DM Philosophy on Transparency of DCs, ACs, and Such

 In Dimension 20, when there's a particularly important roll to be made, they bring out the Box of Doom, which is ultimately just a box with a big skull-mountain thing built into it (I believe a camera is lodged in the skull to look down at the results). During these rolls, DM/GM Brennan Lee Mulligan will typically explain precisely what is required for a success or failure - "You've rolled a 23 on your Athletics check to shove Sky Captain Vaughn off of the deck of the Blood Raptor, potentially sending this notorious pirate, who slew your father and bombarded your home, off into the great blue sky to his death. He has a +12 to acrobatics, meaning that he needs to roll an 11 or higher to avoid being shoved."

The roll is made, suspenseful music plays, and there's either a cheer as the villain is sent to his demise, or a gritting of teeth and a new strategy to be formed if the bad guy avoids it.

What's notable here, though, is that the probability is all out there in the open. The players know that there's a 50% chance that something good happens. Box of Doom rolls also often happen when something very bad might happen - Vaughn and the player character might have been in opposite positions, and the player might be rolling not to be tossed off the ship.

D&D is built on a somewhat hierarchical assumption: the Dungeon Master is the master of the game's world (traditionally, some deep dark dungeon, hence the name). And one of the ways the game is built gives the DM the privilege of knowledge the players don't have. There are, of course, secret traps, hidden doors, monsters hiding around corners or a gelatinous cube hidden plain sight on that far-cleaner-than-it-should-be hallway.

There are a lot of features that allow you to add bonuses to certain rolls, but you're forced to commit to using these features before you know if they'll be helpful. Bardic Inspiration, for example, lets you make your d20 test initially, and lets you see what you rolled, but you need to make the decision to add your extra die before you know whether you have a success. Sure, sometimes it's obvious - if you got a 25 on your attack roll, you probably won't use Bardic Inspiration, and if you got a total of 3 on a Perception check, that d6 is unlikely to change the result.

But there can be this guessing game, sometimes, about whether something is worth using. For example, the Great Weapon Master feat allows you to take a -5 penalty to your attack roll for a +10 bonus to damage. This tends to give a net bonus to your damage output even at fairly high Armor Classes, but naturally, using this on a Zombie is going to be far more reliable than using it on a heavily-armored creature like an Iron Golem. Part of the feat's power is the ability to choose when to use it, but knowing that can sometimes push players into meta knowledge, guessing at a monster's AC (is that big earth elemental really hard to hit because it's made of rock, or really easy to hit because it's so slow?)

So... what if we were just open?

With DCs for ability checks and saving throws, what if we just came out and said "the dragon breathes, and I need you all to make a DC 15 Dexterity saving throw?" or "You might recognize the deity depicted in the fresco with a DC 18 Religion check."

To be sure, this will empower players. Features like Bardic Inspiration or an Artificer's Flash of Genius (especially the latter, which gives a flat bonus) will become extremely reliable. But I think of this a bit like the Shield spell - while I've had a DM try to change its functionality mid-campaign (she relented) you get to know if Shield is going to do its job or not before you commit to casting it. The DM calls out the total of their attack, and if that meets your AC but doesn't exceed it by five or more, you can cast that spell and negate the effect.

I think it can feel tempting as a DM to want to lure your party into wasting resources like this - I've had times when a powerful monster has an effect with a saving throw that's over twenty prompt a Flash of Genius that only raises a character's result to a 19. Or, conversely, sometimes the DC is not that high, and when someone rolls a 16, they think, "I'm level 15, that monster must have a higher DC," only to realize that the DC is only 14, and that they didn't need to spend that resource.

But... that's not very fun, is it?

Given how powerful player characters get, especially at high levels, DMs might feel tempted to try to squeeze out as much of an advantage as they can get. But I think that transparency in this regard could lead to more satisfying gameplay - and it might also give players a sense of whether they're taking a big risk trying to pickpocket that archmage or not.

Comparing Encounter Building in Xanathar's and Flee, Mortals!

 So, the encounter building rules in Xanathar's Guide to Everything were a welcome and far easier-to-use system for balancing encounters than the ones found in the 2014 DMG. The DMG version, I always felt, really emphasized fights against single monsters, which tended to mean that if the party rolled well on initiative, they would kill their foe before it could do much to them. Xanathar's created a kind of "equivalent monsters per player of a certain level" system, with charts showing how many CR 1 creatures you could add to an encounter for each, say, 6th level player.

Flee, Mortals! further simplifies things, giving you a total CR budget for each player in the party. In fact, this winds up being similar to the original system, but without the big penalties for having multiple monsters. In my early days of encounter design, I'd eagerly bring in some, say, Orc Eye of Gruumsh (or Rokotek, in my setting, where the dominant orcish culture began worshipping a Great Old One) which was all I could afford to have my three-person level 2 party fight.

These days, rather than having a single such orc, I'd probably have a group like that (admittedly small and low-level) face off against a handful of standard Orc creatures, with maybe some wolves mixed in to vary things up.

So, given that I haven't used the DMG encounter-building math since Xanathar's came out, I figured I'd compare the latter with FM's system. We'll do this at a couple different breakpoints - somewhere in the middle of each tier of play.

Each system also has a special set of rules for solo monsters, which we might look at after we do the group-fight ones.

Notably, though, Xanathar's system does not have variations for difficulty - you kind of have to play it by ear if you want to tune the difficulty up or down. FM's system explicitly warns that it creates harder fights - a Standard encounter should be a significant drain on a party's resources, and a Hard one should carry a real risk of character death in it. We can look at Easy and Standard encounters from FM to see where the Xanathar ones land.

We're going to assume here we've got a party of four players, and that the party is fairly balanced and normally equipped for their level.

Level 2:

I wrote a post yesterday about building a full day of adventure for a level 2 party. But let's look specifically at the CR budget for standard encounters.

In FM, a level 2 character is worth 1/8 CR in an easy encounter or 1/4 in a standard one. Thus, our total CR for an easy encounter would be 1/2, or 1 in a standard encounter.

In Xanathar's, the ratio for 2nd level characters and 1/8 monsters is 1:3, meaning we could have three 1/8 monsters for each player character. For 1/4 monsters, the ratio is 1:2. In other words, with those totaled, if we use a lot of 1/8 monsters, we could have twelve of them, or a total CR of 1.5. If we use 1/4 monsters, we can have two of them per player, making for a total CR of 2.

    So, I'll actually confess I'm surprised here that the Xanathar's rule is less forgiving. Granted, tier 1 is a very unforgiving tier of play. I usually don't have players go through more than two fights in a day at tier 1, unless some of the fights are truly trivial.

Level 8:

Just on the higher end of tier 2, level 8 is when you typically can have your main ability score maxed out (unless you decide to go for a feat or something - or if you rolled really good stats early on).

In FM, a level 8 character is worth 2.5 CR in an easy encounter, or 3 in a standard encounter. So, with four players, we're looking at 10 or 12 total CR.

Xanathar's gives us a ratio of 1:2 for CR 2 creatures, 1:1 for CR 3 creatures, and 2:1 for CR 4 creatures. In other words, if we're using CR 2 creatures, we can afford 8 of them, bringing our total CR to 16. If our creatures are CR 3, we would get a total of 12. And if we're using CR 4 creatures, we need two players for each of them, giving us a total CR of 8.

    So, here's the interesting thing: if the DMG system really pushed us to having fewer, higher CR creatures, the Xanathar's system is pushing us in the opposite direction. This system seems to build for lots of less powerful creatures.

Level 13:

Now, up into the higher levels, we're looking at some significantly powerful player characters, and the CR budget is getting a lot higher.

FM's system gives us 5 CR per player in easy encounters and 5.5 in standard encounters. So we're looking at 20 total CR or 22.

Xanathar's puts CR 5 or 6 as equivalent to a single level 13 player - which would give us a 20-24 total CR range. If we wanted higher-CR creatures, CR 7 gives us a ratio of 2:1, so we could have two CR 7 creatures, for a total budget of 14. If we went with lower CR, we could have two CR 4 creatures for each player, giving us 8 creatures and a total CR of 32.

Level 19:

All right, I think I've figured out the difference between these systems by now, but just for the sake of completion, let's finish the job.

FM gives us 8 CR per character in easy encounters and 8.5 for standard, for a total budget of 32 or 34.

Xanathar's gives us 2 CR 6 creatures per character, one CR 7-9 creature per character, or 2 characters per CR 10 creature. So, that could give us anywhere from a total CR of 48 if it's all CR 6 creatures or just 20 if it's two CR 10 creatures.

    Now, I realize that the way I've framed this betrays a bias toward the FM system. I think the issue I've identified with the Xanthar's system is that the swing in ratio between CRs can get pretty huge. While the difference between a CR 1 and a CR 2 creature is pretty big, the difference between a CR 6 and a CR 7 one is not, but at certain breakpoints, the Xanathar system considers the latter two be twice as much of a challenge as the former.

What the FM system does is smooth out those issues - when you're just totaling CR, 6 and 7 are rightfully near one another - let's say you are looking for a total CR of 20. You could use three CR 6 monsters and then enough to fill in that last two, or you could use two CR 7 monsters and then maybe even use one of those CR 6 creatures to fill it in.

What's funny is that I think the DMG rules, which were based on adding up XP (XP being linked to CR) was meant to accomplish this same basic idea, but somehow, the FM system feels the most elegant and also flexible.

Again, this is largely theoretical. FM will be more forgiving of throwing very tough monsters at your party, and less forgiving on using lots of lower-CR monsters. That said, in my experience mostly using the Xanathar's system, I have found that it often tempts me to make enormous fights (especially when I have a party that usually has six players and can roll as deep as eight) with tons of weaker enemies that make the fights go very long. I suspect FM's system will make me feel more confident in having big beefy monsters.

That said, there are some high-CR monsters who can be shut down pretty easily. A non-legendary creature without high wisdom saves can be taken out of a fight with something like Hypnotic Pattern.

It all remains to be seen. I have a major boss fight I'm planning that will involve a total of four monsters, but I still suspect it will be a very difficult one - though I'm taking a risk and using a stat block that does not have any legendary resistance or villain actions as the main "boss," and hoping that the minions will truly be enough to make him memorably difficult. (Spoiler alert - it's going to be the FM Lich with a pair of homebrewed stat blocks for a Phyrexian Obliterator and a pair of Phyrexian Negators - the former being a Brute, or possibly Soldier, while the latter are skirmishers).

Especially looking at all the high-CR monsters from Bigby's, having a system that makes using such creatures easier is appealing. The key, though, is also having confidence that your players will be able to handle it when, say, the sorcerer takes an absolute barrage of spell attacks (like what happened on Monday when one of the two storm sorcerers tried to get the drop on a group of Lacunae that weren't initially actually hostile, but trying to hide as inert statues, and he got hit with I think four of their Grief-Eater attacks, one of which was a crit, and each of which deal an average of 29 damage. Miraculously, he didn't go down, and soon the fight was resolved with Persuasion checks, other than the Flintmoth Swarm that the fighting had aroused, which had to be killed conventionally.)

Of course, this is all more of an art than a science. But I do think it's better to use a system where you can't double your monsters simply from dropping from CR 7 to CR 6. Xanathar's was a huge step up in ease of use, but I think FM's system is likely what I'll be using moving forward, pending more familiarity with it.

TDCSR Coming to D&D Beyond

 After Wizards of the Coast acquired D&D Beyond, it seemed reasonable to assume that the oddities of its early days, namely the incorporation of non-WotC features, might be behind it. But evidently, the Darrington Press- (Critical Role's game publishing wing) released Tal'dorei Campaign Setting Reborn will be added to D&D Beyond, along with its many subclasses, items, and other features. (As a player of a Wizard currently wearing a Coat of the Crest, it would be nice to be able to incorporate the actual features onto my D&D Beyond character sheet.)

I do wonder, then, what this will mean for 3rd party stuff going forward. TDCSR is, of course, basically a companion piece to the WotC-published Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, and the previous 3rd party stuff we got on Beyond was Matt Mercer's Blood Hunter - a class tied to CR's Exandria setting (though one that also basically lets you play as a Witcher or a Werewolf or a few other flavors of monster-hunter-who-took-on-a-bit-of-monstrousness).

Still, it would be very cool if things like MCDM's Beastheart, Illrigger, or Talent were also introduced to D&D Beyond.

It'll be interesting to see how CR's relationship with D&D continues going forward. We're starting to get the first details about Daggerheart, Darrington Press' progression-based fantasy RPG - which is evidently unlike Kobold Press' new RPG in that it's significantly stepping away from 5E mechanics (apparently it uses 2d12 instead of a d20 system).

Anyway, there are some cool things to be found in that book, and if this means we see more College of Tragedy Bards, Juggernaut Barbarians, or Runechild Sorcerers, that's pretty neat.

Initial Look at Bigby's Glory of the Giants

 While I haven't read through the whole book yet, I picked up Glory of the Giants, or "Bigby's" as I'm sure I'll refer to it in the future. Something of a companion piece to Fizban's Treasury of Dragons, this is a sort of monster book, lore book, and overall examination of a particular kind of creature, namely Giants.

I will quickly note here that this is focusing on the "true giants" more than lesser giants like Trolls and Ogres, though we get some new (and horrifying) troll stat blocks and a bit of kind of speculative lore about their creation. But the main focus here is on the six main giant types, along with Fomorians (revealed here to be the offspring/creations of a disowned giant deity who was the twin of Grolontor) and the Death Giants - a group of former cloud giants who went to the Shadowfell to serve the Raven Queen.

As with most of the 5E books, there are fun little commentary notes through the book. In this case, it's a sort of dialogue between Bigby and Diancastra, the latter of whom is one of the three daughters of Annam.

I don't know if they were established in earlier lore, but while each of the main giant lines has a patriarchal deity (including the Fomorians, who have Karontor) who are sons of Annam, the daughters of Annam are more broadly revered by giant-kind and their people. While there's divine family drama like Greek myth, the characterization of Diancastra at least is a bit more Norse - she's a goddesss, but also someone who can hang out and go on adventures with Bigby.

There are some notions - not so much canon as a kind of suggestion for DMs doing world-building - that Annam was the one who took the fragments of the shattered First World (as introduced in Fizban's as the creation of Bahamut and Tiamat) and created the many worlds of the Prime Material Plane. Giants, then, built massive empires on many of these worlds, but that was all in the long past. The "Glory" of the Giants is a faded one, and one that they lament losing, while a small minority look to it as something they might reclaim - that these past several aeons are more of an interregnum between golden ages for their kind.

Like dragons, of course, Giants vary significantly in alignment and outlook, and while the book acknowledges that the individual giant deities have their alignments, and those shape the giants of their kinds, there's nothing inherent to being, say, a Fire Giant, that makes you lawful evil.

The book gives you ways to create giant-themed characters, whether they use giant magic (the Path of the Giant Barbarian is the book's only subclass, but it looks like a very fun one - even if it steps on the toes of the Rune Knight Fighter in terms of being able to get real big in combat). There are also backgrounds that come with new feats - though depending on how the 2024 core rules handle backgrounds, I'll hold off on deciding how exciting I find these. The feats are interesting.

There are tables and chapters dedicated to building giant-themed encounters, adventures, and campaigns, and I think like Fizban's there is a section (that I haven't gotten to yet) with adventure locations themed around giants.

Of course, there's also new treasure. And, of course, there's the bestiary.

The bestiary here provides a ton of giant variants. There are also some themes that run through it - there are several examples of giants corrupted into demons (and one devil) such as Stone Giants whose appreciation for Baphomet's labyrinths led them down the road to corruption, or Hill Giants who find kinship in Yeenoghu's hunger and become nasty lamprey-mouthed filter-feeders. There are also examples of giants of various kinds serving cults of elemental evil. One interesting oddity is the Fensir, which are trolls who have gone to the outer plane of Ysgard and for the most part transformed into far more humanoid-looking beings, albeit ones who are petrified if touched by sunlight. Death Giants serve the Raven Queen and make use of the Rune of Death. We also get some variations on Fomorians, along with some of their number who remained in the Feywild while their kin were cursed, and have retained their original, untwisted form (making them kind of elf-giants).

Another note here is that the giant stat blocks are consistently high-CR. The recommendation is that a lot of the adventure hooks and encounters they suggest are built with tier 3 characters in mind. This does mean that you might find if you're running a lower-level campaign, some of these monsters might be hard to use in a straight fight.

But while I don't know that I'd call these "action-oriented monsters" in quite the MCDM way - like those I've been reading about in Flee, Mortals! - there does seem to be in most cases an attempt to make the monsters more interesting than just "this one has multiattack and the individual attacks hit like a truck" to make the CR appropriate.

One of the running "cycles" of creature in the book are giants using rune magic. These giants carry an object with a rune on it, and by destroying the rune, a party can deny the giant the chance to use some of its runic abilities. For example, the Hill Giant Avalancher has a Hill Rune that gives them a "Stone Avalanche" action, that lets them rain down rocks in a 20-foot-radius cylinder, dealing a fireball's worth of bludgeoning damage (dex save for half). They also have a reaction that can deal damage to a foe that has struck them and knock them back. If the runic item is destroyed, they lose those abilities, and must rely on their hefty, thunder-infused greatclub or magical stone bolas - neither of which are going to put out as much damage as that stone avalanche ability.

There are also a ton of giant animals, but if you're excited about using Wild Shape or Polymorph for these, one little asterisk - the Giant Ox (basically Babe the Blue Ox from the tale of Paul Bunyan) is technically Fey. Likewise, a lot of the massive dinosaurs are listed as monstrosities - charged, as they seem to be, with elemental magic.

Though, as a side note, one is reminded here that gargantuan is not a bounded range of creature sizes. The Ceratops is described as being 200 feet long! While you might rule that the main bulk of the creature isn't quite so large, and thus would fit in a smaller space on a grid map, I'd still say you could make a 30 by 30 space on a battlemap for this thing. The Regisaur is described as being large enough to swallow a giant whole, which... is pretty freaking huge.

In Fizban's, we got two CR 30 stat blocks for the avatars of Bahamut and Tiamat, along with Greatwyrms that were not too far behind. While there's no stat block for the various giant deities here, there are epic encounters reminiscent of the Greatwyrms, known as the Scions. These are meant to represent the direct children of the various giant gods. Each begins slumbering in an elemental cradle - a kind of living embodiment of the elements over which that kind of giant has mastery. And so, you have to fight the elemental first - killing it then frees the Scion (and depending on how your DM wants to run it, they either thank you for freeing them or attack you for interrupting their slumber). Essentially, these are like mythic encounters, but dividing each phase into its own separate stat block. The highest CR of these is the Cradle of the Storm Scion/Scion of Stronmaus, which are each CR 27 creatures (they also have 11 legendary resistances between the two of them, which is kind of insane - basically, they should succeed on every saving throw. Here I find myself sympathizing more with the players and liking FM's "legendary resistance with a cost" design).

Notably, though, these don't have legendary actions, so I'd recommend using other creatures in these fights. The Scions empower their respective giants - the Storm one gives nearby Storm Giants a +8 (!) to both attack and damage rolls within 1000 feet. So... build carefully, because this would give the CR 20 Storm Giant Tempest Caller a +23 to hit (what is this, Starfinder?)

Anyway, I like this book so far. I kind of like this sort of broadly-usable sourcebook. Even if you have a homebrew world you run your campaigns in, you can take a lot from this. In my futuristic Spelljammer version of my own world (pushing a bit more of a sci-fi angle) there's a world called Garvox where the giant empire never fell, and this book is chock full of really useful stuff if I ever run a campaign dealing with the Garvox Imperium (which is, at best, a Lawful Neutral empire that skews evil with its notions that it needs to spread the order it represents to all other worlds, and has tried to export the giant caste system to the small folk).

Encounter Building and Daily Encounters in Flee, Mortals! - Building an Encounter-Focused Dungeon

 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).

Monster Roles in Flee, Mortals!

 The monsters in Flee, Mortals! are generally more complex than you tend to see in the core D&D books. One concept that they use is that these are "action-oriented creatures," giving boss monsters - whether they fill the "Solo" or Leader" role - lots of opportunities to do things. For any new DMs who brought out a big scary monster only to have them be able to use their action to attack twice and then die to a Rogue's critting sneak attack, these are meant to make an encounter more dynamic and interesting without necessarily just having the monster hold a ton of HP and deal a massive amount of damage.

I haven't had a chance to use any of these (actually, I did get to use the Orc boss when the book was in previews, but that was against a high-level single player, so not really the normal circumstances).

But not every monster is a boss monster. However, Flee, Mortals! (abbreviated to FM from here on) does another interesting thing, which is that every creature has a role, and these roles are reflected in the sort of abilities they can bring to the fight.

While other publications obviously don't have these roles listed, I think that they can be really useful for building encounters and especially when building homebrew monsters. For any creature you come up with, think about what particular thing it's trying to accomplish in combat, and make sure it has tools that allow it to do that (or at least try to do that).

Let's go through the roles, and then look at some example creatures' abilities that let them perform that role.

Ambushers:

Ambushers are sneaky creatures that can either hide, become invisible, or otherwise get out of sight, spending half their turns attacking and half slipping away. Ambushers usually have a relatively high bonus to Stealth, but also have means to help them hide again while in the middle of the fight.

For our first example, we can look at the Goblin Assassin, who has several features that aid with this. They can hide as a bonus action, and they can inflict a bleed effect on targets against who they have advantage. They can also summon magical darkness that they can see through, and don't provoke opportunity attacks when they run away from a creature, letting them slip in, backstab, and then get away.

Similarly, an Essence of Mist - a type of Air and Water elemental - can turn invisible, and can even potentially enter a creature's lungs to hide from its foes.

Artillery:

Simply put, Artillery creatures have ranged attacks. They're not meant to stand on the front lines, and try to dash or disengage to open distance between them and melee characters.

The Wobalas Demon, CR 10, has a weapon that can, by burning a resource, frighten the target, and a melee attack that can teleport the target away from them.

The Marble Stone Giant has its Greatsling as its main attack, and has a melee attack that can knock targets back, as well as a bonus action that lets them plant their feet to gain longer range and greater damage on their ranged attacks.

Brutes:

Brutes are the most straightforward monsters - they hit hard and have a lot of hit points. Typically melee fighters, Brutes tend to engage with multiple party members and demand to be dealt with due to their damage output, even while they're giving cover to more fragile creatures.

Zombies have a feature called Deadened Nerves, which is effectively a damage threshold (any damage of it or lower is negated) of 5, and can make a reaction attack when an attack is fully negated.

The Servok Builder is a huge mechanized construction engine with a big wrecking ball, which can potentially hit secondary targets after the first.

Controllers:

Controllers typically have some way to debuff others, often using complex mechanics that will restrain and restrict party members. The book has guidance here that a Controller should typically be protected by Brutes, Soldiers, Minions, and Skirmishers, and that the complexity of their actions tends to mean you shouldn't have more than one or two of these in a monster group.

Leaders and Support:

Leaders are one  of the two categories for boss monsters - who have variants on the Legendary rules found in mainline D&D, like "villain actions" (similar to legendary actions). Support creatures have similar functionality, but don't have the powerful villain actions of a leader. Both types of creatures will have various ways to help other monsters attack or survive. Like Controllers, and maybe even more so, the book recommends not having more than one of these in an encounter, as their support abilities can get out of hand if they stack.

The Kobold Signifer can use an action to let allied kobolds close ranks (and benefit from the shared "Shield? Shield!" feature kobolds in this book get, which increases their AC when near allied kobolds by making a shield wall). They also have a once-a-day AoE heal.

Bloodlord Varrox, the named Hobgoblin villain, who has the leader category, has a bonus action that allows an ally to move and make a weapon attack, and some of his villain actions also help position his allies and bolster them with temp HP.

Minions:

Minions have special rules - they're designed to allow the party to face off against hordes of enemies without turning combat into an endless slog. Basically, five of these (or 10 at higher CRs) is the equivalent of a single normal monster, and any damage from a successful attack or a failed saving throw on their end is enough to kill them. People fighting with weapons can also overkill minions - despite potentially dying to 1 damage, they still have HP, but if you exceed that HP with a weapon attack and there's another minion within the reach of the original melee attack or in a line behind the target of a ranged weapon attack (and still within range) you can hit another, killing multiple minions in one attack. Minions can then also make group attacks, getting a bonus to hit when they attack as a group (of up to 5) and all dealing their damage collectively (which doesn't involve die rolls).

Minions can crowd the battlefield and create a barrier to more important targets like a Controller or Leader, and can often create problems for characters who are surrounded by them. 

For example, the Rotting Zombie begins to slow and can even restrain a character if enough of them surround them.

Hill Giant Flunkies can force characters to make a Strength save or be knocked prone when they end their turn within ten feet of two or more of them.

Skirmishers:

Skirmishers are masters of mobility, getting in and striking before retreating. While somewhat similar in role to Ambushers, they're less about hiding from the party and more about getting their hit in and then getting out of range of reprisal.

The Vampire, for example, can use a bonus action to move its speed without drawing opportunity attacks, and has a recharge ability that lets it pass through other creatures, inflicting necrotic damage.

The Lizardfolk Terrorsaur has a reaction that lets them move up to half their speed after they take damage from an attack, which also might help them get their Running Start to then use their flying speed.

Soldiers:

Soldiers, like Brutes, are front-line creatures, but while the Brute just tries to become a big problem for the party by putting out a lot of damage and soaking a lot of hits, the Soldier tends to be there to lock creatures down, preventing them from reaching the more fragile and vulnerable creatures.

The Orc Rampart can impose disadvantage on a character's attacks if they hit with both parts of their multiattack, and can step in to take the blow intended for another using a reaction if they're close enough.

Human Knaves have multiple ways to knock a target prone after landing an attack, and then can use a bonus action called "Stay Down" to reduce a prone character's movement to 0 for a turn - making it impossible for them to stand up.

Solo:

Solo monsters, then, are designed to be fought on their own. Most of these are the named "villain" stat blocks (though you can, of course, re-skin them). They try to use ever movement advantage they have, and focus down problematic party members, while also trying to hit as many characters in AoE effects as they can.

Because a solo creature needs to take on a whole party, they get a lot of multi-part actions, bonus actions, reactions, villain actions, and other ways to make up for the fact that they're just one thing fighting a whole bunch of other things.

    Putting it all together:

Aside from the solo monster, who basically is there to be fought on its own (though I think you could have a lower-CR solo monster fight with a bunch of minions) the point of these categories is to allow you to build dynamic encounters with interesting tactical decisions for both you and the party.

Some classes excel at taking down different types of monsters. A Brute can take a lot of punishment, but might be susceptible to mind-affecting crowd control magic. Support creatures can make other monsters deadlier, but might not be able to withstand a frontal assault on their own.

While a diverse group of monsters will of course give you, as the DM, some tactical options, it'll also present some interesting decisions for the party - do they focus down that Support or Controller monster while they take a big assault from the Brutes? Or do they wear down the defenses so that the Controller doesn't have the damage to overwhelm them after the majority of the monsters are taken out?

Minions in particular give hard-hitting melee fighters a chance to feel epic, carving down waves of foes, while the ranged damage dealers might pick off artillery and a spellcaster can try to lock down an individual like a Support or Controller creature.

If we wanted to make a dynamic encounter for 1st level characters, for example, and we want it to be a Standard-difficulty encounter (which, for 1st level, is actually the same as an easy one) we could have four CR 1/8 creatures.

To cut down on complexity, we're only going to have two roles, and two types of creature. We could have some deep dark cave with two Stirges and two Skitterlings - the latter being little flying rat-bug-things.

The skitterings are skirmishers, which use their 60 foot flying speed and flyby to attack and retreat without fear, and can potentially blind targets after doing a single point of damage. The Striges can then latch onto targets and potentially poison and then daze the targets (daze being a new condition that forces the creature to choose action, bonus action, or movement, but only one on their turn). The stirges can make it harder for the party to go after the skitterlings, while the skitterlings can attack with relative impunity, though ranged characters can focus down the skitterlings while melee folk take out the stirges.

For a higher-level encounter, let's say we want the party to have to fight the revelers at some vampiric court. We'll say our party is fairly high-level, 15 or so. For a standard encounter, with four player characters, we're looking at a total CR of 26. We could just use two Vampires, but instead, let's say this is some loner vampire who holds the souls of the noble family she slaughtered in an unending profane feast. So, we have our vampire, who is a skirmisher and can dart around the battlefield, but she's turned the slain Baron into a Wraith (Controller), and the Baron's house staff have been transformed into Ghoul Cravers (Minions) and his two children all turned into Wights (Soldiers).

Thus, the room has our vampire, a wraith, inflicting fear and the dazed condition, then the wights imposing disadvantage on attacks and stepping in to guard their father and the vampire, the ghouls locking down people in place, while the vampire is flitting around, striking at vulnerable targets.

Thus, it creates an incentive to get past the minions and soldiers, deal with the Wraith, and then focus attention on the vampire, who's likely been able to do some nasty things to the party before it can be properly dealt with.

    FM has some chapters for individual monsters, but most are grouped around types of monster like Kobolds or Goblins and such, and each section has a pretty good variety of creatures designed to play these different roles.

Even without these official labels, I'd definitely start looking at other monster stat blocks and thinking about what role they could play in an encounter. Bearing these roles in mind when doing a homebrew monster is also probably going to help a lot with the design, and it'll help you figure out what monsters to either take from existing books to fight alongside it, or to figure out what other monsters could be created to support this one's concept.

Imagining Pact Magic 2.0

 While we don't have playtest 7 yet, one thing in the recent interview with Jeremy Crawford that came up vis a vis the Warlock is that they'll be going back to using Pact Magic.

But what does that mean?

Fundamentally, what it means is that Warlocks' relationship with Spell Slots is different than other spellcasters. As it works in the 2014 rules, a Warlock begins with only a single spell slot, and caps out at 4 at tier 4 (while you get your second spell slot at level 2, subsequent increases are tied to your tier, so level 11 and 17). While this means you have far fewer spell slots than, say, a Wizard, the big difference is that you regain those spell slots on a short rest, rather than a long rest.

The other wrinkle is that those spell slots scale. At level 3, when a Wizard gets 2 2nd level spell slots and a fourth 1st level spell slot, the Warlock's two spell slots both upgrade to 2nd level. Thus, if you take a single short rest during the day, you actually get effectively four 2nd level spell slots to the Wizard's two (ignoring Arcane Recovery).

Warlock spell slots stop scaling up when you hit level 9, and remain 5th level slots through the rest of your Warlock career.

Spell slots, however, are not the full extent of your spellcasting fuel. Warlocks, also, in the 2014 version of the class, get a feature called Mystic Arcanum at 11th level, and higher-level versions of it at 13, 15, and 17.

Each of these Mystic Arcana let you choose a spell of the level that full casters get at that level - 6th when you're level 11, 7th at level 13, 8th at level 15, and 9th at level 17. The feature allows you to cast these spells without expending a spell slot (which you wouldn't have to do so with) once per long rest.

Now, other pure spellcasters are also fairly limited in their high-level spells. A 20th level Wizard has two 6th level spell slots, and only a single 7th, 8th, and 9th level slot. So, in practice, while that Wizard might be able to Disintegrate twice in a day, they otherwise have the same daily capacity for high-level spellcasting.

Again, if we assume a single short rest per day, the Warlock has effectively 8 5th level spell slots, compared to a Wizard's 3. It's just that the Wizard also has four 1st level slots and 3 2nd, 3rd, and 4th level slots.

The upshot here is that Warlocks basically don't want to spend spell slots on minor effects - ever. A Wizard can easily toss out a few 1st level slots on things like disguise self or mage armor when they're high level, because a 1st level Magic Missile isn't going to keep up with their scaled up cantrips (or at least not be significantly better.

But a Warlock needs to treat every spell slot as a precious resource. This, then, is part of the reason that unlimited effects, like many Eldritch Invocations as well as the amazing Eldritch Blast cantrip (especially amazing when souped up with invocations) are such core parts of the Warlock's class.

    This also creates a few incentives for a Warlock's use of spell slots.

First off, Warlocks love a spell that scales well. Armor of Agathys, for instance, is a defensive spell that gives you 5 temporary hit points, and as long as they persist, when a creature hits you with a melee attack, they take 5 cold damage. Both the temp HP and damage scale up, so that by level 9, you have 25 temp hp and are dealing 25 cold damage whenever a target hits you. While the first level version is going to probably only deal 5 damage, or 10 if you're lucky, against the right foes, a 5th level version could easily do 50 to 75 damage, or even 100 or more against a swarm of smaller foes.

If a spell doesn't scale with level, it starts to drop off in power compared to those that do.

Now, this scaling does hit a wall at level 9, because not only are our spells no longer automatically scaling to higher levels, but we actually no longer have any way to get them to scale further.

Warlocks were just shy of Wizards vis a vis the number of Summon spells from Tasha's they could learn (they only lack Summon Construct). These are actually great for a Warlock - a concentration spell that consistently does a lot of damage for an hour. But there's an odd breakpoint - Summon Aberration, Summon Fey, Summon Shadowspawn and Summon Undead are all under 5th level at base (most are 3rd level, while Aberration is 4th). These summon spells allow the summoned creature to attack at half the spell's level, rounded down, and the attacks hit harder depending on the spell level. So, cast at 5th level, each gets to attack twice per round, and the damage per hit is typically around 12.5-15 damage, or 25-30 damage for a full round (assuming attacks hit and don't crit).

Summon Fiend, however, is the only one of these that is higher-level, and thus we can only cast this at 6th level, and only if we've picked it as our mystic arcanum. The fiend's highest damage option will deal 2d6+3+the spell's level, which will average to 16 damage per attack, and gets to attack three times (48 damage per round).

Because of the oddities of Warlock magic, our Summon Undead will never be able to be cast at this level. And we'll never be able to upcast any of these to 8th level to get four attacks per round.

So, really, what's strange is that Warlocks are great with scaling spells up until they can cast 5th level spells, but then they're locked into spells that need to be cast at their "native" level.

    I'll confess that my concern - the lack of scaling for higher-level spells - is probably a lesser concern to most of the community. Indeed, the problem may be more with the choice of high-level spells, which tends to leave something to be desired.

But the larger issue I think for a lot of players is that feeling of having to be so precious with spell slots. Looking at your character sheet and seeing you merely had two up through tier 2, which many campaigns (and certainly published adventures) seem to be limited to, means you feel like you're always running out.

Personally, I think that's more of an issue of mentality - you need to think of yourself as the magic-martial class, who treats their Eldritch Blast like the Ranger treats their Longbow. But it's a concern that WotC tried to address in playtest 5 quite radically: giving Warlocks traditional spellcasting, only at a half-caster rate.

I wrote more than one post about how I disliked this change. It did give the Warlock more spell slots to spend, but it left them stuck with low-level slots that were not going to have the impact that higher-level spells would, and forced them to spend precious eldritch invocations on Mystic Arcanum features just to match pure caster spell level progression. One of the ironies to this was that you could cast a 6th level Summon Fiend several levels before you could cast a 4th level Summon Undead.

And so, while I've been critical of a lot of the One D&D playtest's backsliding toward conservatism, the reversion of Warlocks to using Pact Magic is something that I was happy to hear.

That said, what will Pact Magic look like?

    First, we should ask what the core of Pact Magic is.

Is it that we have fewer slots, but which recharge on a short rest?

Or is it that the spell slots scale up every two levels until we hit level 9/spell level 5?

    If we go with the first option, what if we took the idea of Warlocks as half casters and divided them not horizontally, but vertically? In other words, a Sorcerer starts with 2 1st level spell slots, then gets a third at level 2 and a fourth at level 3. What if a Warlock instead got 1 spell slot at level 1, and then got a second at level 3, and that was all the 1st level slots they'd get? But then, also at level 3, they get their sole 2nd level spell slot. This would leave them with about half (a little less) as many spell slots as other pure casters, but with the opportunity to get them back in the middle of the day. Yes, a level 9 Warlock only gets one 5th level spell to cast in a single encounter, but they also have a 4th, 3rd, 2nd, and two 1st level slots.

This would give Warlocks more spell slots to spend on smaller effects, but wouldn't have them butting up against other pure casters, and preserve the power space for effects like Eldritch Blast and the Pact Boons (which I hope remain similar to how they were in playtest 5, though I'm fine with Warlocks going back to all being Charisma-based).

    Alternatively, if the real thing is that they have scaling spell slots, what if we just gave them twice as many, but have them recharge on a long rest? At 1st level, you'd have two, and then four at level 2, up through 10th level, and the six at 11, and 8 at 17. Essentially, this would "bake in" the short rest you normally need to recharge these slots in the middle of the day. But it would deny you the chance to get another set of slots if your group is willing to take two short rests.

There are upsides and downsides here: currently, if a level 8 Warlock uses one of their spell slots and then the group takes their one short rest of the day, the Warlock might only effectively get to spend three spell slots per day, and this would ensure you get the full four. But, of course, there's the other scenario, where that Warlock could potentially get six in a day if the party's willing to take more short rests.

    Personally, I'd prefer something akin to the latter scenario. I actually like that the Warlock doesn't have a bunch of low-level spell slots kicking around, because I think this can then push the design of the class into more interesting invocation features that can take the place of low-level utility spells. If I want Mage Armor, I don't want to cast 1st level spells! I'll just take Armor of Shadows.

The progression of that spell slot system could also be adjusted for smoother power progression. Maybe you start with two, get three at level 3, four at level 5, six at level 7, seven at level 9, eight at level 11, and then maybe nine at level 15 and round out at ten at level 17. 10 5th level slots might seem like a ton, but if it's per long rest, that's actually fewer than a current tier 4 Warlock gets with two short rests in a day.

In theory playtest 7 is due soon, though whether that means in the next few days or the next couple weeks I don't know for sure. I'm eager to see what their next pass on the whole thing is.

(As a note, I think my issues with Mystic Arcanum could be solved thusly: you learn a spell of X level (6th, 7th, 8th, 9th) and you get a single spell slot of that level. Unlike the spell slots granted by your pact magic feature, these only come back on a long rest. This would allow upcasting of 1-5th level spells and also allow these spells to be upcast. It could even give us the opportunity to learn other high-level spells amongst our "spells known.)