The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
Session Prep and Encounter Building in the D&D 2024 DMG – Lazy RPG Talk Show
Mon, 11 Nov 2024
D&D and RPG news and commentary by Mike Shea of https://slyflourish.com Contents 00:00 Show Start 01:21 D&D & RPG News: Blades in the Dark Deep Cuts 03:37 Commentary: What Do You Need to Prep Your Session? 36:52 Commentary: Encounter Building in the D&D 2024 DMG and the Lazy Encounter Benchmark Links Blades in the Dark Deep Cuts Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master Lazy GM Resource Document The Lazy Encounter Benchmark 2024 DMG Versus the Lazy Encounter Benchmark Alphastream on Encounter Building Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books:
Today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show, we're going to take a quick look at the Blades in the Dark expansion that just came out. We have two big topics that are both going to take a look at the D&D 2024 Dungeon Masters Guide, but then also talk larger about the tips that we can pick up from this that we can actually use in our game.
The first one of these is the question of what do you actually need to prep for a session of your game? A topic that I have been talking about for many years, but we're going to dive into again, and we're going to take a look at it in the context of the 2024 Dungeon Masters.
guide we're also going to take a look at encounter building with the lazy encounter benchmark something else that i spent a significant amount of time working on and compare that to the encounter building guidelines that are offered in the dnd 2024 all today on the lazy rpg talk show i'm mike shea your pal from sly flourish here to talk about all things in tabletop role-playing games
The Lazy RPG Talk Show is brought to you by the patrons of Sly Flourish. Patrons get access to all kinds of tips, tricks, tools, adventure scenarios, city source books, all kinds of stuff to help you run your fantasy role-playing games. You also get access to the awesome Lazy RPG community, the Sly Flourish community over on Discord, and you get to help me put on shows like this.
To the patrons of Sly Flourish, thank you so much for your outstanding support. I missed it when it first happened, but there is now an official Blades in the Dark expansion called Deep Cuts that was made by Jonathan Harper. If you recall, I ran a Blades in the Dark campaign about, I guess it'd be a couple of years back by now. We went and ran a whole bunch of different RPGs.
Blades in the Dark was one of them. I had trouble running it as a game master. The style of the game didn't sit with me well, but I have huge respect for Blades in the Dark. I think it is a really outstanding role-playing game. Many people have enjoyed it thoroughly. It has this kind of steampunk heist idea going on to it. It's really fun.
And there is an expansion for it called the Blades in the Dark Deep Cuts. You can pick this up on itch.io on John Harper's site. You can find a link to it in the show notes. 10 bucks gets you access to this whole thing. And let's take a look at what it has. It's my first time actually really opening it. I just picked it up. I picked it up Friday, I think.
So in it, you find a whole bunch of new sheets for the different kinds of characters that you can play. I really like them. These are really cool. Oh, look, vampire. Oh, man, I'm in. You get to play a vampire? Oh, and cult. Yeah. Or is that a group? I think these are groups. So you can both be a cult member and a vampire. That's very cool.
So it looks like new sheets are one of the things that you get in here, but I really love one page sheets that you can print out in that sort of apocalypse world style workbooks.
here is a deep cock setting and systems expansion fortune the dark 118 page expansion so for 10 bucks you're getting a pretty good amount of stuff i have not looked at it this is literally the first time i'm opening it up so it looks like it's got a lot of cool stuff though i'm a big fan of all the stuff that i found in blades in the dark the idea of clocks worked really well for me so i was it was no problem i did not get a preview copy of this i went and picked up my own copy for 10 bucks
If you are a fan of Blades in the Dark, check out the Blades in the Dark deep cuts. It was kind of, it showed up on my radar. It wasn't something that I immediately heard about. So I heard about it on another show. I was over on Morris's unofficial tabletop podcast on Friday and they mentioned it. And I was like, ooh, and during the podcast, I bought it.
And I'm like, well, it cost me $10 to be on this podcast because I picked it up. So I think it's pretty cool. So take a look at the Blades in the Dark deep cuts now available on itch.io. Link is down in the show notes.
What do you need to prepare for your session is a it's one of the reasons why you hear me as often as you might is because I don't think many books, if any books do a really good job of telling you what to do when you need to sit down to prepare for a fantasy role playing game. There are definitely some systems that do.
One recently that I heard about was Mothership, where people were talking about how Mothership says, take a piece of paper and write this stuff down. The game Dungeon World, the fantasy version of Apocalypse World, had a really good idea of like, this is what your first session looks like and the stuff you should prepare for it, and this is what your other sessions look like.
And many of those ideas are ideas that helped inform my decisions and my thoughts about building the eight steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. So I have my own sort of instruction for what to do when you're sitting down and prep your game.
If you watch my YouTube show, I do a lazy GM prep show that I've now done for, I think, like three years and hundreds of sessions where you can watch me go through those steps while I'm preparing for my own role playing game. I started that show specifically because people said, hey, I read your book, but I'd really love to see you do the prep. And so I was like, yeah, that's a good idea.
Cause I have to prep for my game anyway. And so I have hundreds of them for many campaigns, probably, I don't know about a dozen campaigns, but like more than five or six big campaigns where I go through the steps, the eight steps from return. And one of my beliefs about return of the lazy dungeon master is that the re it's a popular book. Like, you know, it's, I'm very, very proud.
It's a gold, any award-winning book has sold many, many tens, maybe a hundred thousand copies. It's done very, very well. And I think one of the reasons why it's done really well is that it really narrowed down that topic of like, here's what you need to do when you're sitting down to do your prep. And it did so in a way that made it very flexible so that you could say, you know what?
I don't do it that way. I want to change it slightly. And you could change it slightly. Or I... I want to expand this part out and do it slightly differently. And if you watch my prep videos, you'll see that that's exactly what I do. Sometimes I need more stuff and more sections than others. Sometimes I don't need a section at all and I cut it.
Sometimes I need another section that I don't really have. And so I kind of fill it out. But generally speaking, that framework works. So all of this is important when we take a look at the adventure scenarios that exist inside the 2024 D&D Dungeon Masters Guide. And that's really where I wanted to bring this topic up.
And if there's one main point I would like you to get from this whole conversation, if there's one thing you can grab onto that I think is really valuable when it comes to thinking about your prep and something that I've seen, the reason I'm bringing this up is I've seen so many GMs get kind of caught around this idea is your notes only serve you. You don't have to give your notes to anyone else.
They are not the instructions that you need to give to someone else to run an adventure. They are the notes that you need to run the adventure you're going to run. And the reason this is important is because you can usually get away with a lot fewer notes than you think you can, because you already remember the stuff that you thought of when you were actually going through your prep.
So this is why, like I say, when you're, when you take a map, you can print like a Dyson map and you can just write like a word and
on a location and it's because that word might be enough in your mind to be able to build out the rest of it you don't have to fill in everything out you don't have to come up with great big long random encounter tables because you can roll a random encounter table before you do your prep and then plop that one in so there's a lot of things that you can do to speed up your prep and to make your prep notes significantly smaller when you remember that they are not a published adventure
They are not an adventure scenario you're giving to someone else. They are yours for your use. And I think that context is really important when we take a look at the D&D 2024, the adventures that are inside the D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide, because they talk a lot about this.
So an interesting thing about the adventure scenarios that are inside the D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide is they are very small. In the Dungeon Master's Guide themselves, they are one half of a page. They are one column on one side of the page for the adventure scenario.
And when I first heard that, when I heard that they were going to be a half a page big, I was like, I don't think that's enough. And not even enough from like the sense of someone writing an adventure for me to run, which is certainly very, very brief. But even in my own notes, they take up a page, right? I use a full page.
I just did my prep not 20 minutes ago, and it took up two columns on a single piece of paper. So I was like, I was really curious about what kind of stuff they were going to include in one column. The interesting thing about these adventures, so there's five of these adventures, they cover a different range of levels for each one, and they are all very small.
They're all, again, one half of a page in the Dungeon Master's Guide. There's an interesting thing about these scenarios, which is, unlike...
your own notes that you write for yourself to run your game these were written by somebody else to give to you in this case i'm guessing it was either chris perkins or james wyatt that wrote these i would guess it was probably chris perkins who wrote these adventures out with the intention that they could show you how to run an adventure like this but where people are going to get stuck or have gotten stuck is they they look at this and say could i run this adventure and the answer could be no because i don't know what was in chris perkins's head when he wrote this
The other question, though, that we want to ask is, if I wrote my own adventure notes like this for an adventure I came up with, would that be enough? And the answer to that might be yes, because a lot of the context that's missing from these notes you would have in your head if you were the one that wrote it in the first place.
Chris Perkins had ideas about how this was going to play out, and he might be able to take those notes and then run an adventure like that, playing out from the stuff that he knew. So that's one of the things that I think is a hard thing to understand about the adventures in the Dungeon Master's Guide is they are not published adventures.
These are not adventures that a designer at Wizards of the Coast wrote so that they could hand it to you so that you could grab it and run with it. Now, maybe you read this and you're inspired enough to say, I actually could run an adventure from this. Like maybe I have to add a few things or I have to style it differently than I normally do. But generally speaking, I can run an adventure.
I could run this adventure and I probably could. When I look at these, I could probably I could probably run them. You know, there's the first level. I'm going to kind of focus on like the fallowed stream, right? The first level adventure that's there. And we looked at it. So that's the context that I think is important. You can see like it literally fits on one screen, right?
I can almost fit the entire adventure. I think I can fit the entire adventure on one screen. So one question when we look at this is if we were to write our own notes this way, if we were to kind of sit down with a piece of paper and say, I've got a bunch of people that I'm going to entertain later today with a game, what do I need in order to fill it out? Are these, is this enough?
Is this the kind of notes that I could keep? So that's something that I really wanted to keep in mind. You know, can you really get away with a half a page of notes? Are these enough?
But one question I had, and this is something where I get stuck in my own rut, I think a little bit, about the expectations from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and the things that work for me is, this is all great, but I don't know how I'm supposed to start my game. I don't know what the first thing is that happens. I don't know how to take the characters and bring them in.
So these adventures have things like a situation. An alien fungus in a cave is polluting the stream that flows past the village of High Eerie. The fungus has spawned vile creatures in and around the cave. That's the situation. And the hook is the folk of High Eerie are noticing fungal growths on the riverbanks and a layer of scum on the water.
The characters might live in the village or a contact in the free city of Greyhawk might ask them to investigate. That's really everything you have about how to get started. And that doesn't tell you how to get started. And that's why, again, I, of course, think that what I have come up with is the right approach, which is a strong start.
A strong start is step two of the eight steps of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. The first step being review the characters, which isn't in here, but other parts of the book talk about the fact that you should understand your players and things like that. But I really think that like how to just what do I do when I sit down? I got a bunch of friends of mine.
They're sitting around the table or we're sitting on a virtual tabletop. We're getting started. They're still talking about real life things and I need to get them into the game. What do I do to bring them into the game? What's that first thing that happens? And I don't think you can sort of, you know, many GMs do this, which is you start passively. You're in the city.
You're in the village of High Erie. There's a tavern nearby. There's a blacksmith shop. There's, you know, a town council and there's a bunch of villagers walking around like stuff. What do you want to do? Oh my God, that's, you know, I don't know. I'll go to Tavern, I guess, right? I don't know. I'm going to go to Blacksmith and see if they got any fancy swords. I don't know.
I'm going to wander around, right? The problem is that like that doesn't give anything to the players to say, hey, here's this thing that's going on. A strong start is far better. And an example of a strong start for the fouled stream, when maybe like, you know, if you're a good improvisational GM, you could come up with this is...
You're walking through the village of High Eerie along your journeys. All of you have traveled for some time, but you're relatively well-rested. Nothing really occurred. When all of a sudden you hear a scream and a woman comes running from the nearby river and two twig blights are chasing her away from the river.
They're covered in weird mushrooms that are popping as these things chase after the woman. What do you do? That's a strong start, right? The strong start is something happens. It doesn't always have to be combat. In that case, it's combat, but two twig blights is going to be pretty easy to beat. So it's mostly like come to the defense of the woman and then the mayor will come out.
And now you have a few things. Not only do you have a hook, which is weird mushroom covered twig blights have come out of the river and chased one of the villagers. You also have a situation to draw them into the game at the same time. So to me, the strong start is more useful than a situation or a hook to tell me as a GM or remind me since it's my own notes that,
What I need to do to get things started in the game that I'm going to run. So I'm a big believer in the strong start as a way to go forward. And when I look at these, these don't tell me how to start. Now again, Chris Perkins wrote them and if he was running them, he probably would know how to start, but he didn't write that down.
Now, maybe if you wrote your own notes and you said, well, here's the situation and here's the hook and here are the scenes, maybe you would have enough to know where your game was going to start anyway and you didn't need to write it down. I myself think it's very valuable to write down what's the first thing that happens.
My last game, which I just did the prep for recently, the strong start was Tamarly Morris Jemborn Takes a Walk. Right. The local pain in the ass lord of the well station that they're at is walking around, both desiring to be worshipped by the people around him and also to be kind of checking on everything, even though he doesn't know what to check on.
Not a combat situation, but something is happening that's going to draw the players into the game. So I think that that's something that's really interesting. What are the connectors? One of the things when I look at this is how do you get from point A to point C?
We have these encounters that says like a mile upstream from the village, a stream flows into the river with a little wood on the river's side, from a little wood on the river's south side. Characters can tell that the stream is a source of the pollution. Well, what got them from High Eerie to go investigate the stream and go to the First Fork?
Also, you got to the First Fork, but what's actually at the First Fork? Other than that, you see that there's a corruption there, right? Journey upstream. So I guess they're continuing to go upstream. Bora Grove, a kindly Trent, keeps watch over the wood and meets with the characters as they follow the polluted stream. He knows the source of the corruption is inside a cave.
He gives the characters a magic acorn to swallow it. Does this other thing. Okay. So that's pretty interesting. But like, I guess the idea is they continue to follow the stream, but there's nothing that's really telling me. how to get from point A to point B. Now, maybe it's still enough.
Maybe again, if you wrote these notes yourself, you would know how to get them from point A to point B. You don't really need to spell that out every time. So, but that was something when I looked at this, I was like, you know, I don't know that I, I don't really have connectors in my own notes. There isn't like a step in return for connectors to get people from one scene to the next.
But if you look at the scenes, generally when I outline the scenes and maybe this is good enough is I know how they're going to get from one to the other. So that might be, that might be enough for me to figure out how they're getting from one, from one place to the other. One thing I really like is they talk about one of the maps, right?
So here we have the corrupted cave and it says, use the underdark Warren's map and appendix B. We're going to open that up so we can take a look at it. So that's the underground Warren's map. And it says, ignore the secret door and the inner chambers behind it. Close off the tunnels leading off the map to the southeast and north. The characters enter the cave in the southeast following the stream.
The cave's main features and inhabitants are as follows. So you kind of like cut off. Where does it have the secret? I don't see the secret entrance. So it starts in the Southeast. Oh, I guess. So you ignore, you can ignore this whole inner area here, right? And instead you just fill it out.
One thing I really like about that is the idea that you can go ahead and take a published map and modify it to support your adventure. That's a really good, lazy trick, right? I'm going to make a statement and many of you may hear this and put your hands over your ears and your eyes are going to bug out and go, Oh, what? You don't have to make any maps, right? You don't have to make any maps.
There are so many maps on the web. In particular, Dyson maps. Dyson was the artist who made this map for the Dungeon Master's Guide. And there are, I think, like 12 or 15 maps like this in the Dungeon Master's Guide. But Dyson on dysonlogos.blog has 1,300 maps of this style. And these maps work great. I've been using them for years now. They're fantastic maps. They're great.
You can modify them easily. You can twist them and you can turn them. You can turn them around. You don't need to draw maps.
you can if you want but don't pretend that you need to you can if you enjoy drawing a map out for a thing and i've done it from time to time but a lot of times i'm busy and a lazy trick is grab a map and modify it and do what they say here scratch off certain areas you say there's a rock area here and you can print out that map and you can draw little areas that block off just a section of that map so that you can use it for your own game when you want a smaller map really good trick i'm glad they use it in here a bunch in their in their own things and i think that that's an outstanding an outstanding lazy trick you don't need to make a map
With all of these different adventures, like I've been poking at the level one adventure, but if you look at all of the adventures, one neat thing about these adventures, they all cover a different variety of types of adventures and show you how that could work. Like there's only five of them in here, but each of them kind of gives you an idea of what they're looking at.
There's exploration and dungeon crawling. There's negotiating a situation. There's one for long distance travel. You travel for a big, long while. That's the one where you're getting betrayed by your NPC the whole time. So it turns out you're wasting all your time. But other than that, you're traveling for a long time. And then there's one for dealing with a social situation.
So they cover a good range and a recognition of the different kinds of situations. But the boreal ball, for example, the seventh level one, where you go to a ball in the Feywild and you deal with it. And it's even shorter than the other ones. Right. It's a really, really short adventure. And I saw people there like, man, I could not run that whole situation with just what's there.
Like I need, I definitely need more than that. So the idea of like the situation in the hook is commonplace across all of them, but that's where I really think like the situation and hook could be drawn together into a few things like a strong start. So I think they're very interesting, but of course I have.
my approach uh that i use uh for the eight steps from return of the lazy dungeon master i've spent a lot of time with them i spent a lot of time working with them before i had written return of the lazy dungeon master and now that it's been out a few years i've used it myself hundreds of times i've talked to hundreds of gms who have used it every one of them says oh i love it but i always do things a little differently over here which i'm like that's outstanding that's how it's designed you get to design your own prep system that you like
and that can really work what's interesting to me is the original return of the lazy dungeon master the original book that i wrote back in like i don't know it's like 2014 i think it was a while back only had three steps and those steps were where does your game start the strong start what three scenes might take place and what npcs what three npcs might the characters meet
And my idea was you really didn't need even more than that. Now, in this case, the scenes were more like the scenes that you'd find in here. Because, like, you can look at these adventures and see, like, a scene could be a shrieker fungus just inside the cave alerts inhabitants to the character's arrival.
On watch near the entrance and quick to respond are four Bullywug warriors who have fungal growths on them, right? That's like an entire scene. And, you know, the berserk bear, you know, you go to a bear, but it turns out that the bear can be cured if you do this other thing. The ooze is lair, right? That's a scene.
So the interesting thing is like a scene, if you, if you look at the steps from return from the original lazy dungeon master scenes had a lot of stuff in them. They had NPCs in them. They had monsters in them. They had situations in them. You packed a lot into a scene. That's much bigger than the scenes that I did for Return, which was really just a list of the scenes that might take place.
And then you filled out the scenes with the details you had. But it's interesting to me that this style actually sort of matches that idea of the original Lazy Dungeon Master style. Now, I found after years of using that style that it wasn't enough for me. And I wrote the book, right? This is the book that I wrote.
And one of the reasons I wrote Return is that I no longer followed my own steps that I wrote about in the Lazy Dungeon Master. And it was a popular book. People liked it. People were very complimentary of it. In fact, the very first Amazon review I had for Return was, I wish it was more like the original Lazy Dungeon Master, which made me sad. And that review is still up there. But hey, whatever.
It worked out anyway. And I realized like, no, there's really more that we need.
And also there was this idea of like, there's even the idea of breaking up this components of our prep into separate sections so that we could improvise different scenes as they played out by pulling monsters or NPCs or treasure or secrets and clues and everything and building scenes as we go was a new approach that I took for return.
Just as a quick review, the eight steps for Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master are who are the characters, where does your game start, what scenes might take place, what secrets and clues can the characters discover during the game, what locations might they explore during the game, what NPCs might they meet during the game, what monsters might they face, and what treasure they might acquire.
And I spent a lot of time thinking about those eight steps. Frankly, I don't like having eight steps. Eight is a lot of steps. I have to think. I've written about it and talked about it and used them for years. And I still have to kind of sit and think about what are all the steps. But I really think they're all pretty vital.
If I thought any of them weren't necessary overall, I would have killed it. In fact, it started off with seven. It didn't have scenes at first. And then I realized like, oh, we really need scenes because everybody does it. Everybody needs that loose outline of what they had. So scenes made their way back into it to eight steps. But I was loathe to add any more.
And honestly, I would love a way to reduce it. And maybe you could reduce it if you start to combine the aspects of these different steps into one area, which I think is kind of what the scenarios in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide do.
Because if you look at it, and actually Elizabeth from our Patreon, from the Patreon Discord server, has a, she went through and took one of the notes and highlighted the sections to determine which of the eight steps are actually in these notes just spread out. And the example, Elizabeth is the best. Yes. Robert Table says, Elizabeth is the best. Elizabeth is absolutely the best.
She's a moderator on our Sly Flourish Discord. Fantastic person. Great creator and has a lot of her own work available. So, but one of the things she did here was say, like, if we look at the eight steps, what are the eight steps are in here? And so yellow stuff are like secrets and clues, right? Yeah.
That if you were going to break out secrets and clues, the things that the characters could learn, the alien fungus is in a cave polluting the stream, that's a secret. The fungus has spawned vile creatures around the cave, that's a secret. Fungal growths on the riverbanks and a layer of scum in the water, that's a secret. The treant keeps watch over the wood, that's a secret.
So there's lots of secrets that are buried among these scenes in the situations and in the encounters locations. The locations are kind of the pink color. Oh, no, I'm sorry. Those are scenes. So the scenes are kind of the pink color of like the journey upstream, the correct bit cave and the journey home. Those are kind of the main scenes. The monsters are highlighted in orange.
You have trance and twig blights and shrieker fungus and bully wugs and a brown bear and psychic goose and Sturges.
Treasure is highlighted in green magic acorns and staff of flowers one thing you won't see though is that strong start the strong start really isn't in here there isn't a thing for that so it's it's kind of interesting that a lot of times and I think that this is absolutely true that if you were to follow this style of prepping for your game of thinking of your game like this like from the encounter standpoint.
One little trick about the word encounter is I use the word scene. And the reason I use the word scene is I feel like a lot of GMs when they hear encounter, they think combat encounter. D&D and the style guide for D&D uses encounter to mean any scene. And they even refer to it as an encounter is a scene like a scene from a movie. So you can use those two terms interchangeably when I speak to it.
I will use the term encounter and scene interchangeably, but I tend to call them scenes. And one interesting thing, one little metric that I think is really important for a scene is when you're preparing your game, you can generally expect a scene to take 45 minutes of gameplay.
So if you have like three or four hours, you want to account for how many scenes that you need in order to fill those out by assuming that they're going to take about two scenes for every hour and a half or four scenes in three hours. I usually like to have like five scenes on hand if I have a three hour game, just in case some of them go a little faster.
And you might have a scene that doesn't take place. And you can always like cut a scene if you need time for you need space for things. But generally speaking, you can assume that a scene is going to take about 45 minutes. Some will be faster, some will be longer.
But generally, if you're if you're timing them at that idea of about a scene about every 45 minutes, you're probably generally speaking, you're probably going to have the right of it. But be prepared to decrease those scenes if you need to finish everything in that time frame. Or you could just pass a scene and skip it and then do it next time you get together if you're doing a longer campaign.
So I thought that was really interesting of like the idea that you can, you know, this is reverse engineering, right? That you can pack the eight steps or at least many of the eight steps into the adventure scenarios that they do.
Really, the other way is the way that it occurred that generally speaking, I think GM start by building out their adventures in a pile of scenes that include like any secrets that they could learn, any NPCs they might meet, any monsters they might fight, any treasure they might acquire, right?
And all of those are kind of, and the location where they're doing that is all piled into that one encounter. The NPC is there or not. Monsters are there or not. Treasure is there or not. If you look through any published adventure, that's kind of how they do it, right?
Like you go to a location, the location has a description of the location, the description of the NPC, some monsters that are there, the treasure that they might acquire there, any kind of lore secrets that they might pick up. All of those are sort of piled into those encounters, which means that, you know, that's kind of like fewer steps.
But I believe that Return and the way that we break it out in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master is important because it lets you improvise those scenes. You might decide that those monsters aren't in that room, but they are in another room. And now because your monsters are separated out, you know that you can move them from one area to another.
It's also a little bit easier to reference them when you have them in their own section, having them kind of buried among an encounter.
but it really it really kind of depends on the style the style that you've got one thing that i think is interesting about all this and something that i've already talked about is of course when you're working with the eight steps from return you can always eliminate steps you don't need if you realize like i don't need an npc section because i do have them in my secrets and clues and i have them in my scenes i have them somewhere else you don't necessarily need to have them in there you can cut those and anybody that watches me do my do my own prep notes will see me sometimes say yeah i don't need to have a section for that i've already got that covered
Like today, and we can look at the notes that I did for my game today. This is a really good example because I did it just minutes ago. So this is the notes that I have for my game today. I have the characters because I like to have the characters in front of me. I want to have their names. I want to have their thoughts in there.
I have my strong start, which is six words is enough for me to know that that's all I need. I don't have to explain what's going on here or why. That's just a reminder to me about what's going to happen. I'm not giving it to you so you can run this adventure. I'm keeping it myself so I can run the adventure. But here I have scenes, right?
And I have like traveling down the mountain path and I have the path is the Eastern mountain range South of the four or 40 fingers, a large fungi with floating balloon, like pods anchored. I stole that from an encounter scenario inside the game master's guide. And I said, Hobgoblin Briggins, former soldiers who are hostile and desperate. So I've got location information.
I've got, and I've got monsters in there. I did list my monsters out separate. I wrote Hobgoblins in my monster section. Probably didn't need to do that. But I already have my location in there, which is why you don't see a location section of these notes. I was like, you know what? A, I don't really need to fill them out. I also didn't have time. I'm kind of done.
But you can see, like, I've got tons of secrets and clues going on in here. I've got a lot of lore in the game that I'm running. And I really think the lore is important. And I think that the adventure scenarios that they have in the Dungeon Master's Guide don't offer nearly enough lore or ideas of the world that they're going in.
What I think is interesting about this is if you look at Dragons of Stormwreck Isle, the latest starter set, the D&D starter set, which was written by James Wyatt, it's fantastic. It is a really, really good adventure. And one of the things it does is it's both a fantastic introductory adventure for DMs and players to learn how to play D&D, but it already has a lot of lore in there.
It's got stuff about Orcus. It's got stuff about the Nine Hells. It's got stuff about Tiamat. It's got stuff about Bahamut. It's got like lots of lore going on in there that you as a DM can grab onto and And learn from like, especially as a new DM, you don't know any of this stuff and you can learn from that. The 2024 dungeon masters guide has a lot of that lore.
It's got a fantastic cosmology section that talks all about the outer world. And a lot of the stuff about the outer world is stuff you could learn. Even if you don't go to the outer worlds, you just learn about the outer world.
big greyhawk section that's got tons of like specific nouns about the specific nouns about greyhawk that you could grab onto and it's got the lore glossary with lots of things like who was hadar i thought that was interesting hadar is a big dying son big angry dying son i didn't know that so lots of different lore that you can pick up in there that lore needs to be in your scenario in these sections that's why secrets and clues is such an important thing for me look at it it dominates my notes
It is half my notes are those secrets and clues in this case, because that's the stuff that's really going to make this game different than every other game my players play. My players have been playing for decades. We have more than maybe like 200 years worth, 300 years worth of experience playing D&D combined at that table. I got to make interesting new things for them to learn.
And that's the secrets and clues. Fighting hobgoblins. They fought hobgoblins before. But why? What can they learn about these particular hobgoblins and what's going on with them? That is the interesting thing. So, you know, that that's where I really feel like some stuff needs to be filled out more more than we might more than we might think. One other little bit.
And this is really for continuing adventures is like when one of the things that I that I want to expand upon on the eight steps is that idea that one of the things you can do. And I do this typically in the scene section is what are the scenes that are going to what are the options that are going to lead the players down the next path?
So I'm very, I think it's really important to focus on the notes that you need in order to run the game that's in front of you. I've got a game that's going to be happening in an hour and I need to have notes together for that section for an hour. I've got a game in an hour and I want to focus my time and attention on that game. I want to make sure that that game is going to be as fun as I can.
However, if we're getting to the end of that scenario, I want to know what's going to happen next. And a lot of times what I like to do is offer three options that the players can grab onto to decide where they want to take the game next. I like three options.
I like to make them pretty different so that they can really steer the kind of game that they want to steer and that they're not just following one significant path. So one of the things I will do is in those scenes, if I believe that they're coming up to something next, I'll say, here are the other next three options of things that are going to occur. Which one do you want to pick?
I don't have to worry about that today because today I don't think we're going to get through everything that I'm planning to run. We got a lot of stuff going on in today's game. So I don't believe that I'm going to have to come up with that option next. But the game after next, absolutely, I'm going to have to say, what are the next ones? So that's something that I do.
Another thing I've been talking a lot about is the idea of printing a map and annotating it by hand. You could take those maps in the back of the Dungeon Master's Guide. You could take a picture with your phone and print it to, I don't know, your school or your office printer or whatever if you don't have your own, or you could print it on your own printer.
Printer's a pretty good investment, I think, for Dungeon Master. Even if you're playing remote, it's nice to have physical stuff.
and take a pen and annotate it and i've talked about this on sly flourish you don't need to put tons of detail about every room right you can come up with that maybe you need to come up maybe you need more details if you really want to fill it out but i think like stretch your improvisational muscles a little bit and write smaller room descriptions and then think about what would be there and talk about that at the game use that to help you improvise and come up with stuff
There's tons of random lists that you can find from many, many different publishers. And almost all the Game Master's Guides have details of things that you can drop into particular rooms. The original 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide had tons and tons of tables to help you fill out the details of various chambers. It was really good. And that stuff is not in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide.
So having both guides is actually going to be a value to you. But you can read through those just to get ideas. But then when you're at the table, you can actually stretch your muscles a little bit and improvise the kinds of things that they would find in the various locations.
But it means that when you're actually prepping a map, you could prep probably 20 or 30 rooms in about 10 minutes just by drawing, writing down what you think is in what room. That's something that I do. It stretches my mind and I really like that. And another tip I always have is when you're keeping your notes, write the page numbers of the monsters.
One nice thing about the notes that are in this Dungeon Master's Guide in the D&D Beyond version is they are linked to the monsters. So you can click on the monsters right there. But if you're making your own notes, of course you won't have links like that.
So use the hyperlink that has been around for 5,000 years, which is the index or the page number and write down the page number next to the monster so that when you have the book in front of you, you can look it up. I of course did not follow my own advice when I did these notes and you can see a bunch of monsters and they don't have page numbers. So do as I say, not as I do.
So again, the main thing I want you to get from all of this, the main thing I think you should get from reading Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, which I very much hope you will read. And by the way, you can get a free sample of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master on the page that has it. It's a pretty big sample that includes descriptions of the eight steps.
You can also get a lot of information from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, including a lot of really good rollable tables on the Lazy GM's reference document, a Creative Commons release document that I put out last year. So you can get a lot of material, but the book is also really cheap. It's $8 in PDF and includes an EPUB version and a PDF version. So, you know, it has a lot going on there.
And I would suggest you read it. But the one point I'd like you to get from reading that, but also a point that I think is really important when you are reading these scenarios from the 2024 Dungeon Masters Guide is that your notes are just for you. You only need to follow the steps that you need. You don't need to follow any other steps that anybody else is doing.
You don't need to look at the way that I prep my game and say, well, I'm going to prep it exactly like Mike does. You prep the way that you need it. The only thing I would recommend to you is try to prep as little as you need in order to run the game that you need to run. That you can let the game itself fill out all the details as you're running it.
You may find that there are things that you really struggle to improvise. I'm terrible with names. I always need to write NPC names. I need to have a list of names in front of me and I need to remember the names of previous NPCs because I'm terrible with names. I cannot improvise them very well. A lot of people can't improvise those really well.
Details for rooms, I don't really have a trouble with. Motivations for NPCs. I've heard other people that have talked about how it's really hard for them to get in the head of an NPC and really come up with something. So they need more notes about NPCs.
For me, I usually have the name of the NPC and that's all I really need because I can already know who they are, what they want, and I can get into their head and think, if I am Master Kiprak, the secret cult leader of the lower left hand of Nakrash, whose holiest duty is to steal from the Dragon Empire, I already know how to act. Oh, and by the way, I'm really smart. I already know how to act.
I know how to put myself in Master Kiprick's shoes. And then when the characters are interacting with them, I know how he can work with them. I know how that can play out. And a lot of times, even if I didn't think about that ahead of time, I can improvise a character pretty well.
And I think a lot of GMs have to because a lot of times the players will come up with characters that you didn't prepare anyway. So what I would offer, I asked this to Matt Mercer and then went on the opportunity when I was talking to Matt Mercer many years ago about this. Not to name drop, but we have a video where he and I had talked about this stuff.
And he said that he improvises about half of the NPCs that came up. I don't know if this is still true, but it was true back then that he was improvising half the NPCs. So my argument would be if you have to improvise half the NPCs anyway, why are you putting in a lot of details for the ones that you don't improvise?
Because they will hang on to the character that you improvised and now they're their new best friend. Do you really need anything more than that? And again, all I need are names. So I would say if you were able to improvise NPCs well... Do you need to do anything for the ones that you're not improvising? That's a big point. But again, the notes serve you. You don't serve the notes.
You don't serve the game. You don't serve me. You don't serve anybody else other than you and your players. And that means that the notes that you take only have to serve you and the game that you're going to run for your players so that you and your players can have a great time while you're hanging out together. I think that's the main message I would take.
I think that is a strong message that you can take by looking at these example adventures in the 2024 Dungeon Masters Guide. And hopefully that's a lesson you take from reading my own work in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master when we talk about the eight steps for game prep.
Since 2014, since the release of the 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide for D&D, I have spent a tremendous amount of time thinking about encounter building for the fifth edition of D&D and for fifth edition role playing games now in general.
So when the Wizards of the Coast released a new 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide, one of the first things that I really wanted to dive into was encounter building and how they did encounter building. Before we start, though, I wanted to talk about where I have come to in my 10-year journey diving into Encounter Building for 5th Edition.
And I would say all of that time and energy and thought and conversations that I've had with incredibly smart people, working side by side with Scott Fitzgerald Gray and Teo Sabadia on Forge of Foes, working with Kobold Press on Tales of the Valiant, working with James Cinder Casso on Flea Mortals, that I've had a lot of experience from smart people where we thought about this thoroughly.
And certainly didn't always agree on how we were going to take whatever approach we were going to take. But the culmination of all of that comes down to what I refer to as the lazy encounter benchmark. The lazy encounter benchmark you can find in a bunch of different books. You can find it in The Lazy DM's Companion, one of the books that I have.
You can find it in Forge of Foes, the book about how to build 5e monsters that I wrote with Teos Abadie and Scott Gray. You can find variants of it in Flea Mortals. Flea Mortals is using it. I helped consult it.
on the encounter building guidelines and flea mortals that james inner castle put together but you can find a variant of the lazy encounter benchmark there you can find it in the tales of the valiant game master's guide and monster the monster vault and game master's guide both have different ways to look at the lazy encounter benchmark available in that it is also on my website and it is available as a under a creative commons license so you can use it in your own published work if you want in the lazy gm's resource document which you can find linked in the show notes
But a quick description of the lazy encounter benchmark is, and some of you may be bored because you've heard me talk about it forever. The lazy encounter benchmark comes down for two steps. Step one is you design an encounter based on the fiction of the game first. You don't sit there with a budget and decide exactly what kind of monsters you want to have for what sort of difficulty.
Can you do that? Absolutely. But that isn't the approach that I take. Instead, what I say is battles come and combat situations occur organically during the game. Let them occur organically during the game. Sometimes it's just two drunken hobgoblins at a table and you and your six level characters walked in and saw the two drunken hobgoblins. You don't have to worry about the difficulty of that.
But another time you might have kicked in the door and you see an entire goblin phalanx who's working on their martial techniques for defending themselves against powerful fighters. And like, oh man, this is going to, and by the way, they got their two Etten, their two hired Etten guards that are behind them.
So you get to decide based on the story and the fiction of the game first, what kind of monsters make sense. Step two is to decide if you think that might be inadvertently deadly. Have I set up a situation where the characters could get wiped out and I didn't mean for that to happen?
Now, you probably shouldn't plan an encounter where you do mean to wipe out the characters, but certainly there might be times where you say, I expect this to be a high challenge. So the fact that this isn't meeting the benchmark is okay because I have other information about the characters and the situation in the scenes to know how that's going to go. We're going to talk about that a bit.
But I have a very simple way to handle this benchmark. An encounter may be deadly if the sum total of monster challenge ratings is greater than one quarter of the sum total of character levels, or half of the sum total of character levels if the characters are above fourth level. That's that's the lazy encounter benchmark. The benchmark is a number, a single number.
And that number comes from adding all the character levels together. So if you have six, six level characters, that would be 36. And because they're above fifth level, you divide that number in two. So now you have 18. So your, your lazy encounter benchmark for that group is 18. Let's say you have six third level characters.
That's 18 total, but that one you divide by four because I got to do math because I'm terrible at math. In this case, if you have three six-level characters, that's a total of 18, and you divide that by four, which is actually 4.5, but we're just gonna round it to four, which means that generally your encounter benchmark for six third-level characters is about four.
There is one other element to the benchmark, though, which is a single monster may be deadly if its challenge rating is greater than the average of the character levels or 1.5 times the average character level if you're above fifth level. So even though you have a benchmark of four, if you were to drop a single CR4 monster against your characters of third level, that monster might be too much.
But a third level, a CR3 monster would be okay. So just to reiterate, an encounter may be deadly if the sum total of monster challenge ratings is greater than one quarter of the sum total of character levels or half the sum total character levels that the characters are above fourth level.
A single monster may be deadly if its CR is greater than the average of character levels or greater than 1.5 times the average of character levels if they're above fourth level. That's the entire benchmark. You don't need a table. And once you kind of wire that into your head, you never need to look at a table again.
You can just look at your characters, come up with a benchmark, write it in your notes, then let your characters happen organically. And then on occasion, you might say, this one feels tough. Is it too tough? Did I double the benchmark? Sometimes I've done that, where the number of monsters in the CR of the monsters was twice the deadly benchmark. And you're like, ooh.
And then you're like, well, is the situation going to allow for that to still be okay? The answer could be yes. So that's the benchmark that I came up with. And there are a few other ways to think about this benchmark. One is that you can pre-calculate it during your prep. So if you know, I'm going to have five fourth level characters today, that's a, since they're fourth level, it's a quarter.
So that's going to be a CR five. That's very easy for me to figure out. So the max, the lazy encounter benchmark is five. And the max, because they are fourth level, is four. So you write five and then put a four next to it. You can see I have an example here where I have four and a three. I just keep that in my notes.
That way, even during the game, while I'm doing it, I can quickly do the math and go, ooh, that's going to be too hard or not. That doesn't mean you have to change it. Just because it went over the benchmark, if the scene made sense for that, and if the characters have ways to deal with it, either by running or getting the drop on the monsters ahead of time, it might still be fine.
But it's just giving you information about what's going to happen. It does not dictate to you what you should do. It's just information that you get to use. That's a critical component of this benchmark. I have some rules for scaling for particularly powerful parties as well.
So if you find a, particularly a tier three and above that your characters are really powerful, they're suited out in magical items. They, the synergy of the characters is really strong. They have lots of options that they're using that make them powerful. And you find that the deadly benchmark is not a deadly benchmark at all.
In fact, it's maybe a medium encounter and you want to jack it up a little bit so that you actually know what, what deadly is. Again, you can add this optional rule and the optional rule is above 10th level, uh,
An encounter may be deadly if the total of all monster challenge ratings is greater than three quarters of all the character levels, or if the total of monsters challenge ratings is equal to the total character levels of characters of 17th or higher. That one jacks the benchmark up a lot. It means that if you hit 11th level, so you don't want to do it automatically.
Again, the gauge is to help you give information to you about whether or not you think a battle might be inadvertently deadly. So you decide if you're going to jack the benchmark up because he's like, yeah, I've run encounters that are well above the benchmark and they're, they're storming right through it. Well, then you can jack the benchmark up to that gives you more information, right?
So that's, that's another way. If you want another way to look at this, there's a version of this chart available in the Game Master's Guide to Tales of the Valiant, but it is also available in the Lazy GM's resource document. And I made it available here, which is a little bit easier. If you know what level your characters are and how many characters you have, you can quickly get the benchmarks.
If I have five fourth level characters, I have a five and it tells you the max CR of four. If you just don't want to do the math, you can have this. You can take this, you can print it out, you can put it in your notes, you can do whatever you want. There's a markdown version available in the Lazy GM's resource guide if you want to stick it in your markdown notes.
Lots of different ways you can do it. And one thing I did here, this is all just the benchmark. The math is not any different in this than it is in the benchmark in general. We have different tables of Forge of Foes where we tweak them based on different encounter types and stuff like that. But generally, we have this. And you'll notice that when we get to 11th, there's a range of like 28 to 41.
This is where the benchmark changed and shifted, right? And the lower number is assuming no modification of the benchmark because of their power. The higher one shows that it's higher. But it's giving you a range because once characters hit those levels, the variance of difficulty of encounters is so wide. I wanted to offer a range. And you can see it gets really extreme.
When you have six characters at level 20, the benchmark is between somewhere between 60 and 120. That's a lot of CRs, 120 CRs of monsters. That's like, I don't know, how many, six pit fiends or something like that? It's a lot of monsters. And then still it gives you that, what's the CR benefit of that? So that's important. Big important part of this is treating it as a loose gauge, right?
This is not defined math. I am not guaranteeing for you that a battle will be deadly or not. It's a very loose gauge and many, many things can change whether or not this gauge is accurate or not. That include the fight features significantly more characters than foes. The character's goal in the encounter can be achieved without eliminating all the monsters. The environment favors the characters.
The monsters come in in waves instead of all at once.
foes are distracted or in disadvantageous positions the monsters are all surprised the characters have spells or features well suited the players engage in excellent tactical behavior maybe your character your players are just really smart and they know how to fight the characters are well rested and coming in fresh the characters have an arsenal of magic items the characters have useful companions there's lots of different things that can change the benchmark in lots of ways likewise the monsters might be favored if the monsters significantly outnumber the number of characters or if the characters are surprised by monsters the
Or if the foes are in an advantageous position or the terrain favors them, the monsters fight with a strong tactical synergy or the characters are coming in born out from previous fights. That's a big one. How well rested the characters is a huge difference in how much power they can bring to a battle. So that is those are all things that mean, again, the math is loose.
Don't hang on to it too tight. This is probably the number one thing that you can understand from this other than having the benchmark handy to make it easy for you. is recognize that you will not be able to determine exactly an encounter goes. And that is because you are rolling a 20-sided die most of the time to determine what happens. And there's a lot of variance in that die.
There's a lot of different ways that this could go. So keep that in mind. There's a lot of different ways that this could go. And you'll never be able, in my opinion, with 5th edition D&D, there is no... to accurately predict how a battle is going to go, the best you can have is a loose gauge. And that takes us to the rules that we find in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide for Dungeons and Dragons.
So when I picked up the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide, one of the first things I looked for was how do they handle encounter math? In fact, I had some friends who had it early. I knew some other people. They didn't share anything with me, but I got to learn a little bit about what it looked like.
And then as soon as I got a copy, like a couple of days later, I looked at it and I was like, oh, what did it do? One thing I will say right up front is the new encounter building guidelines they have in the 2024 Dungeon Masters Guide are far superior to the encounter guidelines that they had in the 2014 Dungeon Masters Guide.
And the reason why is there is no weird two-dial system of a multiplier that changes the overall challenge of a situation and the budget that you have available to it based on how many of these other things. It was basically like having two dials that had connectors between them, but you didn't know what the connectors were. So if you turned one dial, all of a sudden the other dial would shift.
You turn the other one and it would shift the other way. It was really, really hard to manage and still didn't give you very accurate results. The new encounter guidelines are much better. They're much easier to do. Step one, you choose a difficulty. How hard or easy do you want the fight to be? Step two, you figure out how many characters you have.
And then based on the party's level, you can figure out per character what the experience budget is. You add up that experience budget together and that tells you how many monsters you can buy. I will say I find working with challenge ratings to be far superior to working with experience points. But there's some interesting things that occur when you start dealing with experience points.
Because I just think like if you have five fourth level characters and that means you have 1,875 experience points budget. Well, now you have to go figure out, well, what does that mean? How many monsters of what challenge rating can I work with for the 1,875 experience point budget?
But a lot of times you have monster lists that are monsters by challenge rating and they include the experience points listed next to it. The Dungeon Master's Guide did for 2014. I presume the Monster Manual will for 2024, 2025 in that case. And you'll be able to figure that out. But I think working with challenge rating is easier than working with experience points.
So here are five main conclusions that I came to after doing a pretty deep study of what they have in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. And one thing I will recommend is my friend Teos Abidia did a really good video where he showed the examples of the kinds of encounters that you would run between the 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide and the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide.
I will link to that video in the show notes. It's really excellent if you want to dive into that math. I spent more time instead comparing the 2024 guidelines to my own lazy encounter benchmark to see how that played out because that mattered more to me. I hadn't used the 2014 guide since 2014. So I'm far more interested in that.
But if you want to see how that math works out, I think it's really important. Five conclusions that I came to. Number one, the 2024 rules for encounter building are far improved from the convoluted and inaccurate rules of the 2014 Dungeon Masters Guide. The 2014 Dungeon Masters Guide rules are a pain in the ass to use and they never helped you really understand the difficulty of battle anyway.
Two, The 2024 encounter building rules match up well with a lazy encounter benchmark. They're close enough in most areas that you can use whichever one you prefer. So you're not likely to build an encounter using the lazy encounter benchmark and have it be completely different than the kind of encounter you would build in the with the D&D 2024 guidelines.
Except in a couple of circumstances that I'm going to mention. And these are those circumstances. The D&D 2024 Dungeon Masters Guide produces particularly dangerous encounters when pitting a high number of low challenge rating monsters against the characters. I'm going to show you what we can look at with that.
And likewise, the D&D 2020 for Dungeon Masters Guide overvalues high CR monsters, making it harder to add more monsters to defend your bosses. The way the budgets work mean you have fewer monsters at higher challenge ratings and many more monsters at low challenge ratings because they use experience points and experience points go up exponentially.
They don't go up linearly like challenge rating does. And of course, this is going to come as no surprise. I still prefer the lazy encounter benchmark, and I still recommend it because I think it has many advantages over using the table in the dungeon master's guide. A particular one is you can memorize it, right?
That if you spend time with the lazy encounter benchmark, if you remember to add all the character levels and divide by four, if they're under fifth level or divide by two, if they're over fifth level, and that is your general encounter budget. If you can remember that,
then it's way easier to use and and you have that benchmark and because you know it's a loose benchmark because this is not going to come up with any more accurate results than any other way you can keep that in your head and you never need to look up anything in a table or use a tool or whatever you can just you just have it in your head and off you go i already talked about the lazy benchmark
So when we're comparing the 2024 guidelines to the lazy encounter benchmark, I only looked at the hard category because the lazy encounter benchmark is to show you when an encounter might be deadly. So I wanted to see when they said something might be deadly. I don't really compare it to easier medium.
And frankly, if you want easier encounters, first of all, you probably don't need to do any math at all. Just use fewer monsters of lower challenge ratings and you're going to be fine. You don't really have to worry too much. I really think having easy and medium columns is not really that important.
I think, you know, you want a loose gauge, have the lazy encounter benchmark, and it's going to definitely be easier, but really low, low CR monsters with fewer numbers and numbers of characters. And you're generally going to be fine. You will, you'll be able to know without having to do any math at all. Oh yeah, this looks like an easy fight and that's probably going to be an easy fight.
so the hard version of the lazy encounter benchmark i'm comparing against the 2024 encounter building guidelines for hard so now we talk about the experience curve and i mentioned before that the when you're using experience points as your budget that the experience points are going up exponentially they're not going up linearly so in other words a this challenge rating of a cr8 monster is double that of a cr4 monster
right you can take cr4 monster a monster cr8 monster is twice as much however a cr8 monster's experience point value is 3.5 times that of the cr4 monster it's 3900 experience points for a cr8 and it's 1100 for a cr4 which means that the cr8 is you know is more than double the considered power of the cr4
That alone, it shows you why the benchmark, the encounter benchmarks in the 2024 Dungeon Masters Guide underweight low CR monsters, i.e. it will allow for many more low CR monsters than it will high CR monsters. And that's because it's an exponential curve. It means that a high CR monster is going to be significantly more expensive in your budget than low CR monsters will.
But that can create some really weird encounters where low power monsters are actually the encounters more overpowered because they're low CR monsters. But here's an example. I made a table. This table is very similar to the one in Xanathar's Guide. And you can find a link to this article.
I haven't published it on Sly Flourish yet, but it is on Sly Flourish, and I will link to it in the show notes. This one shows you the actual challenge ratings of the monsters depending on how many monsters per character you face. So if you have one monster per PC, you can see that a level 3 character can face a CR1, or a level 8 character can face a CR5. And that shows you the one per PC.
But you can see when you drop to the two monster, it doesn't drop by half. Instead of four, it's three. Instead of five, it's three. Seven is four. It's more than half, which means if you're facing two monsters per PC, those challenge rating of those monsters is going to be proportionally higher than if they're facing fewer. And that goes up even more.
If you have one monster for four PCs, like a solo monster or something like that, it's eight. But one monster per two PCs is five. One per one is four and two per one is two. So you can kind of see this curve where the lower the challenge rating of the monster, the more of them you're going to be able to throw, the more proportionally you're going to be able to throw at them.
And the effect of that is if you throw a high CR monster against the characters, you're not going to have a budget to be able to put other monsters in there to protect that high CR monster, which you often need to have.
So the interesting thing about the experience point curve that has a real benefit, though, is if you recall in the lazy encounter benchmark, I have to have this single other line which says a single monster should not be of a challenge rating or a single monster may be deadly if its challenge rating is higher than the average of character levels or the average of one point five times the character levels.
It's kind of clunky to have to add that in there. When you're working with experience points, you don't have to add that in there because exponential experience points already cap out what the maximum CR of a monster is going to be.
What's particularly interesting about that is because it caps out the CR, it means that even on hard, with six characters of 20th level, you still can't throw a Tarrasque at them. The Tarrasque is still considered higher than deadly. But as we know, six 20th level characters are going to destroy a Tarrasque. I have fought Tarrasques before. I have had 20th level characters fight Tarrasques before.
I have been a player fighting Tarrasques and I have run Tarrasques against 20th level fighters. Trust me, even before all the power increase that we see in D&D 2024, they could have killed a Tarrasque. We killed multiple Tarrasques in one fight. That idea is that's not going to be hard. So what it means is I think that it is overvaluing the power of high CR monsters.
Walt APR reminds me that, in fact, yes, when I was a player, when I was a character fighting a Tarrasque, my character did so naked because he had his tighty whities on. He had no reason to wear armor because he was getting hit on it, too, regardless of whatever armor he wrote. But it didn't matter. He's still beheaded a Tarrasque. So here's some charts. Who wants to look at data and charts?
So I have a bunch of charts that show the comparison of the lazy encounter benchmark compared to the kind of monsters that you would face if you're using the hard rules from the D&D 2024 Player's Guide. So this shows two monsters per character. This is if you have four characters, you'd have eight monsters. What is sort of the benchmark?
And we have the Lazy Encounter benchmark, which is the normal tier, not the high tier. We have a high version of it. That's why you can see these two lines are directly up to level 10. They're exactly the same. And then at 10, they start to go off. And then you have the two monsters per PC from the Dungeon Master's Guide. And right off the bat, that's the green line here, the high line, right?
Right off the bat, you can see that their benchmark for two monsters per character is way above
the lazy encounter benchmark if you're using the optional rules it's actually pretty close and that's why i say that if you if you use the lazy encounter benchmark with the optional three quarters of character levels at 10th to 7th 16th level and equal to character levels that's why you see these great big jumps right here 16th to 17th level there's this great big jump that's because the the multiplier for the lazy encounter benchmark changes
But even then, I know that this is really hard. When you increase it to one-to-one, it's really hard. But holy cow, they're saying that you can fight, in this case, CR 13 monsters. You can fight two CR 13s per character at 20th level. That's a lot of challenge rating monsters. That's big. The one monster per character is almost exactly matches when you use the hard rules.
The green line is the, the challenge ratings that you can use for the 2024 dungeon masters guide. The orange line is the lazy encounter benchmark with the hard version of the rules. And that one is, you know, close enough that I wouldn't, I wouldn't distinguish a difference between those two. Then the lower line is if you don't account for high powered characters at the level level or more.
Then we get to one monster per two characters, and here is where the Lazy Encounter benchmark starts to eclipse the other one. And that's because when you have two monsters per character, now when you have the extra jump for a level 11 and above from the Lazy Encounter benchmark, that is significantly higher, and that's because the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide rules...
discount higher cr monsters in fact now it's kind of even steven so again it's interesting because here you see that when it's two monsters per character it's way above the hard benchmark but here when it's one character one monster per two characters now it's way below that benchmark right it's overweighting higher cr monsters Then we get to one monster per four characters.
So this is kind of like your boss monster scenario, dragons and stuff like that. The Lazy Encounter, the colors changed, I'm sorry, and I couldn't figure it out. The colors changed, but this green line here is the Lazy Encounter benchmark considered on high difficulty.
and then the other benchmarks are again pretty even steven that that if you if you looked at the actually i take that back the lower benchmark is above that of the dungeon masters guide but what's interesting here is these other two lines are the 2024 guidelines and what they show at high but also i included the maximum cr of a single monster in here that's why the colors change because there's a fourth line being added
So that shows you that when you get to four, the experience point method and the what I call the Paul Hughes method, because Paul Hughes, the designer for the Monstrous Menagerie, came up with the idea of like the one time, you know, when a monster is equal to the character's average level. that is about as big a monster as you want.
Or if it's 1.5 times the average level, then that's about as big a monster you want. That's what that single monster cap is. And they follow the single monster cap directly. What this shows you is from the experience point perspective, The benchmark works really well for a single monster to ensure you're not going to overweight a single monster.
Although you still have this weird thing where you can never fight a CR 30. But what it doesn't do and what the other benchmarks do is tell you, yes, you can have a monster that's at that challenge rating, but they also can have friends. And the friends can defend them. And trust me, when you have like five 14th level characters, no single monster is going to be able to withstand that.
It has to be a very specially designed monster to be able with. A lot of times, if it's a dragon, they need elementals to help shake things up. They need other monsters out there to help them up. The lazy encounter benchmark has a, has overhead available. for you to add smaller monsters, fire giants that are allied with your red dragon, stuff like that, to make sure that the battle is not so easy.
Think about the battles in Baldur's Gate 3. If you play Baldur's Gate 3, if you play the end of Baldur's Gate 3, you'll remember how many monsters are in that final fight. There's no way you could have just one single monster and have it be worthwhile. It needs to be a bunch of monsters.
There were like two or three big fights in Baldur's Gate 3 that had a single monster, but they were really specially tuned monsters that had a lot of BS going on to keep them alive. The lazy encounter benchmark, and you can see this high curve here shows you, you could have up to 80 CRs worth of monsters at level 20 when it's one monster per four characters.
So you can see that benchmark and you can see that it gives you a lot of overhead to say you shouldn't have a monster higher than CR 30, but you can have up to 80 CRs in order to, you can add other monsters up to about 80 before it really becomes deadly. And then I did another one that's kind of, you know, just to be completionist about it, which is one monster for six characters.
And again, you see that the benchmark of a single monster from the Lazy Encounter benchmark matches right along the lines of the experience point budget that the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide has. However, both versions of the Lazy Encounter benchmark scale way higher. This 120 CRs worth here is way higher than the roughly CR28 that the other benchmark has. But I can tell you, I've met
20th level parties that can handle 120 CRs worth of monsters before it's really difficult. The circumstances can matter. So those are all of the comparisons of the lazy encounter benchmark with the encounter building rules for the dungeon master's guide. The reality is I'm glad we have both.
First of all, I am glad that the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide has a set of rules that are easy to use, and I think they do a pretty good job. I think by the time you get to the point where it's undervaluing high CR monsters, it's probably not a big deal. The one risk... that the 2024 guide has is that it could potentially steer newer DMs towards running deadly fights at early levels.
The example we ran up to was when you have like four third level characters, that means you could face eight lions that are CR1s and CR1 lions will destroy four, eight CR1 lions will destroy four level three characters. So I think it undervalues the monsters. If you want to be careful with,
What I would basically say is whenever you have more monsters than the number of characters, be very careful with the benchmark that's inside the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide because it undervalues their power. And what you could basically do is just, you know, in a circumstance like that, don't run multiple monsters or have the CR value that you would normally have when you use their guidelines.
Right. Really, the answer is just use the encounter lazy encounter benchmark. It's easier to use. It's faster. It's a loose gauge. You can have it in your head and it gives you pretty good results. And we've been using I've been using it for years now. Other people have been using it and finding a lot of value. They're weird anomalies. Yeah, absolutely. They're weird anomalies.
But you got to remember that this is not fixed hard math. This is a loose gauge to give you a general idea to give you a little bit of information. a little bit of a warning red light that blinks off going, hey, just letting you know. And it's not on fire, but it's possible there might be smoke in the air, right? Just something that's helping you get an understanding of the overall battle.
So I hope that this discussion was useful. You can find links for all of this stuff down in the show notes. And I wish you luck with your future encounter endeavors in our fifth edition role-playing games. Friends, I want to thank all of you for hanging out today while we're prepared for our role-playing games. I hope you enjoyed today's show.
If you enjoyed the show and you want to see more stuff like this, please consider subscribing to the Sly Flourish newsletter. You can find a link down in the show notes. It's absolutely free to sign up. You get a free adventure generator for signing up and you get a weekly RPG article sent to your inbox that includes links to all of the other work that I do.
You can also join me on Patreon, patrons of Sly Flourish. Get access to all kinds of tips, tricks, tools, scenarios, and other things to help you run your fifth edition games. You get access to the awesome Lazy DMs community and you help me put on shows like this.
And you can pick up any of my books, including Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, The Lazy DMs Companion, The Lazy DMs Workbook, Forge of Foes, and more at the Sly Flourish bookstore. Thank you all so much. Have a great day and get out there and play an RPG.