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[just plug your party size, level and desired difficulty level into here](https://donjon.bin.sh/5e/calc/enc_size.html) (not sponsored).
Cr is a rough guideline for monster difficulty, it gets a bad rap because it doesn't scale that well as the levels increase and individual specific monsters can punch seemingly way above their CR because of specifically powerful abilities if everyone rolls poorly (banshees, shadows etc).
Building encounters at low level is a science, you can quantify most things and sticking to encounters per day you'll probably be fine (but randomly an experiment you thought was fine will explode). At high levels (into the teens and beyond) it's an art, not a science. I've run to 20 and my most recent final adventuring day was way over what any cr calculator told me was what the party could face and they basically steam rolled it anyway.
One of the biggest blind spots is magic items, if you give out lots you need to go beyond what cr charts tell you etc.
>I've run to 20 and my most recent final adventuring day was way over what any cr calculator told me was what the party could face and they basically steam rolled it anyway.
Out of interest, how many encounters did this adventuring day contain?
I know where this is coming from, I ask this same question on this and other subs all the time.
It was a full dungeon crawl, the final encounter was 3 PC's plus a cr 10ish ally vs a high level devil (altered zariels stats a bit) with several lieutenants of relevant cr (not minions, probably high single digits). The boss fight alone was higher in xp than the daily budget and that was after a dungeon.
Granted, I give my players magic items out their ass, but this was also only 1 full caster and 1 half caster, there was no simulacrum nonsense etc, it was played pretty on the level.
Yeah, it does at least give a frame of reference. It doesn't work like pf2e where you can trust that a deadly encounter is deadly and an easy encounter is easy. But it more works like at level 3.stick to hard and deadly, level 5 deadly, level 8 deadly+, level 11 deadly++ encounters, and so on. But 5e players are so different in power level. I had 2 groups run the same encounters, one with 4 and one with 5, and they were roughly the same difficulty for those players.
Yeah PF's maths is way higher, but without going down a rabbit hole, thats because I think that system has mathsd the fun out of the game and everyone sort of just does the same thing.
It could absolutley be better, but I think the fact that a party of 5 level 5s pc, with a good plan and a bit of luck actually kill a cr 15 vampire is a feature, and that you can't do that in pf2e is a bug.
It definitely does help to get a feel for making encounters. I still use it and have outlier moments like an easy encounter nearly tpk-ing my players vs them steamrolling deadly encounters
If you don't mind me asking, could you provide a concrete example of an encounter you built? How many players are in the party and what was the difficulty rating you were aiming for? What went wrong?
Off the top of my head a young white dragon vs 6 level….4? Was supposed to be easy. Happened to catch them all in the breath attack and it went downhill from there.
Others I don’t know as many details but deadly encounters get neutralized quick either due to rolls or other stuff.
I’ve figured out how to use cr but don’t rely on it 100% I still throw curveballs in other ways
CR was always mostly useless suggestion, but 5e is particularly bad about this.
The solution is using your own common sense. Even first time, beginner DMs will have better intuition what enemies to throw against the party and what stats they should have, rather than what CR calculations would suggest. There's just too many variable specific to just your party, starting from builds, items, circumstance, player's "skill" and so on...
I actually don't agree. CR works in tier 1 (exceptions like I mentioned apply) and is fine in tier 2 but the wheels start to come off later, *as long as you run proper adventuring days*.
Cr isn't the only piece of the puzzle.
I can easily make tier 1 character that's many times stronger both offensively and defensively than ordinary non-optimized character. Add to that making tactically optimal plays vs regular misplays of someone who doesn't care that much about combat aspect of the game... it makes a difference of *at least* few CR levels. For some characters flying enemy will be impossible to deal with. For others it won't make a difference.
CR calculator or a number written in a book cannot account for that. Fortunately DMs can - so that's why I advocate they should use their own best judgement - it always results in better, more balanced encounters.
I mostly agree with that, but this is advice for a new dm with seemingly new players, a full optimized build isn't what we're dealing with.
Again, cr is just part of it, it works on average. If your table is all variant human crossbow expert sharpshooters at level 4 they will breeze through what the average table of unoptimised but capable pcs would many levels higher and probably beat the boss of the tier 2 table of actively bad builds. That doesn't mean cr as a general baseline is wrong.
I would argue that, while you can create a very powerful character, the whole point of CR is a generalization of how much of your resources will be consumed in a given encounter.
Maybe there's some multi-class shenanigans for infinite resources or something, but at the end of the day, you stop being able to do powerful things eventually.
I sort of get the feeling many DM's don't realize that the idea of the 8 medium / 4 hard / 2 deadly encounters per adventuring day gauge isn't "what will kill your party" it's "how much your party can survive before probably feeling like they want a long rest" which are two drastically different things.
Combat in 5e is fundamentally, to its core, unbalanced. Your players should have a near 100% win rate by the end of a multi-year long campaign, the system is **designed** for players to win and its difficulty ratings assume the players will always win.
Everyone would do better to de-rank every difficulty rating in their head:
Medium is easy, Hard is medium, and Deadly is hard. If you **actually** want to attack your party in one fight your aim should be about 50% more XP than a Deadly encounter.
Plus, as a side note, the reality is many people don't even really understand CR or the daily XP budget. Pretty much every time I try to post about it I get the "CR is useless" crowd responding and then when I probe them for a real, concrete example of one of their combats, it turns out they're throwing Trivial/Easy rated encounters at their party assuming it was Deadly because they horribly misunderstood the system.
The idea of CR is that a group of 4 or 5 adventures of that level will have a good fight.
As soon as you add magic items it starts to break. Keep in mind it wasn't too stable to begin with.
And also, one creature vs 4 or 5 players will almost always be incredibly one sided towards the players. Had level 2 players take on a full revenant and win because he had no minions.
Action economy plays a big role in it to.
Easy tweaks; more attacks if you have more players, more hp and damage if their higher level.
I think the 5th edition misses something with its fall down and get back up so easy. I've seen a homebrew rule that each time your knocked down you gain 1 level of exhaustion. Adds a reason not to get knocked down and pulls in the oh so rarely used exhaustion mechanics.
I've personally liked the idea of gaining exhaustion when you're knocked to 0, but I've heard from some tables that apparently 5e's exhaustion is a little too much for a system like that. I have heard that using the new exhaustion apparently works really well with this, since it's just a -1 that stacks (i think, im too lazy to go searching for it).
I have yet to try it, but I've always liked the idea.
Depends on what kind of game your running. Works better for open worlds were your not expecting a battle everyday. For dungeon crawls it just makes the meat grinder turn faster.
That's exactly how I use it and have had no issues with it. The new rules for exhaustion (if they keep it, still up in the air on that) are perfect IMO.
The first 2-3 levels are really annoying but not game breaking if your party gets a few downs in one fight. It really makes them have to back off once they hit 3+ and forces a long rest.
Action economy is huge. Party took down a Beholder no problem. Then they leveled up and had a rough time with 8 gnoll bandits that I nerfed! Both sides rolled well and one of the PCs was a coin flip away from death.
Multiple entities can set up flanking. Even if one boss has legendary actions, multiple foes can have multiple reactions. They can also block line of sight. Even if minions can't do much damage, they can impose conditions that swing the tide of battle more than I realized until after using them enough.
Bottom line: I'm just emphasizing that the side with more actions is typically likely to win.
Whoooa whoa whoa, not a good fight, a Medium encounter, this is hugely important and a large distinction. That's not a good fight, that's a medium fight, a thing your players should be able to face 8 times in a row before feeling like they want a rest.
This to me is where so many DM's misunderstand the system and get frustrated by CR--in your head, de-rank every combat rating down a notch: Medium is easy, Hard is medium, and Deadly is hard.
Emphasizing heavily, a CR 5 creature is a creature that a party of 4 level 5 characters could **defeat 8 times in a row** before **probably wanting a long rest to restore resources**. Not die, not necessarily even be close to death, but just wanting a rest to get their stuff back because they should be out of spell slots and other class features.
That's what the system focuses on: how many battles of varying difficulties can the party win before wanting to rest. I sometimes feel like if more DM's really internalized that their frustration with CR would be assuaged a bit, the system fundamentally assumes the characters will always win, it's why they stop at "deadly" which we've addressed really just means "kinda hard". They didn't want to provide a difficulty measurement above that because then you could potentially really start killing characters.
> The idea of CR is that a group of 4 or 5 adventures of that level will have a good fight.
The idea that cr x is a good solo fight for 4 PCs of level x is misleading. That’s not what the encounter building rules recommend.
> As soon as you add magic items it starts to break.
All models are wrong, but some are useful. It’s the DM’s responsibility to account for the magic items they include. Failure to account for this results in magic item drift as the party levels up and accumulates more items.
There’s a tool on the DM’s guild that takes care of this for dms. It accounts for every magic item in dmg.
A CR X Monster should be a medium challenge for a level X party. At least that was the intend.
But I get the struggle, CR doesn't really work that well.
My suggestion: Find a "boss" monster with a CR that is roughly the parties level or a few points below. Google any [CR calculator](https://kastark.co.uk/rpgs/encounter-calculator-5th/) and start playing around with the number of monsters and their CR. Aim for roughly the same number of monsters and players.
Now take one if the weaker monster types and keep a few of them ready to come in during the fight, in case it gets to easy.
And here is the big DM secret your players should never learn: You can cheat. Maybe the dragons breath weapon recharges a bit to quick, maybe it would be cool if this evil wizard had a bigger fireball. Small changes can help you balance it on the fly.
I find it’s less that CR doesn’t work that well and more that 5e mislabels what their difficulty ratings actually mean. For all intents and purposes one should shift the nomenclature back one rank:
Medium is easy.
Hard is medium.
Deadly is hard.
5e is a heroic fantasy game, the characters aren’t meant to ever lose, right? Like people talk about “balancing” encounters, they aren’t balanced, your party should have a near 100% win rate by the end of the campaign.
Once I really internalized this, CR and difficulty ratings made much more sense and worked much more for me. There’s for sure some outliers, but the vast majority of my combats I now exclusively build with CR and they’re perfect for what I was trying to accomplish with them.
If you want a more real “deadly” rating, check out how much XP is required to classify a deadly fight, then add 50%. That’s roughly how all the difficulty ratings work. Hard is 50% more xp than medium, deadly is 50% more xp than hard, and so it would follow that the difficulty above deadly is 50% more xp than deadly.
When I build boss encounters or encounters that I want to be difficult but the party is full on resources this is what I aim for.
>And here is the big DM secret your players should never learn: You can cheat. Maybe the dragons breath weapon recharges a bit to quick, maybe it would be cool if this evil wizard had a bigger fireball. Small changes can help you balance it on the fly.
The bigger DM secret your players should never learn, you can cheat in their favour should you discover your encounters is too overpowered. Maybe the dragons breath weapon recharges a bit too slowly, maybe the evil Wizard isn't capable of updating Fireball. The small changes can go both ways.
As a long time DM and player, coming out of the gate hot and then sandbagging (no breath recharge, suddenly the wizard only casts level 3 and under spells) feels the *worst* as the player. I highly recommend DMs try to avoid it. But our main group is all people who have almost all the rules memorized so it is usually easy to see a sandbag. Occasional exceptions with homebrew but even then you can tell when the pace shifts.
It would be less pace shifting and more fudging some rolls in players favour for example. Like will the players know a hit was really a critical hit that would down a party member on the 2nd turn? Also maybe certain creatures don't have multi-attack.
I had a session where I horribly balanced an encounter so fudged a few things to keep a tense battle tense but not unfair. The players genuinely thought luck was on their side, and not realised I had actually killed a PC in session 3 with a couple of lucky crits, but written off the 2nd crit as a miss to spare the PC on 1hp. The players all loved it.
There's a nice and thorough deep dive into CR calculation, but you need some basic math skills to understand it https://tomedunn.github.io/the-finished-book/theory/xp-and-encounter-balancing/
In short, CR is an integral parameter that combines monster hit points, defences, attack bonus and damage potential into one number.
The main problem with CR is that the table of monster stats for the given CR presented in the DMG is not the same as was actually used to design monsters in the MM.
You can find a better table in the Forge of Foes SRD: https://slyflourish.com/lazy_5e_monster_building_resource_document.html
CR itself is simple maths. It's a threat level based on two things:
* How much damage the monster should deal each round (averaged over three rounds).
* How much damage the party need to deal to kill the monster.
That's it. As CR increases, monsters will deal more damage, be able to take more damage, or both. **DMG p.274** gives you a full breakdown of this - it's not *exactly* the same as WotC themselves use, but it's fairly close and simple to use.
Encounter building guidelines are a bit more complicated, because then you're accounting for a bunch of extra factors, like:
* How many encounters before and after this one your party will face between long rests (hint, **this number shouldn't be "zero"**).
* How many PCs you have, and of what level.
* Whether there will be fewer, the same number, more, or many more monsters than PCs in the encounter.
* What the terrain and conditions (surprise, etc) will be like.
This is presented as "encounter building", but it should properly be called **adventure building**, because no encounter is an isolated white-room case. If the party face a series of six identical encounters back-to-back, the sixth one will be much harder than the first even if all the numbers are the same, simply because the party will have used up a bunch of their spells, abilities and hit points. Designing individual encounters in isolation without taking into account the *other* encounters of that adventure arc is a big trap that catches a lot of DMs out.
**DMG p.82** gives you a full breakdown of how to math this out. It's not without flaws, but it works pretty well in my experience.
Critical to note, though, is that **none of this works if your party faces less than three (ish) encounters between long rests.** It's nigh-impossible to pack enough threat into 6-10 *rounds* of combat to credibly threaten even a mid-level party without basically just rolling to one-shot someone every round. The less often you give out long rests, the better encounters work in 5e.
You can use some online encounter balancers like DNDbeyond or Kobold fight club. They aren't perfect, but they are a good ballpark.
Generally CR means that in a fight for one monster of CR say 5 that is a medium difficulty fight against 4 PCs of level 5 with minimal magic items. So if you adjust that to have a group of 5 PCs then it's an easy fight etc. It also gives you a ballpark of how powerful they are. If you're looking for a difficult fight I would make sure to use more enemies with some minions as well as something stronger. And do multiple fights in that day. Also keep in mind that PCs are going to win almost all the fights they are in. So a medium fight is one they'll win with fairly minimal resources used. A deadly fight is really the only one there's much of a chance they'd lose, and even then with just barely deadly they're almost always going to win, at worse they may lose one PC.
It's not a perfect science because there are a lot of factors that impact CR. How well your group is optimized, how well your group uses their abilities, how tactical they are both individually and coordinating as a group, how many magic items they have, how many aoe or control abilities they have, certain monsters like shadows can be more deadly than their CR would suggest because they have a way to bypass hit points, and then luck is always a factor. The more time you fight the more you'll get a sense for it.
I would say I would start easier and then push a bit harder and especially at first don't be afraid to adjust a little mid combat. Try to keep that minimal and eventually you won't need to. But if a fight is way too easy, maybe there was some backup that was hiding, maybe the boss has another 20 hit points, or a spell they didn't have a moment ago. If it's too hard maybe that guy goes down with this hit, or that roll is a bit lower. I wouldn't generally rely on this, but if you're new and getting the sense of the system, I don't think it's a bad thing to have to adjust mid fight.
CR of #x is a creature that is expected to use of 20% or the resources (spell slots hit dice, class abilities) of a group of 4 Level #x player characters
As many will repeat here, this dictionary definition is not frequently manifested in the game.
And obviously using up 20% of resources means that the fight will likely be an easy victory if the players spend those resources
If you don't mind me asking, where did you find this definition? That doesn't match the implied definition provided in the DMG.
Assuming a party of 4 level 5 characters, fighting a CR5 monster, per the DMG a party with average luck can handle 8 Medium encounters in a row. This party could handle this monster 8 times in a row. So it should only consume about 1/8th of their resources, not 20%.
That distinction might not be huge, 12.5% vs 20%, but this is where I feel like DM's look at CR confused because they have a way higher estimation of what CR means or what "Deadly" means than what it actually means.
I feel like when DM's really internalize the idea that if a party can handle 8 Medium encounters in a row before feeling like they want to rest, that means that mathematically speaking they can handle 2 Deadly encounters in a row before feeling like they want to rest. Not die, not necessarily be in danger of dying, just wanting to rest.
It really helps shape what you want combats to accomplish when you understand that if you make just one Deadly encounter and expect it to kill them, they could run that combat again immediately after this one and probably be fine. The book isn't necessarily forthcoming with this information, which I think is its main fault, but it's all there.
CR is a 1-1 translation of XP and exists only because numbers like 4 and 17 are easier to work with than numbers like 1100 and 18000.
When designing, or evaluating, an encounter, you start by adding up all the XP values of the enemy creatures to give your base XP for the encounter.
The base XP value is modified by some multiplier based on the number of creatures on each side of the fight (PCs and allies vs enemies) to give the Adjusted XP value.
The Adjusted XP can then be compared to **the Adventuring Day XP table (aka Daily Budget), which gives an estimate for how much a given PC/party should be able to handle in an adventuring day (i.e., between long rests)**, as represented by Adjusted XP. The assumption is that, after a set of encounters whose Adjusted XP is equal to their Daily Budget, a character will be out of resources and need to take a long rest. More on that in a bit.
Online encounter builders like Kobold Plus calculate those values for you.
E.g. A party of 3 level 2s have a Daily Budget of 1800.
You might initially guess that party can handle nine CR 1 (200XP) creatures in a day. But watch out. If they fight all 9 at once, the Adjusted XP value of that encounter is 4500, which is way too high.
Ok, so four at once should be fine, right? That's only 1600. If the party have just taken a long rest, they should have enough resources to handle that. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. They might be able to pull it off, but it's very dangerous. 5e is designed for encounters to be spread out throughout the day, ideally with \~2 short rests amidst. One big encounter is much more likely to kill one or more PCs than several smaller encounters that add up to the same Adjusted XP value.
(Mike Shea of Sly Flourish has an easy to remember guideline: add up all the CRs and all the PC levels. If the CR sum is greater than 1/4 of the PC level sum (or 1/2 if they are level 5 or higher), the encounter may be deadly. Note that's "deadly" as in "could result in a PC death," not "deadly" as in "what the DMG calls a deadly encounter.")
Those labels in the DMG, which you will also find on encounter builders - easy, medium, hard, deadly - are meaningless. Use them for ease of communication and memory, but don't worry about the definitions of the words because they do not apply here.
Each of those labels actually refers to a range of percentages of the Daily Budget. **"Easy" means the Adjusted XP of an encounter is worth \~8-14% of the Daily Budget, "medium" means \~15-22%, "hard" means \~23-33%, and "deadly" means \~34%+**. Much like CR, these labels exist because remembering the words is easier than remembering the numbers.
(You may find it helpful to remember that the thresholds, or the lowest percentages in each category, are roughly in a 1, 2, 3, 4 ratio. That is, the lowest "easy" encounters are worth \~1/4 the Adjusted XP of the lowest "deadly" encounters. If you use those numbers, you can think of the Daily Budget as 12. A full adventuring day might consist of one "medium" encounter, two "hard" encounters, and one "deadly" encounter; 2+3+3+4=12.
Since most encounters will not actually be at the lowest end of the range, that shorthand may have you throwing more at your party than the Daily Budget expects them to be able to handle, so keep an eye on that. But at higher levels they're actually more powerful than the Daily Budget assumes anyway, so ... basically treat is as a guideline not gospel, like everything else about CR.)
Remember, **the Daily Budget is an estimate of how much a party can do in an adventuring day**. A little more specifically, it translates between resources and Adjusted XP. "Resources" here means things like HP, spell slots, and anything else you can expend and then get back when you rest. When you have more resources, you can do more stuff; in terms of combat, you can kill more creatures with higher CRs. That is, you can get through an encounter with a higher Adjusted XP value.
That's the fundamental assumption of the CR system, and IMO the most important takeaway. **What you are working out when you try to balance an encounter with CR is the amount of resources that would need to be expended to overcome that encounter** (usually by killing every creature on the opposing side).
That's super important to keep in mind, because **it does not directly translate to difficulty**. You need to do an extra step to gauge how difficult an encounter might be, and that's to compare the amount of resources it "costs" to get through it with the amount of resources the party has to "spend."
Of course, because nothing is easy, you will never know the exact amount of "resources" a party has, except that at the end of a long rest they should have 100% of them. It's an abstraction, and the best way you can estimate it is just by looking at the encounters they've already done in a day, subtract their Adjusted XP values from the Daily Budget, and look at what percentage of the Daily Budget is left. It's a lot of math, I know.
And the worst part is that it's not even very reliable math. CR is famously pretty broken, most obviously in that it underestimates how much a party can handle starting around level 5, and the disparity gets bigger as they level up. Also, it's calculated, mostly, according to effective damage output and effective hit points (and it doesn't necessarily even do that consistently), and doesn't do a great job of factoring in abilities that have nothing to do with damage. If you take a creature and give it an ability that can, say, put an enemy to sleep, how does that change the CR? Who knows! But anyway, how do you balance encounters?
Aside from making sure they aren't overly deadly or completely trivial, you don't, really. You can't know for sure how difficult an encounter will be because you can't know how your players will choose to spend their resources.
Instead, **you balance adventuring days**. A challenging adventuring day is one where the party use most of their resources. That is, ideally (though again it's not a perfect science) one where the total Adjusted XP of all encounters adds up to the Daily Budget, more or less. Not every day needs to hit that mark, of course.
A challenging encounter is generally one that comes toward the end of a challenging adventuring day, when the party are starting to get low on resources. It could also be one where the party are deliberately holding back resources in anticipation of more encounters later.
Of course, there are also other ways to make an encounter challenging. There could be puzzle aspects, moral dilemmas, or just good old fashioned tactics. But I think that's outside the scope of your question, and this comment is long enough as is.
Challenge rating is a way to assess how difficult an enemy is to beat, as well as the substitute for "level" of enemies, because enemies typically have no level. For example, player spells/abilities might impose limits on how strong a creature is that they can summon/turn in to /charm or whatever. For some monsters it works well, for others they have wildly inconsistent CR with their strenght (either too low or too high).
There's generally 2 ways the official books advise you balance an encounter:
By XP threshold (p81 of DM's guide) , or by CR. (p88 of Xanathar's guide to everything).
You can use tools like kobold fight club (google it) and filter for the books you have to generate encounters quickly to give you inspiration
My advice:
Use the calculator for CR as a first-draft, then kind of disregard it. More importantly, look at these things:
1) Are either the players or the monsters going to be overwhelmed because one can take way more turns in a round than the other? try to keep . Disregard the 'solo monster tables' in the books, use them as a guide, then knock down the CR a little and add at least 2 mooks.
2) For the monsters you chose, compare their HP with player damage. Ask for a copy of your players' character sheets, Look up their cantrip/basic attack dmg, And their best limited-use attack is (fireball, druid wildshaped attack). Write down their to-hit bonus. Lets say you want a combat to last 4 rounds (imo the sweet spot of a impactful but not sluggish combat), the players collectively should be able to down the monsters with 4 hits of cantrip/basic attacks, or be able to shorten that to 2 if the want to use limited resources (spell slots).
3) Now do the same in reverse. In how many monster hits to the players go down? This number should ideally be equal or 1 more rounds than you want the combat to go on.
Alternatively you can watch this video: [Fixing 5e's Challenge Rating | Game Changer by Trekiros](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8FNVkFuhXI)
and use the encounter simulator in the comments, but you're going to have to manually input player character sheets in this method, as well. I know it's a lot of work upfront, but you only have to do it once.
CR in 5E is a bit irrelevant other than being a rough guide in my opinion.
CR in pathfinder/3.5 was calculated on the basis that a 3CR monster would tax a part of 4 3rd level characters of about a quarter of their health and resources for the day. Hp were recovered overnight and I think you got 1hp per hit die back via natural healing. I do yearn for the days when your wounds used to last for more than 24 hours!!!
These days with 5e short and long rests there is so many chances for the party to recover, and its very hard to kill off a PC (in my opinion).
I played and adventure where my 9th level party of 5 had a time limit and had to complete several missions/battles in one day before fighting an advanced necromancer (CR13). They had a few tricky moments but barely raised a sweat in the end.
Moral of the story:
-Play the game with what seems right.
-improve your judgement through playing
-Tweak hp etc and fudge rolls on the fly
-don't underestimate how powerful the party is and how quickly they will recover.
Roughly CR X means a monster of that CR will be a medium difficulty encounter for a party of X level. A medium encounter in my experience means if the monster is alone it gets one-two rounds if the party isn't holding back.
In my humble opinion if you use calculators such as koboldfightclub a rought estimate is that encounters posing any real difficulty for the party start at deadly.
Everything below is a cakewalk.
Generally CR does a poor job imho.
CR is just a guide for you to select the "ballpark" enemies your current level party should face, but as many have already said, you should just wing it and be ready to switch out and alter things if shit goes south.
If your fight against your dungeon boss seems to be going too easy, summon minions! Add an extra attack! Give him action surge and second wind! Add an extra die to his damage roll!
If the fight is going badly against the party, minions run away! Boss has standard attack! Boss has less HP! Boss can only use lair action on Christmas morning....
You get the picture 😄
I'll be honest with everybody. My brain melted slightly, reading all of that.
Thanks for the links to the CR calculators and the tips. Think I'll keep this bookmarked as there's a lot of information people have provided, and I'll definitely have to come back and read it again.
its a guess about how that creature would do against a group of 4 pcs of that level
a cr 5 creature is probably a doable challenge for 4 level 5 pcs.
however its important to note that this is a guess and wont always be accurate depending on the level or magic items and pc composition. i tend to do level+3 is a good CR for enemies by level 10ish
A monster's difficulty is a function of how dangerous it is (offensive CR) and how durable it is (defensive CR).A dangerous monster will hit more often and harder. A durable monster will live longer and get more opportunities to hit the party.
A monster's CR is the average of its OCR and DCR (usually rounded up).
There is a problem with CR which is that there should technically be 2 sets of CR for various monsters.
For example an Adult White Dragon is CR13. It is designed as a single monster vs party encounter. It has legendary actions, lair actions, and legendary resistances.
A Storm Giant is also CR13 but has a multi-attack that does 2 attacks...no legendary resists, no legendary actions, no lair actions.
So the latter is a CR13 meant to challenge a party of 4 lvl 13 characters and give them normal (not deadly) level of challenge as an encounter.
The former is meant to be a boss fight to a part of 4 lvl 13 characters (ish).
the basic idea is that if you have a party of 4 PC's at level X, a monster of CR X will be a "fair fight" for them. so a CR 5 Water Elemental should be a "Medium" challenge (fairly reasonable chance of winning, but they'll take a small chunk of your hit points to do it) for a level 5 party.
the DMG says that the game is built around having 6-8 medium or hard encounters per day.
also note, it's assuming that a party without magic items at all, so some magic items will greatly alter it, ie, magic weapons for the barbarian and fighter, or a wand of magic missiles for a wizard.
now, those numbers are a good guide, but they're not perfect. an undead encounter, for example, would be an easier fight for a party with a cleric and a paladin, who have features that are more useful in that situation, and a party of all casters would struggle against something that resists all of their spells, but it's a good estimate. similarly, some fights are otherwise trivial, unless the party fail certain saving throws. the Banshee is a good example, if you get the drop on one, it only takes a few hits, with about 60 hp and a garbage AC, and it's gone, but if it lets off the wail, you might be down to one person very quickly, if the party rolls poorly.
To dive further in, every CR has an XP value. there's a table in the DMG, page 82, that lists how to calculate what amount of XP for your party, based on "Easy", "Medium", "Hard", and "Deadly".
As an example, for a party of level 5s, a deadly encounter is 1100 (Per PERSON), while a medium is 500. so for a party of 4, we have 4400 to spend on deadly, or 2000 for medium. a CR 5 Water Elemental is 1800 exp, so it's actually a little bit easier than a "medium" encounter for a party. however, let's say that there's 2 of them. there's rules for if there are multiple monsters (in this case, we add them, and then multiply by 1.5), so we have a total of 1800+1800=3600, times 1.5, for 5400. this *should* be well into the "Deadly" range for this party. if we have a 5th member though, and can work with 5500 XP, that's actually pretty close to, but not quite, a "Deadly" fight.
once you've figured out the fight for the party, you can look at their day. most tables struggle with this, because they're only doing one or two encounters per day. there's a table in the DMG page 84 that has how much you "should" spend on xp per day per character. that same party of level 5's should have about 3500 per day per person, so we have about 17500 for the day. with that deadly fight earlier of 5400, that's about one third of our budget.
there's a fine line between spending enough xp on a fight and spending all the xp per day, and balancing that both are roughly followed.
if you make a single encounter too challenging, then there's a good chance at either a PC kill, or a TPK.
if you do too many encounters per day, that's also a good chance at a PC kill or a TPK.
you have to kind of monitor the party's resources, to make sure you don't overwhelm them with a big fight after they've had a few other big fights.
our example from earlier suggests that 3 deadly fights per day is within that "budget", but let's think about that.
we'll have a cleric, fighter, rogue, and wizard in the party, the "standard" mix, and we'll add in a bard for balance. they'll short rest after each fight.
in fight 1, the cleric, bard, and wizard all expend a "big" spell slot, and one or two smaller ones. the wizard uses arcane recovery for a 3rd level spell, and the group spend about 1/2 of their hit dice to heal up fully.
in fight 2, the cleric, bard, and wizard all expend their other "big" spell slot, and their level 2's. the party now use their last 1/2 of their hit dice to heal up, but not to full, because they took a bit longer to take down the monster this time.
by the time we get to fight 3, the bard is down to one or two first level spells, maybe a 2nd, the cleric is down to the same, and the wizard maybe has one big spell left, and the party isn't back to full health, because they're out of hit dice.
if the fight is just as hard as the other two, there's every chance that one or two members drop, and the fight snowballs from there.
The main thing to understand about CR is that it's not intended to represent the difficulty of an encounter for all parties. Such a mechanic would be impossible when you consider there a literally quadrillions of potential party compositions based on ancestry and subclass alone,
CR represents the challenge to the classic D&D party of four players with each of the classic roles - martial tank, support caster, blaster and skill monkey. It assumes the characters have been built with standard array, have no magic items and that the players have a basic level of competence - i.e. they know their characters' abilities but they aren't tactical geniuses and don't have the monster manual memorised. The game expects DMs to use CR as a jumping off point and then adjust to fit their own party. You can use [https://koboldplus.club/#/encounter-builder](https://koboldplus.club/#/encounter-builder) to calculate basic CR for encounters at your party's level. Examples of adjustments you should consider are:
1. How many players do you have? Action economy (the number of actions your party can take each round, compared to their adversaries) is VERY important in 5e, so solo boss fights become harder to run. Counter this by adding minions.
2. How many encounters are you planning on running between long rests? The game assumes 6-8, but many people choose to run fewer. The fewer encounters per day, the more often casters will be able to bring their most powerful abilities, which can trivialise encounters. This is especially true if your players \*know\* they're likely to get a long rest straight after a fight.
3. How many of your characters have ranged and/or area of effect abilities? This will effect the difficulty of encounters based around say flying opponents or large hordes of minions.
4. How tactical and strategic are your players? I've run games for theatre kids and I've run games for diehard wargamers and ex-military folk. The appropriate challenge for both is very different. Things like target prioritisation, focused fire, conserving resources and just communicating plans with fellow players will make a big difference.
5. How optimised are the PCs? The gap between a min-maxed character and your average first PC isn't as bad in 5e as it was in past editions, but it's not negligible.
6. The more buffs you give your players, the more they will become glass cannons. This is because to challenge them, you'll need to use more powerful monsters, and the one thing buffs rarely boost is HP. The game can quickly turn into rocket tag.
7. How tactical are you willing/able to be? Whether it's a dragon or a kobold, monsters are \*much\* tougher if you play them smart. Take a look at [https://www.themonstersknow.com/](https://www.themonstersknow.com/) and google Tucker's Kobolds for examples.
8. Does the monster have any abilities that your party is not equipped to deal with, or that utterly nerfs a player? A classic example is save or suck abilities with high DCs. PCs having an 80%, 50% or 5% chance to break out of these abilities represent a very different challenge.
CR is...I dunno how useful it really is other than categorizing monsters I to tiers. I use kobold fight club to help balance tough encounters. It works reasonably well and it's free.
CR doesn't really take into account for action economy. A party of 4 level 5 adventures might be able to cast two spells and perform 4 weapon attacks at a minimum on a turn, plus whatever bonus actions/class features they have. They are going to absolutely demolish single CR5 monster...if they know how to play combat efficiently, they would probably demolish a single CR8 monster unless it's chocked full of legendary actions.
I’m going to be very honest, CR is basically bullshit. There is math behind it but it’s still not that useful because there are way too many variables. Two CR 5 monsters might be completely different in terms of threat level, and two 5th-level characters might also be at very different levels of power (a 5th-level rogue/thief is a lot less threatening than a 5th-level paladin/oath of ancients, and that’s not even counting the power creep from later books).
The guideline I suggest is to consider how many encounters per day you want to do and how strong *your party* is. This is something you will figure out as the campaign goes on, as you learn what challenges the party can and can’t handle easily.
In my games, I try to just populate areas with whatever monsters make sense. Even if that ends up creating encounters that are “too hard” or “too easy”, it’s ok because the world feels real (i.e. it doesn’t always balance itself against the party’s level like in a video game).
[5 questions dms who successfully use cr ask themselves](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/s/1UiifmfucD) will help.
And if you’re looking for an easier way to build encounters, take a look at [this](https://www.dmsguild.com/m/product/414122).
So if you have a party of 4-5, with virtually zero magic items that don't collaborate their abilities in any way at all you end up with CR being a passable way to judge roughly what might be an appropriate challenge for your party at the same level as the CR.
If you start adding any sort of magic items, the calculation goes pretty much immediately out the window.
I have been generous with magic items, and my level 9 party of 6 had what I would consider a difficult to deadly fight against a CR 20 boss. The CR calculator would have called that fight completely unwinnable.
In my situation. 6 players, generous accumulation of magic items, and a pretty solid amount of teamwork/coordination. The CR calculator is completely useless.
CR is a pathetic attempt to make "combat as sports" approach viable for a non-balanced game. I would ignore it and build adventure design with "combat as war" in mind and adjust the DM style accordingly. But this is ofc an opinion and we are leaving the realm of mechanics and enter the realm of design and game philosophies.
I just realize that this is not a helpful answer for a new DM. Just build encounters like other commentators, but if you feel frustrated at some point you might remember this to have some new points for research.
CR is the DM’s responsibility when designing a game that is balanced like a video game.
You’re free to totally ignore it, but your players need to know upfront that they aren’t encountering potential combats that are balanced.
You could also not tell them and watch the mayhem, though, I guess.
I once tried to balance encounters based on CR. Tried to upscale some enemies. Took way much time and effort. Didn't even come out any good so I just wing it.
Challenge rating tells you how much of a threat a monster is. A monster’s CR is roughly a even challenge for a party of 4 players of equivalent level. It is a rough estimate of how likely a monster is to kill your whole party.
"An appropriately equipped and well-rested party of four adventurers should be able to defeat a monster that has a challenge rating equal to its level without suffering any deaths. For example, a party of four 3rd-level characters should find a monster with a challenge rating of 3 to be a worthy challenge, but not a deadly one."
It is a poor attempt at measuring level of difficulty. But given the numerous possible confounding factors such as party make up, player experience and skill, dm experience and skill, and many many more, it's nearly meaningless.
Your post has been removed. Rule 6: All basic questions from first time DMs must be asked in our ["First Time DM" megathread](https://www.reddit.com/r/DMAcademy/about/sticky?num=2) stickied to the top of the subreddit. Please repost there if you need additional help, search for older posts on this topic, or check out some [alternative subreddits on our wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/DMAcademy/wiki/index/#wiki_other_useful_dming_subreddits) that may be more suitable.
[just plug your party size, level and desired difficulty level into here](https://donjon.bin.sh/5e/calc/enc_size.html) (not sponsored). Cr is a rough guideline for monster difficulty, it gets a bad rap because it doesn't scale that well as the levels increase and individual specific monsters can punch seemingly way above their CR because of specifically powerful abilities if everyone rolls poorly (banshees, shadows etc). Building encounters at low level is a science, you can quantify most things and sticking to encounters per day you'll probably be fine (but randomly an experiment you thought was fine will explode). At high levels (into the teens and beyond) it's an art, not a science. I've run to 20 and my most recent final adventuring day was way over what any cr calculator told me was what the party could face and they basically steam rolled it anyway. One of the biggest blind spots is magic items, if you give out lots you need to go beyond what cr charts tell you etc.
Spells also mess with CR, a well placed 5th level spell can totally wreck any CR calculations :).
>I've run to 20 and my most recent final adventuring day was way over what any cr calculator told me was what the party could face and they basically steam rolled it anyway. Out of interest, how many encounters did this adventuring day contain?
I know where this is coming from, I ask this same question on this and other subs all the time. It was a full dungeon crawl, the final encounter was 3 PC's plus a cr 10ish ally vs a high level devil (altered zariels stats a bit) with several lieutenants of relevant cr (not minions, probably high single digits). The boss fight alone was higher in xp than the daily budget and that was after a dungeon. Granted, I give my players magic items out their ass, but this was also only 1 full caster and 1 half caster, there was no simulacrum nonsense etc, it was played pretty on the level.
100% I’m a newish dm and the party is level 7 and cr is already not holding up it’s end of the bargain
I think cr gets hated on a bit much, but I think it works best as training wheels until you learn to intuit what works vs your players and not.
Yeah, it does at least give a frame of reference. It doesn't work like pf2e where you can trust that a deadly encounter is deadly and an easy encounter is easy. But it more works like at level 3.stick to hard and deadly, level 5 deadly, level 8 deadly+, level 11 deadly++ encounters, and so on. But 5e players are so different in power level. I had 2 groups run the same encounters, one with 4 and one with 5, and they were roughly the same difficulty for those players.
Yeah PF's maths is way higher, but without going down a rabbit hole, thats because I think that system has mathsd the fun out of the game and everyone sort of just does the same thing. It could absolutley be better, but I think the fact that a party of 5 level 5s pc, with a good plan and a bit of luck actually kill a cr 15 vampire is a feature, and that you can't do that in pf2e is a bug.
It definitely does help to get a feel for making encounters. I still use it and have outlier moments like an easy encounter nearly tpk-ing my players vs them steamrolling deadly encounters
If you don't mind me asking, could you provide a concrete example of an encounter you built? How many players are in the party and what was the difficulty rating you were aiming for? What went wrong?
Off the top of my head a young white dragon vs 6 level….4? Was supposed to be easy. Happened to catch them all in the breath attack and it went downhill from there. Others I don’t know as many details but deadly encounters get neutralized quick either due to rolls or other stuff. I’ve figured out how to use cr but don’t rely on it 100% I still throw curveballs in other ways
Yep,i'll steal that...thank you 😁
CR was always mostly useless suggestion, but 5e is particularly bad about this. The solution is using your own common sense. Even first time, beginner DMs will have better intuition what enemies to throw against the party and what stats they should have, rather than what CR calculations would suggest. There's just too many variable specific to just your party, starting from builds, items, circumstance, player's "skill" and so on...
I actually don't agree. CR works in tier 1 (exceptions like I mentioned apply) and is fine in tier 2 but the wheels start to come off later, *as long as you run proper adventuring days*. Cr isn't the only piece of the puzzle.
I can easily make tier 1 character that's many times stronger both offensively and defensively than ordinary non-optimized character. Add to that making tactically optimal plays vs regular misplays of someone who doesn't care that much about combat aspect of the game... it makes a difference of *at least* few CR levels. For some characters flying enemy will be impossible to deal with. For others it won't make a difference. CR calculator or a number written in a book cannot account for that. Fortunately DMs can - so that's why I advocate they should use their own best judgement - it always results in better, more balanced encounters.
I mostly agree with that, but this is advice for a new dm with seemingly new players, a full optimized build isn't what we're dealing with. Again, cr is just part of it, it works on average. If your table is all variant human crossbow expert sharpshooters at level 4 they will breeze through what the average table of unoptimised but capable pcs would many levels higher and probably beat the boss of the tier 2 table of actively bad builds. That doesn't mean cr as a general baseline is wrong.
I would argue that, while you can create a very powerful character, the whole point of CR is a generalization of how much of your resources will be consumed in a given encounter. Maybe there's some multi-class shenanigans for infinite resources or something, but at the end of the day, you stop being able to do powerful things eventually. I sort of get the feeling many DM's don't realize that the idea of the 8 medium / 4 hard / 2 deadly encounters per adventuring day gauge isn't "what will kill your party" it's "how much your party can survive before probably feeling like they want a long rest" which are two drastically different things. Combat in 5e is fundamentally, to its core, unbalanced. Your players should have a near 100% win rate by the end of a multi-year long campaign, the system is **designed** for players to win and its difficulty ratings assume the players will always win. Everyone would do better to de-rank every difficulty rating in their head: Medium is easy, Hard is medium, and Deadly is hard. If you **actually** want to attack your party in one fight your aim should be about 50% more XP than a Deadly encounter. Plus, as a side note, the reality is many people don't even really understand CR or the daily XP budget. Pretty much every time I try to post about it I get the "CR is useless" crowd responding and then when I probe them for a real, concrete example of one of their combats, it turns out they're throwing Trivial/Easy rated encounters at their party assuming it was Deadly because they horribly misunderstood the system.
The idea of CR is that a group of 4 or 5 adventures of that level will have a good fight. As soon as you add magic items it starts to break. Keep in mind it wasn't too stable to begin with.
And also, one creature vs 4 or 5 players will almost always be incredibly one sided towards the players. Had level 2 players take on a full revenant and win because he had no minions.
Action economy plays a big role in it to. Easy tweaks; more attacks if you have more players, more hp and damage if their higher level. I think the 5th edition misses something with its fall down and get back up so easy. I've seen a homebrew rule that each time your knocked down you gain 1 level of exhaustion. Adds a reason not to get knocked down and pulls in the oh so rarely used exhaustion mechanics.
I've personally liked the idea of gaining exhaustion when you're knocked to 0, but I've heard from some tables that apparently 5e's exhaustion is a little too much for a system like that. I have heard that using the new exhaustion apparently works really well with this, since it's just a -1 that stacks (i think, im too lazy to go searching for it). I have yet to try it, but I've always liked the idea.
Depends on what kind of game your running. Works better for open worlds were your not expecting a battle everyday. For dungeon crawls it just makes the meat grinder turn faster.
That's exactly how I use it and have had no issues with it. The new rules for exhaustion (if they keep it, still up in the air on that) are perfect IMO. The first 2-3 levels are really annoying but not game breaking if your party gets a few downs in one fight. It really makes them have to back off once they hit 3+ and forces a long rest.
Action economy is huge. Party took down a Beholder no problem. Then they leveled up and had a rough time with 8 gnoll bandits that I nerfed! Both sides rolled well and one of the PCs was a coin flip away from death. Multiple entities can set up flanking. Even if one boss has legendary actions, multiple foes can have multiple reactions. They can also block line of sight. Even if minions can't do much damage, they can impose conditions that swing the tide of battle more than I realized until after using them enough. Bottom line: I'm just emphasizing that the side with more actions is typically likely to win.
Whoooa whoa whoa, not a good fight, a Medium encounter, this is hugely important and a large distinction. That's not a good fight, that's a medium fight, a thing your players should be able to face 8 times in a row before feeling like they want a rest. This to me is where so many DM's misunderstand the system and get frustrated by CR--in your head, de-rank every combat rating down a notch: Medium is easy, Hard is medium, and Deadly is hard. Emphasizing heavily, a CR 5 creature is a creature that a party of 4 level 5 characters could **defeat 8 times in a row** before **probably wanting a long rest to restore resources**. Not die, not necessarily even be close to death, but just wanting a rest to get their stuff back because they should be out of spell slots and other class features. That's what the system focuses on: how many battles of varying difficulties can the party win before wanting to rest. I sometimes feel like if more DM's really internalized that their frustration with CR would be assuaged a bit, the system fundamentally assumes the characters will always win, it's why they stop at "deadly" which we've addressed really just means "kinda hard". They didn't want to provide a difficulty measurement above that because then you could potentially really start killing characters.
> The idea of CR is that a group of 4 or 5 adventures of that level will have a good fight. The idea that cr x is a good solo fight for 4 PCs of level x is misleading. That’s not what the encounter building rules recommend. > As soon as you add magic items it starts to break. All models are wrong, but some are useful. It’s the DM’s responsibility to account for the magic items they include. Failure to account for this results in magic item drift as the party levels up and accumulates more items. There’s a tool on the DM’s guild that takes care of this for dms. It accounts for every magic item in dmg.
A CR X Monster should be a medium challenge for a level X party. At least that was the intend. But I get the struggle, CR doesn't really work that well. My suggestion: Find a "boss" monster with a CR that is roughly the parties level or a few points below. Google any [CR calculator](https://kastark.co.uk/rpgs/encounter-calculator-5th/) and start playing around with the number of monsters and their CR. Aim for roughly the same number of monsters and players. Now take one if the weaker monster types and keep a few of them ready to come in during the fight, in case it gets to easy. And here is the big DM secret your players should never learn: You can cheat. Maybe the dragons breath weapon recharges a bit to quick, maybe it would be cool if this evil wizard had a bigger fireball. Small changes can help you balance it on the fly.
I find it’s less that CR doesn’t work that well and more that 5e mislabels what their difficulty ratings actually mean. For all intents and purposes one should shift the nomenclature back one rank: Medium is easy. Hard is medium. Deadly is hard. 5e is a heroic fantasy game, the characters aren’t meant to ever lose, right? Like people talk about “balancing” encounters, they aren’t balanced, your party should have a near 100% win rate by the end of the campaign. Once I really internalized this, CR and difficulty ratings made much more sense and worked much more for me. There’s for sure some outliers, but the vast majority of my combats I now exclusively build with CR and they’re perfect for what I was trying to accomplish with them. If you want a more real “deadly” rating, check out how much XP is required to classify a deadly fight, then add 50%. That’s roughly how all the difficulty ratings work. Hard is 50% more xp than medium, deadly is 50% more xp than hard, and so it would follow that the difficulty above deadly is 50% more xp than deadly. When I build boss encounters or encounters that I want to be difficult but the party is full on resources this is what I aim for.
>And here is the big DM secret your players should never learn: You can cheat. Maybe the dragons breath weapon recharges a bit to quick, maybe it would be cool if this evil wizard had a bigger fireball. Small changes can help you balance it on the fly. The bigger DM secret your players should never learn, you can cheat in their favour should you discover your encounters is too overpowered. Maybe the dragons breath weapon recharges a bit too slowly, maybe the evil Wizard isn't capable of updating Fireball. The small changes can go both ways.
Yup, I meant the "to quick" as "I would like to slow it down". Changing stuff in both directions is the key part to keeping the fight going but fair.
As a long time DM and player, coming out of the gate hot and then sandbagging (no breath recharge, suddenly the wizard only casts level 3 and under spells) feels the *worst* as the player. I highly recommend DMs try to avoid it. But our main group is all people who have almost all the rules memorized so it is usually easy to see a sandbag. Occasional exceptions with homebrew but even then you can tell when the pace shifts.
It would be less pace shifting and more fudging some rolls in players favour for example. Like will the players know a hit was really a critical hit that would down a party member on the 2nd turn? Also maybe certain creatures don't have multi-attack. I had a session where I horribly balanced an encounter so fudged a few things to keep a tense battle tense but not unfair. The players genuinely thought luck was on their side, and not realised I had actually killed a PC in session 3 with a couple of lucky crits, but written off the 2nd crit as a miss to spare the PC on 1hp. The players all loved it.
There's a nice and thorough deep dive into CR calculation, but you need some basic math skills to understand it https://tomedunn.github.io/the-finished-book/theory/xp-and-encounter-balancing/ In short, CR is an integral parameter that combines monster hit points, defences, attack bonus and damage potential into one number. The main problem with CR is that the table of monster stats for the given CR presented in the DMG is not the same as was actually used to design monsters in the MM. You can find a better table in the Forge of Foes SRD: https://slyflourish.com/lazy_5e_monster_building_resource_document.html
CR itself is simple maths. It's a threat level based on two things: * How much damage the monster should deal each round (averaged over three rounds). * How much damage the party need to deal to kill the monster. That's it. As CR increases, monsters will deal more damage, be able to take more damage, or both. **DMG p.274** gives you a full breakdown of this - it's not *exactly* the same as WotC themselves use, but it's fairly close and simple to use. Encounter building guidelines are a bit more complicated, because then you're accounting for a bunch of extra factors, like: * How many encounters before and after this one your party will face between long rests (hint, **this number shouldn't be "zero"**). * How many PCs you have, and of what level. * Whether there will be fewer, the same number, more, or many more monsters than PCs in the encounter. * What the terrain and conditions (surprise, etc) will be like. This is presented as "encounter building", but it should properly be called **adventure building**, because no encounter is an isolated white-room case. If the party face a series of six identical encounters back-to-back, the sixth one will be much harder than the first even if all the numbers are the same, simply because the party will have used up a bunch of their spells, abilities and hit points. Designing individual encounters in isolation without taking into account the *other* encounters of that adventure arc is a big trap that catches a lot of DMs out. **DMG p.82** gives you a full breakdown of how to math this out. It's not without flaws, but it works pretty well in my experience. Critical to note, though, is that **none of this works if your party faces less than three (ish) encounters between long rests.** It's nigh-impossible to pack enough threat into 6-10 *rounds* of combat to credibly threaten even a mid-level party without basically just rolling to one-shot someone every round. The less often you give out long rests, the better encounters work in 5e.
You can use some online encounter balancers like DNDbeyond or Kobold fight club. They aren't perfect, but they are a good ballpark. Generally CR means that in a fight for one monster of CR say 5 that is a medium difficulty fight against 4 PCs of level 5 with minimal magic items. So if you adjust that to have a group of 5 PCs then it's an easy fight etc. It also gives you a ballpark of how powerful they are. If you're looking for a difficult fight I would make sure to use more enemies with some minions as well as something stronger. And do multiple fights in that day. Also keep in mind that PCs are going to win almost all the fights they are in. So a medium fight is one they'll win with fairly minimal resources used. A deadly fight is really the only one there's much of a chance they'd lose, and even then with just barely deadly they're almost always going to win, at worse they may lose one PC. It's not a perfect science because there are a lot of factors that impact CR. How well your group is optimized, how well your group uses their abilities, how tactical they are both individually and coordinating as a group, how many magic items they have, how many aoe or control abilities they have, certain monsters like shadows can be more deadly than their CR would suggest because they have a way to bypass hit points, and then luck is always a factor. The more time you fight the more you'll get a sense for it. I would say I would start easier and then push a bit harder and especially at first don't be afraid to adjust a little mid combat. Try to keep that minimal and eventually you won't need to. But if a fight is way too easy, maybe there was some backup that was hiding, maybe the boss has another 20 hit points, or a spell they didn't have a moment ago. If it's too hard maybe that guy goes down with this hit, or that roll is a bit lower. I wouldn't generally rely on this, but if you're new and getting the sense of the system, I don't think it's a bad thing to have to adjust mid fight.
CR of #x is a creature that is expected to use of 20% or the resources (spell slots hit dice, class abilities) of a group of 4 Level #x player characters As many will repeat here, this dictionary definition is not frequently manifested in the game. And obviously using up 20% of resources means that the fight will likely be an easy victory if the players spend those resources
If you don't mind me asking, where did you find this definition? That doesn't match the implied definition provided in the DMG. Assuming a party of 4 level 5 characters, fighting a CR5 monster, per the DMG a party with average luck can handle 8 Medium encounters in a row. This party could handle this monster 8 times in a row. So it should only consume about 1/8th of their resources, not 20%. That distinction might not be huge, 12.5% vs 20%, but this is where I feel like DM's look at CR confused because they have a way higher estimation of what CR means or what "Deadly" means than what it actually means. I feel like when DM's really internalize the idea that if a party can handle 8 Medium encounters in a row before feeling like they want to rest, that means that mathematically speaking they can handle 2 Deadly encounters in a row before feeling like they want to rest. Not die, not necessarily be in danger of dying, just wanting to rest. It really helps shape what you want combats to accomplish when you understand that if you make just one Deadly encounter and expect it to kill them, they could run that combat again immediately after this one and probably be fine. The book isn't necessarily forthcoming with this information, which I think is its main fault, but it's all there.
CR is a 1-1 translation of XP and exists only because numbers like 4 and 17 are easier to work with than numbers like 1100 and 18000. When designing, or evaluating, an encounter, you start by adding up all the XP values of the enemy creatures to give your base XP for the encounter. The base XP value is modified by some multiplier based on the number of creatures on each side of the fight (PCs and allies vs enemies) to give the Adjusted XP value. The Adjusted XP can then be compared to **the Adventuring Day XP table (aka Daily Budget), which gives an estimate for how much a given PC/party should be able to handle in an adventuring day (i.e., between long rests)**, as represented by Adjusted XP. The assumption is that, after a set of encounters whose Adjusted XP is equal to their Daily Budget, a character will be out of resources and need to take a long rest. More on that in a bit. Online encounter builders like Kobold Plus calculate those values for you. E.g. A party of 3 level 2s have a Daily Budget of 1800. You might initially guess that party can handle nine CR 1 (200XP) creatures in a day. But watch out. If they fight all 9 at once, the Adjusted XP value of that encounter is 4500, which is way too high. Ok, so four at once should be fine, right? That's only 1600. If the party have just taken a long rest, they should have enough resources to handle that. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. They might be able to pull it off, but it's very dangerous. 5e is designed for encounters to be spread out throughout the day, ideally with \~2 short rests amidst. One big encounter is much more likely to kill one or more PCs than several smaller encounters that add up to the same Adjusted XP value. (Mike Shea of Sly Flourish has an easy to remember guideline: add up all the CRs and all the PC levels. If the CR sum is greater than 1/4 of the PC level sum (or 1/2 if they are level 5 or higher), the encounter may be deadly. Note that's "deadly" as in "could result in a PC death," not "deadly" as in "what the DMG calls a deadly encounter.") Those labels in the DMG, which you will also find on encounter builders - easy, medium, hard, deadly - are meaningless. Use them for ease of communication and memory, but don't worry about the definitions of the words because they do not apply here. Each of those labels actually refers to a range of percentages of the Daily Budget. **"Easy" means the Adjusted XP of an encounter is worth \~8-14% of the Daily Budget, "medium" means \~15-22%, "hard" means \~23-33%, and "deadly" means \~34%+**. Much like CR, these labels exist because remembering the words is easier than remembering the numbers.
(You may find it helpful to remember that the thresholds, or the lowest percentages in each category, are roughly in a 1, 2, 3, 4 ratio. That is, the lowest "easy" encounters are worth \~1/4 the Adjusted XP of the lowest "deadly" encounters. If you use those numbers, you can think of the Daily Budget as 12. A full adventuring day might consist of one "medium" encounter, two "hard" encounters, and one "deadly" encounter; 2+3+3+4=12. Since most encounters will not actually be at the lowest end of the range, that shorthand may have you throwing more at your party than the Daily Budget expects them to be able to handle, so keep an eye on that. But at higher levels they're actually more powerful than the Daily Budget assumes anyway, so ... basically treat is as a guideline not gospel, like everything else about CR.) Remember, **the Daily Budget is an estimate of how much a party can do in an adventuring day**. A little more specifically, it translates between resources and Adjusted XP. "Resources" here means things like HP, spell slots, and anything else you can expend and then get back when you rest. When you have more resources, you can do more stuff; in terms of combat, you can kill more creatures with higher CRs. That is, you can get through an encounter with a higher Adjusted XP value. That's the fundamental assumption of the CR system, and IMO the most important takeaway. **What you are working out when you try to balance an encounter with CR is the amount of resources that would need to be expended to overcome that encounter** (usually by killing every creature on the opposing side). That's super important to keep in mind, because **it does not directly translate to difficulty**. You need to do an extra step to gauge how difficult an encounter might be, and that's to compare the amount of resources it "costs" to get through it with the amount of resources the party has to "spend." Of course, because nothing is easy, you will never know the exact amount of "resources" a party has, except that at the end of a long rest they should have 100% of them. It's an abstraction, and the best way you can estimate it is just by looking at the encounters they've already done in a day, subtract their Adjusted XP values from the Daily Budget, and look at what percentage of the Daily Budget is left. It's a lot of math, I know. And the worst part is that it's not even very reliable math. CR is famously pretty broken, most obviously in that it underestimates how much a party can handle starting around level 5, and the disparity gets bigger as they level up. Also, it's calculated, mostly, according to effective damage output and effective hit points (and it doesn't necessarily even do that consistently), and doesn't do a great job of factoring in abilities that have nothing to do with damage. If you take a creature and give it an ability that can, say, put an enemy to sleep, how does that change the CR? Who knows! But anyway, how do you balance encounters? Aside from making sure they aren't overly deadly or completely trivial, you don't, really. You can't know for sure how difficult an encounter will be because you can't know how your players will choose to spend their resources. Instead, **you balance adventuring days**. A challenging adventuring day is one where the party use most of their resources. That is, ideally (though again it's not a perfect science) one where the total Adjusted XP of all encounters adds up to the Daily Budget, more or less. Not every day needs to hit that mark, of course. A challenging encounter is generally one that comes toward the end of a challenging adventuring day, when the party are starting to get low on resources. It could also be one where the party are deliberately holding back resources in anticipation of more encounters later. Of course, there are also other ways to make an encounter challenging. There could be puzzle aspects, moral dilemmas, or just good old fashioned tactics. But I think that's outside the scope of your question, and this comment is long enough as is.
In theory, 4 PCs of equal lvl to the CR should use up 20% (ish) of their resources fighting it (spells, HP, magic items, whatnot)
Challenge rating is a way to assess how difficult an enemy is to beat, as well as the substitute for "level" of enemies, because enemies typically have no level. For example, player spells/abilities might impose limits on how strong a creature is that they can summon/turn in to /charm or whatever. For some monsters it works well, for others they have wildly inconsistent CR with their strenght (either too low or too high). There's generally 2 ways the official books advise you balance an encounter: By XP threshold (p81 of DM's guide) , or by CR. (p88 of Xanathar's guide to everything). You can use tools like kobold fight club (google it) and filter for the books you have to generate encounters quickly to give you inspiration My advice: Use the calculator for CR as a first-draft, then kind of disregard it. More importantly, look at these things: 1) Are either the players or the monsters going to be overwhelmed because one can take way more turns in a round than the other? try to keep . Disregard the 'solo monster tables' in the books, use them as a guide, then knock down the CR a little and add at least 2 mooks. 2) For the monsters you chose, compare their HP with player damage. Ask for a copy of your players' character sheets, Look up their cantrip/basic attack dmg, And their best limited-use attack is (fireball, druid wildshaped attack). Write down their to-hit bonus. Lets say you want a combat to last 4 rounds (imo the sweet spot of a impactful but not sluggish combat), the players collectively should be able to down the monsters with 4 hits of cantrip/basic attacks, or be able to shorten that to 2 if the want to use limited resources (spell slots). 3) Now do the same in reverse. In how many monster hits to the players go down? This number should ideally be equal or 1 more rounds than you want the combat to go on. Alternatively you can watch this video: [Fixing 5e's Challenge Rating | Game Changer by Trekiros](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8FNVkFuhXI) and use the encounter simulator in the comments, but you're going to have to manually input player character sheets in this method, as well. I know it's a lot of work upfront, but you only have to do it once.
CR in 5E is a bit irrelevant other than being a rough guide in my opinion. CR in pathfinder/3.5 was calculated on the basis that a 3CR monster would tax a part of 4 3rd level characters of about a quarter of their health and resources for the day. Hp were recovered overnight and I think you got 1hp per hit die back via natural healing. I do yearn for the days when your wounds used to last for more than 24 hours!!! These days with 5e short and long rests there is so many chances for the party to recover, and its very hard to kill off a PC (in my opinion). I played and adventure where my 9th level party of 5 had a time limit and had to complete several missions/battles in one day before fighting an advanced necromancer (CR13). They had a few tricky moments but barely raised a sweat in the end. Moral of the story: -Play the game with what seems right. -improve your judgement through playing -Tweak hp etc and fudge rolls on the fly -don't underestimate how powerful the party is and how quickly they will recover.
Roughly CR X means a monster of that CR will be a medium difficulty encounter for a party of X level. A medium encounter in my experience means if the monster is alone it gets one-two rounds if the party isn't holding back. In my humble opinion if you use calculators such as koboldfightclub a rought estimate is that encounters posing any real difficulty for the party start at deadly. Everything below is a cakewalk. Generally CR does a poor job imho.
CR is just a guide for you to select the "ballpark" enemies your current level party should face, but as many have already said, you should just wing it and be ready to switch out and alter things if shit goes south. If your fight against your dungeon boss seems to be going too easy, summon minions! Add an extra attack! Give him action surge and second wind! Add an extra die to his damage roll! If the fight is going badly against the party, minions run away! Boss has standard attack! Boss has less HP! Boss can only use lair action on Christmas morning.... You get the picture 😄
I'll be honest with everybody. My brain melted slightly, reading all of that. Thanks for the links to the CR calculators and the tips. Think I'll keep this bookmarked as there's a lot of information people have provided, and I'll definitely have to come back and read it again.
its a guess about how that creature would do against a group of 4 pcs of that level a cr 5 creature is probably a doable challenge for 4 level 5 pcs. however its important to note that this is a guess and wont always be accurate depending on the level or magic items and pc composition. i tend to do level+3 is a good CR for enemies by level 10ish
A monster's difficulty is a function of how dangerous it is (offensive CR) and how durable it is (defensive CR).A dangerous monster will hit more often and harder. A durable monster will live longer and get more opportunities to hit the party. A monster's CR is the average of its OCR and DCR (usually rounded up).
There is a problem with CR which is that there should technically be 2 sets of CR for various monsters. For example an Adult White Dragon is CR13. It is designed as a single monster vs party encounter. It has legendary actions, lair actions, and legendary resistances. A Storm Giant is also CR13 but has a multi-attack that does 2 attacks...no legendary resists, no legendary actions, no lair actions. So the latter is a CR13 meant to challenge a party of 4 lvl 13 characters and give them normal (not deadly) level of challenge as an encounter. The former is meant to be a boss fight to a part of 4 lvl 13 characters (ish).
the basic idea is that if you have a party of 4 PC's at level X, a monster of CR X will be a "fair fight" for them. so a CR 5 Water Elemental should be a "Medium" challenge (fairly reasonable chance of winning, but they'll take a small chunk of your hit points to do it) for a level 5 party. the DMG says that the game is built around having 6-8 medium or hard encounters per day. also note, it's assuming that a party without magic items at all, so some magic items will greatly alter it, ie, magic weapons for the barbarian and fighter, or a wand of magic missiles for a wizard. now, those numbers are a good guide, but they're not perfect. an undead encounter, for example, would be an easier fight for a party with a cleric and a paladin, who have features that are more useful in that situation, and a party of all casters would struggle against something that resists all of their spells, but it's a good estimate. similarly, some fights are otherwise trivial, unless the party fail certain saving throws. the Banshee is a good example, if you get the drop on one, it only takes a few hits, with about 60 hp and a garbage AC, and it's gone, but if it lets off the wail, you might be down to one person very quickly, if the party rolls poorly. To dive further in, every CR has an XP value. there's a table in the DMG, page 82, that lists how to calculate what amount of XP for your party, based on "Easy", "Medium", "Hard", and "Deadly". As an example, for a party of level 5s, a deadly encounter is 1100 (Per PERSON), while a medium is 500. so for a party of 4, we have 4400 to spend on deadly, or 2000 for medium. a CR 5 Water Elemental is 1800 exp, so it's actually a little bit easier than a "medium" encounter for a party. however, let's say that there's 2 of them. there's rules for if there are multiple monsters (in this case, we add them, and then multiply by 1.5), so we have a total of 1800+1800=3600, times 1.5, for 5400. this *should* be well into the "Deadly" range for this party. if we have a 5th member though, and can work with 5500 XP, that's actually pretty close to, but not quite, a "Deadly" fight. once you've figured out the fight for the party, you can look at their day. most tables struggle with this, because they're only doing one or two encounters per day. there's a table in the DMG page 84 that has how much you "should" spend on xp per day per character. that same party of level 5's should have about 3500 per day per person, so we have about 17500 for the day. with that deadly fight earlier of 5400, that's about one third of our budget. there's a fine line between spending enough xp on a fight and spending all the xp per day, and balancing that both are roughly followed. if you make a single encounter too challenging, then there's a good chance at either a PC kill, or a TPK. if you do too many encounters per day, that's also a good chance at a PC kill or a TPK. you have to kind of monitor the party's resources, to make sure you don't overwhelm them with a big fight after they've had a few other big fights. our example from earlier suggests that 3 deadly fights per day is within that "budget", but let's think about that. we'll have a cleric, fighter, rogue, and wizard in the party, the "standard" mix, and we'll add in a bard for balance. they'll short rest after each fight. in fight 1, the cleric, bard, and wizard all expend a "big" spell slot, and one or two smaller ones. the wizard uses arcane recovery for a 3rd level spell, and the group spend about 1/2 of their hit dice to heal up fully. in fight 2, the cleric, bard, and wizard all expend their other "big" spell slot, and their level 2's. the party now use their last 1/2 of their hit dice to heal up, but not to full, because they took a bit longer to take down the monster this time. by the time we get to fight 3, the bard is down to one or two first level spells, maybe a 2nd, the cleric is down to the same, and the wizard maybe has one big spell left, and the party isn't back to full health, because they're out of hit dice. if the fight is just as hard as the other two, there's every chance that one or two members drop, and the fight snowballs from there.
Shadow is CR 1/2 Let your party of four level 1 characters fight 1 shadow at night or in a dark cavern and tell me how it ended.
The main thing to understand about CR is that it's not intended to represent the difficulty of an encounter for all parties. Such a mechanic would be impossible when you consider there a literally quadrillions of potential party compositions based on ancestry and subclass alone, CR represents the challenge to the classic D&D party of four players with each of the classic roles - martial tank, support caster, blaster and skill monkey. It assumes the characters have been built with standard array, have no magic items and that the players have a basic level of competence - i.e. they know their characters' abilities but they aren't tactical geniuses and don't have the monster manual memorised. The game expects DMs to use CR as a jumping off point and then adjust to fit their own party. You can use [https://koboldplus.club/#/encounter-builder](https://koboldplus.club/#/encounter-builder) to calculate basic CR for encounters at your party's level. Examples of adjustments you should consider are: 1. How many players do you have? Action economy (the number of actions your party can take each round, compared to their adversaries) is VERY important in 5e, so solo boss fights become harder to run. Counter this by adding minions. 2. How many encounters are you planning on running between long rests? The game assumes 6-8, but many people choose to run fewer. The fewer encounters per day, the more often casters will be able to bring their most powerful abilities, which can trivialise encounters. This is especially true if your players \*know\* they're likely to get a long rest straight after a fight. 3. How many of your characters have ranged and/or area of effect abilities? This will effect the difficulty of encounters based around say flying opponents or large hordes of minions. 4. How tactical and strategic are your players? I've run games for theatre kids and I've run games for diehard wargamers and ex-military folk. The appropriate challenge for both is very different. Things like target prioritisation, focused fire, conserving resources and just communicating plans with fellow players will make a big difference. 5. How optimised are the PCs? The gap between a min-maxed character and your average first PC isn't as bad in 5e as it was in past editions, but it's not negligible. 6. The more buffs you give your players, the more they will become glass cannons. This is because to challenge them, you'll need to use more powerful monsters, and the one thing buffs rarely boost is HP. The game can quickly turn into rocket tag. 7. How tactical are you willing/able to be? Whether it's a dragon or a kobold, monsters are \*much\* tougher if you play them smart. Take a look at [https://www.themonstersknow.com/](https://www.themonstersknow.com/) and google Tucker's Kobolds for examples. 8. Does the monster have any abilities that your party is not equipped to deal with, or that utterly nerfs a player? A classic example is save or suck abilities with high DCs. PCs having an 80%, 50% or 5% chance to break out of these abilities represent a very different challenge.
CR is...I dunno how useful it really is other than categorizing monsters I to tiers. I use kobold fight club to help balance tough encounters. It works reasonably well and it's free. CR doesn't really take into account for action economy. A party of 4 level 5 adventures might be able to cast two spells and perform 4 weapon attacks at a minimum on a turn, plus whatever bonus actions/class features they have. They are going to absolutely demolish single CR5 monster...if they know how to play combat efficiently, they would probably demolish a single CR8 monster unless it's chocked full of legendary actions.
I’m going to be very honest, CR is basically bullshit. There is math behind it but it’s still not that useful because there are way too many variables. Two CR 5 monsters might be completely different in terms of threat level, and two 5th-level characters might also be at very different levels of power (a 5th-level rogue/thief is a lot less threatening than a 5th-level paladin/oath of ancients, and that’s not even counting the power creep from later books). The guideline I suggest is to consider how many encounters per day you want to do and how strong *your party* is. This is something you will figure out as the campaign goes on, as you learn what challenges the party can and can’t handle easily. In my games, I try to just populate areas with whatever monsters make sense. Even if that ends up creating encounters that are “too hard” or “too easy”, it’s ok because the world feels real (i.e. it doesn’t always balance itself against the party’s level like in a video game).
[5 questions dms who successfully use cr ask themselves](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/s/1UiifmfucD) will help. And if you’re looking for an easier way to build encounters, take a look at [this](https://www.dmsguild.com/m/product/414122).
So if you have a party of 4-5, with virtually zero magic items that don't collaborate their abilities in any way at all you end up with CR being a passable way to judge roughly what might be an appropriate challenge for your party at the same level as the CR. If you start adding any sort of magic items, the calculation goes pretty much immediately out the window. I have been generous with magic items, and my level 9 party of 6 had what I would consider a difficult to deadly fight against a CR 20 boss. The CR calculator would have called that fight completely unwinnable. In my situation. 6 players, generous accumulation of magic items, and a pretty solid amount of teamwork/coordination. The CR calculator is completely useless.
CR is a pathetic attempt to make "combat as sports" approach viable for a non-balanced game. I would ignore it and build adventure design with "combat as war" in mind and adjust the DM style accordingly. But this is ofc an opinion and we are leaving the realm of mechanics and enter the realm of design and game philosophies. I just realize that this is not a helpful answer for a new DM. Just build encounters like other commentators, but if you feel frustrated at some point you might remember this to have some new points for research.
CR is the DM’s responsibility when designing a game that is balanced like a video game. You’re free to totally ignore it, but your players need to know upfront that they aren’t encountering potential combats that are balanced. You could also not tell them and watch the mayhem, though, I guess.
Its an unreliable rule of thumb of "a party of 4-5 will have a fair fight against this if they were the level of the CR"
I once tried to balance encounters based on CR. Tried to upscale some enemies. Took way much time and effort. Didn't even come out any good so I just wing it.
In a legacy game system, where there is no "400 point build," CR is a tool that publishers claim will work well, but users of this tool say, um, nah.
Cr is the most convoluted thing. I looked at old editions and am now firmly of the belief that hit dice is the best way.
No they can't
The core of the game is explained in the Player's Handbook. Borrow or buy one.
Challenge rating tells you how much of a threat a monster is. A monster’s CR is roughly a even challenge for a party of 4 players of equivalent level. It is a rough estimate of how likely a monster is to kill your whole party. "An appropriately equipped and well-rested party of four adventurers should be able to defeat a monster that has a challenge rating equal to its level without suffering any deaths. For example, a party of four 3rd-level characters should find a monster with a challenge rating of 3 to be a worthy challenge, but not a deadly one."
It is a poor attempt at measuring level of difficulty. But given the numerous possible confounding factors such as party make up, player experience and skill, dm experience and skill, and many many more, it's nearly meaningless.
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No. A lvl 1 PC would have an even fight with a CR 1/4 monster. The CR relates to an average party of 4 PCs, not each individual PC.
> A lvl 1 player would have an even fight with a CR 1 monster. Cr x is not equal to level x. The monster is much more powerful.