Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms has partnered with D&D Beyond to create a series of encounters that you get as a bonus to your usual Encounters of the Week. Fight (or parley) with some goblins, and get closer to the demonic heart of this forgotten dungeon!
So, coming into 5th edition after a long break, and trying to design some encounters. So yeah, about those 'design your own monster' rules. On top of being really unintuitive and hard to understand, they seem to give no absolutely no good mechanism for figuring the value of things like non-damaging spells or class features. What's the difference between XP and adjusted XP in D&D 5th edition? Dnd-5e encounter-design experience-points. Try to create three CR 1 creatures using the DMG 'how to create a custom creature' section (Between pages 82 and 90) and make each one significantly different in HP, AC, damage, etc. Then make 2 different CR 4 creatures.
I'm new to DMing! How do I start?
First, congratulations on running a game! You'll get the hang of it pretty quickly. The easiest way to build an encounter is to pick an enemy from the Monster Manual with a CR around the same as the level of PCs in your party, maybe one higher if you want them to have a tough fight. This won't always be perfect, but it's a good place to start. You'll find that this method mostly generates Medium or Hard difficulty encounters, which is about what you are aiming for.
To spice things up, increase the number of enemies. Either go for a group of lower-level mooks, or a second bad guy of around the same CR, or mix and match. Don't go too wild with this, though - the PCs can only take on so many enemies at once. In 5th Edition, outnumbering your opponent can be quite an advantage. Be very careful before putting your PCs up against a Deadly encounter, especially against lots of enemies.
Why are my players finding encounters so easy?
If you're using this calculator a lot, you may have found it can seem to overstate the difficulty of encounters. First I'll explain why this happens, and then how you can fix this.
The biggest culprit for easy encounters is the party resting too much. If you're like me, your parties tend to have maybe two or three encounters per long rest, often with short rests in between - this makes more sense for some play styles, but causes balance problems.
The way 5th Edition balances resources assumes that parties will have at least a couple of medium-difficulty encounters between each short rest, and maybe two or three short rests between each long rest. This forces characters to be conservative with their limited resources (spell slots, class features, hit dice, and so forth), making each individual encounter tougher. A party that can approach an encounter fresh, with no worries about saving resources, will often find that encounter relatively easy.
How do you fix this? You have two choices.
- Don't let your party rest as often. There are a couple of ways of doing this - you could have encounters happen closer together without any chance for a break between each (maybe putting the characters on a timer, or make it dangerous to rest), or use the 'Gritty Realism' rest model as described in the DMG (page 267) which makes rests take longer. I have started using Gritty Realism in my games and I've found that it makes designing adventures substantially easier, and stops the party attempting to rest at every opportunity.
- Make the encounters harder. You can probably make the Adjusted Difficulty Rating of an encounter up to double or maybe even triple (for very experienced parties) the XP* rating of a Deadly encounter, and the fight will be more challenging and risky, but not impossible for a prepared party. There are some downsides to this approach, however. Fights become much more dangerous as an encounter can quickly snowball from challenging to deadly if one or two of the PCs are dropped. This is especially pronounced at lower levels where a single hit can be enough to put someone on the floor. If you use this method, you may need to increase the difficulty slowly until you get to the level of challenge you want.
*Note for those who use CR, this scales differently. You may only want to increase the CR of encounters by 1 or 2.
From D&D Wiki
This is part of the Mythic Sourcebook
- 1Mythic Monsters
- 1.2Other Statistics
Mythic Monsters[edit]
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Mythic monsters are entities of immense power, beyond that of even legendary creatures. They are rarely found in the Material Plane except at cosmic distances, instead residing in the vast outer planes or even the far realm. When a mythic creature disturbs the mortal realm, it can dominate on a continental scale; a whole nation's army might not be enough to quell the turmoil.
These creatures are a challenge for 20th level player characters, with epic boons or other high-level benefits.
Size[edit]
- Colossal
Creatures of colossal size occupy a 45 by 45 ft. space or larger (or 9 by 9 squares). They have d66 Hit Dice (average 33½).
- Titanic
Creatures of titanic size occupy a 90 by 90 ft. space or larger (or 18 by 18 squares). They have d100 Hit Dice (average 50½).
Other Statistics[edit]
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Some statistics continue to grow as CR increases, whilst others are bounded.
- Proficiency bonus continues with linear progression
- Hit points, damage and save DCs are unbounded
- AC has no strict bound, but becomes more exceptional the further it moves past 19.
Statistics by Challenge Rating[edit]
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Use this in conjunction with the Creating a Monster chapter in the DMG.
Since DC 30 represents an 'impossible' task, and an attack bonus of +21 gives the monster a better than 50-percent chance of striking AC 30, I decided to end the CR track at that point. Further progression would simply be a case of increasing the hit point and damage values - you should instead consider creating the monster as a multi-statblock entity (see below). For example, if I wanted my monster to have 10,000 hit points, I could create it with four CR 49 statblocks.
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