Why Your Monsters Suck - Numbers

the party treks through the Crystal Caves of monteharo filled to the brim with a spawn of aberrations from the far Realms they find themselves eventually at a clearing a tidal wave of star hatchlings climb up rushing toward them you expect this to be a difficult encounter everyone rolls initiative the hatchlings go first and Swarm at both their cleric and wizard with the Wizard's Shield spell and the clerics armor they're able to stay standing the Rogue slashes through one of the many hatchlings and then it's your Wizards go they cast Circle of Death on the waves of hatchlings clearing through half of them your cleric goes after calling upon Divine Light to incinerate the rest of the Sunbeam it wasn't unfun but it certainly wasn't as gripping as you thought it'd be let's talk about it for the past couple of Adventures maybe you've been dming and running some pretty terrible fights maybe an enemy you've been hyping up died in two rounds or a band of goblins somehow wiped her whole party you look online for a solution some guides tell you to choose an appropriate CR okay you start throwing hard encounters than deadly encounters then double triple quadruple deadly and you don't even understand what the point of this CR even is heck even your quintuple deadly encounters might get curb stomped by a lucky hypnotic pattern or something even if you do find success with challenge rating it doesn't give you the skills you need to make balanced Monsters by yourself or teach you how to modify an existing monster to create an evocative fantasy in this video I'm going to teach you how to use fundamental concepts of the game to make the encounters you've always wanted to make I'm going to talk about the secret underlying design framework of combat creation and provide a free tool to help you design those encounters if you stick through this video you're going to get gming advice that nobody else on the planet will give you this is why your monsters suck this episode we're focused on Concepts first we have to discuss what difficulty means one of the many problems with CR is that they attach misleading names to different tiers of difficulty for encounters to most people when they see the term a deadly encounter they believe the players have a decent chance of losing the encounter and getting wiped this is not the case the designers created the deadly difficulty with the intention that if something goes horribly wrong there's a chance that a single party member could die so when we design our combat Center campaigns we should ask ourselves How likely is it that my party will fail if you want to create a grim dark tough campaign then the base difficulty of every fight should be much higher I want you to keep this in mind though the more likely it is your party can fail the more frustrating it may be modern tabletop culture is not geared around characters dying constantly that was common decades ago people nowadays get really invested in their characters if you want High chances of death or failure in your game let your players know that before they make their characters and backups difficult games also have less room for error even if you're running a gritty souls-like campaign those games take a lot of care and making sure it feels as Fair as possible when you design these mathematically difficult combats you need to make sure it feels Fair which requires a lot of telegraphing and game design finesse you can check out one of my previous videos in the series for some insight on that if you're running more of a Dynasty Warrior style power Fest then you need to take care and making sure the players feel powerful rather than feeling mindless that's also a fine balance to Teeter when there is an exceedingly low chance of failure usually most tables will enjoy something in between a somewhat unlikely chance of failure five to ten percent I'd say but a possible one the difficulty of your game can impact the tone heavily so do what best fits your table when balancing your encounters there are many hidden things that can throw your desired difficulty off the rails there are certain player traits or features that can disrupt the intended difficulty quite drastically these features are disruptive because they affect the action economy too much much of the difficulty and strength of features in a turn-based RPG system is based on the action economy action economy is simply how much value a character gets within their turn the more efficient your action economy the more value you're getting in a game like League of Legends one member of either team getting picked off is pretty bad especially at higher skill levels a two to three man deficit it might as well be impossible at Pro level play the same principle applies to turn-based games having more or less actions is extremely important if you have less actions each action needs to be stronger to compensate the traits that disrupt intended difficulty are those with extremely disproportionate action economy trade-off hypnotic pattern is a low resource spell both in terms of spell slots and its actions it only requires one it usually takes several creatures out of the fight entirely regardless of their health basically one action in exchange to negate several actions for multiple turns thus hypnotic pattern has an insane action economy efficiency other Mass crowd control spells like web also have insane action economy efficiency against a single boss single Target crowd control like heat metal or whole person can be devastating as they have high value against that one creature across multiple turns we will be calling features with incredibly disproportionate action economy efficiency Force multipliers strong crowd controls and obscene damage per round synergies are generally amazing Force multipliers anything that lets you hit well above your weight class essentially cheese the rest of the video and the tool I've made assume that you have kept Force multipliers in check my first video in the wire monster suck series defense discusses how to handle Force multipliers especially with boss monsters having more creatures thus more actions in the action economy can also be an adequate way to deal with Force multipliers party composition and the level of play can also affect the desired level of difficulty the full Caster classes like the Wizards clerics and Druids scale exponentially in power every level compared to the non-caster classes like Fighters Rogues and barbarians they scale more linearly the composition of full Casters in full non-casters were pitted against the same Monster the full casters would have an easier time at most tiers of play the parties items and other Boons that you can grant can also sway the game balance obviously having a flame tongue and plus three armor at level 3 would impact game balance severely terrain and other outside variables like allies or special area conditions should also be accounted for example if there's falling damage and elevated terrain that you expect your players to exploit maybe add some health to your creature to account for that fact and incentivize them to knock them off to make the fight progress faster the inverse is true as well if you're running a flying creature facing a mostly melee party in open air decrease their health to make the fight less of a potential slog so now that we've determined our desired difficulty and accounted for destructive factors we can make the assumptions for our monster creation system number one we have chosen a desired difficulty number two we have negated or weakened the impact of party Force multipliers number three we have accounted for party composition number four we have accounted for party inventory slash magical items and number five we have accounted for terrain and outside factors so they do not act as Force multipliers if these assumptions are not followed then the rest of the system will not work with these assumptions set these are the components of a monster defense AC health and number of monsters offense accuracy damage number of turns number of monsters number of attacks and number of aoes these are the same variables used in my tool the heroic Homebrew monster maker if you want to follow along and Tinker with it make a copy of the spreadsheet in the description below fundamentally there are three steps to making a mathematically balanced Homebrew creature number one input party statistics number two determine difficulty in power budget and number three output desired monster traits we're at the first step input party statistics the monster's final stats in the Monster Maker are based on the party statistics the players to hit bonus helps to determine the Monster's armor class if the character does not attack often do not fill in this column Wizards are not allowed in this treehouse if your party uses bless often or something that gives additional bonuses to hit across the party factor that in infrequent accuracy boosters like Bardock inspiration should not be considered less adds around two to your chance to hit for reference it's way more complicated than that in reality but that's a good estimate Armor class in one part determines the monsters to hit bonus if the character has the shield spell especially at higher levels add the Spells AC bonus just do it every wizard spams it effective health of the players determines the health of a monster and the damage of the monster the player has significant amounts of healing or temporary hit points in this encounter account for that by adding those things this creates a player's effect of Health I would not account for things like healing word at lower levels but bigger fatter heels like heal or mass heal are definitely worth considering lower level healing spells are used to keep action economy High not entirely for their survivability since we're using effective health of the players to calculate the health of the monster that assumes the players deal about as much damage as they can take this assumption is false if you have a decently optimized party or one that deals an irregular amount of damage here's a Baseline if a significant amount of the party is beating this Baseline consistently that probably means the effect of Health assumption is false when this assumption is false we have to use the damage per round of the players Instead This is much more precise than the effect of Health formula but requires some work if you want to keep using the rough estimate of effective health or the Assumption still applies to your party skip to this time stamp alright click the box below DPR or damage per round think about your individual party members and whether they attack more or use saving those more then we're going to calculate the DPR of one of the party members they're a fighter that attacks a bunch to calculate this we're going to the advanced attack DPR section full disclosure these DPR sheets were made by Aureus falgen and ludic Savant I have a link to their original sheets in the description so let's break everything down here we don't have to worry about Target AC or your characters to hit bonus keep those the same we're not considering accuracy at this step we're going to manually input accuracy at a later step to get the game feel we want putting your Fighters damage dice for their weapon and their bonus to damage then change the number of attacks to the number of attacks they have our Fighters level 20 so they have four attacks if they have a weapon like a flame tongue that provides bonus damage dice on every single hit add that to this row as well if they have a bonus action attack from something like crossbow expert or polar Master change the number of bonus action attacks from 0 to 1 and repeat the process for those attacks when we're calculating the DPR we're doing a midpoint of their resourceless damage and their Nova damage if they spend everything A good rule of thumb is that if they can spend the resource for extra damage for about three to four rounds it's a good midpoint since our fighter is a Battle Master they can spend maneuver dice fairly often Saul ad is maneuver dice to the bonus damage on first hit another example of how to input medium resource DPR is the Paladin if your paladins spends slots on smites often add the Smite damage dice of an average level to the bonus on first hit category say if they have access to fourth level slots add the damage dice of a second level Smite there round up if it's odd my recommendations are just a rule of thumb if you have no idea where to go if you know how the party spends their resources make those your assumptions instead if the character primarily uses summons input the damage dice of an individual summons attack the number of attacks should now be equal to the number of attacks each summon can make multiplied by the number of summons some subclasses like shepherdrude increase the damage of summons so take that into account once you have the numbers for the party members that deal damage through attacks record their normal DPR on the red box and write it in the DPR box for player inputs our Fighter's DPR is 52. for characters that rely on saving throws consider what their most commonly used spell is that deals damage input the damage dice for that speller effect then go to the save type and select the save type that is appropriate we're using Fireball for our wizard it's their bread and butter it's a save for half spell that deals 86 damage don't mess with the number of targets section keep it at one record the number in the red DPR box and write it in the player input row if you make an encounter with hordes of enemies their DPR will be much higher than if they were against just a few enemies don't change the ndpr based on the number of enemies consider the battlefield terrain and the positioning of the enemies and adjust accordingly adjust expectations based on how you know your group will play the midpoint guideline is just a guideline if you know your Paladin or cleric uses everything every fight adjust your assumptions and calculations based on that after you input all characters that mainly use saving throws we're done with the DPR and now we have an accurate guideline for your custom monsters health the save bonuses the party help determine the safety sees of the monster if the party has consistent saving for protections like Aura of protection factor that in if it will be relevant to the fight now there is the magic item difficulty scaler only mess with this if you're giving out significant magic items be more conservative in your estimates when adjusting this if there are allies in this fight add them to the sheet this is simple enough let's move on to the fun part building the monster stats on this second sheet you'll see a difficulty slider you can set either a custom difficulty or one of the presets the desired difficulty is based on the amount of rounds it takes for the party to win and the amount of rounds it takes for the monster to win the more rounds it takes for the party to win the more help the monster has the less rounds it takes for the monster to win the more damage the monster deals by basing difficulty off of rounds we can control the pacing of the fight itself the presets are designed to be accurate to their names however they will be only accurate if you play them as best as you can if the creature has behaviors that would significantly alter their effectiveness consider adjusting the difficulty to account for that perv stop difficulty is actually a curbstone it mathematically would take an average party around one round to smoke this group of monsters it would take these monsters eight rounds to defeat this party it's never happening on easy difficulty the health is ramping up a bit to last a smidge longer but their offense isn't enough to pose a real threat on medium the monsters get another boost lasting for three rounds is a significant Milestone at this point so they have four more chance of actually dealing some damage on challenging somebody has a real chance of going down in this fight if the fight really goes terribly maybe somebody could die this is sort of equivalent to deadly in the CR system on coin flip difficulty the monster is functionally equivalent to the party it is actually a coin flip of the player's win and there are no cheesy Force multipliers or outside variables involved at this point in past it we are getting into dangerous territory balance wise on the difficulties past monster Advantage tier I would recommend letting the players know what they're getting into because the chance that they lose gets much higher the damage averages get so high that the monster can both drop a party member to zero and deal high amounts of damage to other party members the party will start consistently losing action economy against these monsters which decreases their offensive output these high difficulty encounters can really snowball against the party if you want a serious fight at either statistical end you could have experimental mechanics that give one side a disproportionate Advantage essentially the encounter should be designed with the built-in Force multiplier if you want encounters at statistical extremes maybe you're extremely overpowered giant has a crippling weakness to lightning that the players figured out from a knowledge check you placed a magic bow in combat that deals a tremendous amount of lightning damage and your players are able to beat the giant with it conversely the enemies are so tiny that the players cannot physically hit them with most abilities maybe they have to eat some shrooms to get tiny in order to fight them adequately the Monsters May deal middling damage in order to let the players figure out the mechanic we can use a combination of difficulties throughout encounters or campaigns to create the tone we desire a difficulty curve if you will here's an example for a broader campaign in a gritty difficult campaign we would maybe have the Baseline be around medium to challenging and have the harder climactic fights be around the large monster Advantage difficulty here's an example for a story arc within a campaign immediately after the party levels let's start the curve with a few curb stop encounters we're gonna let the party feel strong by having them smack the life out of some goons after their level and let them experiment with their new features after that we might conclude the arc with a few mediums after they familiarize themselves with their abilities you could also use the custom value setting to fine tune and create Encounters of your own devious design you could have an encounter where both the party and the creature blow up in one turn by setting both player win and monster wins to be one round maybe it could be a slower battle so you set both numbers to 10. you can also use decimals to fine tune the experience you want after we determine the numerical difficulty we should determine the first Monster group's name a monster group is a single Monster or group of monsters with identical stats then we assign the accuracy of the monster input the accuracy you want the monster to have and the sheet will provide it to hit bonus for your custom Monster The Sweet Spot area I'd say is around 50 to 75 percent for most monsters once you start deviating from that the damage starts getting wonky since the lower the accuracy the greater the damage per attack has to be to compensate ranges Outside The Sweet Spot can be used to cultivate a certain flavor accuracies that approach a hundred percent May portray a primordial certain Force like death or maybe it's some sort of dead shot like a cowboy ranges below 50 percent can portray a very powerful yet imprecise creature like a giant just keep in mind that you should play monsters outside of The Sweet Spot accuracies a bit differently than normal creatures after accuracy determine how many attacks they should have more attacks necessitate lower damage to keep the damage the same but it's less swinging attacks in 5e usually scale up the tiers of play but you can Buck this trend lots of attacks may be indicative of an insanely feral Beast or a master swordsman one to two attacks especially at higher tiers of play May again portray a physically Mighty creature then we input our player's accuracy sweet spots are around the same here as a point of advice low accuracy can be frustrating while high accuracy can be super fun if they want to unload damage lower accuracy means lower health and higher accuracy means greater Monster Health the ranges outside of The Sweet Spot still portray different flavors the low end could maybe beat some indestructible construct while the high end may be a massive easy to hit sludge monster now we're on to the juicy stuff the power budget section is one of the most influential and useful parts of the entire Monster Maker you can use it to plan out an encounter day or use it to distribute power between creatures during an encounter you determine the length of the adventuring period and what encounters are in it for every rest you give the party during the adventuring period give yourself a hundred percent to play with every 100 is the budget for one rest period if you let them rest before they complete a hundred percent of the power budget the encounters will be unbalanced before you assign your budget think ahead of time about these things how many arrest periods should I give them how many individual encounters will there be in the adventuring period how many Monster groups will there be how many monsters are in each monster group I'm going to have three rest periods so that gives me 300 percent to work with I'm spending a hundred percent on a boss fight up first another 100 on a group of five then the party fights the last 100 percent of three monster groups I could make them take on the last three monster groups in individual encounters which would be easier or take all three of them on simultaneously which would be harder this would be better for a common more narrative based game with cinematic encounters I could instead have the budget B1 rest period at the very end giving me just a hundred percent to work with I give every encounter 20 to work with and then can group them into any number of separate individual encounters this is similar to the regular adventuring day for more classic Dungeon Crawl style games the power budget can also let you make statistical trade-offs depending on the special traits or characteristics of the creature say a Caster creature and a Defender creature were a pair fighting the party it wouldn't make sense for the Caster creature to have this same defensive capacity as the defender creature maybe the Caster creature has 75 percent of the offsets of budget and 25 percent of the defensive budget while the defender has 75 percent of the defensive budget and 25 percent of the offensive budget consider the trade-offs and rules that your monsters are playing when assigning the budget if you want a monster group or encounter to have a high quantity of monsters at higher tiers of play give the minions a very low defensive budget one to ten percent increase the number of them drastically and spread them throughout the battlefield with decent positioning this should mitigate the impact of force multiplying AOE abilities which are common at that tier of play the number of initiatives should only be different from the number of monsters in the case of elite or boss creatures while it isn't conventional and 5V design many turn-based RPGs give their bosses multiple turns to compete with the party's action economy giving your bosses multiple turns can be a good way to reduce their damage per attack and give them more movement and reactions to play with obviously you should design monsters around their multiple turns if they have them if you want to implement legendary actions alongside multiple turns consider making the legendary actions replenish at the start of its highest initiative turn the last section before we move on to the final monster stats are areas of effect not all monsters need one but it's certainly a consideration for many monsters and can be a good way to make your monster stronger the type of saving throw you force can evoke very different types of flavor strength saves are often used to avoid getting restrained or forcefully moved typically forced by very strong beasts or Mighty Warriors dexterity saves are quite common and used to move out of the way of explosions or traps Constitution saves are often for bracing through physically taxing things on your body like exhaustion or poisons intelligence saves are often the rarest and most devastating things that Target the Mind specifically like mind flares or spells like psychic scream wisdom saves are things like fears and frightens things that make you go against your better judgment Charisma saves her almost exclusively to do with things involving sheer willpower good examples of this are staying glued to your plan all out banishment or staving off possession from ghosts consider amplifying or reducing the damage from the calculator's given value depending on the condition or effect your chosen saving throw applies if it afflicts a nasty condition consider decreasing the damage while the damage of the spell is Afflicted also grants a different flavor a saver take half ability makes sense if it's hard to avoid in the fiction entirely like the explosion of a fireball a saver take none ability should be more horrifying to get hit by and a relief to avoid things like disintegrate the damage is a lot more swinging as a result if the area of effect provides no save it is probably some sort of Aura effect or the effect of a primordial concept like a marute after you determine the type of saving throw and the type of damage it deals we can determine how many areas of effect we have per round how many people we hit on average and the chance to save I would recommend one to two areas of effect per turn as to not bog down each round too much and to make each save more impactful then we consider the average number of players hit by an AOE be realistic about your estimate by factoring the size of the AOE and the likely positioning of your monster the higher your estimate the more your AOE will feel like a big damage over time effect the lower your estimate the more your AOE will feel like a big burst of damage against a few players you can get bigger bursts of damage by picking a number between one and two but be careful about getting too close to one that can be a huge Spike of damage that can instantly kill a player not just knock them out the player's chance to save is very important if you set the save chance too low especially at higher levels it can feel impossible or useless to roll against your creature's effect I would recommend keeping it at least 45 to 60 at most years of play if your monster is a world-ending beast or a grand Super Hyper Arch wizard I would get this out of the sweet spot for dramatic effect and not follow the calculator's DC recommendation but do this with caution now that we've inputted everything we need we can see our glorious outputs and we're 99 done we have one last thing to do let's build our damage with dice every dice is a different average damage and a different feeling to it d4s are 2.5 sharp is a prick in Death By A Thousand Cuts flavorfully a bunch of these are very consistent these sixes and d8s are worth 3.5 and 4.5 average damage respectively they're in the run-of-the-mill dice tier not too consistent not too swingy e10s and d12s are 5.5 and 6.5 average damage they're the big meaty Dice and are a lot more swingy or inconsistent than the rest d20s are 10.5 they are not typically used for damaged ice and are vastly more swinging than the other damaged ice but they are an option if you want something more bombastic the bigger the damaged ice the more flashy it may be your damage per attack number should be composed of any number of any combination of these Dice and a static modifier say plus five as long as it adds up to the damage per attack number let's say our damage per attack is 12. it could be 44 plus 2 that's 12 damage or 2D 10 plus one that's also 12 damage if you want each attack to do a different amount of damage like a dragon's multi-attack simply subtract the damage dice or modifiers from one attack and add any combination of Dyson modifiers to another attack and that's it we have our monster now you know how to use the Homebrew monster maker and have a strong understanding of many of the game's underlying design conventions with this knowledge you can effectively give your creatures the stats you need for precisely any type of fight rather than shooting in the dark I've left several links in the description if you want to learn more about the math of the game from a more player side of things thanks for watching this has been my densest video by far but one of the most important videos I've made if you've enjoyed the video leave a like drop a comment about what you made using the monster maker And subscribe thanks so much for the 5K Subs guys

Channel: AHero

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Id: Rul9LeIzjCo

Length: 28min 47sec (1727 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 05 2022