this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Unfortunately, to a large extent, it's going to be something you have to intuit from knowing your party. Is it a big group of unoptimized, heavy RP players? Easier/simpler encounters. A group of min-maxers? Go nuts.
There really is no good way to perfectly balance encounters without taking into account the characters you're throwing them at.
Early on, I'd just rely on the exp budget method until you get the hang of figuring it out. Most encounters designed with the exp budget should be fine, if a bit easy a lot of times.
I'm afraid I haven't heard of the exp budget system, can you explain it to me?
I'm guessing it means comparing how much XP particular monsters are worth per their stat block and adding those together then comparing the total to table on page 82 of the Dungeon Master's Guide for encounter difficulties by party level. I agree this is a good baseline to start from, but those XP values are based on CR, which is itself really only a general suggestion and starting point to balance from.
Like eerongal led with, you have to know your party and their strengths and weaknesses in order to prepare an appropriate challenge for them. All of the options in character creation and progression mean that there are far to many variables in even a low level group of 3-5 PCs for any static rating system to guarantee balanced matchups for any given group without the DM actually having to learn the rules and use their brain a bit.
Agree, this is what I look at as well. I try to have the XP difficulty match close to the party's "xp budget". I like using the encounter difficulty calculator at https://kastark.co.uk/rpgs/encounter-calculator-5th/ because it shows both CR and XP, it's very basic and minimalistic.
Yeah, that's a great tool to use as a starting point. But getting a good looking number from that calculator doesn't mean that your party isn't going to smash the enemies or get wiped in three rounds. Different monsters will have different abilities (AC, attack bonus, damage, spells, resistances, saves, etc) just as your PCs will depending on their classes and builds. A group of slow moving monsters with high AC and low dexterity saves might be an appropriate or tough challenge for a heavily martial party, but add one wizard with spells like fireball or even burning hands at lower levels and suddenly they're all taking full damage at once. There's also the action economy to consider; a single enemy that attacks once per turn isn't going to deal as much damage as a party of four all attacking it (unless it has legendary actions or it's hitting hard enough to drop a PC in one or two hits) but a bunch of low CR enemies can potentially take out a half the party in a round or two via sheer volume of weak hits if they aren't hit with some sort of AoE attack. As the DM you have to adjust for such factors and that's really much more of an art than a science.