[RPG] How to create reasonably challenging encounters for large groups

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I'm running a 5e campaign that has become quite successful to the point that everyone wants in and I have 6-8 players at my table every other week.

It's awesome, but I'm having troubles with creating challenging encounters.
Two of the players are very heavy crowd-controllers (a Lore Bard and a Divination Wizard). The divination wizard also uses his portent to force fails in important saving throws for abilities like Suggestion or Hold Person on the strongest enemies, effectively dismantling my encounters.

That wouldn't be that big a problem if there weren't 4-6 more players backing them up with heavy damage to deal with the lower-challenge enemies.

They aren't even overly geared. Some of them have only 1 uncommon item (+1 weapon), a couple of them have a couple extra uncommon items that do not affect combat (eyes of minute seeing, goggles of night, etc)

So my question is: How can I keep my encounters challenging without adding a million enemies? I've noticed that if my encounter features 8+ enemies, each round becomes very slow and tedious (16+ turns per round).

As an example, the last fight of my last game was against 4 enemies with CR 6 (this adds up to 9200 exp, which is between the Hard and the Deadly difficulty thresholds for this party). The entire group was paralyzed by Hold Person pretty much the entire fight, and I was at a loss as to how to handle this situation. Perhaps it was OK that this happened?

Edit: Thanks for the replies!
The problem seems to be having a low amount of encounters. On that in-game day the party only had 2 hard encounters. I asked some of the players and they were all pretty much out of spell slots by the end of that fight, which means that anything else I threw at them would cost them dearly.

Best Answer

It sounds like you have two problems: (1) your game with 6-8 players has slow combats unless you use a small number of monsters, and (2) if you use a small number of monsters, your crowd-controllers can shut the encounter down.

The first problem is easier to fix:

  • Use a larger number of monsters, but make most of them them identical so that you can run turns for them quickly. Move them all on the same initiative. "Okay, these three orcs are attacking you. Each of them makes one attack, with an attack bonus of +4... (rolls) they hit AC 11, 15, and 17. How many hits? Okay, take... (rolls) 12 damage." Optionally include one or two bigger monsters so that your crowd-controllers have something awesome to do.
  • Consider splitting your game into two smaller games. You can start slowly -- have occasional "side missions" which don't involve the whole group. These will be easier to schedule: choose the time and place that work best for you, and see if around half of your players are able to be there. If that seems to work, you can have more and more side missions, and save the "full group" scenarios for boss fights and special occasions. In the extreme case, this turns into a West Marches scenario.

For the second problem: remember that D&D 5e is balanced around having a lot of encounters per day. Are you doing that? If you're only giving them one big fight in between rests, your characters with daily powers will be much more powerful than the designers intended, because they can use all their dailies in that encounter. Those crowd-control abilities: are they daily powers?

If you suddenly change your game from one fight per day to three or four, make sure to telegraph that in advance so your casters don't waste all their spells on the first fight.

One final note: it can be dangerous to have battles with a small number of active monsters. What tends to happen is each monster stands in one place and focuses all its damage on one player character. This is really bad for that player character, and it's sort of boring for all the other characters who never get attacked. One solution I've used for this problem is, when I have an encounter with just one monster, I make sure that all its attacks are area-effect attacks, so that it spreads out the damage more evenly. This involves a lot of inventing homebrew monsters, though, so it may not be best for every group.

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