Encounters

Planning encounters can easily take up most of the time devoted to preparing adventures. The good news is that it is the most fun. The endless variety of combinations or min-maxing can mean tons of entertainment. A players are always limited by what they find within the context of the game. A DM has much more leeway in selecting what they can use. However, just remember that whatever cool items given to the villains will most likely find its way into the player's hands. Beware of what you wish. In order to maintain good game balance keep a few things in mind.

Challenge Ratings

Trust in the system when preparing encounters. The proper way to make combat or dungeons harder is to run the encounters one after the other and not by adding more creatures to each encounter. Remember this when structuring the adventure. Each encounter is designed to drain resources. Wizards and clerics run out of spells and fighters run out of hit points. Space the encounters out by an hour of game time and not real player time. Let spells durations from the previous encounter expire. Run the encounter again with the same statistics.

The experience you award will reflect the difference between the two encounters. The first being relatively easy when the character were fresh on spells and hit points and the second being a little harder when the characters were more depleted. If you find players are one shot dying wonders or instant kills then you're probably having problems structuring encounters. Try using this Excel spreadsheet to help managing Challenge Ratings, Experience, and Gold for a particular adventure. It makes a nice printout to bring along to the game.

Treasure - Character Wealth By Level and Community Wealth

Table 5-1 on page 145 of the DMG lists the balance guidelines for published D&D adventures. For each level, it lists the maximum price in gold pieces for a magic item that a character might possess. Table 4-40 on page 137 of the DMG lists the price of the most expensive item available in a community. Keep this in mind when building villains.

So figure out how much treasure should be awarded based on the PC's level. Use this as seed money to purchase magic items for NPCs or monsters and leave some as loot. PCs get a lot of magic items by winning it in combat but remember not all of it will roll into the PC coffers. Some of it will get missed or used by the NPCs for combat. Include a lot more disposable magic items it is an excellent way to buff up NPCs and make them more challenging.

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