The Deadly Encounter Benchmark – The Lazy D&D Way to "Balance" Combat Encounters

Mike offers a simple tool you can keep in your head for determining whether a given combat encounter may be deadly in Dungeons & Dragons. Here it is in two steps:

1. Build encounters from the story and the situation. Choose monsters and determine combatants by what happens in that story.

2. Determine whether an encounter may be deadly. An encounter may be deadly if the sum total of monster challenge ratings are greater than half the sum total of character levels or one quarter if the characters are below 5th level.

Video Contents
00:00 Beginning
00:35 The Deadly Encounter Benchmark
02:03 Comparing monster CRs to character levels
05:30 Qualifiers for encounter balance. Why it's so hard.
09:24 Only you know the true capabilities of the characters in your game
10:31 How the Dungeon Master's Guide does it
12:24 How Xanathar's Guide does it
13:08 How I do it in the Lazy DM's Workbook
14:37 Running easy battles is awesome
17:30 Advantages of this system
18:42 Summary of the benchmark

Artwork by Jack Kaiser and Victor Leza Moreno.

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