Introduction
Hello and welcome back to the second installment of DM Crash Course! Today we will be covering the three major categories that help spice things up in your campaign by introducing two tools that I normally use and a short table that helps me measure how long my session will be. In the previous session we discussed world building, building a flow chart for your story and finally drafting your first town, so primarily this will be affecting both our first and second process: World Building and Our Flow Chart.Session Length
A session can range anywhere from a quick 30-60 minutes to a twelve hour power quest. It just depends on how large your group is and how many encounters the party is facing or will be dealing with. In general I use the rule of thumb in the following for a group of 4-5 adventurers and assuming that all of the encounters are set to a medium difficulty:
| Time of Session | # of Encounters |
|---|---|
| >= 30 minutes | 1 |
| 30-60 minutes | 2 |
| 60-120 minutes | 4 |
| 120-180 minutes | 8 |
| 180-240 minutes | 12 |
| 240-300 minutes | 16 |
| 300 minutes+ | 16+ |
If your group happens to be larger you will have to shift down the total amount of encounters, because more players means more thought and conversation, here is a modified chart for a group of 6-8 adventurers:
| Time of Session | # of Encounters |
|---|---|
| >= 30 minutes | 1 |
| 30-60 minutes | 1-2 |
| 60-120 minutes | 2-4 |
| 120-180 minutes | 4-6 |
| 180-240 minutes | 6-10 |
| 240-300 minutes | 10-12 |
| 300 minutes+ | 12+ |
Now that we have an official number for encounters you might be asking yourself, while designing, what constitutes as an encounter, and in general, that could be anything that poses a risk to the adventurers and will reward experiences in one value or another. You might also be asking yourself what constitutes difficulty? Well onwards to explain Kobold Fight Club and shifting encounters upwards or downwards in difficulty.
Encounters
Get ready to bookmark your new favorite tool when it comes to designing an encounter with monsters: https://kobold.club/fight/
Kobold Fight Club allows you to quickly build an encounter for your party, but the drawback is that it does not have the stat blocks for any of the creatures. So you will need to at least have access to the books you are looking up or using for a source. So let's play pretend and assume that we do not have a computer, a smartphone, or the internet and have to design an encounter by hand. Assuming that you have a party of 5 adventurers that are all at level 1 we will be working on designing an easy, medium, hard and deadly encounter. I want to take our mascot, kobolds, as our adversary but do not know how to balance an encounter.
That means that if you threw 12 kobolds at a level 1 group, they would be dead. If you threw 2 kobolds at the group, they would squash them in the first round. So how do we figure out what the core number is? The first step is to look at the CR rating of a kobold, in this case it is a CR 1/8. CR, or Challenge Rating, is deviously deceptive in Fifth Edition, but if you look at the total party number you can ascertain that 1 player could easily kill a kobold before the kobold kills them. So we can assume that our party can easily take on a group of kobolds between 2-4 and rightfully so. That would be considered an easy encounter.
A medium encounter would be between 5-6 kobolds. That means the party could potentially die, or at least one member could drop to zero quickly. This is where you should strive to build encounters. Any higher or lower will either bore the group or potentially wipe them out, but in case you are wondering 7 kobolds would be considered a hard encounter. Someone will die or at least be dying and there is a potential of a party wipe. From 8+, the party will potentially die or multiple members will die.
Another way to handle encounters, if you don't want to run a bunch of creatures at once is to use one big creature or mix your encounter. An example of a medium encounter using kobolds would be: 2 kobolds and their pet crocodile (CR 1/2). The group could also handle a CR 1 monster to themselves as a medium encounter, like an animated suit of armor with a kobold.
I implore you to go play with Kobold Fight Club and get an idea of what is the right challenge for your party.
Kobold Fight Club allows you to quickly build an encounter for your party, but the drawback is that it does not have the stat blocks for any of the creatures. So you will need to at least have access to the books you are looking up or using for a source. So let's play pretend and assume that we do not have a computer, a smartphone, or the internet and have to design an encounter by hand. Assuming that you have a party of 5 adventurers that are all at level 1 we will be working on designing an easy, medium, hard and deadly encounter. I want to take our mascot, kobolds, as our adversary but do not know how to balance an encounter.
That means that if you threw 12 kobolds at a level 1 group, they would be dead. If you threw 2 kobolds at the group, they would squash them in the first round. So how do we figure out what the core number is? The first step is to look at the CR rating of a kobold, in this case it is a CR 1/8. CR, or Challenge Rating, is deviously deceptive in Fifth Edition, but if you look at the total party number you can ascertain that 1 player could easily kill a kobold before the kobold kills them. So we can assume that our party can easily take on a group of kobolds between 2-4 and rightfully so. That would be considered an easy encounter.
A medium encounter would be between 5-6 kobolds. That means the party could potentially die, or at least one member could drop to zero quickly. This is where you should strive to build encounters. Any higher or lower will either bore the group or potentially wipe them out, but in case you are wondering 7 kobolds would be considered a hard encounter. Someone will die or at least be dying and there is a potential of a party wipe. From 8+, the party will potentially die or multiple members will die.
Another way to handle encounters, if you don't want to run a bunch of creatures at once is to use one big creature or mix your encounter. An example of a medium encounter using kobolds would be: 2 kobolds and their pet crocodile (CR 1/2). The group could also handle a CR 1 monster to themselves as a medium encounter, like an animated suit of armor with a kobold.
I implore you to go play with Kobold Fight Club and get an idea of what is the right challenge for your party.
Treasure
Now, you've made it to the end of your session and you have all of these grumpy, grumpy players who had died, almost died are dying and/or were never touched, rubbing their hands together in hopes of gathering glinting and glimmering glory. There are several ways to approach this and this all depends on your setting.
A high magical campaign might see potions and scrolls as a common reward in treasure with the occasional magical item. Magical items are considered not as rare as normal and even NPCs and monsters could be wielding them on the battlefield.
A medium magical campaign uses potions and scrolls with a mix of more monetary coinage and gems. This is about average road.
A low magical campaign rarely sees a potion or scroll and magical items are a process of exploring high and low and in hopes of maybe finding that +1 long sword after five or six levels. Most rewards tend to be coinage, gems, arts, etc.
So, because we live in a technological era let us look at: http://donjon/sh/5e
Here it allows you to roll for treasure, trinkets, magical items, anything. The real key is to match your treasure with the encounter or session difficulty. Did your party raid a castle? Roll two or three hordes as the session treasure. Did your party just kill bandits? Roll a few treasure rolls and choose/roll a 1d10. It is a super easy and quick way to keep the game moving without bogging the game down to go through books to look at tables, to roll on tables, to determine that the tables are correct.
Join me next week as I talk about characters, variant rules, and the dreaded Session Zero.
A high magical campaign might see potions and scrolls as a common reward in treasure with the occasional magical item. Magical items are considered not as rare as normal and even NPCs and monsters could be wielding them on the battlefield.
A medium magical campaign uses potions and scrolls with a mix of more monetary coinage and gems. This is about average road.
A low magical campaign rarely sees a potion or scroll and magical items are a process of exploring high and low and in hopes of maybe finding that +1 long sword after five or six levels. Most rewards tend to be coinage, gems, arts, etc.
So, because we live in a technological era let us look at: http://donjon/sh/5e
Here it allows you to roll for treasure, trinkets, magical items, anything. The real key is to match your treasure with the encounter or session difficulty. Did your party raid a castle? Roll two or three hordes as the session treasure. Did your party just kill bandits? Roll a few treasure rolls and choose/roll a 1d10. It is a super easy and quick way to keep the game moving without bogging the game down to go through books to look at tables, to roll on tables, to determine that the tables are correct.
Join me next week as I talk about characters, variant rules, and the dreaded Session Zero.
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