Sage Advice on Encounter Building

[Music] hello everyone and welcome to another edition of sage advice I am great tito and i am joined by do mr. jerry crawford hello everyone how is it going great great yes what’s the new year we get to work on D&D what’s not to like exactly except for all the other things that are happening in the world but we’ll ignore that for this next hour while we talk about some fun stuff in Dungeons and Dragons rules that we don’t necessarily get from you know your sage advice columns or things like that this is a way for us to kind of investigate different bigger topics in what is going on with the mechanics and the intent of the design behind them and today we are going to talk about encounter building yes indeed I immediately latched on to you when you said challenge rating and you’re like no it’s bigger than challenge rating it’s like the the whole idea but that’ll be a part of the discussion too is what CR means for us and and and how to interpret that and use that when you’re building encounters exactly right so what you want to start to reach start with the first encounter the first encounter of the third kind the spaceship descends from the sky there’s mashed potatoes that point you to where you can meet the spell jammer that will take you up into the phlogiston and travel from faerun to earth but wait that’s not what we’re talking about today we should yeah now you got like 50 people were like we should talk about that right one of these one of these days I will happily do a spell jammer one yeah nice they’ve talked about a lot on lorry should know it’s it’s it’s fascinating yeah well plus my home campaign is chock full of airships and spell jammer type craft so it’s near and dear to my heart but encounters yes how do you counter them which can certainly include airships and creatures from beyond the stars I like that you’re justifying the tangent yeah I mean this is sort of the the beauty in DND that in some ways D&D is all tangent since since you can encounter pretty much anything and the encounter rules in fifth edition which are expressed in their most detailed fashion in the dungeon masters guide are really there to help DMS get a handle on how difficult a combat encounter in particular might be now we know that in a game that has three main pillars combat social interaction and exploration in the just sort of normal English sense of the word encounter you can have other kinds of encounters I mean you you know you can have a heated argument with somebody you know a diplomatic engagement of some kind you can encounter something wondrous in the wilderness but it did not involve battle in any way when we talk about encounter building we’re specifically zeroing in on combat encounters and the whole reason we have these rules is not because there’s assumed to be a correct way of building encounters that’s actually one of the main things I wanted to get across in this segment is there is not one right way to do it there’s not like some mystical formula if you just add this and add this you’ll get the most fun that your players will level have exactly because because we have all had experiences in D&D games where the drunk goblin at the gate all by itself could end up being more fun than the carefully calibrated set piece battle you know at the top of a tower while there’s a vortex to Hell nearby it’s like the drunk goblin if role played well can be just as exciting even if the numbers tell you this is not really a challenge so so much in D&D is about the story that’s brought to bear the role-playing not only by the DM but also by the players but you do often as a DM particularly when you’re writing an adventure preparing for a session have this question that will pop into your head and this is really the question that the encounter building rules are meant to answer and that is is this going to kill them all am i throwing too much at them and the kitchen sink yes and so the encounter building rules are really there for the DM to try to suss out in advance is this encounter going to be too dangerous now you can also use the encounter building rules to assess is it going to be super easy is it going to be just right is it going to be kind of hard or is it going to be SuperDuper hard and probably kill them all the rules in the Dungeon Master’s guide help you get a sense of of where in the spectrum of difficulty and encounter is likely to land yeah it really in the end though is really just giving you a sense and the reason why I say this is there are so many variables that can come into play in a D&D encounter you could have an encounter where you face four ogres and you’re standing on a road on you know a wheat filled plane that encounter is gonna play up very differently if you met the same four ogres on a collapsing bridge over a chasm of lava right with occasional you know lava Jets shooting up at you while you’re trying to fight the ogres and not fall off the bridge to almost certain death below so just environmental factors can change how difficult something will be in play we also know that because of the variability that we’ve built into the game with things like critical hits and the recharge abilities of certain monsters that an encounter that you could DM it with one group and because of how the dice rolled for you it was not too bad yeah the very next group if you as DM your dice are on fire suddenly that very same combat encounter could be devastating right a great example of this is our dragons have breath weapons that use the recharge mechanic and many of them will come back on a roll of a five or a six in some cases just a six on a d6 and you could have a group where they just have rotten luck and that breath weapon keeps back and in that case that dragons gonna be way more difficult than it would be normally or the opposite can happen where you know whether it not even just by chance but like a good circumstance or taking advantage of the circumstances on the part of the player can you know ruin a carefully crafted it you know a tentpole encounter we’re like okay this is going to be the big bad and someone rolls a queer at crit someone has a really great idea on how to sneak into something and then all of a sudden all that dramatic combat the you plan for the next three hours gets diffused in 30 minutes exactly and the thing is that variability we consider it to be a feature not a bug of the game we assure of everyone out there right right but yeah but we we designed this variability into the game partly for the sake of narrative surprise not only for the players but for the dungeon master that’s a good point we’d love that not even the DM can fully predict how something is going to play out and that makes it so that even the DM gets to experience D&D as a game yeah without some of these these little dice surprises that occur in pretty much every session of D&D it would be super easy for DMS to predict and railroad various outcomes because of that variability even that question of will the dragon be able to use its breadth weapon a second time let’s the DM in on that fun that the fun of just you’re playing a game and you don’t even know you’re the narrative you’re the narrator of the story and you don’t even know what’s going to happen next yeah I think that point is lost for some players who don’t realize that they want their Dungeon Master to be these puppet masters and and having all the answers and they portray themselves that way I mean I know as a dungeon master sometimes I will make it seem like oh I knew exactly was gonna happen when I had no clue but you’re right there is that nugget of fun for the dungeon master to roll with the improv just as much as of a dice roll and how it goes there’s as much the players like to do that and I is a DM love to really let myself have fun with that game aspect so one example of me doing this is any time I’m running a monster with a recharge ability i will almost always roll the recharge die on the other side of the DM screen so the players can see it so that if they’re seeing that I don’t I don’t even know that me guys and that’s even better a lot of the time I have the players roll it because then it it really changes the dynamic of basically it gives them sometimes this terrible feeling of weak cause it’s like if you had just rolled better dead under number generator you would have done better yeah but it it it creates those improv opportunities which I think often lead to our favorite moments when playing D&D sometimes it can lead to a spectacular unexpected success and then it can also lead to catastrophe right sometimes the catastrophe in my mind is even better than the spectacular success because I think something something I like to talk about and I know many other experienced teams like to talk about is this notion of leaning into failure of seeing failure in a narrative game like D&D as an opportunity to steer things in new and wonderful directions to to have one problem spawn other problems for the heroes to try to solve or villains if you’re playing a group you know a group of rascals yes some tea parties are a bunch of Rascals because there can be definitely moments when you’re playing where you you know you roll ahead can you miss and you know I’m guilty of this sometimes I miss something like okay I just miss go to the next area by the law but I love the moments when you describe exactly how you missed and you’re right that can often lead to just more storytelling right if you just are like okay I rolled this dice and I didn’t get the number I hit there’s no not a lot of narrative play there right but if you say like oh I swung my sword and I hit a barrel of oil and that wheel is leaking all over the floor you’re like that’s so there all right well that’s more possibilities maybe someone takes advantage it may be take advantage of that you know and so all of a sudden a failure becomes something that makes the the dynamic of the encounters so much more interesting yeah and now when that that oil is is oozing around the battlefield people are like oh my god don’t cast burning right or near it in a way to get them in the enemies in the right situation to cast it yeah exactly Wichita it’s way more fun than I missed no guru the next goon the next person right Yeah right so the CR or the Chand rating is meant to be a tool to you know even though there is all this variance in how an encounter will play out in real play to at least give you the okay this is in an ideal situation this is how difficult this encounter is going to be for my players yes so so the challenge rating in in our monsters it basically what it communicates to you on its own is that a monster of a particular challenge rating on its own will usually it’s not going to wipe a group out if you have a group of sort of a regular size which can run anywhere between like three and six characters and and I give a range there because even though often in our rules they’ll say the typical group is four yeah or it’s fine if it’s five and six is okay two and maybe three it that that number shifts depending on the mix of the group so let’s say you have a group no one has a single healing ability everyone has you know sort of their hit points are in the basement they all you know Kahn was there dump stat and they are or they rolled for the hit points and rolled horribly I sub-optimal party yes it’s gonna say yes if you have a suboptimal party you there could even be five of you and suddenly you know what what is actually not too hard for the three or four person group as a nightmare for you because of your mix so there’s you know there’s a bit of a range there but again if let’s say typical group usually four to five characters you look at the CR or even six characters you look at the CR and you think oh yeah this this CR cr3 monster is not going to give a third-level party too much trouble and that’s really all it’s telling you it’s not telling you this is gonna make a satisfying fight it’s not telling you everyone’s gonna have a lot of fun if you if you do this because there’s so much more art involved in again the role-playing and the environment you use really again all it’s telling you is how likely is this thing to just kill them all yeah and do so easily now it starts getting trickier when you start adding monsters together because it’s fairly rare for a combat encounter to just be one monster hmm unless it’s a legendary monster wit and a legendary monster is really designed to be sort of an entire encounter in itself this is why legendary creatures have their legendary actions which they get to take at the end of other peoples turns I mean they’re really almost acting like a group of monsters and that in that situation exactly and we’ve designed them as such that that you know it’s like this this monster shows up and it’s basically I’m a whole group of people and I’ve got all these actions and I can always do every turn right yeah but about your come back to what you’re saying about the three you know a sound rating of three it’s your third level party it shouldn’t be too hard but when you add in another third level or a 3cr monster how does that change it so that’s it’s at that point you’re gonna want to take a look at the rules in the Dungeon Master’s guide where it it it basically takes the monsters turns them into hit point totals and says okay total up these hit points I’m sorry not high points experience points and then compare that to the levels of the the characters in the party there are tables for you to look at and it helps you gauge how difficult a group of monsters is likely to be for a party of a particular level now in XANA thar’s guide to everything we provide an alternative way of assessing this and frankly i think it’s an easier way because the the approach and the Dungeon Master’s guide requires you to do quite a bit of math and because not only are you basically reducing all the monsters to piles of a P and then you compare those two levels it then also introduces this notion of once a party gets big enough that you then also have to apply a multiplier to deal with the with the fact that the more player characters you have the less difficult a certain group of monsters become it also has the opposite of that of the smaller your group gets then there’s another multiplier which also changes the difficulty you know I as a DM created a spreadsheet that does all of this for me but we realize not everyone is going to want to have to do all of these calculations so in XANA thar’s guide to everything we have a new set of tables where you can cross-reference look up see our look up the level of the characters and then it just tells you you know this this number of creatures of this CR is not going to be too hard for this number of characters of this level so it does a lot of the math for you and then there’s also a separate table specifically for monsters you’re likely to meet by themselves so usually that’s gonna mean a legendary a legendary monster but again it’s important especially for people who are coming from third and fourth addition to not mistake what these encounter building guidelines are telling them we’re not telling you you know a correct encounter has this mix of monsters a correct encounter is one that people have a good time playing through but that is actually the only measure of did you build a good encounter was did people have a good time if the answer is yes you built a great encounter all these rules are telling you is it’s giving you an assessment in advance of how likely a particular monster or group of monsters is going to give your group of a bunch of trouble right when we design our adventures like tomb of annihilation we use these guidelines not to build our different encounters in the adventure in a kind of highly scientific way we use them to do exactly this test and that is is this particular potential combat encounter going to be harder than we want it to be because for a lot of our published adventures will have broad difficulty targets for different parts of the adventure for example we might decide that one chapter of one of our adventures whether it’s tomb of annihilation or storm Kings thunder or cursive straud is really designed to be not too much trouble for a group that say like okay this chapter might be for generally six level characters characters of any level can go into that chapter yeah but really what we’re doing is just we want to ensure that if the kind of optimal group is there it’s not too much trouble and then of course if you’re if you’re lower level or less optimal the difficulty is going to start going up and then if you’re higher level or more optimal the difficulty is gonna start going down yeah so it’s it’s really for us again just a test for you know we just want to make sure that this thing that’s meant to be a challenge but not a TPK is indeed a challenge and not a total party kill yeah and that’s a difficult thing to encapsulate in just like okay this is the exact number that you need to be in order to get that I know some Dungeon Master’s I’ve seen online or like oh my characters you know my party was at X level but they they really want to go to this place and how do I tell them not to do that you know because they won’t be okay and I think there is the almost expectation that the dungeon master won’t present challenges or encounters that are too far outside their there their level right right in the expect expectation is like oh they might my doesn’t matter is not gonna try to kill me all the time but there is something to be said about like well that’s just you need to be able to know that there’s lethal parts of the the world that you cannot always do or if you do you have to make sure you’re very careful and you’re using all that you can’t just go walk-in willy-nilly and I think there’s something in the open you know I mean I guess we’re talk a little bit more about like you know open style adventure writing of you’re exploring a whole area versus the more narrative of like okay event event event event but I mean those kind of play into it’s like you know that’s why it’s harder for some don’t just a manager to run sandbox campaigns is because well how do i how do i deal with that so a DM could certainly whether it’s an adventure they’re designing themselves or if they’re taking one of our published adventures and modifying it they could certainly use the encounter building guidelines in the dungeon masters guide or in Zanna thar’s guide to adjust all the encounters so that they are designed specifically for their group of characters and and these guidelines would help the DM figure out roughly how difficult a combat encounter is going to be our are starting on some assumption in fifth edition though is that the game is pretty open-ended in sandbox II and we often like particularly in our published adventures dangling out the possibility that you might wander into a fight you can’t win yeah because we don’t we don’t view the game as a series of combat encounters that you are expected to face in a predictable way and then March off with a set amount of experience points and treasure we viewed the game as a set of potential combat encounters some of what you might might not turn into combat at all because you might talk your way out of the problem you might cleverly use a spell or the environment or one of your class features or an element of your characters background to circumvent the problem entirely and all of those to me are our legitimate ways to handle the many challenges that face adventurers in D&D and often those non-combat ways can be the most exciting when you write when you figure out okay we can just avoid this whole thing and I as a DM reward a group that does that sort of problem-solving just as much as a group that fights its way through the problems you know I’ll give just as much experience points and I’ll try to make it so that if there was a treasure involved that there’s an opportunity to gain treasure in some other way at a later point right because the again the point is moving the story forward having a great time and solving problems without we hope diem getting too fixated on only one way through the problem and that can include not expecting always that people will fight their way through something I often like to having potential combat encounters in an adventure particularly one that I that I know I’ll be DMing because then I can I can control what happens at the table I often like having ones in the path of the party that the numbers tell me this is way difficult this is if they try to fight their way through this without negotiating without fleeing this has a good chance of destroying them not because I want to destroy them it’s because I love the sense of the world being living and breathing that that often gives that that reminds them that they’re not they’re not in a sort of they’re not in a video game like experience where everything has sort of been pre calibrated for them they’re in a living world and they happen to wander into this place that’s like oh boy and this is too much and it’s often a great opportunity to reveal something about the setting it’s also a chance sometimes to introduce NPCs or friendly monsters that might show up to help them sometimes if they do get themselves into trouble I like to have an ally of their show up and help them out because that’s also another sign of being a living breathing world but like hey they helped that that high level cleric a while ago who it turns out has been spying on them and knew that they were getting into trouble and sends help yeah so that also it adds the storytelling it’s not it doesn’t take away exactly I often love to give warning so often as I have to yes often quest giver quest giving NPCs in my games will give cues about the danger of something you know and we’ll do some version of like are you sure you want to go in there and you know and click yes yeah like this is this is what you might be facing you know if you go in there and I’ve also I’ve also made use a number of over the years of DMing of you know as a last-ditch effort of a fight starts that I know the players cannot survive and I will have some version of the NPC who rides by and says some version of fly you fools like because because again there are other people in the world especially if you’re not down in a deep you know deep dungeon if you’re if you’re up if you’re up in the wilderness or you’re in a city area in your castle there’s likely someone else in the world knows what you’re up against yeah and it was how dangerous it can be and and can yell out you know are you crazy you know get out of here you’re going to die or to start off a fight with like a a bang right yeah like you use the breath weapon in the first rounds they know exactly what they’re up against or something like that so that it becomes like okay no this is not just a you know a dragon I use injured and ready to be killed like no this is a dragon at its height of its power and you’re all gonna experience that right now yeah yeah yeah that happened in my home game several actually more than several sessions ago the player characters wandered in this mystical place through this portal that allowed them to see a possible future for the campaign and a possible outcome should they fail in their great quest and so they actually got a glimpse of doomsday and they appeared in the midst of this epic battle and they were on this airship being attacked by an ancient dragon and I really wanted to drive home for them that like this is not a place we were just gonna stand and fight and so exactly as you say the dragon first thing breathed and one of the characters was almost instantly killed and so my my players are experienced they got the message loud and clear they’re like we are getting the hell out of here because this is not a fight we can win that’s cool that’s good signpost yes use the miraDry of glad real to to show how terrible your life will be if you go down that path yes they ran out of that possible future really fast don’t want to do that yeah so so after all we’ve talked about here then what are some you know guidelines that you’ve used that that makes an encounter memorable I know you said like oh that’s the only real measure is are people talking about it is it did they have fun doing it which I totally agree with then what are what are some ways that you can use the stuff it’s in our books as well as some your personal ways to like alright really spice up those encounters so one one thing that I like to do is ramp encounters up it it’s very easy and this is a this is a fine way to start fights where you basically you roll initiative everyone is there and like if you’re if you’re if you’re using miniatures you know you’ve placed all the miniatures out on the grid and fight I like to vary that sometimes of having fights we’re not all the combatants are there at the start so I like that the rising tension of the fight getting a little more difficult as it goes along or less difficult if it turns out the people showing up or actually showing up to help the player cow right yeah because that’s that’s another thing that I really love to play with is not just your fighting might notify more foes which happens quite a lot actually in D&D adventures you know and in many publish adventures even it will say things like if you make too much noise then the monsters in the next-door rooms come running in yeah well particularly cuz I run a lot of urban games I run lots of a lot of adventures that take place and also in wilderness areas but then also in dungeons where there are potentially friendly creatures as well I’ll like sometimes for there to be a chance for helpful people to show up or for I also like when it comes to sort of changing circumstances to have the environment change over the course of a fight whether you know it’s the classic that you know the place is collapsing or this portal is opening or you know there’s some kind of timed element where there is some MacGuffin in the room where you know if it’s allowed if all three gems light up over the you know the course of the next few rounds then something awful TM is going to happen so again I liked I’m Dell I also another way I actually introduced this of circumstances changing is I love having villains who inch they themselves introduced complications a great example of this is the villain who loves monologuing so much that they say so this the normal way of monologuing where it basically you know the villain I’m going to kill you yeah all the things you’ve done let me list all of them right now yeah and and then sometimes will I give away part of the plot so that’s the classic villain saying too much so I do that sometimes partly just cuz it’s fun but I also like sometimes adding twists in the mists of combat where over the course of monologuing a villain might suddenly plant a seed of doubt in the player characters about why they’re fighting this person hmm but particularly because in my home game I often have multiple villain groups like in my current game there are at least four and if any of my players are listening to this this is actually a slight spoiler because I think they have figured out there at least two villain groups it actually turns out there are four villain groups you’re saying at least yes there could be more we got more later and but the villain groups are actually all at war with each other and some of them are less evil than others in fact one of the villain groups is not actually evil it just has goals that are different and often opposing to the player characters so I like to sometimes if they’re up against a foe have the foe let’s slip some piece of information that plants a seed of doubt of like wait a second this person might not be as bad as we thought this is the right should we even be fighting this right yeah and then you have those great moments of like okay let’s let’s let’s redirect redirect because when you realize suddenly the real Big Bad is someplace else who might actually be delighting in the fact that these two that the player characters during my rivals are taking each other out exactly playing into their pants I also have a group of villains called the priests of OC boosts who are actually mentioned in the curse of straud who my players oh god do they hate them and they’re supposed to I designed them to be hated yeah they are they’re a group of necromancer’s who have the sign in burned somewhere on their body called the mark of Elath on their God as Elath on that when they die if this mark is not destroyed after a certain number of rounds it will illuminate and they will come they will rather Auto resurrect as some form of Undead and this just will keep happening until the the mark is destroyed so really that’s just a kind of like fancy special effect for me to add more monsters to an encounter right and and so I like coming up with fancy ways of more basically just some version of more dude show up yeah but there were many ways you can have more guys show up and again have this amped up tension so that not every fight is simply they here are my pieces on this side here your pieces on that side we roll through a fight and we move on yeah which is that’s perfectly acceptable and it’s also good to have those sorts of fights sometimes really what I’m where I’m going with all of this it’s a variety is great you want a mix of the encounters that are kind of easy and straightforward ones that are a bit more complex ones with surprises if if only as a DM to amuse yourself so you don’t get bored that you’re always introducing something that makes your players feel that oh my gosh are we going to get through this or it’s also great to sometimes give them that feeling of food this is a cakewalk we’ve got it yeah there’s that idea they’re like you you can feel powerful if you just you know throw a bunch of minions were great for this and fourth edition for that reason we’re like oh you’re mowing through these goblins that you know at first level we’re a substantial threat to you but now you know you’re at six level they’re nothing and you one fireball it takes rid of all of them and there’s some times that builds that up and then it’s great way to do that right before the big bad that’s gonna be the big dragon that’s gonna blow them out the way so they feel real powerful and oh wait by the way let me cut you down to size right and all that – so and I love that you bring that up great storytelling involves as we know showing not telling and I do really like to show in a campaign occasionally that the player characters have gotten more powerful and and as you as you said it is great to bring back foes they fought before types of foes they fought before who gave them trouble and now are easy it’s such a satisfying way for the the players to see oh yeah we did get more powerful this yeah we’ve got it because you you want as a DM to give the players victories so that you can then also give them a struggles and slip that that carpet right out from under them yeah exactly yeah you because again every any good story has sort of this rising and falling action then you know where the the rising tension and then you know the tension dissipates and right it’s a roller coaster and there’s the idea that you know we brought it out of the beginning this conversation we’re like if there’s a CR guidelines and those are the ones that you need to follow for every encounter to make sure that they’re the exact amount of challenge that will put players up against the wall but won’t kill them right and if you do that for every single encounter then that isn’t doesn’t have any tense moments anymore you like you’re losing the the idea that okay there’s going to be crests and Falls and narrative tension will come and go and so yeah there’s a danger you can fall into two making you know perfectly crafting encounters too much exactly because if you do that if if you took our encounter building guidelines and said all right I’m gonna make my third level group only go up against CR three monsters there’s a good chance your game is gonna start feeling a little monotonous a little boring very it but you know have some encounters that are gonna be tougher have some encounters that are going to be easier in the encounter building guidelines and in XANA thar’s guide in the dmg are there to help you assess that beforehand but it but again it’s not gonna be an exact science um those are tools that you can use in the craft of encounter building yes and often you’re gonna find yourself wanting to adjust difficulty on the fly because and this is the beauty of having a game that’s run by a dungeon master as opposed to sand you know it’s not run by the rulebook it’s run by the DM who can see how things are actually going and play in a room and yeah read see you know we’ve talked about this before that you know read your players see what what’s causing them excitement what’s fun for them you might have calculated things in advance and thought okay this encounter is gonna be really tough but then in play because of the die rolls and the decisions made it’s a cakewalk for the the player characters sometimes just give them the cakewalk let them savor that victory other times you can do things to make things a bit more difficult on the spot one of the easiest things DMS can do because I get asked a lot you know well how can you know if I see things are going too quickly and it’s because sometimes that easiness can be narrative ly unsatisfying one of the easiest ways that you can add a little difficulty a kazakh combat that maybe it feels like the group wants it to go on a little longer is just raise the hip points of the monsters in every monster there’s a number of hit points printed but then next to the hit points in parentheses we give the hit the hit dice of the monster and so if you’re looking at parentheses you’re basically seeing the potential range of hit points for that creature it means you could go lower and you could go higher so play with that range DMS look there and if you want if you want your standard goblin to be a bit tougher just look in the parentheses next to its hit points and you’ll see that that goblin could indeed go up a bit yeah and it could also go down if you’d like to let’s say you’d like to have monsters that sort of pop like balloons the way fourth edition style minions do will then you know just bottom out the monsters hit points because you know again you have a range there in in parentheses yeah and you can and because here’s the thing the players are never going to know you’re doing it right hopeful you don’t have that one player is like looking over your screen and be like and but I bring this up because it might be easy for a DM to think well is that cheating or is that fudging in some way and know what I’m telling you is no that’s actually you’re using the monster as intended if you play with that hit point range yeah the the number that appears as the number of hit points for a monster and the monster manual or Volos guide to monsters or in one of our adventures is the average for a monster of that type it but it is not like the monster must you know must only have that number of hit points to start right you can vary so that and you can also go the other way though to like if a fight is taking too long it feels like they’ve already kind of bested the the strategies needed to make it happen and you know you’re like three rounds left at the current thing to get all the monsters hit boys down just lop them off exactly because you can go it’s the if that’s the average you can go at a lesser number and then you’re everybody’s happy like oh yeah we did it and you defeated the monster yes yep yeah cuz because I’m sure every DM has had that experience or sometimes it’s exciting that that monster has only one hit point left and everyone’s going to enjoy that extra round of combat that’s now necessary to shave away that one hit point yeah but then there are those other times where the person does this awesome blow they describe it really well but because of their role their hit is going to leave the monster with one hit point and many DMS I know have just made that one hit point quietly disappear and said the monster dies never exist it never existed a Schrodinger’s hit points alright and and again dm’s when you do it you’re not cheating because our monsters are built for you to have some flexibility yeah when it comes to how many hit points and now it comes down to what you said like what is the what is the guideline for whether an encounter is is a successful or not was it fun was it fun now one thing I also want to talk about before we close is this question of what’s the right number of combat encounters in the adventuring day this is a this is a question get sometimes the Dungeon Master’s guide has a section about the what what’s called the adventuring day and it mentions that a typical party can withstand six to eight encounters before they’re gonna need a long rest this this bid in the Dungeon Master’s guide sometimes gets misread as saying sort of a correct adventuring day has six to eight encounters that is not the intent of that text really again all that text is telling you is if you’re curious DM about how much can they take in a day six to eight encounters is the limit now this is assuming that they are encounters of sort of typical difficulty if they’re all cake walks well then you know a party might be able to take more yeah but a typical group up up against you know average difficulty combat encounters is gonna tuck her out around six to eight encounters again we do not design the game thinking the correct adventuring day as sixteen encounters like because many adventuring days might have only one some will have three some will have four that’s fine those are all legitimate ways to construct a D&D adventure that’s six to eight numbers just basically the ones that where resources begin like spells and consumable things will start to get low yes exactly yeah exactly and then we also tell you that you know in especially in an adventuring day that that runs on that long you’re then a group is also likely to have one or two short rests but that’s again highly variable and that’s fine the game is is designed to accommodate that variability well that’s why I only schedule six to eight meetings per day is because that’s the limit I can only have six to eight encounters in my my working day right tell my boss I’m like no I’m sorry I can’t have any more the workday only take that sounds like I didn’t even get a short rest I know have you been trapped in this room the whole time this is only my fourth encounter of the day so I think I’m okay it’s been a great I’m talking to you those were there was a great nuggets of sage advice if people want to get in touch with you and ask you more about encounter building or anything but the D&D 5th edition rules how can I do so best way is on Twitter where I can be reached at Jeremy eke raw furred awesome I am at Gregg Tito you can ask me some of those things and maybe if Jamie’s busy I’ll walk him over to him and do these things called letters that’s crazy but thank you very much for listening we’ll be back with another different segment in next week okay thanks bye everyone all right twitch folks we’ve got done a couple minutes early so we might be able to take maybe just one and then we gotta do some tests here so I think we’re gonna do one really good question from the the chat group we don’t have time to do in a whole other segment obviously right we always try like oh we can do two or three segments at one thing but no we use talking lock yeah we are so chatty we want to make sure we get to all the topics of the topic though right no and it’s fun to talk about D&D it’s true right exactly so when in one of these days we’re gonna do like a whole day I’m just you and me see then I would get boring too like you tell about the variety yeah it makes sense so this is an interesting question I’m not really sure what it means but it’s from stabby row games I found that working as a business analyst has helped me as a DM do you use any UML diagrams like sequence diagrams in your campaigns you know what a UML diagram well if if the questions referring to you know different ways to do flowcharts and whatnot or you know you can do sort of decision trees then sometimes yes I do do that particularly if I create a very complex plotline I will sometimes like to visualize it in advance to see how things might flow and to make sure the the decision points in the campaign are clear to me but honestly in most campaigns I leave so much up to the decisions the players are going to make that I do of planning and course correction before each session mmm because I’m a big believer in preparing as little as possible so you like before a campaign right because yeah you can’t it’s you get to railroad e if you do too much exactly right exactly but you sometimes ya doing doing some form of flowchart it’s some form of visualization can be a really powerful way to see how the pieces of something fit together yeah you UML as a unified modeling language and it’s a general-purpose developmental modeling language in the field of software engineering that’s intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system hmm fascinating I didn’t know that at all so now now I feel like I’ve learned something from from you guys so thank you for that is that where the flowchart for storm Kings Thunder and tomb of annihilation kind of that page that kind of was like oh here’s how it kind of maps yeah because we had we had gotten feedback before working on storm Kings Thunder that some of our adventures were quite complex and people like help me I can’t visualize give a give us some visual cues so I thought with storm Kings Thunder how about we do a flow chart early on so that people have a visual for how they might walk through the what is admittedly a complex epoch for people to adventure through yeah and I think that helped I’ve got a lot of good feedback from that from people just be like alright this makes especially when it’s so sandbox II you know and there’s so many different things you can do at least you can have a representation of like oh if you’re doing this thing you should be at this level and even though we can throw all that out and as we just talked about in that in that segment but at least it’s like a visualization that makes sense to most people so yeah that I think it’s super helpful and you know when the what’s prepare you know if we were like oh they’re gonna do this well read these two chapters that I know kind of where they might end up going the another thing I’ll say about preparation for sessions and for a whole campaign is I’ve mentioned before to people that I do almost all of my camp in prep in Microsoft OneNote one reason I do that is I can access it on all my devices and computers also I love it because you can write all the notes in discreet boxes which you can then drag around which gives you a lot of flexibility for like when things happen in a different order than you expected or miss Marri or this this encounter you designed to happen here the players had their characters route right around it well then I just pluck up that whole little note and place it someplace else and I’ll reuse that get to that later right exactly huh I wonder if I’ve never used any of those like Evernote or OneNote to things like that but I’ve heard people using them for script writing for that reason to where you know can write a seam and then you can change where it goes the order of things very quickly and easier yeah that’s makes sense yeah I know again what OneNote in particular is fantastic for this and it means I basically have all of my campaign notes accessible to me as long as I’m here phone on my phone yeah I’m just crazy ya know it means any where I am if I suddenly have an idea for my campaign I can just open up one note on my phone and yeah quickly jot down my notes well I’m accessing OneNote right now with my retina projector from the chip that is running it so once we get there that’ll be even better right all right well thank you guys so much we’re gonna take a quick break now do some prepping for the interview we’re gonna have to Skype callers coming in Shelly and I will be speaking to Claire Hoffman and Travis Woodall from the DND adventurers League very soon that’s gonna be very exciting I can’t wait all right thanks everybody we’ll be back in a couple minutes those of you who haven’t subscribed you will be seeing some ads in this little break if you don’t want to watch those ads and instead you just rather watch the webcam footage of us moving around microphones and stuff in here go ahead and subscribe it’s only $4.99 and you get access to tons of fun emotes so how could you go wrong all right thank you guys we’ll see you in like 5-10 minutes all right bye and thank you Jamie my pleasure as always [Music]

D&D Sage Advice

Questions on Dungeons & Dragons answered by game designers

Widgets

Sage Advice on Encounter Building – Dragon Talk 1/15/18

Leave a ReplyCancel reply

Share this:

Leave a ReplyCancel reply