Can we talk about monsters? Monster building and encounter building, I mean? The thing is, it’s been a bugbear on my back – or wherever the hell you get bugbears – for a while now. And, in D&D 5E, it’s worse than ever. And, look, I bought PF2. And I haven’t started reading it yet. And I WILL get to it. Eventually. I’m f$&%ing busy. The point is, I really don’t need anyone pointing out that PF2 fixed everything and it’s the second coming of role-playing games and it’s so innovative. I will find out soon enough. Until then, I’m going to continue dealing with things my own way, thank you. So I don’t CARE right now how PF2 has f$&%ed up encounter and monster building in its own unique way compared to the way D&D has f$&%ed it up. I’ll fix it myself.

And that’s why I’m here talking about this. Because, over the past several months, I’ve been fixing it myself. Encounter and monster building, I mean. As in, how to assemble encounters and also how to build custom monsters. And now that I’m pretty happy with how things are playing out, I figured I’d share it all with all of you. Because I’m just that great a f$&%ing guy. You’re welcome.

Now, here’s the thing: I’m not really concerned with the statistics themselves. I know some people get really, really worked up about how the stats for individual monsters don’t seem deadly enough, even at high levels and how the players don’t feel threatened and all of that crap. I haven’t had that problem. My players frequently have conversations during my adventures that involve discussions about whether they will die if they try to push forward any further. Because I understand the attrition model of D&D. And I also understand how to build a monster and a monster progression and how to push the players to push themselves to their limits.

In fact, if anything, part of my improvements to the whole monster-and-encounter-building thing involve unbalancing things just a bit. At least, it’s been about blurring the balance. Because trust me, the game can take it. In fact, it makes things better. But this Long, Rambling Introduction™ needs to come to end. It’s getting too focussed on the topic of the article to count as an LRI™ while also being too vague to count as actual article meat. So, let’s just leave it at this: I have had a vision for improving encounter design since the days of D&D 4E based on the framework that 4E had laid down. And I hoped that 5E would build on that framework, not crap all of it over it and then leave it in a gutter on the side of the road. Because, as terrible as certain aspects of 4E were, 4E’s design on the monster, encounter, and adventure building side were leaps and bounds ahead of anything D&D had ever done.

But enough ranting. It’s time for article meat.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated to Work

Let’s talk about combat encounter design in D&D 5E. Specifically, I want to talk about the two systems that we GMs who insist on designing our own adventure content for D&D have to deal with all the f$&%ing time. First, there’s the encounter building s$&% described starting on DMG 81 under the heading “Creating Encounters.” That’s all the crap about how to design how many monsters of what CR would be an easy, moderate, hard, or deadly challenge for a given number of hapless victims. Second, there’s the custom monster creation s$&% described starting on DMG 273 under the heading “Creating a Monster.” That’s the process you follow to assign various statistics, traits, attacks, and special abilities to your own custom-made monsters and then how to figure out what CR your monster actually ends up when you’re all done. I use these two systems a lot. Well, sort of. Honestly, I haven’t really used them in a year. But I’ll get to that.

The thing about these two systems which provide almost everything you need to build your own combat encounters in D&D 5E is that they are, as we say in the business, a f$&%ing mess of kludgey bulls$&%. If you told me that they were designed by a group of brain-damaged gibbons flinging s$&% at a wall, I’d believe you. It’s not that they give bad results. I mean, I know some people think the results are s$&%. But those people generally expect too damned much from encounter balance systems to begin with, they often don’t know how to properly use encounter balance systems, they don’t understand that the point of such systems is actually to produce fights the average party can win if they aren’t complete f$&%ing morons. So, let’s table that discussion and accept they give okay results. Not great. Just okay. Manageable. Useful.

Well, kind of. Now, I’ve already complained about the monster building process in 5E. In fact, I wrote a whole series of articles explaining that pile of crap just because it was so complicated most people didn’t use it. But the thing is, it doesn’t actually have to be complicated. Because monster building in 5E is actually remarkably simple. Only certain things really affect monster building. At least in terms of balance. But I’ll get to that too.

The thing about the encounter building rules, though, is that they are built around this false dilemma that you have to decide what combats in your game are primarily about: are they about a group of heroes beating the mother-loving crap out of single monsters or are they about a group of heroes fighting roughly their own number of minor baddies. Because the way D&D combat has been designed in every edition of the game that cared about balance was to pick one of those two as the “best” type of fight, design the monsters around that, and then try to adjust the system to handle the other type with clumsy adjustments and workarounds. That’s why, in 3E, you had all that crap with fractional CRs and ELs and how two creatures of a given CR had an equivalent EL as a single creature whose CR was 2 points higher than the CR of each of the creatures. And don’t get me started on mixed pairs. And that’s why in 5E, you’ve got all that crap about fractional CRs and encounter CR multipliers for group sizes. And why, in 4E, you had… well, you could just throw the same number of normal monsters at the party as the number of PCs in the party. And if the monsters’ levels were off, you could just use an XP budget to buy monsters instead. But if you wanted to use more or fewer monsters, you had to use an elite monster, a solo monster, or a pile of minions.

Actually, 4E wasn’t that complicated. Yeah, there was the problem that elites and solos didn’t really work great as advertised. But they were on the right track. Hell, with a few corrections tied to the action economy, they were actually pretty damned effective. I know. The first article I ever wrote over a decade ago was about how to easily fix solos in D&D 4E. And it worked.

Here’s the thing: 4E was on the right f$&%ing track. It was on the right track because it was built on the assumption that the most interesting fights were the ones that involved multiple creatures. That’s undeniably true. Yes, big fights with single monsters like dragons and beholders and giants are iconic things. I’m not denying it. They are great set pieces. I love them. But the workaday encounters, the ones that fill the brunt of your adventures, those ones are best served with a little party of baddies to match the numbers of the little party of goodies. But beyond that, 4E was on the right track because it was simple. You could slap together a well-balanced fight just by throwing one baddie per PC of roughly the same level as the PCs at the PCs. Or you could play with a budget if you wanted to do something wonky, like a large number of lower-level creatures or mixing one elite cave troll in with a couple of hobgoblins and their goblin minions.

What killed 4E’s encounter balance more than anything else – apart from the fact that it took them three iterations of the Monster Manual to nail down the monster design properly and, by then, everyone was losing interest – was the fact that it, like all editions of D&D, tried to be too damned exact. See, all of the encounter and monster design systems present this veneer of perfect balance. They present this idea that there is a formula that you can follow to design encounters of the perfect difficulty for any party. And that lie hurts the system. And it’s dangerous besides.

Part of the problem with that lie is that it lets the encounter-building GM off the hook. It says they don’t have to think and tweak and adjust. And that’s just silly. What is an average or easy or difficult encounter for one party won’t be for another party. Different combinations of abilities, different numbers of magic items, different levels of tactical skill, different methods of battlefield design, and so on: all of those things affect the actual difficulty of any given combat. So the idea that there is one size of average encounter that fits every table is absurd.

Second, the very precise encounter building is highly restrictive. Well, it’s highly restrictive in the wrong way. But I’ll get to that too also. The thing is, if tell the GMs they have to hit an exact bullseye of perfect difficulty with their encounters and you don’t align everything exactly, it can be very difficult for a GM to build the encounter they want to build. I mean, let’s say I have a group of four 1st-level PCs and I want them to have a single encounter with a group of goblins. Well, one goblin is too low a threat to even register. Two goblins are somewhere between easy and medium. Three goblins are hard. And four goblins hit deadly. I can hit easyish or I can hit hard, but I really can’t get an average encounter out of that. You run into these little problems all the time because none of the numbers actually divide evenly into anything.

But, here’s the thing, any GM who has built their own encounters can tell you it’s not REALLY that exact. One extra goblin really doesn’t take the encounter from “just north of easy” to “hard.” ESPECIALLY once you stop building encounters for 1st level PCs. Because even I will admit everything is way swingy at 1st level.

And that’s the thing: the D&D 5E encounter building rules actually work best if you don’t sweat them too much. If you don’t try to be precise, they actually work pretty well. Well, as long as you’re imprecise within a certain range of imprecision. And as long as you respect certain things at certain levels. The trouble is knowing the range of imprecisions and what things you really can’t push too far beyond.

Anyway, that leads me to the point of this whole project: I got tired of doing a bunch of careful math only to discover that I couldn’t get anything to work out just right and then fudging it and having everything work out just fine anyway. It seemed to me like there was a giant extra step there. Maybe what I could do is just figure out a better way to quickly design encounters that didn’t involve a lot of math. I just had to figure out what things I needed to be precise about and what things I needed to be fuzzy about. And I had to make sure they aligned with how I actually wanted to design encounters.

The problem is that, in the end, I broke everything.

How I Want to Design Encounters

It is impossible to have an encounter building system that doesn’t place any restrictions on the GM. As I noted above, it’s a matter of choosing the restrictions that work best for the game. You have to establish a framework within which the GM must work. That’s the whole point of even having a system. The GM can do whatever they want already. You can have your 1st level party encounter a red dragon and a dozen kobold slaves without needing me to tell you how to design the encounter. The only reason you come to me – the game designer – for advice is because you want a system to design balanced encounters that provide a reasonable level of difficulty and whose outcome is fairly predictable within a given margin for surprises.

D&D 5E provides guidelines and restrictions by assigning every D&D monster a CR. A Challenge Rating. That Challenge Rating basically represents the average level of a party of four PCs for whom one of those monsters provides a good challenge. For example, an adult green dragon is a CR 15 monster. That means that all else being equal, a lone green dragon provides a good challenge for a party of four PCs whose average level is 15. That’s how CR works. And everything else – how to adjust for multiple creatures; how to adjust the difficulty of combat between easy, medium, hard, and deadly; how to adjust for different numbers of PCs – everything else is an estimate based on that basic principle.

The problem is that not all monsters are designed the same way. And they are not all intended to be used in the same way. In general, if you’re going to encounter in a game, you’re going to encounter one of them. So that measure works. But how often do you ever encounter ONE goblin or ONE orc or ONE gnoll or ONE giant rat? Almost never, right? So why the hell would I measure those monsters based on whether a single one of them would provide a good fight?

Now, you may think this argument is academic, but here’s the thing: the number of dragons or goblins that show up? It actually affects how the monsters are designed. At least, it should. Take hobgoblins for example. They have this ability that allows them to deal extra damage to a target if they have an ally nearby. And their Challenge Rating is computed based on them being able to do that extra damage. But if only one hobgoblin shows up, they aren’t going to deal that extra damage. And kobolds have that pack tactics thing that lets them also benefit from having allies in the fight. No allies, no benefit. Beyond that, though, look at dragons. Look at how complicated their stat blocks are. They have lots of options, they have multiple attacks, and they have ways to attack multiple targets at once. The best ones also have different mobility options to keep them from getting pinned down. That’s not just to make them more powerful, it’s also because they have to hold their own alone. On top of that, imagine trying to run a fight with twenty dragons. Imagine tracking the three uses of legendary resistance times twenty and the three legendary actions between each turn times twenty and the use and recharge of twenty breath weapons. That’s why giant rat stat blocks are so simple. Because you’re never going to be running one of them. You’ll probably be running five or ten or twenty.

The point is that the number of creatures that appear in an encounter is important. And if you’re going to look for something that you’re going to build an encounter design framework around, that’s a good place to start. That’s why 4E did that whole “solo, elite, minion” thing on top of its normal monsters.

So, the first thing I want to consider when I’m designing an encounter is whether I’m designing an encounter for one monster or several or two dozen. And that is undeniably a property of the creature. Dragons don’t come in groups, orcs do, dragons should be designed that way and orcs should be designed that way.

The other thing I want to consider when I’m building an encounter is the general power level of the critters involved. That is to say, I want to consider their level. What level should the party be when they encounter this creature? Because, again, that’s just something you can’t get away from in D&D. As their levels rise, PCs can take more damage and they can dish out more damage. And the monsters have to keep up. And this is something else that is built into the fabric of monster design. See, the actual CR of a monster is based entirely on just two statistics: the monster’s hit points and the monster’s damage output. At least, in 5E it is. It’s just a little hard to see that sometimes because of the way you compute the CR. For example, when calculating the defensive component of a monster’s CR, you figure out the base defensive CR based on the number of hit points the monster has. And then you scale it up or down based on how far above or below average the monster’s AC is. But that’s just because if the monster has a higher than normal AC, it’s going to take less damage on average than a similar monster with an average AC. So it’s hit points are going to go just a little farther. The same is true for the damage output. The monster’s attack bonus and save DC determine how often it’s actually going to deal damage compared to an average monster. So, if the monster’s attack bonus is low, it’ll get less mileage out of its damage output. And you’ll notice that all of the other abilities a monster might have as spelled out from DMG 277 to DMG 281 are all about how they affect either the monster’s hit points or the monster’s damage. Either directly or indirectly via attack bonus or AC.

And this makes perfect sense. A monster’s HP determines how long it will survive in combat while the PCs chip away at its health. And the PCs’ damage output increases throughout the course of the game, both directly and indirectly. Meanwhile, a monster’s damage output determines how much damage it’s going to do every round it’s still alive. On average. And that determines how many of the PCs’ hit points it’s going to take out before it dies. So, monster HP increases in pretty close lockstep with the PCs’ damage output. And monster damage output increases at the same rate, more or less, as the PCs’ hit points. That means that combats last for ROUGHLY the same number of rounds regardless of level and that PCs suffer ABOUT the same amount of damage in a given combat compared to their maximum hit points regardless of level.

And note my use of the words ROUGHLY and ABOUT. In all caps. Because it isn’t exact. It isn’t precise. And there’s no way it could be precise. Which is why it’s so f$&%ing crazy that it pretends to be.

Precision Levels and Statistical Treadmills

The thing I described in the last couple of paragraphs before the heading is what some of us in the biz refer to as the “advancement treadmill” or the “statistical treadmill.” The idea is that as the PC statistics increase throughout the game, the monster statistics keep pace so that the game provides a nice, even experience across all levels. IN THEORY. Yes, that’s another hedge along with ROUGHLY and ABOUT. I KNOW that it doesn’t work quite that way. I’m describing the THEORY. And remember, I moderate my f$&%ing comments now.

Anyway, ASSUMING the treadmill really does work the way it’s INTENDED IN THEORY ROUGHLY, it ensures that the difficulty of combat encounters really doesn’t vary as the character’s levels increase. The thing is that that’s actually terrible f$&%ing design.

On the one hand, it’s terrible for the players because they never feel like they are actually getting more powerful in play. I mean, yes, they get excited when they unlock that second attack at 5th level and their cantrips do more damage and all that stuff. But once they start actually playing with them, the combats don’t feel quicker and easier. They feel like the same amount of slog.

On the other hand, it’s terrible for the pace of the game because the game never feels like tension is really rising. Things just aren’t really getting more difficult. Sure, the party is fighting balrogs instead of imps when they hit 15th level, but the balrog still sticks around for five rounds and takes them down to 50% of their maximum hit points. Just like the imp did. They sweat the same amount no matter what.

So, that’s the first flaw in the whole “5th level monsters for 5th level PCs” type of balancing that D&D insists is the right way to do things. The second flaw is that PCs level up a lot faster than they used to. Back in the day. And so, every monster has a pretty narrow window of opportunity in which it can be used to build good combats. At least it does if you do the encounter math. So, most GMs tend to use each monster only a couple of times and then that monster is forgotten. There’s no running a whole campaign around war with the goblins because goblins cease to be challenging foes after about third level. Unless, of course, you keep increasing the goblins’ levels. And if you do that, you’re either just throwing the goblins on the treadmill or you’re changing so much that they don’t feel like the same creatures anymore.

The thing is, there’s a lot of benefit in having the players fight the same monsters for a little while. I’m not saying every fight for six levels should be with goblins, but I am saying that goblins should pop up every couple of sessions for a little while before or after they figure heavily in an adventure of their own. And that’s because the players can become familiar with the goblins. They can learn how to fight them, learn what tactics work best with their abilities, and learn how to thwart the goblins’ favorite strategies. Besides, fighting creatures that used to give you a hard time and discovering you can cut through them like tissue paper is a great way to feel like you’re getting more powerful.

Now, after you’ve been building your own encounters for a while, what you discover is that the whole CR vs. level thing isn’t nearly as precise as the game seems to imply. That is to say, all else being equal, a group of PCs can generally handle a broader CR range of encounters than is implied in the rules. And I don’t mean in terms of “as long as someone crawls away, they technically won the fight.” I mean that if you take an average difficulty 3rd level encounter and throw it at a 4th level party, it’ll feel easier, but it won’t be so easy as to be boring or trivial. And a 4th level party will be taxed a little by an average 5th level encounter, it’ll feel a little tougher, but it’s not going to go from victory to TPK. In general, for an average party of pretty casual players, I’ve found that if you use only average difficulty encounters, you’ve got a swing of a full experience level either way. Which brings me to something else.

What the Hell is an Easy Encounter Anyway?

So, the DMG tells you that, to build an encounter for a given party, the first thing you do is figure out the XP thresholds for an easy, medium, hard, and deadly encounter. For example, if I have four 4th level PCs, an easy encounter has 500 XP worth of monsters in it, a medium encounter has 1,000 XP worth of monsters, a hard encounter has 1,500 XP worth of monsters, and a deadly encounter has 2,000 XP worth of monsters. Which you might notice helpfully doesn’t actually align with any of the XP values of any of the monsters in the f$&%ing game. CR 3 monsters are worth 700 XP, CR 4 monsters are worth 1,100 XP, and CR 5 monsters are worth 1,800 XP. And no, it doesn’t work out any better if you assume 5 PCs. But you’ll also notice that it basically supports what I said about a one level swing in either direction. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

Here’s the thing: the idea of encounter difficulty is complete and utter horses$&%. I’m not saying some encounters aren’t more difficult than others. They totally are. But, first, the difficulty of a given encounter is affected by so many factors beyond the raw statistics and the difficulties are already so fuzzy and imprecise that the idea of labeling an encounter as hard or easy based on the difference between a CR 4 and a CR 5 monster is pretty f$&%ing laughable. And second, what the hell are you even supposed to do with that anyway? Do you use that to vary your difficulty through the course of the adventure to develop a difficulty curve? I mean, I used to do that. It worked okay. But the book sure as hell didn’t teach me that trick. Or are you supposed to use it to adjust the difficulty of the game to your party? If they struggle with mostly medium and hard encounters, do you scale the encounters down to mostly easy and medium? Because I’ve never really seen GMs do that. Mostly, what I see GMs do is check the encounter they’ve built to see if it falls somewhere between easy and hard and, if it does, pronounce it good enough to put in the game.

The thing is, there’s already a nice difficulty curve built into the game anyway. It’s called attrition. All else being equal, every encounter is harder than the last because the party has to get through each successive encounter with fewer resources. And every fight is easy if it’s the only fight in a day.

The point is, I have never really found it remotely necessary or rewarding to treat the whole easy, medium, hard, deadly thing as anything more than a “range of acceptable encounters.” Beyond that, it’s not worth considering. It doesn’t mean anything. F$&% it, I say.

Bait… and Switch?

Now, I know a lot of you are looking at the word count for this article and realizing that I’ve spent over 4,500 words just laying out the problem and talking about how I wish things worked instead. If I’m going to get around to presenting an actual alternative, I don’t have much time to do it. Well, the truth is, I’m not going to. Not today.

You know me by now. You know I think it’s important to lay out the problem I’m trying to solve before I try to solve it. And the problem I’m trying to solve is that encounter building in D&D 5E is too damned complexity and demands too much f$&%ing precision considering how fuzzy the results are. I want a simple way to build an encounter without having to do a bunch of math and without a whole lot of precision. A looser, fuzzier, more practical way. And one that leans into the fuzziness to create a better pace to the game. And one that recognizes that different monsters need to be built differently and thus they need to be encountered differently. And I have that system. And I am going to share it. But it has to come alongside another system. Because, the thing is, my system doesn’t work unless you’re willing to rewrite every monster in the entire game. Or just make your own.

And that means I also need a quicker, easier, fuzzier way to make monsters. Or to edit the existing monsters. Fortunately, I have a system for that too.

Now, I feel really bad about the bait and switch. And I feel even worse that this article is a couple of days later than I promised. And that’s after it was already delayed by a week due to medical treatments and visiting family. So, here’s what I’m going to do. It’s Friday, right? Unless you’re one of my Patrons and get early access to this s$&%. But let’s just say it’s Friday. So, what if I work really really hard this weekend and post the second half of this thing on Monday. Will that make it up to you?

If not, tough s$&%. Because that’s what I’m doing. And if you don’t stop whining, I’ll drag this out into a THIRD half.