 Howdy how's it going, my name's Dabby Chappy, so a while back I made a video talking about how D&D doesn't need any sort of specific power level to be played viably, and I talked about how one of the main reasons for that is that it's the DM's job to balance encounters for the party that they have, and not the idea of a party that doesn't exist. I got a lot of pushback for the claim that DMs are required to balance their games, and it prompted me to write an entire script detailing out not just the importance of balancing your games, but how it's not even a question, it's just an omnipresent part of how the game is played and you literally cannot have a game without it being balanced to some extent. I'll still release that video one day, but I realized after thinking about it that I wasn't actually tackling the problem, I was just complaining that it was there. And since the main rebuttal of DMs should always balance encounters is, well I don't know how, I decided to do my job and walk you through the process of how to explicitly create encounters with your party in mind. Now a few ground rules here, I'm not gonna talk about encounters against effectively invincible enemies, or fights that you're otherwise supposed to either lose or circumvent without fighting. I don't consider them combat encounters because they're intrinsically designed to be one without fighting. I also won't talk about the grand concepts of how and when to insert combat encounters into your game, because I already have a video on that, which you can find by clicking this weird annotation thing that I never use. And as always, if you have your own way of balancing your games, feel free to leave them in the comments and play your games however you want. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So assembling an encounter in D&D isn't the hardest thing in the world, but it is a little deceiving. Every enemy in 5e has a CR, which stands for Challenge Rating, and it denotes the level at which a four person party should be if they want a baseline, average fight. So if Monster is CR1, then four first level characters should be a match for it. If it's CR7, then four 7th level characters. And if it's CR1 4th, that means that a single first level character is enough to handle the mangy goblin in the kitchen. At early levels, CR is a decent measurement for setting up your encounters, or at least it used to be before Power Creep turned everybody into demigods. But the higher level you go, the more varied every class's power gets, and the whole thing sort of goes off the rails rather quickly. So CR is more of a guideline than an actual code. With that in mind, I'll be going over the character building secret so that if you're a DM that's scared of doing math that isn't disguised as fantasy violence, there's an easy way to build encounters that should show you the ropes until you develop your own way of doing it. So you'll start by following the CR given by the book, and setting up an encounter based off of that. The encounter need not be important, but the point of it is to see how difficult it is against your players. After the fight is over, see how well they did, and then look at the health and damage output of your monsters. The next time that you make an encounter, if the last fight was too easy, gradually add more monsters to it, or swap them with monsters that have more health and damage. And if it was too hard, do the opposite. Always err on the side of caution when you're doing this, because this method is definitely a cheat for people who haven't gotten a feel for it yet. So you'll get varying results, and a fight that is too easy will be boring, but a fight that's too hard will burn resources and leave players frustrated. Pretty much every DM uses this method, or has used it in the past. It's just so easy to understand, so you've probably heard of this system before. But another way to look like a master without actually being one is for you to take a step back from the role-playing and take a look at the game. The secret to building an encounter is understanding that the monsters aren't real. Every monster is just numbers with some art to go with it, and I can swap out the art with anything else, and you'll believe me, because how would you know? I can take a Tearask, file off the serial numbers, and then send you into battle against an animated Crunchwrap Supreme, and you'll be none the wiser. Likewise, since a Tearask is nothing more than numbers and some flavor text, I can edit those numbers to make it completely unbeatable, or I can let the Ultimate Monster be conquered by level 5s, based on what I want the battle to become. It's why I'm so thoroughly unimpressed by people who break the game so that they can 1v1 the Ultimate Monster, because congrats, you have misunderstood the way this game works so you could brag about doing math. Like, if you want to be invisible, I'll say it can smell you, or it goes off to do something more important than you. If your plan to beat the Tearask is flying over it, then I'll say the Tearask can jump really high. I'm not trying to ruin your fun, but if the point is to have a climb-active boss fight that you have to harness all of your seam into blast through, then it's my job as the DM to make sure that that happens and that you're not gonna be a two-pump chump about it. When building an encounter, this means that you don't have to swap out a creature that you really want to use just because you're worried that it'll be too tough to fight. You can lower its health, make it do less attacks, decrease the amount of dice it rolls for damage, lower its spell DC, anything. If you want an in-character reason for this change, you can say that it's a juvenile creature, that it's been injured before, or that there isn't a reason at all. This one's just built different. If you want a good example of this, take a look at the Dead and Thay adventure in Tales from the Yawning Portal, where adventurers are traveling through a pit infested with tons of crazy cool monsters that have all been scaled up or down to fit a level nine part. In fact, you can use this during a fight too. Sometimes your players start to get overwhelmed by the Den of Ogres, not by their own fault, but because you accidentally overestimated their chances. And now you're sweating because three players are down and the wizard has to resort to fighting with his sandal. If it gets that far, there are narrative ways that you can resolve the conflict without killing the party, but another way to fix your problem is by using the DM's secret weapon, cheating. The players are unable to see your monster's health, so when you seriously mess up, you can retroactively shave away some of their health or lower their AC. Or they can coincidentally miss a couple more times than they were supposed to. Obviously you shouldn't let the players know about this or else they'll feel like the agency is being robbed of them and you should learn how to prevent these situations from happening in the first place before you start relying on DM Fiat. But if you're the one who made the mistake, then you should make efforts to fix it. It's interesting that this concept is talked about a lot in regards to increasing difficulty, such as by adding in a second wave of kobolds that the first ones are dealt with too soon, or by giving the BBEG a second phase boss fight final form if it gets defeated anticlimactically, which is good advice, but it's always so taboo to talk about doing it the other way around to make it easier on the players. It just seems silly to me. But the most hyper-fixative way for you to ensure that your encounters will be perfect is to play them yourself. It sounds cringey, but if you're feeling really awkward about a certain fight, you can take your player's stats, take the monsters and mash them together like the airport scene from Captain America. Play out the fight on your own, understanding that players will probably make different choices because they're different people, and adjust the fight based off of the gathered data. It's the most surefire way to know how a session is going to go, and if you really want to be anal about it, you can replay the fight multiple times to get a bigger sample size. Once you get used to the basics of balancing, you'll likely start to create your own shortcuts for setting up encounters, and then soon enough, your games will be perfectly balanced as all things should be. But that about to it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Be sure to leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, check out my social media in the description below, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can balance out my checkbook. But yeah, Davy out.