As I am writing this, I am reflecting on a game I was in last night. I was playing my Dhampir cleric and sensed an issue with the combat my party was in almost immediately. While we had the general cultists that you normally see in a combat, and a wizard looking guy, there were two figures that the DM gave us pictures of that made me feel a bit… uneasy. They looked like Shader-Kai from the Shadowfell, which I vaguely remembered from a source book, but didn’t really ever use, so figured this would be an interesting encounter. I moved forward to set myself up for the next turn, hoping my 20 AC would keep me safe…
And it was around the third attack from the same Shadow Dancer that I realized I was going to go down.
It knocked me to the ground, crit me, and then hit me again. Its buddy came up and within its three attacks knocked me below 0 hit points. Our druid got me up again, and I was able to stone shape around myself and the hostage in an attempt to save her, but an AOE spell from the wizard dropped me and killed the hostage, and left my party no way of knowing I was in trouble or helping, which even if they wanted to, they couldn’t as they all got wiped out in short order after that.
Our DM was very apologetic afterwards, as she shared information about the encounter with me. She’d wanted to give us more of a challenge, so she threw the shadow dancers in the mix to help give us more of a fight. Unfortunately, this meant that the CR 7 boss had two CR 7 minions, and four flunkies that were negligible.
A deadly encounter for our 7th level party was 6800xp.
This encounter was 22,250xp.
I don’t bring this up to shame our DM. Not at all. Especially since as a means of describing this encounter, I joked about one where I created a new enemy for the Displaced characters (that will be revealed in an upcoming book), that I thought were CR 4s. When their abilities were put into a calculator and the numbers were ran correctly… they were actually CR 10s. So now there’s a joke in our group, when a monster seems a bit too hard for the party, we assume that they’re CR 4.
But how do you get these CR 4 monsters? And what do you do when you find yourself struggling to not completely wipe your party with them?
A lot of DMs will start fudging rolls and make them seem a bit more incompetent than they should be for dealing with the party. Unfortunately, that comes across as wishy-washy hand waving, or condescending.
There’s always the option of just plowing ahead and letting the party take a loss to lick their wounds and come back later, but that can generate some resentment from the party, as they feel like they were thrown into an unwinnable battle for plot reasons.
Some DMs may even just halt the combat, reset the clock and apologize for creating a situation that bad in the first place. While honorable, it does kind of set a precedent that if the party gets into trouble, a deus ex machina will appear and pull them out of it.
With all these ways of handling it seeming less than ideal, what is a good way to handle it? Well, here are a few tactics I employ when I realize that, Like A-A-Ron, I done fucked up:
1. The Killing Blow
I like the Warhammer universe, though as of late I’ve not been enjoying playing the game all that much, but that’s just because my particular faction’s rules got a little… bland for my liking. I’m a Tau player, and my favorite thing about them is the mech suits and shooting. We’re not much for melee, but I once one-shotted a Carnifax off the board from the other side of the board. Still something my friend and I talk about with wonder from time to time… I do miss 9th edition…
Anyway, the Tau have two main fighting styles, the Kauyon (the patient hunter) and the Mont’ka (the killing blow). Either of these are a good way to adapt to how the party is doing. First, we’ll look at the Mont’ka:
Enemies who have powerful abilities (like something they can do on every attack, or something that just makes it so they’re dishing out way more than the party can handle) can suddenly weaken when that ability disappears. I’m not saying you should nerf them from the getgo, but if they dropped your party’s tank in a single round and now the rest of the group is eyeing the door, you can just… drop that ability. Say it was a “once a day” thing, and they wanted to start strong. They went in for the killing blow. Now the party is weakened, scared, but not facing down round after round of fighting a threshing machine with a pitchfork.
The Shadow Dancers had the ability to force a creature they hit to make a dex save, and on a fail, got to choose one of three outcomes: add 4d10 necrotic damage to the hit, knock the target prone, or grapple them. Making it so that they could only do this once per round, not able to do the same one twice in a round, or both of these, can immediately nerf them enough to make them less of a threat. Or even create a rule of your own saying they only got three attacks on that first round because it was the first round, like a Deep Stalker Ranger. Then the party gets a good scare, there’s a lot of damage in that first round, but the rest of the combat evens out more.
2. The Patient Hunter
The Kauyon focuses on holding your power in reserves until the board is set up. This works really well for powerful enemies you’re pitting against your party without knowing just how the party’s balance will react to it. By focusing on using your less powerful abilities at the start, you can gauge how well the party is going to be able to handle the encounter overall.
If they’re starting out wrecking house, start adding in the other abilities. Take that third attack, push that aura out, make them struggle a little bit more each round until you find the point where they balance out.
When in doubt, you can always add more salt to your soup, but it's a lot harder to take it back. By being the patient hunter, and keeping abilities, or even forces, in reserve, you can choose whether or not your party can deal with it. Recently, I ran the Displaced characters through a gauntlet of four encounters in a row, with only two rounds between to recuperate. They were beaten down, exhausted, and low on pretty much every resource, but through my patience, they were able to walk away feeling like they won a hard battle, which they did. Had I thrown everything in each of those encounters at them at once, they would have been ripped to shreds.
It may even be a good idea for you to keep a few extra groups of combatants in reserve to push into the battle at a given point, should it look like the players are going to have too easy a victory. Fifty goblins have no reason to retreat when the party starts to go down, but twenty have all the reason in the world to call for back up when ten just went up in a fireball.
3. The Army of One
There are other fighting philosophies of the T’au that can be enacted here. The Monat, or the army of one, is a philosophy where one warrior fights on their own and becomes exceptionally dangerous for it. We see this a lot in boss fights when we know that if the party goes up against it and an army of its own, the party will get destroyed, but if the boss doesn’t have allies, then they’ll be the ones eating it in two rounds.
This then tempts us to boost the boss, throw on more hit points, give it a higher armor class, maybe pump up the number of attacks it gets. However, the creators of the game have actually given us the answer for this one already: balance the action economy.
See, one of the biggest problems with the fight last night was that:
The boss had two attacks
Each of the two Shadow Dancers had 3 attacks
Each of the four cultists had 1 attack
That meant that the antagonists had 12 attack actions among them.
We, as a party are made up of:
One cleric, one attack
One artificer, two attacks
One druid, one attack
And one fighter, two attacks
That’s six attacks to their 12. Now four of those were measly CR1/4th creatures, but three of them were CR7s. There was no way we could hope to keep up with their damage output, out-heal the damage in any meaningful way, or recover when we began to fall. It wouldn’t be possible.
For a singular creature, the problem is reversed. Your boss monster may have three powerful attacks, but that won’t balance out against the party’s six. Eventually, sheer numbers overwhelm. So we get things like Legendary Actions or Reactions to help boost the action economy for the boss, especially when you allow it to take these actions at the end of player’s turns. It creates more drama and allows what would normally be a weak boss one-on-one, and gives them more than just a fighting chance. It gives them a sense of menace.
These are just a few ideas that I’ve pulled together from one source of wisdom in a different fandom. I’m sure there are ideas that I’ve never considered that are floating around out there, inspired by works I’ve never experienced before. Don’t consider this an end all be all list of how to balance an encounter on the fly, just some tips and tricks from someone who’s made many a mistake when DMing, and wants to pass it on to others who may need to pull these skills out of their hat at some point or another in their lives.
Best of luck in your future games, and remember that balance is difficult, we all stumble, but the more you practice it, the better you’ll get.
