The New DM's Guide To Balancing Encounters: (AN ACTUALLY USEFUL HOW-TO) 

I think that this also touches on a different way to think of encounter balance that makes it more immersive. Don't balance at all, just come up with what would actually exist, and leave the problem solving to the players.

I love seeing great D&D creators referencing each other. You need to take inspiration and lessons from a variety of people in order to get a solid understanding of a topic, and seeing them building off each other helps a lot

Great insight and a real eye opener! If you think of the fight against the scouts, the fight against the door guards, the fight against the goblins in the first room, and the fight against the goblins in the last room each as their own individual encounter to balance and try to make each one memorably on its own - which I did until now - it's easy to get lost in detail, to become inflexible if players think out of the box. To miss the forest for the trees. But thinking of the goblin clan as a single encounter that is devided into smaller groups suddenly brings everything into perspective and opens up so much potential for interesting narrative, environmental worldbulding, sudden twists, and opportunities for on-the-spot adjustments for the sake of the player's fun. Oh, the party is struggling? I better delay the reinforcements one more round.

Level is not the only factor in determining a balanced encounter. You can't figure out balance until you become familiar with how your players are gong to play their characters (which includes you being familiar with their abilities and gear). You also need to weigh in action economy. If the party can focus fire on one target, it can make a deadly encounter trivial. Likewise, an "easy" combat is not so easy when the party is outnumbered three to one, even if the monsters drop in one hit. You also need to consider the ambush. Whichever side is getting ambushed is going to have a harder time winning the fight. Likewise, favorable terrain can also swing a balanced encounter to heavily favor one side. The last factor that I think is rather important is how smart (tactical) you play the monsters.

I just use the Giffyglyph Monster Maker and everything feels very balanced as is because it takes a more mathematical approach from the ground up like 4e had.

There are some great ideas in this video; the greatest takeaway for me is defining "encounter," making waves of enemies instead of everyone starting at one time. Only thing I'll add to this concept is you can combine enemies and traps in a single encounter, making triggers release enemies in a dungeon that get to the party eventually. Examples: water trap that eventually releases swarms of piranhas, or a crushing trap that also releases gelatinous cubes to clean up the mess. With that, balancing encounters in 5e is hard because it totally depends on the player characters, especially with the min/maxing character builds. A roleplaying/drama focused party behave and survive differently than an optimized min maxing party. As a DM, you may find you get the hang of it with a party you are managing only to have to relearn the balancing after a new party is made. Final words, to paraphrase Professor Dungeon Master, I actually do not think that "balancing" an encounter is such a huge priority, as the role of the die has a lot to do with it. A simple encounter can become deadly and deadly become simple based on random numbers. Make a situation, see how players deal with it, and remember that as a DM it is not your job to annihilate the PCs. Whenever you make an encounter, always predetermine what will happen next if the party is defeated and it should not always "they all die." Maybe just one or two that don't make their death saves :D

Great video! A great thing about the 1E tables is that the encounters are tuned to be challenging. There's an incredible amount of thought and mathematics that went into 1E generally that gets overlooked due to the High Gygaxian nature of the text (which I appreciate as part of its charm).

I don't worry about balance too much. I just decide if its a mild inconvenience or decent threat like a mini-boss and tweak whatever range in between If its too hard/easy I let them work it out. It's their problem to solve. Flight is always an option

Great stuff, and updating the chart for 5E? You, sir, are becoming a river to your people!

OD&D wasn't just about delving into dungeons, it also had strong roots in wargaming. The PCs were meant to have an army of hirelings (which it was paid with treasure found in dungeon). The Wildernes had encounters such as 20-200 Bandits or 40-400 Goblins (with rules for how many leaders the army had, if they had magic items or special powers). Another difference is the use of Morale, large groups could be dismanteled by killing the leader or using a spell like fireball which would cut a significant number of troops and would make the survivors flee. There was also a Reaction Roll which determined the intentions towards the PCs, so even a large group of orcs could be friendly (at least friendly for an orc). I'm not sure what edition has a different number for monsters encountered on a dungeon and encountered in the wilderness (in the wilderness the distance you spot the enemies is so big that you have more ways to evade large groups). But if you look at games like Old School Essentials they have different numbers (also different numbers for treasures depending where you encounter the monsters)

This is one of your best videos. The AD&D context/explanation of "encounter" is something I've never considered but explains so much about the tables and CR system.

As a new DM, thank you for this video! Extremely thorough and helpful!

This dude can pack so much useful shit into six minutes that it blows my mind.

Thanks for your videos! Hope you feel better!!

Thank you so much for the great work you do and for the knowledge and resources you share with us!

as a new DM, this will be a great asset when trying to put together my own encounters to supplement the existing adventure, thank you!

I run Pathfinder 1E and it wasn't until deep into the third arc a campaign that I ever looked up the EXP budget rules, and only did so then because I was running a large-scale encounter and needed some guidance. And so far that is the only time I've used the rules. Thank you for this explanation of Encounters though, it's very helpful in introducing a different way of looking at how to populate dungeons.

There will always be a range on challenge based on behaviour too. Enemies may be at a certain challenge rating based on them fighting at their most efficient on flat terrain, but that would be a strange engagement. Most enemies, intelligent or not, will only choose to fight if the odds are in their favour or if they have no choice. A lot of things will also fight inefficiently until desperation kicks in unless trained. Most terrain will offer advantages to whoever positions themselves first. Some enemies will fight to the death while others run after one failed attack. Likewise some will fight to kill while others just want to intimidate you or stop you attacking them. The truth of balancing encounters is that, so long as you are not going to extremes, challenge rating is highly adjustable by play style. I did like this video (just in case it seems like I'm deriding it). It is useful to see balance in the variable long play (between rests) sense rather than as an all at once encounter. Just stating that any encounter balance system used is a start, but a significant part will be discovery of how you as DM play, how your players play, and whether the players or the enemy are the attackers.

Incredibly excited to try out the tables in my next session coming up tonight.

Im convinced this is Legal Eagle’s secret second channel.

Awesome stuff! I'm gonna use this to populate my void crawls in my upcoming liminal horror game for backrooms style exploration, as well for urban exploration, and other encounters. I'm thinking the first would resemble a more classic encounter table, while the other two will have more "mundane" non-monsters, like cop-callers, or nosy criminals, and maybe a single monster, depending on the scenario, so make the real life stuff all gel

This was incredibly useful, thank you!

4:55 You're awesome

Thank you for sharing this resource!

One thing that 4e did kinda right that sadly didn't get brought over to 5e was suggested encounter groups in the Monster Manual.

Glad I stumbled on your videos. Would move to compare notes

What a great philosophy. I like this approach so much more than trying to mathematically construct the perfect combat every time.

4e had enemy roles, like brute and artillery. And they had encounter groups in the monster manual. And in the dmg they had encounter templates based on roles and cr. It was good stuff

I run a lot of solo and one-on-one games so balance has been a neat little puzzle for me to play with. I'm looking forward to seeing if your tables can give me insight. Thanks.

And here I was weighing minis on a mechanical scale.

DnD4E has example encounters for every monster. And that feels Amazing.

Excellent video

Excellent, thanks! Definitely worth a few coppers. (at today's metals rates....)

I heard Abria Iengar talk about how she will sometimes use a stat block from a suggested encounter and just flavor it differently based on setting and tone. I think having an encounter table readily available regardless of DM or player plans is probably a good idea, and instead of sticking to exactly what any given monster is, just say it’s something else that fits.

This will work so much nicer for my randomized campaign, than the random encounter tables I have been using. Of course, I'm also randomizing the levels of the encounters, so my locations are crazy.

This video should be an hour or longer Baron. 😃 There's so much more that we can touch on. How bout revisiting this (a yr later) & compare & contrast each stage: e.g. 1st to 4th, 4th to 8th & so on?

Gygaxian ... what an amazing word!

I highly enjoy the different approach you've taken here, but I would also like to point something out. 5e's Challenge Rating system assumes a party of four, and doesn't take into account any sort of variance - Spells, feats, magic items. It comes down to what's vaguely appropriate from a hit points vs. DPR perspective, and even then, it's not very useful, especially when you have a party of an odd size. Challenge rating should be based not on a four-person party, but on a per-character basis - With additional points for each Extra Attack present in the party, and each spellcaster (Based on the levels of spells they can cast. I would do it like this: -The party's CR is equal to their collective number of Hit Dice, and gains modifiers as following: ---For each Extra attack possessed by a character, they gain a +1 to their individual CR. So a level 20 Fighter, with Extra Attack 3, would have a CR of 23. ---For each spellcaster in the party, they gain a bonus to their CR equal to one-half (Rounded up) of the highest-level spell they can cast without magic items: 1-2 (+1), 3-4 (+2), 5-6 (+3), 7-8 (+4), or 9 (+5). ---For each magic item in the party's possession, they gain a bonus based on its rarity - Common (0), Uncommon (+1), Rare (+2), Very Rare (+3), or Legendary (+4). These values increase by 1 for any item that requires attunement - This system is far from perfect, but adds some value. So, we have an 11th-level party of 3 - A Fighter, a Ranger, and a Sorcerer. The Fighter has a Sun Blade (Rare, attunement), the Sorcerer has a Wand of Paralysis (Rare, attunement), and the Ranger has a Cloak of Elvenkind (Uncommon, attunement) and an Oathbow (Very Rare, attunement). The Fighter would have a CR of 16 (11 HD, +2 Extra Attack, +3 magic items), the Ranger's CR would be 20 (11 HD, +1 Extra Attack, +2 Spells [3rd], +6 magic items), and the Sorcerer's CR would be 17 (11 HD, +3 Spells [6th], +3 magic items) This gives the party a total CR of 53. And applying the same system to monsters, you could throw a total CR of 53 at the party to challenge them, in theory. I have yet to write out and fully define this system, but it's very interesting and at least more functional than the published system.

I’m planning a session 1 specifically introducing 3 new players to DND two are currently playing their first ever campaign with another group (at level 4) and one has NEVER touched DND before. This is supposed to be a tutorial session walking the newest player through character creation before having a quick “tutorial” encounter in the form of a Wild West style train heist my main issue is how many guards would be appropriate for 3 1st level players, (guns exist and the players are filling the role of outlaws working for a roving gang of conmen, thieves, and gunslingers)

I get the analogy to training wheels but ironically training wheels have been found to delay learning how to ride properly. That’s why kids are recommended balance bikes these days instead of training wheels

If you want to go REALLY Old School in terms of "Balancing Encounters" you might like to take a look at Don Turnbull's early White Dwarf series of articles covering the Monstermark System. Lots of maths, and quite a bit of handwavery, in there! It was, essentially, a way in which you could roughly work out how much damage each side could dish out, and absorb, and you could then compare them. You could also award XP based on the MM which was it's original purpose. It also had a way of awarding XP for non-combat things too. I'm not sure that people really interpreted those encounter tables as you're saying. 1e didn't have the concept of a "Long Rest" so, depending on how many clerics they had around, a party could still be pretty banged up the next day - healing was slow. In 1e a lot of encounters (especially non-dungeon, wilderness ones) were either avoided, or were resolved through peaceful negotiation rather than deadly conflict. That band of bandits were to be parleyed with, or perhaps deceived into situations where they could be picked off piecemeal.

I got distracted by the training wheels analogy, so now I have to watch it again. I'll bet that was by design and that you know that a balance bike is a lot better way to learn to ride a bike.

I think when balancing its often a good idea to just consider how many hits this will take to put down. Not turns, hits. When throwing a lot of enemies at players at once which you want your players to mow through, youll want them to go down in roughly 1-2.5 hits. If your fighter averages 10 damage every time they hit, monsters should have 10, 25 health. Bigger enemies take 3-5 hits, harder to hit enemies might take less hits but have higher AC. Basically if players are hitting their shots you as a DM should want these to go down fast, and when players dont make their rolls theyre going to wish they did.

I love finding new ways of developing encounters, especially ones inspired by Gygax's 1e

Thanks for sharing. 🥳

Restoring the dungeon's place helps other aspects of the game come back online. The narrative arc can still be there, with the resources extracted from dungeons giving the party the money to get established and have grand adventures outside of the dungeon. The AD&D 1e Dungeon Masters Guide is the single greatest resource for the creation of player driven, sandbox campaigns.

Henchmen, hirelings, bodyguards, torchbearers, loot carriers, mercenaries, meat shields, whatever you want to call them, players were expected to spend loot and hire npcs so definitely you could engage with a single encounter of 12 bandits. Monsters had number of appearance both outside and inside their lair, the latter being the case you described but with bigger numbers.

Very cool!

Awesome!

Those tips and the supplement are great, thank you so much. The only question I have is how many players the supplements assumes. I would guess around five?

The 1st Ed AD&D DMG was published in '79, not '77. I know this because I was in gradeschool when I read it. Looked it up to make sure... okay, back to the video... 😀

nice, i didnt know this difference in encounters

Dude bravo dude

This is how I have ran my campaigns for the last 20 years, but I started with ADnD

Don't worry, those tables never made sense to us old grognards either! 😆 As far as I know, no one ever used them. People mostly ran modules back then with a few notable exceptions. Most of the modules had encounters spelled out in them. Nice picture of a tower ruin @3:44. Looks like Germany. Is it?

Time to put this to good use

Runaway..... probably the best thing to do. Dont touch unless you have to

I'm curious how you use the 6-8 encounters per day advice in this scenario. I think if you have enough bandits rolled, you can smeer those out to the 6-8 encounters. But the single encounters might get very thin? So that's where CR and XP budget comes in? In my oppinion those 6-8 encounters are what make the encounter design go bad in the games. If your players can nova the single encounter and then take a long rest, the XP budget and CR will be skewed for sure.

Does your table assume 4 party members? How should we adjust the numbers for smaller or greater groups?

What is this page??? It looks like page 133 of the 1e Monster Manual II, but you have it listed as page 267 of the Dungeon Master's Guide, Appendix J? What secret version of the 1e DMG is this? (Good video, BTW)

The ten AD&D bandits for a relatively large 1st-level PC Party, is easily do-able; it's perfectly balanced, not a too hard combat. Even for a party of 4, it's still do-able --- and actually easy if there is a PC Wizard. Those charts are for *random* encounters only. They are not intended to be used as a guide for understanding challenge in combat. (The numbers also change depending on whether the monster is located in its lair). The (5e) DMG, already has appropriate random encounter charts. It's not true that modern players focus more on narrative than in the past.

The casual basement tarrasque

I just ran a survival mode siege campaign no balance 5e rules with 3.5 monster stats my players loved it.

Good video. But I have a different approach: dispense with the very notion of the "balanced encounter". There, life is now much easier. Lol

I will take your entire stock!

Something about 5e makes a lot of people over estimate how complicated CR really is. The rules for building encounters (DMG pg 81-84) really only truly take up 2 pages due to large art. They break down difficulty definitions, explain CR in detail, and give good advice on party size and making encounters fun. This system is much more approachable than anything I've run, people just need to stop only trusting online voices and just read the damn books.

I know the CR system works because I use it all the time, but seeing new takes is always interesting. Appreciate the effort.

How to read the table ? What is 2d6 and what is no app ? Im sorry I very new on DnD

Balance is an illusion. sometimes kobold wipes the party, sometimes the red dragon is done in the first turn. Everything is in RNGesus hands.

"and then run away" if you dont know your group so well NEVER assume that they will run away. maybe prepare a emergency deus ex machina (f.e. some NPC appears pulling up a magic wall and screaming at the player to run a way while they still can)

Isn't this 5e's adventuring day mechanic?

Although AD&D 1E does have these tables for assisting with random encounters in Dungeon environments, they were not really intended to be guides on how to stock non-random encounters. The misinterpretation of 'game balance' to mean, "a balance between monster power and party power," goes back further and has led us to where we are today. The actual described meaning of game balance given in D&D Basic (Moldvay) on Pg. B60 under Dungeon Mastering as a Fine Art is, "The treasures should be balanced by the dangers." Somewhen over 40+ years that has been misconstrued to mean all encounters must be winnable and fair. To those who expect this I say, if you want a fair fight in a war - you're gonna die.

I had 6 level 5 PCs defeat my 5 vampire spawn. I start with deadly everytime and scale back/pull punches as needed. I have no confidence in challenge rating anymore.

Problem is two folds. 5e players can't die. 5e players and 5e is focused on combat not dungeon survival. 5e is only narrative in that players NEVER die and have +5 plot armor.

Unfortunately, you didn't mention what the DM needs to do to balance encounters. You gave a chart and we just need to take you at your word that your new chart is balanced. In the future it would be helpful to give new DMs a system more focused than just... "you'll develop a sixth sense" for balancing encounters. Sly Flourish has something like this: If the total CR is more than a 1/4 of the total party level (below 5th level) the encounter is most likely deadly. That increases to 1/2 above 5th level. I've been using this system now for 2 years and it seems to be working very well. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-05VWofhNMHI.html&ab_channel=SlyFlourish%E2%80%93TheLazyDungeonMaster Just my 2 cents.

Best balance is to don't balance. First rule: explaine to players that the nature of the game is that they can die at any time and the fight if not always the best solution to choose. You can try to sneak past enemies, barter or run away from an encounter. They need to learn how to self assess dangers and discover monster abilities is part of the fun. No one knowns that a troll regenerate and they can't find out how to stop its healing? Why would they want to keep fighting if that would be a real situation? Once discovered that your gun is useless against a tank, would you stay there keeping shooting at it until you are squashed, drilled by the machine gun or splatted by a cannon shell?

interesting

i love you ok !

Anyone seeing this: challenge rating ignores environment. Back Alley? Chase? Wide open field? Thick forest. A beautiful road, with thick forest on both sides? A cramped dungeon hallway? Also, link is dead now :-(

For how many players are these tables good for? 5E uses action economy and the more players you have in the party, the more damage and healing can be delivered per round. It would have been more useful to provide a table and specifying that it's for 4-5 characters and every 1-2 additional characters, add 1-2 of the mobs...

I mean... Prewritten adventures provide this.

Get better! Hope it's just the normal flu

0:29 This is a somewhat ironic example since children actually tend to lear how to ride a bike better without training wheels, and learn best using specialised training bikes that instead lack pedals. Training wheels tend to teach bad habits and lead to overreliance, making them comparable to CR or XP budget.

While I like the concept, I am not sure this table would work for a non veteran table. A hydra at lvl 4 and an adult black dragon at lvl 6 are threats that could easily result in a tpk.

As someone who's actually used these tables, this is a hard no. These were random encounters in a dungeon. If you rolled 10 bandits, then there were 10 bandits. You might space them out a bit, but it would be a single encounter no different than a 5e encounter.

What's wrong with a party of 1st level characters running into a dozen or more bandits at one time? Not every encounter needs to be a fight. Maybe the players have to sneak by them, possibly trying to steal their loot or free a prisoner in the process. Maybe they have to parley with the bandits and end up bribing them. Or maybe they have to run away? What about if the players strategize to divide and conquer the opponents. IMO there's too much focus on balancing everything. Set up encounters, give the players ample warning when they're facing a really dangerous situation, and see how it plays out.

One of my players said after the last Session in which we only played out 1 combat: "We cant know how dangerous the monsters are, so we blast out our strongest spells immediately." How would a great game master answer that?

One thing I think this really emphasizes is that the difficulty has a lot to do with how smart players play. Rush in like idiots, and a tpk is almost a guarantee. Carefully peel solo opponents away from the main force, and even weak PCs will probably do fine. I think it also emphasizes how player approach is stronger than any class feature. No, Leroy Jenkins is not a viable playstyle. It's funny when you win. But let LJ cause a tpk, and no love for the idiot.

Balance is an ilusion

The 1e tables had nothing to do with long rest. That concept did not exist, at least in the 5e sense. A single spell would come back after 4 hours of rest per spell level, Hit points returned at a rate of 1 per day of rest. The way you described is nothing like anyone I know played 1st edition. Every DM I played with looked at those tables as the number you encountered at a single time.

Balance is not desirable. Let them learn to flee.

Encounters should not be split up like that, an "encounter" should be what you challenge the players before giving them a break.. not a rest, just time to do out of combat healing and move to exploration. The total number of encounters in a Day is what you want to use before players need a long rest, and then you must decide how many opportunities for short rests are spread throughout a day. And there are multiple types of encounters, most encounters are just there to whittle down player resources, as they get low then things start getting dangerous. This is a typical dungeon crawl. it allows for short rests and maybe even a long rest if it is more of a wildneress big exploration type dungeon where the monsters would not team up to fight players but are acting on their own. Then their is the the single big fight in a day where players are pushed to their limits with all their resources on hand, this kind of encounter needs to feel threatening enough to die in or it's no fun. and should only be used for epic moments. If you do this as your 1 encounter a day traveling through the woods ten it will make your other bandit type or dungeon crawl encounters lack luster, because it takes alot to threaten a party at full strength. Just traveling along level 5 party... and you find 2 bullettes... now that is very dangerous to a group of level 5's but when they re in a dungeon there are finding small groups of bugbears to challenge them or a force of a dozen goblins... this wont feel anything like the bullettes but enough of those encounters will drain the party.

Don’t balance your encounters. Just don’t Research or imagine how many enemies might guard a location about what enemies they most commonly face How will those guards form a group that gets the most strength and value for the least cost and number of soldiers? Think about how your encounters form a system. There is no way CR 10 beasts are just roaming the forests so commonly that a single days travel would result in some Consider that most monsters, weak and strong might spot the party but have no interest to engage

Trainng wheels are bad. They teach a false security and reliance on a safynet. My kids learned wiht out training wheels. Just had to get that straight my godfahter had a bicircle shop and two of my best friends ( and players at my table ) work in the bycircle industry and all said the same.

Just downloaded it and it looks mostly good, but I really don't like the fields that just have "1" as the number encountered. That doesn't follow your example in the video at all and it's unclear how to make that interesting and balanced. Populating a watch tower with 2d6+3 bandits is great in the example you gave since there are different areas you could use, but populating a dungeon with a single wight at level 2? I'd love to have examples on how to make that balanced. Are you saying that a single floor of the dungeon would just have that one wight on it? This also makes the higher tables pretty much useless. Why is a solar the most commonly encountered thing at 10th level? At that point the appendix is basically saying "from this point on, you're on your own, so here are some joke entries that are all impossible to beat at 10th level."

5E, LOL

It's such a shame that 5e jumped straight to challenge ratings and xp budgets for encounter design with no sort of easy to parse, common-sense way to build encounters. Compare that to 4e, the edition everyone loves to hate, in which xp budgets are a thing but also includes numerous boilerplate templates for encounters that you can just slap some monsters on and run. Each entry in the monster manual also comes with a ready-to-run suggested encounter! 5e could never!

"A single encounter in this old school Gygaxian understanding describes how many monsters should be interacted with before [...] a long rest." I'm sorry, but this makes little sense. There is no Gygaxian understanding of what 5E coins a "long rest".

I only disagree with the usage of the word "encounter" when you actually mean "session", "dungeon", "adventure", etc. I'm hard pressed to find encounter defined as "all monsters at a dungeon or location", even in the old days; instead, what you're conveying was what the "number of appearance" could be used for (you could have, as you explained in the video, dozens of orcs at an orc encampment, but they wouldn't all be at the same place at the same time). As you said yourself, modern dungeons can be stocked with monsters just like old days, but in a more narrative way. That's why encounter design has been established in recent years as a piece of narrative that mostly involves NPCs, monsters, traps etc organized in an engaging way. An encounter can involve any type of relationship, including a battle, even an unbalanced one. But a dungeon or location can have dozens of encounters. You can say that, to balance a number of encounters in a single location, you should keep the sum of all threatening creatures within the desired level's number of appearance for those creatures (of course the wording needs some work, but what I mean is, this would separate encounter and number of appearance). By mixing up encounter with number of appearance, you're making it more confusing to understand than you would have separating things.

Balance? What's balance? Throw cool things at players and see what they do about em