DMG ENCOUNTER BUILDING HOW TO

First, there’s the encounter building s$&% described starting on DMG 81 under the heading “Creating Encounters.” That’s all the crap about how to design how many monsters of what CR would be an easy, moderate, hard, or deadly challenge for a given number of hapless victims. Specifically, I want to talk about the two systems that we GMs who insist on designing our own adventure content for D&D have to deal with all the f$&%ing time. Let’s talk about combat encounter design in D&D 5E. It Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated to Work

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.īut enough ranting. 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.

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. 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. But this Long, Rambling Introduction™ needs to come to end. At least, it’s been about blurring the balance. In fact, if anything, part of my improvements to the whole monster-and-encounter-building thing involve unbalancing things just a bit. 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. Because I understand the attrition model of D&D. My players frequently have conversations during my adventures that involve discussions about whether they will die if they try to push forward any further. 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. Now, here’s the thing: I’m not really concerned with the statistics themselves. Because I’m just that great a f$&%ing guy. And now that I’m pretty happy with how things are playing out, I figured I’d share it all with all of you. As in, how to assemble encounters and also how to build custom monsters. Because, over the past several months, I’ve been fixing it myself. I’ll fix it myself.Īnd that’s why I’m here talking about this.

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. Until then, I’m going to continue dealing with things my own way, thank you. 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. 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.

Dmg encounter building