Bad Dungeon Master Advice & Better Options Instead
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- čas přidán 5. 09. 2024
- Dungeon Masters, please stop doing this. Here are some better DM Tip alternatives for your Dungeon and Dragons table to try out instead. #dungeonmaster #dmtips #dnd
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If your players came up with a clever plan and you nullify it with boosted hp, they’ll start to feel like the time spent planning was wasted. If you boost hp to make up for some lucky crits, they’ll stop getting excited about them. You gotta have a solution that doesn’t feel like a consequence for the players doing well.
They will only feel those things if they know that you adjusted the stats, they will still be excited about the crits and then wonder how they would have survived without them, causing it to feel so much more heroic, the same with the planning, you are the only one who knows that you adjusted the fight to be dramatic even though they did the sneaky thing that would have ended it unceremoniously. In fact they will be happy they planned because they will feel if they hadn't it wouldn't have gone as easy as it did, even though it was harder than "it was supposed to be"
@@aggiegunner18 Again someone else gets it. The game is just a vehicle for good times and story. Never fudge rolls but fudge other things not seen by players to make the adventure more engaging. The illusion of choice is still there AND you managed to make the encounter feel epic.
On the other side, if they come up with a clever plan, and they don't get to run though it because the target dies to soon, you have the exact same boat. Adjusting things is more subtle that just double HP. Change things to make the encounter its most enjoyable, move things up, move them down, move anything you can to make the party enjoy it.
@@aggiegunner18 Coming from a player who has seen this type of DMing, no they will not be happy. It's pretty obvious when the DM is fudging more than just rolls. Your poker face isn't as good as you think.
When every fight has to be life or death on the chance of critting multiple times or you have to have the perfect plan or you're doomed, it just becomes exhausting and feels pointless. The fear of the big bad is nullified because you have the same level of difficulty for a fight with bandits on the road. In fact, this type of DMing kills the need for planning altogether. If you go into a battle with a master plan vs no plan at all, and every time the result is the same, why not just wing it? That's what you're telling them to do essentially because their choices don't matter in your cinematic that is playing.
Players love the feeling of interacting with the world and their choices mattering. When those choices all equate to the same result, they are really showing up to a story telling session, and might as well just swap their dice for popcorn.
Indeed. Never punish the players for success.
I agree that the dm should only cheat for the players. That said, the villians HP can be adjusted (up or down) to make sure the fight is satisfying FOR THE PLAYERS. If the bbeg is going down fast, but the players made a big plan or did a lot out of combat to make it happen, let them take the bbeg down quickly. If they rolled some crits and max damage up front, let the bbeg die quickly. If however, you goofed and didn't really keep track of how much damage your players can do, adjust up or down within the first round, not for a specific round number, but just to make sure it is a satisfying experience.
Agreed!
1000%
Yeah, I've been in the situation both as a player and a DM where there was no plan made, the party just stumbled upon a big boss monster, and the guy goes down 1 or 2 rounds, half the party didn't even get to do anything. It's extremely unsatisfying on both ends.
THANK YOU for saying this. As soon as he said you only cheat FOR the players, I'm thinking "Well yeah, it's so the players have a satisfying fight." I'm not gonna give my baddie extra HP because I want him to last longer or to combat a clever move by the players, I'm gonna give him more HP if I miscalculated the difficulty level of the encounter. If I've been building up to a fight and the PC's look to be able to down him with basic stuff by round 2 because I miscalculated, I'm boosting that HP so it's epic for THEM.
Seriously. My players only really like stressful combat that feels like it matters. If they're not getting hit and there's no real threat and the baddie is just going to die in a round and a half, I know they're all sitting there going "Why are we doing this?" So, yeah, I'll adjust my baddie's stats or even give them reactions mid-fight so the players feel like they accomplished something when they win.
I halved my first baddy's hp mid fight (don't tell my players). Kinda overestimated what my players could do to him. Didn't want a tpk in the first session.
I've done this
I think we all have at some point
I've done this and also doubled it
Shhhh
Players and GMs need to quit being afraid of tpks.
TPK with careful consideration of the persons playing the PCs. TPKs are OK as long as everyone at the table is a mature fully functioning adult who understands it's a game. But, in 1 hour I am starting my 3rd session with a group of 13 year old girls (daughter's friends) and I will not TPK them no matter what. The reasons are: They are new to the game, they are youngsters, and they are really having a great time growing in their knowledge and understanding of Pathfinder 2e. Killing them off is the best way to make sure they never play again. I want them to discover a lifetime hobby filled with joy and adventure. It's the most fun I've ever had at the RPG table, too. They are nutty fun. Like the time the one girl who had frozen a zombie said she was going to eat a zombie ice cube... oh, yeah, that was fun to role play, and yes, she did get sick from it and we laughed and laughed.
Dm of 11 years. On the fly adjustments are a part of running a good game. I have slashed or buffed enemy hp, attack or number of enemies on the fly. This is because there is no way you are gonna nail all the math all the time. Typically i make those adjustments before initiative tho.
I know you probably do, but i hope you reward your players for any increase in difficulty. If you add extra enemies, give them extra gold or exp. If they're too strong too fast, maybe turn the encounter into a role play moment. I don't imagine every monster/enemy/npc wants to fight to the death. It allows you to role play monsters in a way that makes them unique. Defeat an Orc and he might be proud and return with his tribe. Bloody a goblin or kobold, and they will surely flee, beg, or surrender, perhaps even before combat starts. But at the end of the day, If you're doubling enemies or even HP, hopefully you double the reward as well.
@@Docsfortune Difficulty is a big word , something trivial for a party could be deadly for a different one , they are the same obstacle .
Do you give LESS experience to the party that trivialized the problem?
I leave you with something to reflect on.
@@Docsfortune if I adjust a boss mid fight, I also almost always make sure that boss doesn't kill any players. Now it's about fun, and not having a hyped up fight fall flat.
One exception, I was playing a lich I had massively built up as a genius, but I had forgotten to add a spell to her spell list. She has an intelligence of 24. I mentally shrugged, meh she would have predicted this situation and is smarter THEN ME, . But in another situation they actually outsmarted her, and I didn't adjust her actions and made sure the party knew.
Last minute adjustments like this are about the roll play, and that I don't make perfect preparation. Otherwise I am just trying to make a cool boss fun and not be a flop.
I usually place treasure in advance based on guidelines, so I rarely need to adjust treasure. If the party has too much or too little treasure for their level, I prefer to adjust it down the line so I can get it right. I use milestone XP and know in advance where I want players to be at for the various areas, so adjusting individual encounters up or down generally has no impact on XP gains.
I was running a boss encounter a while back and as the players were just getting warmed up and readying some great combos I realized the boss had about 10hp. I doubled his HP.
Contrariwise, more recently my players had geared, prepped, and saved momentum up for a big boss fight. They beat him in 1 round. I happily gave them the 'how do you wanna do this' moment.
In each case I measured how much fun the players would have and adjusted to give them the most satisfaction. But I'm also not the type to get mad or frustrated when the players beat the badguy too fast. It's not supposed to be *me* challenging them. I'm supposed to give them a fun and engaging experience. Challenges are only a catalyst.
Generally, having _standard combat_ for your BBEG or especially player story related final showdowns is more the issue here. Combat is swingy in D&D. It isn't predictable. If a story needs a predictable ending there are other options for playing that out that usually end up being more satisfying. Some examples:
1) Countdown to Destruction - The players show up and the bad guy has just initiated something outside of everyone's control that is just _going to happen_ and even if they kill the bastard, that thing is still going to happen. The scene becomes about dealing with the consequences of the final event, and not merely killing or dealing with the bad guy. This works great for bad guys that were trying to bring about the apocalypse, or releasing a demon, or anything like that. It doesn't always have to be the final step that is happening either. A bad guy trying to end the world may _think_ they have succeeded, but the players can still beat back the great evil being used when it fully emerges. But perhaps it would be better to use...
2) Stop Me or Else - The players show up as the bad guy is just starting a ritual or similar to summon their final goal. While performing it, they are invincible and you have a limited number of turns to deal with the situation, make the bad guy vulnerable, and end their ritual. This can take the form of having to destroy magical pillars surrounded by guards, or even simple puzzle solving on a time limit. Once, I had the players have to solve a small tower of Hanoi made from different sized corpses that were biting and scratching at them as they shuttled them between spikes, all while a the turn limit ticked down. Very tense.
3) Let's Play a Game - The players show up and the bbeg challenges them to a game instead of combat. The party has to win fairly (or cheat, or catch the boss cheating) at some other game. This works best if the game has been a part of the campaign already. If your dungeon crawl ends with a round of Jenga, it probably won't work. But if you've been using Jenga through the whole campaign (which is great, use Jenga in a dungeon to track how unstable things are and when it falls, all hell breaks loose in the dungeon, it adds an amazing push-your-luck mechanic to a dungeon. Every failed roll is a pull.) it works great. Just make sure the game itself has consequences that can be trusted. Either magically compelled or similar. The BBEG can't simply ignore the outcome.
4) The Spawn Ending - Killing the big bad engages a killswitch _that the players know about_ and they have to either disable that first or defeat the big bad some way other than combat. This raises the stakes of the big bad without just making them harder to put down.
5) The Lord-Ruler Ending - Similar to the Spawn Ending, but the players _don't know_ about it. This takes the form of the big bad warning the players that killing them is bad. "You don't know what I do for mankind." And when they die, things get worse somehow. A monster breaks free, or the world starts falling into the sun or the moon starts to fall to the Earth or something.
That doesn't seem right. You are robbing your players from the epic fight. It sould be more than normal combat, but definitly not less. It would be pretty anticlimatic if you defet the epic dragon, waiting on his treasure at the end of a long dungeon in a game of Jenga and he simply leaves. Yes combat isn't predictable, but thats the reason why ist is fun.
I'm just here for the Mistborn reference
@@Noobs_of_Gaming If you think I was advocating for the dragon at the end of a campaign that had nothing to do with Jenga challenging the players to a game and then flying off when he loses, you didn't understand what I was saying.
I literally said _not_ to do that. "If your dungeon crawl ends with a round of Jenga, it probably won't work."
What I am advocating for with all of these is the _option_ to have the final "fight" not be standard combat. If it would be dissatisfying for your players to not have a tense final conflict, it is absolutely an option for it not to be combat if your campaign supports it. Most DMs end campaigns, even big story-driven ones, with combat. But unless your game has been nothing but a dungeon crawl with very limited roleplay, you probably have more options.
Yes! I'm going to go out on a limb and say you've been doing this for awhile
The best way to ensure tense combat is introducing timed effects.
Just describe what is about to happenen roll a dice +modifier and that's how long it takes before the event is going to happen.
It can be simple as an alarm was rung and reinforcements are underway, if you are early in a dungeon.
Or the structure of a mine not holding on the room you are in and you want that treasure but the beast guarding it, it's magically compelled to guard it with it's life.
Players might find creative ways around these impeding dangers and they should be rewarded for it. It also steps away from the standard murder solution to all problems.
I have a rule I use for teaching and GMing: "Never let my students (players) pay a price for a mistake I made." If I made the assignment (encounter) too easy, let it go, NBD. If I made it too hard, reduce the consequences, change it to be easier, etc. The goal is learning (fun), keep that goal constantly in mind.
This!
While I agree in principle, and hell, I agree 99% of the time, I feel like an anticlimactic BBEG because I didn't accurately predict the amount of damage those guys can do IS punishing them. Working your way up an arc, or hell a whole campaign, to simply roflstomp the final boss without payoff to the foreshadowing of their power kinda cheapens everything that came before. I've been the player when that happened an I'll tell you now it took me a good while before that disappointment wore off.
I've been running my first adventure, and I've repeatedly forgotten small things that would have made encounters or dungeons a little harder... I ended up noticing these things shortly after the party was supposed to run into something (even left out that an entire fight would have happened much earlier, but the group wanted to sweep the area and take out all the monsters anyway). It's like that one card in Monopoly: "Bank error in your favor, collect $xx." If you screw up as the DM, reward the party.
@@Aussie_Archmage Same. I've been a player when our final fight against the BBEG ended with me still having 80% of my spell slots.
I got 2 turns in. Felt so fucking cheap.
@@KamuiSeph That's fair. If the GM is new, cut them a break, there is a learning curve to running games as well as playing them. In life, one thing that sucks is you have to suck at something before you become good at it.
I think it's important to draw a delineation between adjustments made on the fly to spite the players or railroad into certain narrative beats and adjustments made on the fly to preserve verisimilitude. Example: I recently ran an encounter where I had re-skinned a fiend stat block into an undead. Changed a couple of its abilities around, etc. Once combat started, one of my players hit it with necrotic damage and I realized I had neglected to write down immunity to necrotic in the stat block. So I gave the monster immunity on the fly. Not to spite the player, but because that made sense for the situation and I could easily have done it before initiative was rolled.
I think by the same token general encounter design fundamentals are the same way. The party is fighting a solo boss that I would have normally given legendary resistances and actions to, but I just simply forgot to do so? I'll probably have them start using them assuming it hasn't already been a few rounds.
Encounter design can be fluid. There's nothing fundamentally virtuous about locking in a monster's stat block when dice start rolling. That said, if you're going to do it, you need to know yourself well enough to know when you're doing it simply because you're not enjoying the outcome of the fight vs when you're doing it because you'd have done it beforehand if only you were more clever.
“Encounter design doesn’t stop once initiative is called.” -Matt Colville
If a DM can only ratchet DOWN (in favor of the players), as suggested in the video, then the DM can always just plan EVERY encounter as super deadly and then ratchet down during combat. The result - fun yet challenging combat - is the SAME as if the DM accidentally designed an easy encounter and ratcheted the difficulty up during combat.
The suggestion of adding a new boss or a second wave of minions mid-combat is conceptually no different than adding to the pool of boss hp. The bottom line is that the DM has increased the difficulty mid-combat.
Saying you can only ratchet DOWN during combat is meaningless, and allowing yourself to adjust everything EXCEPT HP is arbitrary.
Make whatever adjustments you need to make the game fun.
Auto-doubling hp on the fly might not be the best option in a situation, but it’s one legitimate tool in the DM toolbox if the encounter calls for it.
This, exactly this
Yup, you're right. The videos advice is BS 🤣
@@JimmiWazEre It’s not total BS. I agree that “just auto-doubling boss HP” mid-combat is probably not the best rule of thumb because a DM has many other tools available: adjust AC, adjust saving throw modifiers or DCs, alter boss features like multi-attacks, adjust the boss’s available spell slots or spell list, subtly use suboptimal combat tactics, etc.
A DM can always incorporate contingency plans as part of the encounter design. Plan something you think is balanced, but have a backup plan in case the encounter turns out too easy/hard.
If seeing the PCs curb stomp a boss seems like the most fun option for the table, then do it. Be more willing to let them stomp a mini-boss. You’ll have other chances down the line.
@@marcadiadd5681 Don't alter AC, stuff like multiattack or if the players can see the dice (e.g. roll20) modifier, if they allready seen it. You would give away that you are cheating. Its ok to cheat, but your players must never know that.
@@Noobs_of_Gaming I would never alter AC if the switcheroo can be discovered by the maths.
I was DMing and threw an Enslaved Deva at the party. The first turn the wizard cast banish and the Deva failed the save. I was shocked but let it stand. It was a great learning moment as a DM and very memorable moment for the players.
Nice! And that's a great example of using the right tools from your players. But if a major boss that the party is afraid of gets rolled in a similar way, I will totally defend. Giving some buffs to make it a worthwhile fight that the party has spent months building up towards
Also that Deva can come back later, bigger and badder and more pissed off for being banished. No doubt they will have learned of a way to avoid being banished. he he.
Had something similar happen to me. A NPC I absolutely did not expect the party to take a swing at in the circumstances they were in (he was a demigod/demigod adjacent), so I was already on the back foot, but I picked a stat block that seemed close enough (pit fiend), knowing that with their planned actions, this would be over quickly one way or another. They dropped either banishment or plane shift in a surprise round, and he botched the save. Epic saves in a surprise round seemed wrong, so it went off, and he wound up in the hands of the party’s patron goddess (there was sort of a divine Cold War thing going on, and he’d made some choices that were not in keeping with that agreement, so once they had him away from his seat of power, she was able to step in.
That’s one of the Druid’s player’s favorite stories from the game. Not every fight has to be this big epic climactic event. If every boss fight is an anticlimax, that’s a separate issue, but one or two playing out anticlimacticly just serves the purpose of letting the party feel powerful, and especially if it was a long road to get there, and they’ve grown to hate the boss, it can be even more satisfying on occasion than the epic fight.
Lucky them, thats why all major bossed have legendary resistance XD
@@mwhearn1 if I remember correctly banish sends the being back to its home plane. The just saved that Deva they sent an enslaved Deva home to good plane full of beings that will help them.
I have been running for about 20 years. I started making every big battle have 2-3 different versions. It is setup where minions or lieutenants could join, running in from a back room or different level.
Or if the players are loosing badly, maybe an enemy they let escape stabs the boss in the back, either physically or by breaking/taking a source of power.
Even this is quantum ogring. It makes the player decisions not meaningful. This fight will last 4 rounds no matter what so why bother? Let the players win.
The goal when DMing is for the players to have fun. Setting up reinforcements and/or phases in big fights normally does that for the group.
@@tbgold07 making player decisions matter does it really well. DMed for 20 years now and that is easily the single biggest advice is let the players choices matter.
I agree choices should matter, agency is very important. As above if they decided to let an enemy live, it comes back affect them.
The top part is more for balance. The choice of whether phase two has minions or lieutenants is just a DM judgement call, like most game setup.
@@OldSchoolGM94 having the option to add reinforcements is not a bad call. What if the players worked to prevent that? Then yiu can reward them with the reinforcements not coming. What if an enemy they spared came and aided them against the boss? That's 100% player agency and Reward for actions. If they killed the enemy, they wouldn't get that aid.
The big part is how often you do this, is it telegraphed, and why do it? If you do this all the time, thats an issue. It becomes predictable to players and they will dislike it. Only on occasion? Then it's a way to spice up a boss fight. Isnit telegraphed? Then players can prepare for the event in various ways, or maybe prevent it. If they prevent it, don't do an unfair work around, reward their guile by preventing the reinforcements. If they have another way in, make it delayed as a reward. Maybe they can kill the boss and escape before the minions can come, making for an intense escape sequence. Lastly, why do it at all? To add to the experience, that should be the ONLY reason. The players are what matters and making the fighting, story, and exploring exciting is the DMs job. Sometimes, that means small twists and turns.
I don't disagree with the idea if don't adjust entirely, but to say it's ALWAYS wrong to do is flat out ignoring when it's not a bad thing. Know your players, what they like, and what would enhance the experience. For some DMs, this means next to no fights and making an interactive story experience. For others, this is non-stop, zerg wave like fighfighting, and others may be to replicate their favorite character in game. Just be smart about how you do it.
I learned this lesson really early on, in my first game of D&D actually. The DM threw an adult blue dragon at us, we killed it, and he basically said, it’s now an adult blue dracolich
Now that was a missed opportunity. The DM should have had it come back 6 months later as a dracolich, that would have been cool
@@JadeyCatgirl99 Yes, the timing is important. Essentially without it becomes: just fight the boss again because you killed it too fast
I remember, I was doing a one shot for my cousins just so they could try DnD for the first time (first time DMing), and I decided to include an optional encounter with some bandits (they were locked in the cells, if they decided to unlock the cells the bandits would attack). One of them decided, upon running into the room, that she wanted to *eat* the key right in front of the bandits, failed the CON save, and promptly vomited in front of these bandits. I made the executive decision that this intimidated the bandits into just listening to the crazy eld lady. Did this *completely* smash my planned final combat with a room full of goblins? Yes, and maybe it was rewarding stupidity, but I felt like rewarding a unconventional plan with some allies made their very first game ever fun. Because, like, bonking an enemy is fun, but being able to do something to make the bonks work better is *also* fun, and that works just as much to make the *player* feel powerful, even if not so much the player character.
I think this happened roughly fifteen years ago: My group of a sorceress, druidess, cleric NPC and barbarian NPC had finally come to the battle I had spent the most time ever in my DM career to prep: the biggest hydra in the MM 3.5 book. Round one: sorceress casts her newly learned _Polymorph_ spell. We used active rolls for everything (every instance of ‘10+’ was replaced by ‘d20+’). It didn’t matter one bit. Hydra rolls horribly on its saving throw; secondary save for mental faculties, fails too, though barely. Hydra is turned into a kitten and dropped in a well to be drowned (quite horrible!) for fear it might turn back (they couldn’t know, after all). I don’t think we had ever laughed so hard from a fight ever! Had I fudged the dice, we would never have had that great memory.
Don’t fudge your dice, fellow DMs; enjoy your players’ success and they and you will love you for it.
Agreed.
I'd tend to disagree on that one. As a DM, preparation is sometimes tough, especially when you're a beginner. So, unless you spend an ungodly amount of prep time (and even then), you'll make mistakes, and make some encounters too weak and some to hard. Do you need to correct all the time to get a "calibrated" experience? Of course not. Let the player wreck some of your encounters, let them flee some of the harder ones. It makes for good and fun game and story. However, sometimes they cannot. Sometimes, they are stuck fighting an encounter you severely underestimated, and sometimes a supposedly climactic battle is way too underwhelming. And in these moments, I think it's okay to feel like you can adjust things on the fly to make up for you own prep mistakes (and not to compensate for a good plan or awesome luck from your players). And I would add, I would 100% rather have a BBEG fight get boosted mid-fight because the DM underestimated how much HP the fight needed to be fun and scary, than have a dumb out-of-nowhere plot twist where the villain was not the real villain actually - that will add 1000 plot holes and feel way more immersion breaking to me than any stat adjustment ever will.
I don't entirely agree with this take... I agree not to take away player agency, but you as a DM also has an obligation to make an encounter enticing, suspenceful, challenging and above all of that; fun and satisfying. It's very anticlimactic if the BBEG goes down in the first round of combat, unless the players have come up with a brilliant plan.
To that end, I sometimes adjust HP on the fly. Not doubling, but enough to maybe last one more turn. That's the only fudging I ever do as a DM, and only if it serves the satisfaction of the encounter.
I learned a valuable lesson about 6 years ago dming. It was that the numbers don't matter for D&D (other systems they do) but in D&D all that matters is that player choices matter to some degree and that the adventure was fun. Ultimately fudge absolutely everything if it gets you the above desired goals.
Something that could help make Combat longer but also making them more fun, is that make Boss fights not only a single boss, but a group of enemies with a Boss, not only will players have more options but Bosses won't be rushed down in a few turns because of Action economy
If you want the players to _feel_ challenged, give them a big-bag-of-hit-points to beat on. If you _actually_ want to challenge them, give them a group of enemies.
Always have minions! It helps SOOO much with action economy, giving tactical choices to players, and makign certain builds shine like AoE attacks. if you are worried about tracking hit points, don't. All minions have 1 hit point. Sweet!
I would argue that buffing a boss's HP mid fight is cheating for the players. There's nothing worse than an anticlimactic ending. If my DM gave me a boss and it's too easy that feels disappointing as a player.
I would disagree…if we as a group completely own a “BBEG” that makes us feel like the baddest people on the planet. Then, the DM makes the next encounter with a boss tough enough to humble us. No fudging required, just let the party revel in their awesomeness until you smack them back to reality with a tougher opponent later on!
I agree. If a bbeg is hyped up for so long and the party just walks over them, it mitigates all the foreshadowing and build up the villain had. Not satisfying for players or the DM.
Yeah, agreed. Buffing fights for the sake of story is almost always okay imo.
It depends. I think that cody is taking things to extreme in the video. If you kill the boss in a single round it probably will be a let down. Tho it will feel like cheating If the fight goes for ten rounds.
I agree with the stranger
Follow for quite some time and use tons of information and tips from Cody
But can't agree with "never fudge" dogma
Fudging is a tool to create suspense in a right moment
Or execute bigBad in an epic manner
Or give players chance to win this
Or use it as spotlight tool and give sweet kill and finishing move to the one whos arch was build on it
Lots of cases
But NEVER TO TOOK AGENCY!
On that I'm agree, sir
Increasing HP can be useful when you realize you've severely undertuned your encounter. It isn't stealing agency, it's making adjustments to your encounter design on the fly. You can also add additional waves of enemies or toss in some unexpected spells or abilities. As long as you make it interesting it's fine. The problem comes when you continuously undertune or overtune and have to always make adjustments. Every boss encounter should be important to the story and have things occurring during it that make your party think. You should allow your players to come up with clever solutions to defeat the bbeg, AND you should let them work, at least partially, if they make any kind of sense. Your party should never know everything there is about the BBEG though, and so maybe their plan to kill him works... but he comes back as undead, or his demonic master resurrects him, but at a price, or his lieutenant escapes and becomes the new BBRG having inherited his master's will. Or maybe instead of outright killing him you blast off his arm and he loses his ability to use one of his powerful abilities. That way your party still gets a cool encounter and you don't take away agency.
Sometimes changing the HP is the best thing you can do. I just make sure that I do it as rarely as I can. If there is a better measure I do it. Sometimes the party will have to flee. Someetimes the boss will. Sometimes something unexpected happens. A shield appears. A lieutenant appears to try to save the boss and earn glory. Anything could happen. But they are all fudge. Being a DM is about knowing when and how to fudge. Dare to make mistakes. Practice. And know when the time is right to fudge. You usually shouldnt. But sometimes there is no way out if you want the session or campaign to be epic.
The trick can't be used too often; the players are going to notice eventually.
I’m not quite in agreement, because this feels like a false dichotomy. Adding HP is not strictly reducing agency, unless you are running a dungeon crawl. If you are running a super thematic and story driven game, you should give a sense of danger with your big scenes. When players succeed, it’s not that the players rob me as the DM, it’s that if the bad guy is not as strong as hyped, I have robbed my players of that experience of beating a big boss. It’s especially problematic with backstory related villains. Sure, a player can just switch up their backstory, but that’s kind of a cop out and a lot of players, like those I play with, would find me forcing an alteration or under powering their boss to be a greater theft of agency than buffing their hp or damage on the fly. This is great advice for dungeon crawls, but not story-oriented campaigns. Well presented tho!
I completely agree. If a bad guy has been hyped up as a big challenge, having the players demolish it in two turns is gonna make them feel way more robbed than if you powered them up halfway through the fight. They were expecting a gnarly fight where they can really explore the mechanics of their character, and suddenly the fights over! It's way worse if its a backstory villain, those HAVE to be satisfying, no way they should be underpowered or the player might feel like you just don't care about their character, and honestly that's the last thing I'd ever want as a DM.
Yep this fella gets it. This entire video is a false dichotomy. The thing about 5e is that it almost always requires this type of quick editing on the DM's part. PC's have WAAAAAY too many abilities and it makes encounters almost impossible to structure without really bending some game mechanics. Ultimately 5e is more of a story driven adventure than any other D&D system and the illusion of scale has to be maintained. Now if you are playing Dungeon Crawl Classics, this all goes out the window and makes way more sense to have these insane swings.
Yeah mad disagree, in my experience the last encounter that players should feel like you are fudging numbers on is the boss. Especially if it is a single creature, it is painfully obvious when a DM is artificially adding difficulty through more HP.
@@alecolson8360 it shouldn't be and if you are seeing that you have a bad dm
@@alecolson8360 They shouldn’t feel like you’re fudging, of course. But I don’t see how they would.
Ive been playing, and DMing a long time, two things i like in this situation, 1) combat isnt quiet, and can draw in other nearby encounters, creating a multi-stage fight, where the party gets pressed to clear one group before the next arrives. And 2) add a confounding element. IE, the McGuffin is about to be destroyed if you dont get to it, or, the BBEG has kidnapped someone important. To raise the stakes. Just as examples
Combat gets complicated REALLY fast when you has just one more wheel. It is Glorious!
A third party? who are they going to attack first? can we ally with them? what if they takes pot shots at both? now we have to think of angles as well as distance between three fronts!
An innocent party? now you have to think about portecting them, running interferance, expediting retreat.
Another non-combat task to complete, Such as finding a specific book, completing a ritual, healing someone, or shutting down a portal. Now you have to decide do you focus on the task at hand, or do you put a few whacks on the bad guy to give your friends some breathing room.
Envoirmental BS! How can you use it? how can your enemy use it? How can you avoid it? What will happen if we don't? is this situation stable or is something worse going to happen?
Add one more thing for the players to worry about and it makes for a tense and memorable combat, as well as tactical choices to make. And as a GM, it adds a butt load of more ways to complicate the situation should it be too easy.
For me, the point of the game is for people to have fun. It's important to let players have victories, but by the same measure, a victory that's too easy can also be anticlimactic. It also means that player agency is less important than players *feeling* that they have agency. I recently ran a campaign where I gave the players full agency, but I found out too late that some players felt that they *didn't* have agency, and it killed the game.
It's a running joke in my games over the past 32 years that often when I come up with an epic encounter against a powerful foe of my own creation the players somehow go on an improbable run of natural 20's and obliterate it. My players refer to these creatures as my "super beasts."
32 years of getting constant 20s right at the big bad? So, are you aware your players are cheaters, or do you actually think they're that specifically lucky...or, are you just exaggerating your story to make it seem more interesting than it is?
I actually did that in the first session of my new campaign. The "boss" for the first session was a Bandit Captain, and beforehand I was a little nervous that he might be a little too tough for four level-one characters to defeat, at least not without potentially killing someone - the previous (and first) time I'd run a game, I nearly one-shot a PC with the "boss" (a kobold sorcerer who hit the lvl-1 rogue with Scorching Ray) - so I reduced his "level" a bit (lowering his HP by 20 or so) and took away his parry ability. Then the PCs got to him and got him down to below half within a single round. I realized I probably didn't need to nerf him, so I gave him back the HP I'd taken away.
And nothing is wrong with that. I don't agree with taking20's take on this at all...
That’s not necessarily what he was talking about. Correcting a mistake mid game is different than deciding to extend the fight because they PCs are doing well.
Intent matters and the players will pick up on that.
@@DOOMsword7 Miscalculating the amount of dmg your party can do is not a mistake?
It goes both ways , i don't understand this comment section at all , you all act like you just deus ex machina your players out of every dangerous unexpected situation but when the situation goes from an expected hard to trivial you just don't care , that makes 0 sense , that's a table my players would NEVER sit at , it's clear that i modify stuff on the go and they trust me because i am fair in both ways and that's what actually makes the game fun , maybe you all don't agree with this take because you actually need a brain to do this without breaking players' trust or game balance .
@@CoffeeSipper555 Rude
I wouldn't say , never adjust the hp up mid fight. Sometimes I forget to do it before the fight, as generally need a bit of a buff.(not doubling). Occasionally something is meant to be hard and the players only perform marginally and you realize that was way to easy for the moment. It's not about preserving a round count. It's fixing a moment that might fall flat. It's not often thing, but there are times you are avoiding an " oh that's it ? " Moment . You read the table. And use some nuance
I as a DM have rebalanced many fights mid session. Especially when new spell levels and stuff comes on. I rarely do it. But I have done. it. Having everything perfectly balanced with testing each encounter is difficult. It is not wrong to use the tools at your disposal to prevent your mistakes from affecting your players. It is the only reasonable choice.
Accidentnally TPK:ing your players because that spell apparently did 10d8 dmg is your fault for not noticing. Most of them only have
I feel like this is more nuanced than just saying 'never do this', been DMing longer than you've been alive (probably), and can say that this is often dependent on the players, the encounter - and purpose of it to the plot or campaign, and the mood at the table. I disagree that doing this robs the players of their agency, that's just a stupid thing to say - you don't know my players, you aren't at the table - what a dumb assumption to make. The problem with this type of 'absolutely never do this or that' is life doesn't work that way. There are always exceptions.
Exactly. "I want memories that players will remember." My players aren't gonna remember the BBEG that I'd hyped up who turned out to be an absolute chump.
Creating a bigger boss doesn't fix the throwaway fight. "Your princess was in another castle" type reactions are far, far worse of a response.
In my experience (3 decades behind the screen), your pc’s are going to walk all over any encounter you make in 5e. The game seems focused in that way. Never leave a monster to fight alone. Always have cultists or followers between your BBG and the party. Adding hp mid fight is lazy and doesn’t add anything to the encounter.
Yep you got it. This is why I ALWAYS say 5e numbers do not matter. Its a story driven game massively in the PC's favor. If you want engaging combat just go play something more oldschool where hits feel like they matter and hp pools are much lower.
"Cheat"
Monster hp are the average , it means that the monsters can have more or less and if your party is killing everything too fast with little to no resources spent you can modify those hp , you are not taking agency away by prolonging the fight for one round to let the enemy do something especially if the fight turns out to be very anticlimatic and you can partially fix it .
The players are not gonna know that you modified hp , BUT they are gonna notice that you are making shit up storytelling wise when you prolong the story instead of making the world react to their actions.
2nd phase is just like adding hp , it requires more Dm work and it CAN still be as anticlimatic as the normal fight could be , they look like a fun idea but every time i tried them they failed hard , they require more Dm work but they are just non functional , if you divide the Monster hp into different pool it means every phase is super short and less meaningful unless you increase the monster hp and if you do that you have to make the first phase weaker ( so very short and meaningless ) to compensate for the hp increase and the 2nd+ phases being harder but at that point you can increase the hp instead or give the Monster another ability/legendary action that does what your new phase would do ; 2nd phases feels even worse for the players because they are basically forced and even if you balance them properly it feels you are takin agency away from the players , not reccomended at all.
Got to say I disagree with this take.
But not your reasoning behind it.
Change the stat block mid fight only to help your players. NOT THEIR PC'S. THE PLAYERS.
I routinely change stats and such mid fight. If the players have a really cool idea or something they want to try, and before they can get it fully set up, the monster would go down. Well it turns out he is a tougher bugger than they thought. But the party's plan just so happens to work perfectly.
Or if one player hasn't gotten to do much this session and the bardlock is about to kill the thing off, turns out it as immunity to that damage type but the quieter pc is overpowered against it.
Yep this person gets it. D&D numbers DO NOT MATTER. as long as your players FEEL like they have agency and they never peer through the illusion you have done your job. The game is just a framework for the story and a vehicle for good times.
Balance is key
When I was starting out DM’ing, finding out that CR doesn’t mean much and what I could use to create easy & tough fights
I’ll admit that I have in the past during my first year some of my bigger bads got given some extra HP, but only to get a few more rounds in to build more excitement and give my PCs a more solid and earned win
I’m much more experienced now in how to balance encounters and love seeing how my PCs treat every challenge I throw at them
A message to Cody, telling people that it’s wrong to do so I’d say is bad advice, it’s disingenuous to do it often, but it can be necessary especially if you where underprepared to run the encounter
to me the worst advice i got was "just remove the boss hp"
Only time I ever did something like it was when a missing player unexpectedly joined the fight mid Session, so I readjusted the fight a little to fit more players. But I did it as a second phase when the enemy was down to half their hitpoints
I change my fight to fix the pacing, if I made a mistake in monster design then that's my problem and it should be fixed. Same if the fight is going on for too long, reduce the hp or give the win to the character who could benefit from it the most. The game doesn't need to be locked in , its doesn't undermine your players at all, you are trying to make it as fun as possible for everyone
I am totally in Taking20 camp with it.
I am sure you think you are doing good of course. You think you are making everything as fun as possible for everyone but you are not: you are deciding what happens and narrating your story, assigning kills to player in the way you think will make the best story and funniest night. This is not your role, and you are taking a power that is not your and robbing players of their agency. They are not there to listen to your story about how they are very cool. They are there to play their character and discover together with you what will happen.
I’ve been running the same campaign for 4 years. I routinely turn the dials on my villains to ensure that the encounters aren’t too soft. This is practically necessary with level 10 plus characters.
1. Let it happen. I have had this happen more than once, and I have talked/laughed after the session with the players, admitting they breezed through an encounter. I also have done this when I obviously overtune a fight. They really appreciate the honesty in these discussions, because they know that what they do matters, and I am not fudging things when it comes to encounters.
2. I always try to have some method where a BBEG can attempt escape or utilize minions/additional assets in a fight if it is appropriate. After all, they would prepare as much as the players would. My current 3.5 campaign that's been going on more than a year has a throwaway mini vampire boss from like session three that was obviously a caster and was able to escape with some of their minions through a logical means. He's reappeared once just to maintain that reminder that he is still out there, and they still occasionally mention how he definitely won't go after them again, right? And I smile and shrug, leaving them to always consider that there are foes in the world that may do them harm.
If they wait too long does the vampire become a lich?
I’m currently using Lost Mine of Phandelver to creates a story in the past that ties into Tyranny of Dragons (this story is set a few thousand years before the events of HotDQ). When the party took the ONE path that lead straight to the black spider (which I replaced with Wyrmlord Azarkul) I just added another boss. I replaced the spectator with a young black dragon named “Hazirawn”. The party shoveled black dragon scales into the forge like coal to reignite the innate magics in the Forge of Spells and used it to forge a greatsword. The forge hasn’t been lit in hundreds of years so the process malfunctioned which inadvertently trapped the black dragons soul in the weapon thus the sentient weapon Hazirawn. so now they took part in creating the weapon that will show up thousands of years later in Tyranny of Dragons
I was running a fight where my PCs went up against a bearded devil. It wasn't supposed to be a super dangerous encounter, but I was still shocked at how they were annihilating it. Something wasn't right and I didn't quite realize what, so I doubled the devil's HP. This ended up making it take a little longer than I intended. Afterwards, I realized the mistake I had made. I somehow had blanked on the devil's resistances and immunities. Had I run the encounter how I designed it from the start, everything would have been fine.
Similarly, I had my player's destroy an encounter through a combination of clever strategy and spell use, high rolls, and the fact that after Roll20 broke on me forcing me to refresh, I opened up stat blocks of much weaker creatures than what they were actually facing.
Moral of the story, don't completely deprive yourself of sleep and still try to DM when your brain just can't hack it.
I think there's a significant difference between "I don't want the players to win, I'd better increase the boss's HP" and "This is a climactic event with a level of planning to the experience, I want to make sure that they get what they came for". There are encounters where my players have surprise stun-locked and annihilated bosses and salted the earth, and there are encounters where players fought against tweaked HP thresholds to make sure the entire experience of a fight properly happens. And while I'll accept this is entirely up to the vibe of the table, I have yet to have even one person at mine say they wish they had more fights like the former than the latter, or that they dislike and don't enjoy fights that are extended to fit in their engaging elements.
No one is considering the "I don't want the players to win" extreme, that's just toxic nonsense and no one would defend it. Of course the video is about tweaking for (imagined) increased tension.
And I fully agree with Taking20: it does not increase tension and if you think that the players do not notice you are wrong. I noticed every time it happened as a player, and I hated it. It always look like you have to pay due homage to the time the DM spent preparing the event. Also notice that often the opposite is true: tweaking the event midfight is a way out of spending time properly preparing the event.
Indeed if the players stun-lock the boss without any clever planning, using standard strategies and class skills, the issue is that the event is lousily prepared.
If instead the players defeat the boss in a clever and original way, good for them! That's way more memorable than waiting round after round to see how long the DM wants them to play with it before declaring the monster dead.
I strongly disagree that you should NEVER do this. I would agree if the point was to *avoid* doing this or only do it sparingly, especially if it's going to extend a fight that's already dragging on. But there's been too many times I have *under* tuned an encounter and the players are finding it 'trivial' when it should be 'medium' at least. Being an XP DM has helped with that, as opposed to the Milestone user I was before.
So... basically: dont cheat adding some HP... instead you suggest cheat in other ways... that are adding HP with extra steps, some of them more frustrating to the players than adding some hp to the monster, and more work and difficulty to the GM to implement. Aha... ok.
This.
this
This was basically my whole opinion of this video. Thank you
I will always change my monster for the players enjoyment. Sometimes they wanted more of a challenge. But yea, like you said I just use second phases like the mythic actions, but I foreshadow them well before the fight, even if it doesn't go anywhere. Additionally, if someone has a better story connection and they drop the big bad to 10 or less, I just give them the kill.
As a player, I love it when my DM hears my damage roll, gives an annoyed sigh, and tells me to pick up the mini. It gives me life
I think presenting your ideas as alternatives that potentially take more effort and experience to pull off would have been better than calling someone out and saying to never do it
In my first campaign my DM threw a horror style travel encounter with a waaay over-leveled demon like creature at us. He had envisioned us to flee, but with some lucky nat 20s we managed to kill it. My DM apparently had written a whole backstory for the creature and when it died, it left two bracelets behind. Despite my DM’s subtle warnings one of the player put them on, revealing that they where impossible to remove. Later we would learn that they slowly would turn him into the same creature we just fought. What followed was an epic adventure of us trying to find a way to get rid of them to save our friend’s life! Would that have happened if my DM instead inflated it’s Hp? most definitely not
That sounds pretty awesome~
Matt Coville put it perfectly when he said “encounter design doesn’t stop once initiative is called.” My job as the DM is to provide a fun, challenging encounter for the players. If them steamrolling an enemy isn’t going to be fun, I absolutely am going to adjust its HP midfight, and I’m not going to feel bad about doing it. It’s not taking away their agency, it’s making the game enjoyable
Have to agree. In one of my campaigns, my players clashed with a paladin and a bunch of warrior followers. One of the PC, a dwarf champion just rushed to the paladin and scored three crits (he had advantage on the rolls). The fight was over in a round, every enemy just threw their weapon and stood still as they just saw how their powerful leader layed there reduced to shreds. Even though my encounter didn't go as expected, it was great to see the reactions. Can't deny them the fun !
I’ve never actually downvoted a video before, but I feel like this is really bad advice. It starts with a false premise and builds from there. On the fly changes in HP, abilities, number of monsters is fine as long as you are making those changes to make things more fun for the players. It does not “steal agency” in any way.
Then you go on and make suggestions that are equivalent to giving the BBEG more HP in more words. I feel like you lost the plot here Cody.
I've been running a very customized and barely recognizable version of Descent into Avernus. Back in Baldur's Gate my players finally found Thalamra Vanthampur and cornered her. I knew they would wreck her pretty much immediately, which they did...but not before she could hurl a couple of fireballs into the group. She was a glass cannon...easily defeated, but devastating, especially since they weren't through the whole dungeon yet.
A second example is when they fought their way through Elturel's cemetery, which had a portal for the Abyss. I made it abundantly clear that powerful necromantic energies were flowing through that portal, and they fought against undead and demons up until they defeated the glabrezu guarding the portal. One of the paladin made a big religion check and correctly identified Orcus as the demonic influence behind all that, he relayed the information to the party...and as soon as he said "Orcus" a shockwave of energy came through the portal, reviving all the demons and the dead human soldiers as undead, and the second phase of the combat began. What was beautiful about it is that it was entirely because of that roll, I didn't plan for it at all. Epic.
This misses the mark. There is so much more to player agency than initial HP values. Their choices still 100% matter, and making a meaningful encounter can mean stretching it out or shortening it for various reasons. Run your games however, but DMs who modify along the way are not ruining the game or betraying their players’ trust.
I agree. The ideas listed as alternate ways to buff the boss were great. Even though they were good suggestions does not mean they work for all scenarios.
I had an encounter where the necromancer boss was squishy, but had filled the field deadly traps. If a player failed the first save they would be pulled to the ground by skeletal arms and would get another chance the second turn with disadvantage as they would be prone. If they failed the second save they would re-emerge from the ground as a zombie version of themselves fighting for the necromancer on their next turn. The only way to return to their true form was to defeat the necromancer as they did not yet have spells powerful enough to reverse the effect.
However, the players rolled really well and not even one of them ever failed the first save to get pulled to the ground. Because of this they steamrolled the encounter and with all of their combined damage killed the boss in 1 round once they got through the minions barring their path to him. One of my players said, "Really?" in a voice that sticks with me to this day when the necromancer died. They were disappointed by how easy the fight was.
I explained the mechanic that they completely avoided through lucky rolls rather than good ideas and they agreed it would have been a really cool encounter if that had happened. Instead they remembered it as a boring encounter because I didn't modify anything and they got lucky
You are SO right about the "nobody's gonna know" part. People actually paying attention will know. They will hear you say that phrase differently, they will notice the small change in your tone, they will see your eyes shift. They will notice things that change about you that you think are hidden, because we are a species build for pattern recognition and notice when something changes, even when we don't consciously recognize what. and many WILL feel cheated. I've had fights in my early years where I (or another DM) would try to change something, either for or against the party, and the player would repeatedly argue. Because "let me live or die for my decision, I'm here to make a story not watch you write a book." And honestly, even though I've lost multiple characters I loved to that sort of mindset, I wholeheartedly agree. As long as I wasn't like, teleported into a dimensional arena randomly, I chose to be here and do this fight. I could've run for it at any point. And if I dunk on the boss quick? GOOD, if you described it half decently now I feel powerful. Campaigns feel SO much more fun, because I actually feel like I earned everything, because I KNOW that if I made a bad call on what I could take I wouldn't be here.
Because there's one thing nobody talks about on this, and it's that now every death is going to feel like an attack the second you get caught. You changed the HP to make it bigger, they rightfully won and you extended it to kill them. You didn't extend the HP on the last boss when Jeff was about to die, but I died on this one and I felt we were doing a ton of damage, is it because you bumped up the HP? Why did I die, I KNOW you fudge dice, I KNOW you change stats, why did you fudge for Alice last arc but not for me right now? We have a DM in our group who has slowly lost FOURTEEN players over the last 6 years, and this is the biggest reason. Alongside it's extension of "gotta make sure they live for plot reason." An act which makes the player stop caring immediately, because why are you wasting my time with combat now that I know I can't lose?
How do we feel about simply having more enemies show up to the encounter after a few rounds? Usually it's pretty easy to justify in most environments, without seeming unreasonable within the context of where the players are. I'd never add enough to try to screw the players over, just enough to tweak the difficulty and excitement of the encounter a bit more.
I do that a lot! Have you ever heard a fight in the parking lot outside a bar and watched people running out to see what's going on? Now imagine that with the sounds of ringing steel and screams of pain. That would ECHO through a dungeon like a fire siren. Anyone living there MIGHT be curious about what all the racket outside their "house" is!
That is my normal way for encounters. Really helpfull if you dont know how strong your new monsters. Strat with few and ad every few runds some more. I personaly dont let them fight in the first rund, so the players can react to them. Works especially good with monsters, that typically come in large numbers: cobolds, rats ... Sadly that will not work for a single BBEG
Ehhh, I have an exception to this: I have difficulty gauging how much damage my players can output as they go up in levels. As a result, I will make boss characters with a range of hp (80 - 100, for example) or give them a healing item. It's not to artificially extend the fight, but to make the threat of the bad guy feel appropriate. Sometimes when the big boss is *almost* killed from an epic attack (like, 3 HP left over) I will round up the damage so it ends big.
I think slightly cheating the game can be done well for storytelling and awesome moments, but it requires careful judgement and awareness of what is fun for everybody.
I disagree on his post (coz it very simple and usually not working) but i also disagree with you with that - DM screen not for "cheating".
I make phases for one of my bosses mid fight coz my players get bored when previos evil dude was evaporated by them like snail and this one gonna be the same, if i didnt remake him right there.
BTW CR calculator was saying - its VERY hard.
And Yes DM screen there for your to fudge sometimes rolls and stats and other to make game interesting for your player.
Not all the time for sure but when its needed to be done. Player happiness is main goal at the table.
Lots of great ideas here. My thought... not every fight is a fight to the death. Your BBG might surrender but have a trick up its sleeve to escape, or maybe being captured is part of a calculated part of its plan (or as suggested in the video, a plan concocted by a higher power). Give the players the win (and the great loot if that's what motivates them) but begin plotting BBG's next move.
Strongly, strongly disagree with this take. First of all, the DM cannot "cheat". It is the DM's job to craft engaging encounters and, alongside the players, tell an interesting story together.
Sometimes this means adjusting an encounter, but only for the right reasons. If they've been particularly clever or got lucky rolls? Yeah, they can defeat the bad guy faster than anticipated. But if I've misjudged something, and even through normal combat they're steamrolling the bad, an adjustment needs to be made.
Perhaps a very skilled and experienced DM can perfectly tune encounters before the game, but I don't think this perfect DM exists. When we over or underestimate the party's ability, it's definitely okay to adjust the encounter.
Yep you get it as well. The numbers in D&D do not matter you could strip the entire game of numbers and still achieve a similar result. The correct answer is indeed to craft encounters that are fun and leave the pc's with a sense of accomplishment.
As a possibility, you could have a situation arise where the BBEG is being teleported against their will and chooses to ask for the party's help in preventing the teleportation; the party has a major choice in this example and if they decide to help the BBEG they could end up gaining an ally.
I’ve only been Dming for a few years and over the few years I’ve learned that my players having fun and me having fun in the end is what matters. As long as me and my players are smiling after each session than it was a good session. Your videos have helped me get to this mind set and I love the advice you have given me. I completely agree with you, the players fun is what matters.
Totally agree, having fun is my number one goal.
I can't even count how many times I had an awesome fight all mapped out, and then a creative player idea just ends it in a round. What I've learned over the years though is if the players can end the fight in a round, then that fight was only worth one round. Use all that time saved on more rp, or future combat encounters.
More hit points doesn't make a fight more exciting. It just makes it a slog. If players Cakewalk thru your Big Bad, design better lead in rooms/fights to make the players use up their resources/spells before they hit the big bad. Nothing is more intimidating/fun than taking on the BB when your wizard is down to casting cantrips and your healer has one or two charges left.
Nothing's more intimidating than fighting a big bad and watching it suck up 300 damage worth of spells before it gets a turn without dieing.
Some people find different things intimidating, some people find different combat interesting or technical. I often centre my dungeons or climatic sessions around a powerful boss enemy in a environment that the players can heavily interact with or, the boss can interact with, like liar actions but they usually effect terrain more.
Why would I want to take away all of the players cool, powerful and exciting abilities before they get to the final encounter? Simply assuming everyone enjoys the same style of play as you, and telling DMS to just "design better dungeons" helps nobody. Thats why such dogmatic opinions as "never adjust monster HP" are toxic.
@@pastformal8354 "To each their own," said the Old Lady as she kissed the cow.
Agreed wholeheartedly. I was planning a campaign where the players would meet the big bad early on as he's using his magical mcguffin to try and summon death god but the players wound up killing him in the third session before he could escape. The campaign turned from my rather generic plot to one where the players tried figuring out what the mcguffin was, how it worked, and how to protect it from the evil cult that now wanted to take it back from them. Never could have done that if I'd just boosted his HP and let him escape.
There is nothing more disappointing on both sides of an encounter than when you extend the HP mid-fight to bump up the climax, then your players suddenly roll like shit and die. I tried that on an endgame boss, second to last arc-ender. thought I'd add 50 HP. Then it quickly turned to "OK NEXT HIT KILLS." and they proceeded to never hit for 2 full rounds. felt bad for them, and for me because I knew I'd cheated them.
On the flipside, my players sent tiamat kicking and screaming back to hell in and all-out blast of 1 round of a 2-year-long campaign. She never got an attack off, outside legendary actions. It wasn't anticlimactic, they call that one of the best moments in our decade of weekly games. Because it wasn't anticlimactic because it was over so quick, it was thrilling to watch the goddess of evil's eyes go wide, the queen of dragons acknowledging how powerful they grown while her sudden anger and fear. If blasting a powerful foe to bits in seconds isn't interesting, you need to up your description game.
I'm not saying you should never change anything. Some of the greatest gaming moments have come when the party's brilliant plan left your homebrew ultraboss with 4 hp and you decide it dies there, as opposed to on the monk's turn with a slap. But I'm very much in the camp of letting the dice lay where they roll unless there's a VERY good reason. Almost all of which are in the vein of "Oh shit I messed up this encounter bad, they can't actually fight OR escape this," "oh crap I forced this on them and it's way overpowered," etc.
I've been a mentor for beginning DMs at my local club for a few years now, and one of the ground rules I always lay out for them to follow for a better gaming experience is to never cheat against your players, only in their favor. If you miscalculate an encounter or RNG is against the party and they struggle much more than you had intended, then you can fudge a little to ease up the pressure or change up certain parts of the encounter. But if the RNG is against you or the party made a solid plan: Let them have it. There is no challenge in killing your party or making them sweat. The real challenge and fun comes in the form of having the players revel in their victories, be they swift or hard-fought.
Many of the tips you give in the end are suggestions I have both used and shared with others.
I have a story to share:
After three sessions freeing a city, dealing with spies and finally traversing a live maze my players face the big bad guy, a green young dragon and his army of kobolds. The players them blinded the dragon (I didn't realize dragons have blind sense) and focused fire, killing the dragon in 3 turns without taking any damage.
Up to this day (4 years latter) they talk abou this fight.
One of my favorite D&D memories is actually an encounter in which my players dropped the baddie in literally the first TURN of the battle! We had just agreed to implement the instant kill optional rule at the beginning of the session. My party left Homlet to go investigate The Moathouse and they where attacked by Utreshimon, the blue dragon, in the courtyard of the Moathouse. The party's psychic warrior won initiative and charged with their greatsword - the player rolled two natural 20s and then confirmed an instant kill! Everyone around the table was shouting with excitement!
A trick I use, that I'm sure my players have started to suspect, is that there's always reinforcements that could show up.
Like, I had them clearing some carrion crawlers, and initially there were two. I had another two lurking on the DM layer in roll20. By the second round, I brought #3 in because the players were rolling well and chewing through the first two with ease. Their luck dropped off a bit, so they never saw #4, but I was able to adjust the encounter so that it was a fun fight. Had I had only the first two, it would have been a pointless little three-round nothing. Had I put all four in at the start, it probably would have turned into a painful slog. So this technique allowed me to adjust the fight to just perfect.
One of the options that didn't come up, or came up only as a means to escape / extend the overall adventure is environmental effects or lair actions. Environmental effects can pivot attention away from your planned encounter to the madness going on around them. These can be virtually anything, but should be tailored to the scene. For example, an encounter in a classic dungeon might have random tiles fall away, limiting movement, and forcing Athletics checks to avoid falling for some PCs. Alternatively, sconces might start firing Scorching Rays. The PCs will need to destroy them to avoid 2s6x3xN every turn. This gives the boss a little breathing room for healing, buffs, or anything else and can kick off a fun phase two without changing the boss's stats.
This is one of the reasons why I like the idea of my Big Bads being the kind of boss their soldiers LOVE to work for, Giving them great benefits, supporting their families, giving them what they need and no reason to even think about betraying them. I have a means to make the fights a little longer without making it look like it was just out of nowhere. Big Bad takes a ton of damage suddenly? There are healers on stand by in just this case and perhaps some elite soldiers with the Sentinel feat come rushing in to form up a defensive line. Perhaps a single soldier in the room has an item that lets them cast counter spell once that's in plain view of the party. It's a means to try and do something that doesn't remove the party's ability to interact with the situation, And the party can still blast through it easily cause the new soldiers don't have a lot of HP, but they are still a threat because of their ability to bring the Big Bad back up even if it's just a small amount of HP.
I have yet to hear anything bad from my players when this is done but I'd love to hear more ideas.
While I would not adjust stats mid-battle, I'm certainly not above fudging a roll or two if a big encounter is getting ridiculously easy (though I prefer not to). It should be done sparingly, but it has NOTHING to do with player agency. Players beating an encounter via good decision-making and beating it via sheer luck are completely different things.
Blinding light engulfs the room and the BBEG has been replaced with something (I've done a hostage, an orphan, an animal). BBEG then uses the Message spell and says something menacing and vaguely ominous like phase 1 is complete or the first seal is opened, I hope you look forward to our next encounter.
A couple of stories: first, one time I used polymorph to attempt a second phase, the plan being that the villain would become a T-Rex. However, I forgot that he was standing in the druid's moonbeam. I had a choice of either fumbling it saying that he's immune to the anti-shapechanging effect or just let them win. I realized in that moment that given everything the players had done to make sure the fight went the way it did, I should just give it to them. It made it much more meaningful.
Second, look through mythic actions. They give some great ideas as to how to work a second phase.
As Brennan Lee Mulligan put it, you as the DM are The House of this casino. You always have the ability to win. If the players win, let them. You can always change it in the future. If this rung of the ladder was super easy for them, great, let them have that. You can just add another rung
Bro, buffing battles sometime IS THE BEST move. Parties want to be challenged as much as they want to feel badass.
I've been running Icewind Dale recently, and one thing I have come to appreciate about the module is the wide variety of encounter difficulties throughout. It helps a lot with suspension of disbelief (at any given level) to have some encounters which are quite easy, and some which are severely challenging. "There's always a bigger fish..." -- sometimes it's the party, sometimes its the Ancient White Dragon they could conceivably run into at Level 1! Every time a potential enemy appears, the players are highly engaged trying to determine just how dangerous it might be. There is always the possibility of a super fun stomp where they wreck the competition, but always some nervousness that any encounter could conceivably become quite deadly.
I agree. Though I think there is a distinction to be made between fixing your mistakes by either buffing or nerfing mid combat as a DM vs. doing so because of rolls or player choices.
I could see some circumstances where a DM might buff or nerf HP a bit to fix a mistake on their end, though I'd argue minions or additional monsters or environmental factors, or other ways might be a better method if possible and if it makes sense for that encounter.
But buffing or nerfing HP should never be done because of good (or bad) rolls or because of player choices. If the encounter was properly set to begin with and it ends up lethal or a walk in the park, so be it.
Totally agree. I did a puzzle level in a wizards tower. I thought it was pretty cool. The players spotted a flaw which meant that they could cross in 3-4 turns. I didn't stop them or change the puzzle (the equivalent of increased hp). I let them have their win. That puzzle is coming back in another wizards tower, but it will be harder. Might actually make an appearance in all wizards towers. It's part of their magical security system. The players will think I've just started them off on an easy one to get them used to it. Make lemonade out of lemons.
The big joke in our group was that the DM just rolled dice to make it seem like it mattered but actually decided what happened on the fly. We never knew for sure what went on behind the screen but it was always good fun.
The screen is there for both. It is the GMs job to facilitate a fun game. If the fight is anti climactic that's a huge let down.
You have to be sly about it. It's not about boosting HP because they came up with a good idea that derailed you. It's for when you miscalculated how easy the fight was. Not because of good rolls but just because of a CR miscalculation
A super easy compromise between these options is built right into the monster stat block: base vs. max hit points. All you have to do is make note of the max potential HP for the BBEG, and count the damage dealt to them up instead of down. Once the players deal enough damage to reach the BBEG's base hit points, they have reached the "kill zone." At any point between then and reaching the BBEG's max HP, any character can deliver the killing blow. This allows the DM to extend the combat a bit without cheating, while still allowing for the combat to end on a cool moment, like a crit or sneak attack, a clever move or spell, a character who's been rolling poorly to finally get in a hit, etc.
Iv never doubled my villains ho MID fight but I have doubled it directly before the fight. They had been clearing my Dungeon extremely efficiently and I was extremely confident in them that they could handle it with ease. So I doubled it and we had a great time. The couple rounds that that probably added to the combat led to some really cool RP moments that actually brought the party closer together. D&D is just so great. Great video as always Cody!
I totally agree with this video. My players were easily dispatching an epic demon that I had thrown at them via a town-scale battle with hordes of tiny demons fighting the town guards as the players took on the demonic champions. Because they saw this fight coming and had prepared so well, one of the two demon bosses got trapped in hallowed ground and was effectively neutralized. This meant the big boss was getting focused down more easily than I anticipated. Rather than making their trap fail, which would have ruined the fight, I let it happen. When they called in the town cleric, who was exhausted from having spent the last 24 hours casting Hallow on their trap, he came in and used his highest level spell: Divine Word. I didn't fudge the save, but the demon did fail, and was thus banished back to his home plane of Abyss. So now, the players, who were robbed of a chance to end this demon for good, have some revenant friends (who were killed in the battle and resurrected by The Raven Queen) tasked with ending this demon's existence once and for all, AND they have this sense of foreboding all through the campaign, not knowing when the demon will strike again. This demon also played into the backstories of two of the PCs, so stretching it out and giving it another chance to not be owned is just as rewarding, IMO, and far more rewarding than a single slog through an enemy with boosted HP. The players even played into it with criticizing the cleric NPC until he explained that the exhaustion made him unable to think clearly and forget that aspect of the spell. Players still get an epic win, and we all still talk about how good that fight was.
Had this happen last session. Got a nat 20 on initiative, Readied a spell, (good thing because the rogue who rolled 19 went after the enemy) enemy stepped out and triggered the ready condition. Hit them with a crit, dealing 70 dmg. Instantly downed them. Fought him again the next day. He ended up taking 160 dmg before going down again. We were all confused why he didn't go down again, but it made very person at the table very, very mad
In this situation I like to instead buff my bbeg’s damage as it doesn’t make the fight longer it just helps raise intensity, I think it actually makes players feel better as this make the foe I’ve built up as dangerous and scary actually feel that way without having my players feel cheated. I’ve had it done to me or at least I think it was done to me and it felt almost as if the boss had underestimated us and had to actually try. It felt as if we pushed him to his limits because he had to use full strength attacks on us. I’d like to hear what other people think about this?
I've done this, or at least something very similar. Upping hit points is very different from the situation you described where something a player wanted to do and rolled well on was just completely invalidated
A lot of the solutions described here aren't anything you can come up with on the spot. Certainly not good for new DMs not practiced in inprov
A few years ago I just stopped using DM screen and started making every roll publically. Never looked back since. The feeling of "fairness" and "realness" makes every fight so much more thrilling and exhilarating.
I have started taking the base monsters in the MM and adding things to up their action economy. I've added grunts to a fight that my boss monsters can control and have given the boss heals and shields that the team have the opportunity to counter if they can. It serves to extend the combat, make the fight more challenging and to give those awesome character moments. It makes my players feel like they have accomplished something when they win.
As a DM and I have been playing/running for over 20 years. If I can fudge my rolls to make the fight easier for them because I made the fight too hard, then I should be able to fudge/adjust things to make them harder if I made it too easy.
As long as the thought isn’t I’m mad they are beating my boss, but that I want this to be a memorable moment not a letdown.
It is my job to control pacing and flow of the game. They have been tracking this warlock murderer for a few sessions. Lured him to a warehouse and then did like half his hit points in a turn. So I adjusted a few things had a couple minions come from hatches in the cieling and boosted him from 75 up to 120 Hp. The fight was more memorable and my players thoroughly enjoyed the session.
Had they just wiped him in that second round, I know they would have been disappointed.
One narrative branch you can take if a really hyped up big bad boss got got too fast, is to then post hoc plant clues that someone sabotaged them. Was it a ambitious minion trying to take over , or another big baddie? Were they poisoned, or were they just in fight prior to players showing up and they didn't have time to rest up? Might be difficult to come up with a coherent plot point on the fly, but if you suspect this might happen, you can then prepare for it.
I have yet to DM myself, but something I think would be a good backup plan: give the big baddie some defensive items before the fight starts, things they would reasonably have ofc.
That way, if a fight is going by fast, the baddie gets worried, going on the defensive as they see theyre outmatched. On the flip side, if a fight is longer and more drawn out, they wont use the items, instead pushing to try and end it as soon as possible.
Its also some extra loot for the party, so win win imo
I have also added minions that come out at 50% and 25% and possibly 10% health. Nothing substantial, but enough to add chaos or additional targets for player to worry about. 10% health minions are there to help try to cover boss escape. These minions (at any point they appear) usually have only enough hit points so that 1-2 hits will drop them.
I stopped using a DM screen many upon many years ago specifically due to being accused of flubbing my dice rolls. At that point, I folded it up, and started rolling ALL rolls in front of my players. They were in shock as to how accurate I stuck to my rolls. My BBEG would roll a 5 to hit, I'd say, "not with that roll!" and they would laugh, likewise, when I'd roll a 19 or 20.. they knew the fit was about to hit the shan.
So i ran Hoard of the Dragon Queen and was building up how threatening and cruel Rezmir was for months. The party had a Sorcerer, a Ranger, A Paladin, and a Rogue when they finally got to her in the castle in the clouds. She goes first and dealt good damage to the paladin, before the sorcerer cast hold person on her and the paladin thus got a crit and smited. She basically got two shot. I had planned for this in advance however and before we got to this session already had an idea for a second phase where she becomes undead and puts on the Black Dragon Mask. I describe the start to this phase in an incredibly eerie way that unsettled the Paladin Player, who on the next round proceeded to naturally crit against her and roll ridiculously well on the smite and one shot her. It was almost disappointing, though the party did nearly get wiped by the white dragon in the room after that. It ended up being a great and well-remembered moment, but I had a third plan the entire time too! I had the paladin make a wisdom save with a quite high but reasonable DC, which he failed, so now Rezmir's spirit is attatched to his soul and is making him second guess every decision he makes
I've done something like this and the reverse. Not because of my feelings about how well they were doing against a creature. But because I could see how much fun the Party was having fighting and going back and forth with the villain, so I wanted to extend it for the roleplay they were enjoying. If the combat gets boring, I end it early for them by reducing the hp. The point is fun.
Something I always found helps in final boss fights. The Max HP of your villain is a point of when they could die, at the latest. If you're players do some big flashy and fanciful tactic that works well and is symbolic for the campaign, then let that be the moment the BBEG is defeated. Say your players are fighting against an Adult Chromatic Dragon as the BBEG, say your teams sorcerer has casted Faerie Fire and it's used all of it's legendary resistances and fails. You're rogue has the Fey-touched feat and uses their bonus action to misty step over the dragon's head and is now able to get that sneak attack damage due to advantage and ends up dealing massive damage but not enough to kill it. If you're rogue has been hunting down this dragon because of what it's done to them personally, then this would be a great symbolic moment for them and if the fight has been a challenge. Then why not play into the hopes of the PCs, after all they are the heroes of this story and you want them to feel proud of what they accomplished. You want them to feel inspired. I'll never run a boss fight beyond the already established hp amount, but if they do something super cool, I'll reward that every day (within reason of course.)
I used to play a skill-build LARP.
The campaign had been running for decades, and permanent character death was VERY rare. This led to a lot of high-powered characters.
Fighters putting out 10, 20, 30 points per hit. Spell-casters able to put out several hundred points of damage/healing in a day (and a few could reach a thousand or more with certain spell effects).
Combine this with new characters putting out 1-4 points per weapon hit, and maybe 20-50 points of healing/damage in spells in a day.
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Statting encounters got ludicrously difficult.
One of the techniques that got used was "capped damage" where a weapon hit would only do 1-5 points no matter how much the character was outputting. They usually had spells do full damage, except for defensive effects or resistances (sleep against a lich is a waste, for example).
This was a crutch for a broken game system.
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At least at a D&D table, all of the characters are at or near the same level, so the problem is a lot less difficult to solve.
I have played world of warcraft since the first expansion. I love and so do my players, the Vista traversing boss fights. IE the last one shattered the floor, all those that didn't have flying active fell 40 feet into another room were it was hard to breath.
Increasing the difficulty of an encounter is not hard to do. Don't be lazy and adjust hit points. Add more to the situation for the players to have to deal with. Making that much more epic when they kill the boss.
That fight lasted three rounds, two before the floor shatter and another with some creativity from the players to finish the big bad.
I actually used the "bigger, badder villain" route once. Even that got messed up due to player agency, but we all had a good time about it.
There was a dragon that I had as the strongest creature in the region. The players met her, and once she learned there was a settlement, she demanded tribute. The players lied to her, and said that they needed time to gather the money. She gave them a grace period, with the regional hub town on the line, and sent them on their way. I thought the players would use the grace period to tie up all their loose ends and get the gold to pay the tribute. Instead, they used that time to call in favors from several smaller villages throughout the realm. Once I realized this was going to be a battle between two armies, the players and their army against the dragon and her kobold army, I made it very clear to everyone that this was going to take multiple sessions. To mix things up, I gave each player a small squad of NPCs to control and roll for.
First session of the fight was going to be between the player army and the kobold army, with the dragon appearing at the end of the session to lead into part 2. In the first round of the session, a small advance party of kobolds appeared to offer the players one last chance to pay the tribute. The players, being players, refused. Before the kobold general could sound the horn to advance, one of the players used her turn to command an NPC to cast an advanced mind-control spell. The command from that spell: "Sound the retreat." Then, the other players commanded their NPCs to kill the kobolds. The entire first session of the fight was done in one round.
That's when I forwarded the plans for the second session and had the dragon appear. She arrives by breaching into the town from the nearby ocean waters, all the way across town from where the kobolds had appeared. She starts wrecking the NPC squad that was stationed at the town's docks, so it became a mad scramble to get everyone to the new fight. The players command their NPCs to aim for the dragon's wings. This should have clued me in that the players had no plans to let her escape, but I thought they just wanted to cripple her a little bit and she would still have the ocean route. Then the players commanded their NPCs to surround the dragon. They even used a couple enlarged allies to grapple her.
So the scenario, instead of being a massive army v. army battle, was turned into a birthday party of toddlers whacking around a pinata on the ground. She let out her dragon breath every now and then, but she always rolled low and the NPCs made their saves. Casters ran out of spell slots. Magical buffs ended. Some of the ranged NPCs ran out of ammo. In the end, the dragon finally succumbed to 2 real-life hours of wounds. There was much rejoicing, an in-universe party, and then the players used the next session to quickly wrap up their loose ends and finish the campaign. It was awesome.
I think part of the DMs job is to strike balance between player agency and encounter challenge. I am still learning how to develop encounters that properly challenge my table so Ill let monsters linger longer than originally planned to develop the tension we want.
But more than anything, I think there are very few universal rules. There is a time to do almost anything, including doubling hit points or fudging rolls. Hell, there is even a time to push an old lady down the stairs.
ever since I started DMing in the 80's the only thing i use the DB screen for was quick refrence and hideing my notes and maps from players eyes. dice rolls have ALWAYS been in the open, I even sort of let the players know the monsters HP (not the actual number but how ingered they were, i.e. half, quarter, near death.) and when you tell the players "the monster staggers as your hit knocks it to one knee, It glares at you growling as blood trickles from it's nose and mouth!" it's kind of hard to sudenly increase the HP's. when I ran DoIP my group killed the white dragon in 3 rounds once they got to engage with it the wizard cast earthbind. I did enhance the encounter with some cultists, kobolds, and a white abishai. over all the fight took about 8 rounds.
One of the things I feel needs to be carefully discerned is that encounter balance can be very finicky.
I had run Sunless Citadel for a party of 4-5, who I had allowed to hit 2nd level just before entering the citadel, (I ran some in-town encounters to help naturally guide them to the Citadel) and hit 3rd level before hitting the final floor, and they had managed to draft a few NPCs as well. Because I was allowing them to hit higher levels (the original game essentially called for level 1 on the first floor and 2 on the 2nd, only hitting 3 after the final fight, and my players had classes from Tasha's and races with big abilities) I was also boosting up all the encounters to give an appropriate challenge, everything basically got replaced with some sort of creature that was a few CR points higher. (I kept everything thematic though, stronger undead, stronger blights, parasitized goblins, and gardeners got replaced with guardian mud golems (like snow golems, but homebrewed with more clay golem features to boost the CR a little, and with a garden on their back that could be set on fire for extra damage)
For the final fight, I had the tree function as a Tree Blight with 0 movement speed, with the druid homebrewed to be able to use a wildshape to merge into it, and give it the ability to move once he lost enough health. I had debated back and forth between having this act to put the tree at full health, or simply combine HP. When it finally came time, I thought the tree would get taken out before it had a chance to do anything, so I chose to make it full health, but then it whomped HARD and people started dropping, so I backpedaled and stuck with just merging the two HP pools, which turned out to be just the right amount for the next few hits to drop it.
Now here's the thing; if you plan an encounter too hard and backpedal, how is that any better than planning an encounter too easy and back(fore)pedaling? No matter what you do, it takes a LOT of experience to hit that sweet spot of challenging enough to be fun, but still a fair chance of players succeeding. Yes, it does take away player agency for solid strategies and hard moves to just be met with something that nullifies the actual impact, but as long as you set a limit on how MUCH you will change in reaction, I think you're actually fine.
It's one thing to say "okay, you cut through all his health in 1 turn, so it's actually double that" but I don't think it's as bad to say "okay, the Big bad has 8d8+24 hit dice, his HP could theoretically range anywhere between 32 and 88, so let's go with the average of 60, and if they chew through that WAY too fast, then I'll claim his HP was maxed. If they manage to chew through even THAT, then I just have to roll with it.
There was a time that this kind of happened to me as a player, but it was also sort of handled in one of these better ways. I don't remember the exact details, it was one of my earliest games (which goes for the DM as well, he was still new to it.)
This was in Pathfinder. One way or another, the big bad got knocked out right at my Fighter's feet. I did what any dwarf with a mighty axe and a big bad helpless at his feet would do: Coup de Grāce. It's been a while since I've read up on the rules, but essentially I had to roll an attack, and rolled a critical hit. Head and body of the big bad became less aquatinted.
But then he just picked up his head and teleported away. I understand, because we had a great thing running, and he wanted the story to continue. But I'd been having a crappy night. Low rolls everywhere, when my attacks hit, they didn't do damage. So then I get to do something cool, and it was immediately taken away from me.