Another way to deal with the disproportionate actions available to monsters vs players is to use Legendary and Lair Actions. These special actions are reserved for more badass monsters but can be easily homebrewed for other monster when building encounters. The environment is always important when it comes to engaging and challenging 5e encounter building. A great example of this can be seen by looking at the cannon fodder of the Monster Manual : Goblins.
They are the vanilla ice cream of monsters. What would happen if you built an encounter in which the players were walking in a canyon and some goblin archers popped up on the ridge above while other goblins attacked from the front and back? This encounter just got a whole lot more interesting.
Building encounters with enemies in which they utilize the environment to their advantage can tax player resources more heavily and make them think outside the box to overcome the encounter.
Sure there were a lot of low CR Orcs, but the Fellowship dealt with them eventually. In order to make the Fellowship feel challenged, they could have thrown more Orcs at them, but watching Aragorn cut down Orcs for an hour and a half would have become tiresome.
Instead, to make things interesting, the Orcs brought in a high CR Cave Troll that, when combined with the low CR Orcs, really made our heroes use all of their resources and cunning to survive. The same holds true when encounter building in DnD. If you throw one big baddie at your players, the action economy has the potential to be completely one sided. This can cause a monster that was meant to be a challenge to turn into a monster that gets killed in one round of Initiative.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, if you build an encounter that has a lot of low level minions, PCs could easily deal with them or become bored and frustrated if there are enough to actually overwhelm them. Start by looking at the level of your party members. Not only will this provide more variety in the encounter, but it could change up the goals of the encounter. Maybe the goblins will run if the Bugbear Chief is killed?
Maybe the Bugbear Chief stands back and tactically orders the goblins around the battlefield? Building an encounter with a mixed bag of creatures also offers an awesome chance to use monsters to further your story or increase immersion in the environment. Most DnD combat ends with one side killing the other.
The first encounter my party fought was from the starting adventure Lost Mines of Phandelver against four goblins. Imagine my surprise when one of the players was knocked unconscious, and the goblins were barreling full-speed toward a total party kill TPK. What happened? For example, a brown bear has two attacks per round. A four-person party has at least four actions. One creature can also be avoided, restrained, or otherwise incapacitated.
Four goblins have four attacks per round. If one of the adventurers falls unconscious, the goblins now outnumber the heroes, leading to a death spiral and potential TPK. As long as the two sides are of similar power levels, the side with the most actions wins. If your party size differs, adjust accordingly. Parties larger than five will have an easier time and should use the multiplier one step down.
Parties fewer than three should use the multiplier one step up. In the above case, we see that the fight with four goblins has a x2 multiplier, and the difficulty, measured in XP, is XP: a deadly encounter.
Running a deadly encounter is fine, but it is important to know what you are challenging your players with. It does raise a good question…. The DMG assumes that a party of adventurers will be taking on medium to hard encounters in one day, with two short rests taking place. How many encounters will your players face before they are able to take a long rest and regain their abilities? Also, consider what sort of tone you want to set for your campaign.
Do you want your world to be highly lethal, needing players to be strategic and lucky to survive through the early levels?
Do you want your players to feel like powerful heroes tearing through enemies? Both can be fun if the players know what to expect. In general, make encounters harder than you think.
Then, turn up the difficulty for next time. Puzzles and Riddles can be tricky! What is a DM to do? Well, our friends over at Dungeon Vault have an assortment of puzzles, riddles, and tokens to enhance your gaming experience. They even have a murder mystery and a political intrigue system! Not the bite and claw attack—Look at the other special properties of the monster that sets it apart. Then think about how that would affect your party.
However, they have an ability called Rust Metal. Any non-magical metal weapon that hits the rust monster corrodes , taking a permanent and cumulative -1 to damage. If that reaches -5, the weapon is destroyed.
So, basically a CR1 monser means that if your characters are level 1, this will be a challenge for them. If they are level 2, it will be pretty easy depending on how you use the xp budget to put 1 or more monsters into the battle. But the important criteria you want to use when buliding an encounter is your XP budget. Use CR to only filter out which creatures are too deadly for the level of your party of any size.
Much of the advice in this section focuses on the XP values of monsters and encounters, as opposed to their challenge rating. Challenge rating is only a guidepost that indicates at what level that monster becomes an appropriate challenge. Such a creature might deal enough damage with a single action to overwhelm PCs of a lower level. Even though an ogre has a challenge rating of 2, for example, it can kill a 1st-level wizard or sorcerer outright with a single blow.
When building encounters, use XP values. Those XP values along with the relevant multipliers for party size and number of monsters, are what are important when determining how deadly a monster is to the party or to a character. CR is only a filter for the "upper limit" of which monsters you should choose from when using the XP budgets. So in the end, trying to understand how many party members a CR is coordinated against, becomes a bit of a red herring for when it matters. The answer is "4", but that isn't really the answer you want, what you want to focus on is your XP budget, and the multipliers for party size and number of monsters.
A single monster will present a medium or hard challenge against a party of four PCs of a level equal to its CR. Page 56, "Simple Encounters" Choosing monsters for larger or smaller parties is covered on page 58, "Larger or Smaller Parties".
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