D&D: Five Ways To Guess How Strong Your Party Really Is
It’s often said that balance in D&D is as much art as it is science. This is because the actual strength of a party can vary wildly.
Combat in D&D can be a wild, chaotic thing. Balancing encounters can be a challenge. Because it’s not just that you have to know your party’s level – that’s just a start. I think every DM has probably had the experience of having a seemingly “low-level” party punch well above their weight, because a monster’s CR is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.
If you want to get a better idea about how strong your party is at any given moment, here are a few things you can look at to try to gauge “okay, but will this monster actually kill the party?” And just to be clear, you don’t have to meticulously track all of these variables (this isn’t even a comprehensive list) – even if you did, there’s still the chaos of the dice and party composition and plenty of other things to consider. But if you want to get a better idea, here are some things you can look at.
Hit Points
One of the places to start is with players’ hit point totals. As a DM, you don’t have to know how many hit points any given character has at any time. You’d go crazy. But what’s worth knowing is everyone’s hit point maximums – these don’t change that often, usually only when a character levels up. But knowing how many hit points a character can have is a great piece of information.
Because then, when you’re building an encounter, you can look at how much damage a creature does if it hits. You can know, “okay, the Knight deals 27 damage per hit,” and then figure out how many hits an individual character can take before they go down. Obviously, hit points fluctuate. Going into a battle at full health usually means the party can handle more. But another thing that can help with this is…
Spell Slots
If you really want to get into the nitty gritty of it, it can be enough to know “hey does my party have any spell slots left?” I wouldn’t go so far as to know exactly what spells your players have – again you could go mad trying to keep track of all that – but knowing, in general, “okay if the party has plentiful spell slots, they can go nova and it probably wins them the fight.” One thing you can do is make a little mark any time a character casts a spell (in between Rests) so you know “okay the party has cast five spells before this fight, they probably can still pull some punches, but might be getting low.”
Obviously this all depends on how many spellcasters are in your party. And what kind. But in general, knowing what your players can do with those is pretty cool.
Once Per Rest Features
Some of the most powerful features in D&D can only be used once per Short Rest or once per Long Rest. These are things like a Fighter’s Action Surge, or a character’s ability to not drop to 0 hit points. If players have these abilities available to them, then you know, “hey actually the Fighter can just Action Surge and do all kinds of damage.”
It becomes harder to keep track of the bigger your party is. Especially if you’re playing with multiclass characters. But, in general, knowing “Hey when was the last time the party had a rest?” is a good way of gauging their strength.
Magic Items
The number of times I’ve had an encounter “ruined” because I forgot that the party had a Horn of Valhalla that could just pull in a bunch of extra guys to fight for them. I mean, it’s never a bad thing, ultimately, usually when that kind of thing happens it’s a celebratory moment for the party. But if you know the party has some powerful magic items it can be worth it to try and keep tabs on it if you want your epic boss fight to try and feel epic without you doing some last minute flailing adjusting.
How Much Time Is Left In The Session
This is very much a meta judgement. But it’s something that goes into the calculus of the players – it should probably go into your planning too. How much time is left in your session? If you’re starting a fight at the beginning of the session, odds are good the players might be a little conservative with their resources. But if you get into a fight with, say, an hour or so left in the playtime, then odds are probably good that’s the last fight for the evening.
And unless you run a real gritty campaign where you aren’t guaranteed a Long Rest before the next one begins, you can pretty much bet that players are gonna try and use whatever they have left for the last fight. Because even if they don’t actually get to rest between sessions, or early into the next, the brain kind of thinks that way. Anyway, just a few things to keep in mind when figuring out how hard your party can hit. And how hard they’re likely to go.
Happy Adventuring!
