what’s the point?

another preface: this answer is given in the spirit of avoiding the “slog” – the combat encounter where it feels like baddies and PCs are just stepping up to the plate, whacking at each other, and stepping back down. that’s boring. and boring combat is the worst. sometimes it’s unavoidable – we all have our off days, nothing wrong about that – but the less that it happens, the more fun that everyone has! right?

now, on to the answer itself!

first of all, i’ve already written an answer to an ask a little while back about combat that might be useful to you. click here to read about how to make more action-oriented monsters, especially for boss battles and random encounters that you want to feel significant and deadly.

second of all, here’s the 5e CR encounter calculator i used to use all the time. it’s extremely intuitive and has toggles for number of players, level of players, monster CR/EXP, and how difficult encounters would be rated (easy, medium, hard, deadly). 

third of all, i never use that calculator anymore.

over the course of the 2.5 years i’ve spent DMing 5th edition, there are three main things i’ve learned that can drastically increase, or decrease, the difficulty of a combat encounter. they are: # of baddies, armor class, and # of hit points.

regarding # of baddies. due to how the action economy in 5e plays out, the more creatures there are on either side of a combat, the bigger the advantage that side has. it’s just kind of how it works. so, an easy way to bump up the difficulty: throw more monsters at the players than there are players.

the one soft exception is boss battles. personally, i fucking LOVE having just ONE, super badass, super hard to kill, hardcore boss that the party gets to face down during crucial turning points in the campaign. it makes me feel like i’m running fucking Dracula in Netflix’s Castlevania against some lovable and deadly dumbasses. it’s great. it’s fun. it’s thrilling. to make bosses as challenging (and therefore rewarding) as possible, i highly recommend reading the ask i linked earlier in this reply. (click here for the link again.)

now, i say it’s a soft exception because i like giving my bosses minions. i basically utilize the 4th edition (i think?) “minion” mechanic where the AC, bonus to hit, and damage of all minion creatures are the same as regular versions of the creature. the only difference is, they have 1 HP. 

this can give the PCs the awesome feeling of wading through waves and waves of minions – say, dozens of zombies, as an evil lich cackles upon their raised stone dais 80 feet away. i don’t utilize this too often because then it can feel tiring to the party. but done sparingly, and with narrative stakes, it can be quite thrilling! (that maxim is also true for basically any kind of combat encounter in D&D.)

regarding armor class. obviously, the higher the armor class, the harder the challenge. if you can’t hit the damn thing obviously you can’t kill it. i personally like to pitch the AC of my enemies a liiittle bit lower, to increase my PCs’ probability of hitting. the exact number of the armor class will depend on your players’ level.

as a super general guide for players at level 3, 10-13 is easy, 14-15 is moderate, 16-17 is challenging (heavily favoring 17), and 18+ is very challenging/almost impossible. 

just so you know, i generally set my enemies’ ACs for a level 3 party to be 13 for less important creatures, and 14 for more important creatures. i’d probably set the AC to be 15 or 16 for a mini-boss, and 16 or 17 (if i’m feeling cruel lol) for a boss.

obviously, this scales as your party levels up, finds magical items, and gains special features and boons. i would scale the difficulty by 1 when they hit level 4 and get an ability score improvement, and then by 1 every 2 levels or so.

in other words, at level 4, i’d consider an AC of 11-14 to be easy, 15-16 as moderate, 17-18 as challenging (heavily favoring 18), and 19+ as very challenging/almost impossible. and by the time your party is levels 12-16, AC can often feel like it doesn’t freaking matter anymore because they’ll be able to hit, like, fucking everything. anyway.

there’s some nitty gritty mathematics about this if you like to get granular. this is a good video about dice math, armor class, and calculating advantage mathematically if that sort of thing interests you.

regarding # of hit points. honestly, i fudge this most times. because i like to scale my AC on the lower end, in exchange, i make my creatures fucking FAT. like, i’ll look at their stat block in the monster manual, and add 30-50% to what they already have. sometimes i’ll straight up double or even triple it.

for example, the spectator normally has 39 hit points, but i gave my spectator ~100, because it was a miniboss. i did, however, keep its armor class at 14 because that meant my players, at 3rd level, would be able to hit it 60-70% of the time. this strategy of mine tends to work out, because my players are usually able to dish out a LOT of damage per round. (we have a barb, a fighter, and a warlock in the party lol.)

something i did in the spectator fight, that i wish i didn’t do, was stay faithful to the number of hit points it had. the barbarian ended up killing it with a rather anticlimactic attack. i know for certain that my warlock, which was next in the initiative order, had this SUPER cool and character-relevant attack planned. what i would do differently, is keep the spectator alive just long enough for my warlock to do their cool fucking move, and have that move kill the monster.

and now for the big takeaway. combat, for me, is all about giving my players a chance to shine, be badass, utilize their class abilities, and be creative. just like any other aspect of d&d, such as roleplaying and exploration, combat is an exercise in collaborative storytelling (for me, at least).

i rarely introduce combat that doesn’t tie into an A plot, a B plot, or a side quest that the PCs are chasing. i don’t have anything against random encounters – in fact, i ran some RE’s in the second-most recent session – but what makes combat fun for me as a DM is the fact that it advances story, and potentially deepens the players’ understanding of their character.

so, before you throw your players into a combat situation, ask yourself: why? how can i make this narratively dramatic – and not just a slogfest?

bonus answer: most combat encounters will struggle to last beyond three, maybe four, rounds. especially if there are an equal or fewer baddies to the player characters. however, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. in fact, if combat went on for five, six, seven rounds, it can begin to feel like… well.. a slog.

so make the most out of your three, four rounds, and make each combat encounter unique! how about an environmental challenge? slippery ground, swinging axes, pools of lava, a sudden earthquake, a portcullis dividing the party, water filling the room.

or roleplay/plot-related challenges? maybe there’s a circle of mages attempting to summon a demon that are protected by enchanted suits of armor that the PCs need to hack through. maybe there are hostages. maybe there’s a powerful magical artifact that the baddies and PCs both want, and the challenge in the combat lies in who can most deftly and efficiently maneuver through the clockwork maze protecting the raised dais the item resides upon.