Hey everyone, I've been GMing for a while now but i still don't really know how much i can do to the players before overchallenging them.
This is about monsters, the simple question being: What is the highest CR solo monster I should throw at a party of 5 or 6 adventurers?
Is there a rule of thumb to go by when creating an encounter and what would be challenging but managable worthy boss monster?
My players are all rather casual and mostly inexperienced so they don't optimize their characters very much. I'm not posting the average party level here because i would rather like to know for all levels.
APL +3 is generally considered to be an 'epic' difficulty encounter, but it can sway depending on the make-up of the enemies.
Here's how to kill your players in the mid levels:
[list]
That should do pretty well. Oh, and don't let them sleep/rest. Harry them with bullettes and other burrowing beasties, and perhaps some bat swarms.
Level appropriate challenges are sort of a curve. More like a scatter plot.
The further you get from level 5 or so the less accurate CR is*, and the more likely a total meltdown is to occur based on player skill and party composition.
At first and 9th level, I'd say the imprecision is about accurate, that is to say, much less predictable than 5th level.
Past 10th level, you will find that challenges become even more predictable. Part of this is the nature of saving throws, part of it is the accumulation of powerful magic items or spells that can "solve" a monster if you have them at the right time. Notice that these factors increase the likelihood of a swift and unexpected resolution in one direction or the other.
APL+X is a dangerous way to think about challenges, but it works for a narrow band of levels, that Pathfinder sweet spot. I'd say APL +3 is actually pretty tough, but my party typically doesn't notice an enemy's power unless it is +4 or +5 at mid levels. That same differential could obliterate a 12th level party.
The best way to learn what your party can take is to ratchet up the power level and experiment. I was pleased to find that my group actually enjoys APL+2 or +3 as their standard encounter. It's made the game much more interesting for them.
But as you go up in level, you have to give special attention to the party makeup, especially saving throws. What might stomp over one combination of classes will be totally powerless vs. another.
My best advice about challenge (that scales to level and fits in a soundbite) is this: aim for the "near death" of the players. If the think they're going to die and they don't, it's usually a good game. If you fail in either direction (a fight is too easy or someone dies) be at peace with what you have done.
* That is a completely non-scientific statement of personal observation. YMMV
|
Level appropriate challenges are sort of a curve. More like a scatter plot.
The further you get from level 5 or so the less accurate CR is*, and the more likely a total meltdown is to occur based on player skill and party composition.
At first and 9th level, I'd say the imprecision is about accurate, that is to say, much less predictable than 5th level.
Past 10th level, you will find that challenges become even more predictable. Part of this is the nature of saving throws, part of it is the accumulation of powerful magic items or spells that can "solve" a monster if you have them at the right time. Notice that these factors increase the likelihood of a swift and unexpected resolution in one direction or the other.
APL+X is a dangerous way to think about challenges, but it works for a narrow band of levels, that Pathfinder sweet spot. I'd say APL +3 is actually pretty tough, but my party typically doesn't notice an enemy's power unless it is +4 or +5 at mid levels. That same differential could obliterate a 12th level party.
The best way to learn what your party can take is to ratchet up the power level and experiment. I was pleased to find that my group actually enjoys APL+2 or +3 as their standard encounter. It's made the game much more interesting for them.
But as you go up in level, you have to give special attention to the party makeup, especially saving throws. What might stomp over one combination of classes will be totally powerless vs. another.
My best advice about challenge (that scales to level and fits in a soundbite) is this: aim for the "near death" of the players. If the think they're going to die and they don't, it's usually a good game. If you fail in either direction (a fight is too easy or someone dies) be at peace with what you have done.
* That is a completely non-scientific statement of personal observation. YMMV
I actually had a very similar experience. I decided to make CR+2-3 the norm, and it works really well from levels 1-6 so far. CR+4 is pretty lethal at this point, and I save that for something special. That was even including very unoptimized characters, so I bet a group of optimized characters could have handled it no problem.
My standard approach is to gauge the party's abilities when I start a campaign. I deliberately design three encounters, one for a party one average level below, one for their average party level and one for a party one party level above. Then I throw them at the party in ascending order and see how they go. If one of them TPKs or almost TPKs the party, I've got my baseline.
Then I revise my encounters as we go and the party either gets better (usually) or worse (sometimes).
Almost all of my encounters are multi-staged encounters, meaning the party almost never engages the entire group of available enemies immediately. Usually I bring about 1/3 in to start, see how the fight is going, and decide how many of the remaining ones to bring in as "reinforcements" or "just got to the fight" enemies to make sure the encounter is challenging but not overpowering.
Sometimes I see myself almost like a musical conductor, bringing up the bass, the treble or the mid-range depending on the encounter and how the party is dealing with it. I see the NPCs' and monsters' abilities as different tones or sounds to increase or decrease as the fight goes on.
I really enjoy the challenge of creating a memorable encounter.
Not that I'm perfect, I've never TPK'd a party, but I've come close and I've killed more than my share of characters. But as I tell my players, "hey, adventuring is a dangerous occupation." They typically don't seem to mind.
Not that I'm perfect, I've never TPK'd a party, but I've come close and I've killed more than my share of characters.
Oh everyone needs to TPK a party every once in a while -- isn't that what one shots were for? (:
The 3.5 answer was APL + 5 = a deadly encounter. That encounter should be run from; if the PCs actually stay and fight, they're probably going to be killed.
PF doesn't list an encounter that is "deadly" -- which is a shame I think. If I were to guess, I bet APL + 5 is still probably a good bet for a TPK-worthy encounter.
Just an eyeball check, level 5 party versus rakshasa. Need a good piercing weapon, otherwise huge DR and 33 AC with shield/mage armor. SR is pierced via a natural 20. 5 7d6 lightning bolts. 115 hp. 40 ft. movement. Yeah that's probably a TPK. . .
So anything below APL + 5 could work. APL + 4 is tricky because you might have one or two deaths. I think APL + 4 is fine for a big bad guy type. If the party isn't truly prepared for an APL + 4, it's probably a TPK. APL + 3 is probably not *that* epic, especially for a 5 character party.
Also, bunching all your CR into one bad guy makes the encounter pretty random. Things are kind of swingy if the players or the monster gets lucky. I'd save the big single monster fights for campaign-climatic moments.
All this depends on whether or not your party is playing 15 point buy with standard wealth per level. If you play with giant point buys and tons of treasure, APL + 5 might be doable -- but it's pretty unlikely.
Hey everyone, I've been GMing for a while now but i still don't really know how much i can do to the players before overchallenging them.
This is about monsters, the simple question being: What is the highest CR solo monster I should throw at a party of 5 or 6 adventurers?
Is there a rule of thumb to go by when creating an encounter and what would be challenging but managable worthy boss monster?
My players are all rather casual and mostly inexperienced so they don't optimize their characters very much. I'm not posting the average party level here because i would rather like to know for all levels.
That depends on how good the players are. What exactly you should use against them depends on the party build also.
If you really want to get murderous, throw the PCs against a comparable sized group of adventurers (or anyhow monsters with class levels), each of whom are higher level than the PCs. A group of 4th level PCs vs. an equal sized group of 5th level NPCs = pretty much guaranteed TPK.
That's CR = APL + (5 or 6). . . run!
You're better off with goblin rogues; the little suckers have such a huge Stealth modifier... They can't even find themselves.
Not to mention more movement and darkvision. A goblin rogue can actually be quite a fearsome opponent -- in the right environment. . .
CR = Core/Base character level - 1
Ohhhh I was using 3.5 mechanics. . . my bad.
In that case, it's not a TPK. APL + 4 isn't quite deadly. It's a hard fight, but a well-prepared group should be able to take them out. . . with maybe one casualty or two. . .
Remember, NPCs get less wealth than players do. That's the advantage that puts PCs slightly over the top in this case.
Almost all of my encounters are multi-staged encounters, meaning the party almost never engages the entire group of available enemies immediately. Usually I bring about 1/3 in to start, see how the fight is going, and decide how many of the remaining ones to bring in as "reinforcements" or "just got to the fight" enemies to make sure the encounter is challenging but not overpowering.
+1.
This is what I do, but not every time. I especially do it when they've just leveled up, or the party size has changed. This is how I gauge their strength. After that, I mix it up: sometimes I give them easy encounters to build their confidence (or to spend their best spells/powers for the day), and sometimes I give them life-or-death slugfests.
Trash-talking the GM prior to game day typically results in higher CR encounters.
Yesterday, our 3 person 11th level party (chaos gnome brass dragon shaman, feral kobold red draconic battle sorcerer, catfolk ranger) had 3 encounters: a pair of frost giants buffed by an invisible ice devil, an ice worm, and a fire giant fighter. The average Encounter Level was 13, I think.
One of the frost giants got one-rounded by a pouncing kobold, the catfolk and my gnome took care of the other frost giant as the kobold sought out the invisible foe, hit it with a fiery globe of acid, then the next round got a natural 1 with another fiery globe, but quickened a 2nd one and got a critical hit, so dusted the devil. Easy peasy.
We then took on an ice worm, and it was rough. It got us short folk in its breath weapon, then it munched on the kobold a bit, and I had to use my 1/week Fear ability from my Eyes of Doom to scare it away from melee with the kobold. Then when we finally killed it, it blew up! 20d6 Reflex for half, 100 foot radius. Fortunately, my allies had energy resistance cold up, and I had my ring of cold resistance 10 on, or it would have been a TPK....or close to it.
The fight with the fire giant was tough, because 2 of us are fire-based attackers (kobold sorcerer and gnome dragon shaman). Even my big gun is a staff of fire, so that was useless. My other tricky items use Fort saves, so I basically acted as a hit point sink. Fortunately my +4 AC vs giants actually helped once or twice!
Edit: So, basically, even though all the encounters were pretty much the same EL, they played out really differently because of our strengths and weaknesses.
Good stuff, valid point
...but now I am stuck with this ridiculous image of the party you described one-rounding frost giants. At first I thought, it's preposterous, patently ridiculous. Sure, it works mechanically, but the idea of it is just too cartoonish for me.
...or is it? The more I think about it the more awesome it gets. Kudos to you, good sir (or madam, your forgiveness I implore). You have expanded my world.
Personally, I think you should never throw solo monsters at your party unless you have a solid plan for how your monster will account for the action economy. Otherwise you have 2 possible outcomes. The players steamroll it because of the advantage of the action economy. Or the monster is strong enough to overcome this, but ends up being too strong a threat to any single character in the party thus having an unreasonable risk of death for any one character facing the monster. No matter what people may like, parking a single monster in front of the party is never a good idea, and it very rarely makes for a 'good' encounter.
Personally, I think you should never throw solo monsters at your party unless you have a solid plan for how your monster will account for the action economy. Otherwise you have 2 possible outcomes. The players steamroll it because of the advantage of the action economy. Or the monster is strong enough to overcome this, but ends up being too strong a threat to any single character in the party thus having an unreasonable risk of death for any one character facing the monster. No matter what people may like, parking a single monster in front of the party is never a good idea, and it very rarely makes for a 'good' encounter.
+1 to this!
What CR is appropriate is entirely dependent on the party in question and how you string the fights together. Party cohesion, party resources, the class powers present, and how well those match up against the foes abilities and resources are critical to consider. Swarms are a good example. No matter what CR the party should be able to take in theory, if a 10th level party doesn't have some way of doing area effect damage, they can still get quite beat up with just a simple swarm.
Four 1st-level halfling crossbow rogues with a 3rd-level cleric boss, employing snipe & hide tactics (they never indulge melee), are an absolute pain in the ass to any party of 6th level or less.
I love stuff like this. It comes uot better and more fun thatn the "big monsta".
Hey everyone, I've been GMing for a while now but i still don't really know how much i can do to the players before overchallenging them.
This is about monsters, the simple question being: What is the highest CR solo monster I should throw at a party of 5 or 6 adventurers?
Is there a rule of thumb to go by when creating an encounter and what would be challenging but managable worthy boss monster?
My players are all rather casual and mostly inexperienced so they don't optimize their characters very much. I'm not posting the average party level here because i would rather like to know for all levels.
Firstly, I would advise against using CR solely as the determining factor of a "Solo Boss Encounter", because it honestly doesn't work out too well, IMHO. There are generally two ways it can go down. Either A) The boss is too powerful for the PCs to defeat and/or kills PCs really fast, or B) the boss gets ganged down quickly, as the combined might of several adventurers can be brutal.
If you do plan to do big boss monsters, I would suggest building them to survive foremost. That means favoring things with fast healing, regeneration, and resistances. You'll want a solid AC, hit points, and saving throws. You probably don't want their killing power to be excessively larger than more usual enemies, but you'll want them to be threatening.
NPC classes such as warriors and adept can be ideal for providing a little bit more umph to a single enemy without breaking the bank XP/CR-wise. Let's say your party is 6th level. You want a CR 9 creature (APL +3) for an "Epic" solo enemy. So we pick something like a troll.
The standard troll is CR 5, and is pretty tough. However, we need to add about +4 CR to him, and make him a pretty beefy, scary, nasty dude that is going to make the party go "Man, this guys is tough" without it being a sure total party kill.
So we give our troll 6 levels of Warrior, and 2 levels of Adept which will provide him the following adjustments:
- +7 Base Attack
- +5 Fortitude
- +2 Reflex
- +5 Will
- +60.5 hit points
- +8 skill points (counting Int penalty)
- Full Weapon, Armor, and Shield Proficiency (even Tower Shields).
- A smattering of spell potential and a familiar.
- Two points worth of Ability Increases from hit dice.
- 3 Additional Feats.
- 10,050 gp worth of NPC equipment
You can also play around with templates. Applying the Advanced and Giant simple templates, followed by a few levels of NPC classes, will result in a very formidable single foe. Advanced (+1 CR), Giant (+1 CR), 2 Warrior (+1 CR), 2 Adept (+1 CR) would look about like this:
- Size Increase: Huge
- Str +8, Con +8, Dex +2
- Natural AC +5
- +3 Base Attack
- +3 Fortitude
- +3 Will
- +82 hit points
- +14 Skill Points (Int no longer penalized)
- Full weapon, armor, and shield proficiency (even Tower Shields).
- A smattering of spells and a familiar.
- A +1 ability score increase from hit dice.
- 2 additional feats.
- 10,050 gp worth of NPC equipment.
With his NPC equipment, our troll might consider a partially charged wand of resist energy, a nice two-handed weapon (since he's huge, a nice glaive would give him an amazing reach, combo well with his now amazing strength, and deal about 3d6 base damage), some armor, and maybe a few magical trinkets and potions. If you want to be really mean, he could also sport a potion of enlarge person (since he's a humanoid) will take him all the way to Gargantuan size!
Scary.
=====
Personally, I prefer encounters that have more creatures. Action economy is the name of the game, and lots of weaker creatures can often pose a much greater - and interesting - challenge than lone bosses. Mixing them up (strong creature + weak minions) is also a good plan.
This is a difficult question, and admittedly, it is something I have had trouble with myself. As everybody else said, there is a delicate line between too hard and too easy, and the action economy is ultimately what seems to decide things.
Once, I pit my evil party against a red dragon that had been posing as the king of a city it had been periodically razing every few decades. My party, full of martial-oriented characters, got torn apart by AoE's. The blaster druid could barely scratch it, and that was before I forgot about the monster's spell resistance. I had to nerf the encounter severely - had I full attacked, I would have had a TPK.
As opposed to my very first BBEG, an imp that had been manipulating a tribe of kobolds into raiding a nearby town. The monster was APL+1, but the imp's DR, fast healing, and invisibility at will made the encounter one hell of a goose chase.
The toughest thing you "should" throw at a party is an encounter that has a slightly better than even chance that it will kill (I mean "kill" not "knock unconscious") at least one party member, and maybe two, if the party is larger than four characters.
This has always been my "secret GM rule" so I am very hesitant about revealing it here.
When a party loses a member in a fight, they take to heart the message "Wow, that could have been MY character." This reinforces the idea that adventuring is a serious business, not an afternoon lark in the park.
It should also only be done in a MEANINGFUL encounter, where something critical is on the line for the campaign. When a party pays a price that high, it should get something meaningful in return. The character death should be an epic death, one that would inspire bardic lore. Ideally the death should be part of a sacrifice so that the rest of the party feels a sense of debt and gratitude towards their slain companion. This also helps to ensure a raise dead if the party has the wherewithal to do so.
Once this encounter is set up, the GM must play it dead straight. This is the time to say "Because this encounter is so critical, I'll be rolling my attacks and damage in the open." The party has to know the fight is not rigged. The enemy should play it smart and play to win. This is the time that your NPC will choose a coup de grace if they get the chance.
To pull this off you have to know your party's strengths and weaknesses to a pretty high degree of predictability. It helps if your NPCs taunt and tease the party. This is NOT when you exploit the party's known and obvious weaknesses. This is when you square off in a no holds barred street fight and you go strength vs strength to give the party the chance to pull off all their special moves and expend those one-shot magic items you gave them just for this fight.
That's how I do it. It requires a lot of planning and forethought and you have to be willing to risk killing a character or two, because if it's not that deadly, and it's not played straight, the party will never believe they were at risk.