So, FM has its own system for encounter-building, as well as guidance on how many encounters you'll want to have players face in a day.
I thought, as an experiment, we could look at how we might build a low-level dungeon/adventure using this system.
First off, before we get into individual encounters, we can talk about the Encounter Point Rating system. Different kinds of encounters are worth different amounts of points, with the expectation that a normal adventuring day will give you about six to eight points.
FM gives essentially five classifications of encounters.
Trivial ones are not going to be much of a challenge at all - the party blowing through a single or small number of weak enemies. These aren't worth any daily encounter points, but remember that these can be a slog if you throw a bunch of them at a party that's higher level, and that even a seemingly trivial encounter at low level can, with an unlucky crit, have the impact of a much more serious one. So, basically, use sparingly.
Easy Encounters are worth 1 point. This should not present a major threat to the party, unless they're already drained of resources.
Standard Encounters are worth 2 points. You can expect a significant expenditure of resources and hit points in a fight like this, even if you don't expect anyone to die in it unless there are some serious tactical fumbles (or profoundly unlucky dice rolls).
Hard Encounters are worth 4 points. A Hard encounter is not called that for nothing - this is meant to be a significant, climactic fight where the party will want to be tactically clever and fight carefully, and it'll still be a challenge to win.
Extreme Encounters are worth 8 points. These are harder-than-hard, and might require the party to retreat if they want to survive. This sort of encounter doesn't really need to appear in a campaign unless the players want brutal difficulty and lethal stakes.
Now, with all that in mind, how do we determine what difficult an encounter is? Or, going the other way, how do we build an encounter that fits a difficulty we want to go for?
Let's say we're building a dungeon for a party of four 3rd level adventurers. They've spent the first two levels having minor little outdoor skirmishes, but now we want them to go in and have to make their way through some single-day adventure that involves multiple fights.
FM's Encounter CR per Character table makes this pretty simple. For Easy, Standard, or Hard encounters, each player is worth a certain amount of CR to contribute to the total for our encounters.
For easy encounters, each 3rd-level player is worth 1/4 CR at easy, 1/2 at Standard, and 3/4 at Hard.
With that in mind, let's also think about how we want to structure this. Given that level 2 characters don't have a ton of resources to spend, and we don't want to force them to play too conservatively, let's make this a 6 daily encounter point day.
So, we could break that down a couple ways - if we want a difficult encounter by the end of it, we could spend four of our six points on a hard encounter to finish it off - with a CR total of 3. Or, we could spread the encounter difficulty out a bit - maybe we start with a Standard one to wake everyone up, then have an easy encounter once the party truly gets into the middle of the dungeon. Then, say, we have another easy encounter a little further in, and then finish the whole thing off with another somewhat more challenging, but not insane, fight. We could also have three standard encounters if we wanted to really keep things smooth.
I'm going to go with the second option. So, we have two encounters with a CR budget of 2 and two with a CR budget of 3.
Now, let's pick some kind of theme. (I'm going to use monsters from FM, though in theory this should work with any 5E monsters assuming their CR is accurate... which, yeah, it doesn't always seem like it is).
Sea Hags are CR 2, meaning one could play the villain in this dungeon with some minions or low-CR soldiers/brutes to keep the party at bay. We could thus have some kind of tidal cave that serves as the lair for some cruel Sea Hag our party has gone to take down.
Thus, working backwards, we start with our big boss fight. Let's keep it simple and only have two types of monster at most per encounter. So, our Sea Hag boss fight has room for 1 more CR's worth of creatures. Maybe our Sea Hag has ensnared the souls of sailors lost in shipwrecks, giving them a group of Shade minions. Shades are a CR 1 minion, but minions come in groups of 5 (or 10 at higher CRs) so we'll have a total of 6 monsters in this final fight, even if five of them go down very easily when hit. Still, with 8 HP, at this level it's unlikely that a player character will do enough damage to take down more than two of them in a single hit.
Now, let's step back. While the Hag and her shades are deep in this tidal cave, there are probably also some non-sapient monsters in the cave as well. Our penultimate encounter will be an easy one - meaning our total budget for it is 2 CR.
Clawfish are typically associated with Angulotls (the FM equivalent of Grungs, or possibly Bullywugs) but as semi-amphibious beasts, they work pretty well for some kind of sea creature. These are CR 1/8 brutes, which means we could throw a full sixteen of them. But that's boring. Let's instead throw 4 of these into the fight, leaving us 1 1/2 CR left to budget. To fill things out, we can use three 1/2 CR monsters, and in this case, I'm going to say we'll use Swarms of Spider, only reskinned to Swarms of Crabs. The Spider Swarm is considered a Controller, less about the raw damage as much as it is about disrupting and locking down characters, which they do with their "Too Many Legs" action. None of these have tons of HP, but it'll up the creepy factor.
Now, moving backwards, let's say that before we get to this Sea Hag's lair proper, we need to get into the entrance of the cave. And, it just so happens that some pirates have scouted this cave out for use as a stash. And they aren't going to like the idea of anyone knowing that people have seen where their treasure is hidden.
I'd actually intended to use humans here, but surprisingly, the CR for most of the human stat blocks in FM is a bit higher than what we need here. So, instead, we'll go with Orcs (of course, there's nothing saying we couldn't mix these groups together). We'll start with two Orc Bloodrunners - CR 1/2 Skrimishers, whose Spiked Shield attack can knock PCs back and allow the Bloodrunner to run in, strike and, and then retreat to a safe distance (they're also very fast, with a speed of 60 feet). Then, for the other half of the fight, we can use a single Orc Garroter - an ambusher, whose Strangle attack is meant to help it take out a spellcaster and prevent them from casting spells with verbal components. While they've got these underhanded tactics to fight, the party will outnumber them.
Finally, we'll back up to the very first encounter of the day. Again, we've got a CR budget of 3. Given our coastal theme, a classic sea monster is the Harpy, which is a CR 1 Controller - naturally, its alluring song is going to potentially take characters out of the fight while they are entranced by it. Starving Harpies are a minion version of the Harpy, also CR 1. So we could have two Harpies and five Starving Harpies, or 1 Harpy and ten Starving Harpies. I think I'd be more inclined to the former. Naturally, this fight will be harder for a party if they don't have a lot of ranged options, though the harpies need to get into melee to attack (and don't have flyby).
So, putting it all togehter:
Our party has heard rumors of a monstrous hag causing shipwrecks somewhere along the coast, and are told that there is a cave that can only be accessed at low tide. The party makes their way to the cave entrance, but along the way, they find the half-eaten remains of an orc, the brand of the notorious Crimson Thread - a pirate armada - still visible on the left shoulder. Judging from the claw marks, the party's ranger realizes he was probably killed and eaten by harpies. And, when they reach the cave, knowing what to look for, they see that the craggy cliffs above the beach have become the nest for a brood of harpies, who attack the party if they are seen.
(As a note: characters succeeding on things like stealth checks, or even talking to monsters and convincing them not to fight them some way, is and should be a valid strategy for conserving resources. Your Bard might not have a ton of powerful damage spells, but if she can convince the harpies that they can keep the cave once the hag's been cleared out if they leave them alone, the amount of HP and spell slots and other resources that saves the party will make you very happy you took that expertise in Persuasion.)
Once they've gotten into the cave, they find signs that there are other people here - recently burned torches, perhaps a beached rowboat. Finally, they come up through a tunnel but see the glow of torches, and sneak up and overhear a bunch of orcish pirates reveling, drinking rum, and counting the booty from their latest score. While the party tries to sneak up on these pirates, they are surprised when one of the pirate cutthroats gets the drop on them, and begins trying garrote the cleric.
While this initial surprise sets them on their back foot, ultimately our heroes are able to kill the pirates, or perhaps take one or more of them prisoner and interrogate them about what lies beyond. If they do, the pirates don't know - they only just discovered the cave, and they didn't notice the harpy nests up there because they came at night, trying to avoid a naval patrol. One of their number was superstitious and got spooked staying inside the cave, and ran off at some point (this is the dead orc the party found earlier). The surviving orc(s) say that their former companion said he thought he heard the wailing voices of drowned sailors coming from the cavern beyond, and didn't want to stay in the cave. They didn't check it out for themselves because there are weird sea creatures further in there.
So, the party now ventures deeper into the cavern, and into a part where water fed from some further-down cavern leaves only a narrow dry passageway. While hugging the wall, swarms of tiny crabs begin to crawl up from the water in search of food, and as they do, a group of disturbed amphibians emerge from small holes in the walls, defending their territory. The party has to fight these creatures off while they struggle not to fall into the water (except for the Triton Paladin, who easily slips down into the water to smash those swarms of crabs).
Finally, they reach the innermost chamber of the cavern system, and there they find the menacing sea-witch who has caused so much trouble. But she is not alone - she has ensnared the souls of drowned sailors just as a fisherman might catch fish in a net, and with them under her control, she can send these disposable minions against her foes while she blasts them with the power of sea storms.
So, yeah, there's a lot of fluff here in this last part, but I think that sounds like a pretty decent little dungeon, don't you? Again, you'll probably want to take at least a short rest after the orcs, and by the end of the day, you might be totally out of spell slots, and maybe you've had to down a healing potion or two. But hey, that treasure hoard the pirates had collected should make up for the potions expended, right?
What I've built here has a total CR of 10, but, of course, CR and XP do not scale linearly. Our first encounter gives 600 xp (150 per player). The Orcs give 400 (100 per player). The beast encounter also gives 400, and then the final encounter gives us 650 xp (162.5 per person). So, if you're using XP, each player gets a total of 512.5 xp. That's most of the way from level 2 to level 3 (you need to go from 300 to 900). And if we give some XP for the "quest" and perhaps have some puzzles or environmental challenges along the way that grant XP, this little dungeon could give players a full level (and would likely take a couple sessions, at least the way my players tend to do things).
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