Zeazecca's Enhanced Action-based Levels
When I started DMing Lost Mine of Phandelver for a party of friends, I had no real idea of how monster balancing worked. Yes, there were challenge ratings, or "a fair challenge for a group of 4", but the math never really seemed to check out when you're playing against a group of five players, or three. Two CR 2 guys are not the same as one CR 4; and creating fun and somewhat balanced encounters on the fly is difficult unless you can remember an entire XP table and you can do all of the required math on the fly. After reading AngryGM's articles on building custom monsters, this started nagging somewhere in the back of my mind. Yes, there's a way to build custom 'balanced' monsters, but encounter building is still less intuitive than I'd expected from 5th edition.
Now I'm not a game designer, and though I've floated a few ideas, I wasn't able to figure out some system from nothing. Until I found this great Reddit post by u/gradenko_2000 named "Improving the Monster Quick Stats Table" that applies some 4th edition mechanics to the 5th-edition system. Using these mechanics (and a few assumptions), I've attempted to figure out a method to scale custom monsters to player levels.
Why use it?
Because it makes encounter building easier and more intuitive. Before most sessions, I spend at least one hour trying out multiple monsters of different CRs to create challenging and hopefully fun encounters. Some turn out great, others less, but the CR system is not intuitive enough to my poor programming mind to let me create simple encounters easily.
Just a few sessions ago, my 5-man, level 5 party fought two reskinned hobgoblin iron shadows (VGTM p. 162) and a summoned air elemental (MM p. 124). That's a hard-level encounter, just shy of deadly, and none of my players are big minmaxers. Yet they slaughtered the irons shadows in a turn and a half, and one turn later I decided that the air elemental was going back home, because the battle was dragging on for no real reason. It was mostly a roleplaying session, and this was the only encounter on that in-game day. They steamrolled it, which made the battle less fun for me, and less meaningful to them.
It would have been more intuitive to know that each of the hobgoblins was a match for a single level 5 character, and that the air elemental was also level 5 when counted against three characters. The battle was never all that difficult, both sides were evenly matched in levels and actions. Using this table, it would have been easy (barring some simple math) to add more iron shadows, or to toughen up the existing ones to be a match for two players each.
Monster Statistics by Level
| Level | Hit Points |
Armor Class |
Damage/ Round |
Attack Bonus |
Save DC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| -3 | 1-4 | 12 | 1-1 | 2 | 12 |
| -2 | 5-12 | 13 | 1-1 | 3 | 13 |
| -1 | 13-20 | 13 | 1-2 | 3 | 13 |
| 0 | 21-28 | 13 | 2-3 | 3 | 13 |
| 1 | 29-34 | 13 | 3-4 | 3 | 13 |
| 2 | 35-38 | 13 | 5-6 | 3 | 13 |
| 3 | 39-42 | 13 | 7-9 | 4 | 13 |
| 4 | 43-55 | 14 | 10-11 | 5 | 14 |
| 5 | 56-66 | 15 | 12-14 | 6 | 15 |
| 6 | 67-69 | 15 | 15-16 | 6 | 15 |
| 7 | 70-71 | 15 | 17-19 | 6 | 15 |
| 8 | 72-74 | 16 | 20-22 | 7 | 16 |
| 9 | 75-76 | 16 | 23-24 | 7 | 16 |
| 10 | 77-88 | 17 | 25-27 | 7 | 16 |
| 11 | 89-101 | 17 | 28-32 | 8 | 17 |
| 12 | 102-105 | 17 | 33-37 | 8 | 17 |
| 13 | 106-108 | 18 | 38-40 | 8 | 18 |
| 14 | 109-112 | 18 | 41-43 | 8 | 18 |
| 15 | 113-116 | 18 | 44-48 | 8 | 18 |
| 16 | 117-124 | 18 | 49-53 | 9 | 18 |
| 17 | 125-133 | 19 | 54-56 | 10 | 19 |
| 18 | 134-136 | 19 | 57-61 | 10 | 19 |
| 19 | 137-140 | 19 | 62-66 | 10 | 19 |
| 20 | 141-155 | 19 | 67-70 | 10 | 19 |
| 21 | 156-178 | 19 | 71-73 | 11 | 20 |
| 22 | 179-196 | 19 | 74-76 | 11 | 20 |
| 23 | 197-214 | 19 | 77-80 | 11 | 20 |
| 24 | 215-232 | 19 | 81-83 | 12 | 21 |
| 25 | 233-250 | 19 | 84-86 | 12 | 21 |
| 26 | 251-268 | 19 | 87-90 | 12 | 21 |
| 27 | 269-286 | 19 | 91-93 | 13 | 22 |
| 28 | 287-304 | 19 | 94-97 | 13 | 22 |
| 29 | 305-322 | 19 | 98-100 | 13 | 22 |
| 30 | 323-332 | 19 | 101-103 | 14 | 23 |
Monster Levels
The Monster stats by Level table on the previous page has stats for monsters from level -3 to level 30. You can substitute this table for the Monster Statistics by Challenge Rating table (DMG p. 274) when you use level calculations. The rest of the calculation process is described under Creating Quick Monster Stats starting on the same page.
As described in the AngryGM article linked above, it is not necessary to follow the exact steps in the DMG; often it is more useful to either take an existing monster and matching its statistics to those in the table to calculate it's level. When you want to create a custom monster, it might be more useful to pick a level, then pick offensive/defensive levels that average to that level, then you can use the statistics in the table to create your monster.
Encounter Building
Using these levels, a single monster of level 5 is supposed to be a medium to a hard challenge of a single player that is level 5, as described in the DMG. For every additional player of the same level, one additional monster of that level should keep the difficulty more or less equal.
For example, an owlbear (MM p. 249) has defensive level 4 and offensive level 9 or 10 (depending on if it's damage/round is rounded up or down, though I would recommend up), for a final level of 7. If we check using the CR encounter building rules in the DMG, we find that a single player against a single owlbear should be a medium challenge, on average. Adding more creatures to both sides ups the challenge to a hard encounter and finally a deadly encounter at 11 or 12 creatures per side, though one could argue that a party of that level has more than enough options and resources to deal with multiple successive deadly encounters anyway.
The difficulty of an encounter can be scaled up or down by adding or removing monsters, with more monsters increasing the difficulty of a combat encounter. Adding 1-2 monsters of the same level ups an encounter to deadly. Some testing seems to reveal that three times the number of players in monsters of the same level is about the same as an CR encounter that takes up the entirety of that adventuring day's XP budget.
I haven't tested the effect of putting a party against a group of monsters of higher/lower levels; I myself would just take the existing monster, calculate its offensive/defensive levels, then increase/decrease those as appropriate.
Stronger and Weaker Monsters
4th Edition had this great ideas where some monsters were not balanced around one player versus one enemy, but sometimes one player versus more enemies or vice versa. These 'Minion', 'Elite' or 'Solo' monsters were balanced around fighting different numbers of players than the average monster.
The important number is the action ratio, a number calculated using the number of players and the number of monsters for a single monster:
When you create for a monster that is not meant to fight one player, multiply its final hit points by the action ratio, and multiply its damage output per round by half of the action ratio if the action ratio is larger than 1, or by double the action ratio if it is smaller than 1.
If you take a monster from an existing source, decide on its action ratio and but divide its hit points by the action ratio, and divide its damage output by half the action ratio if the action ratio is larger than 1, or double the action ratio if it is smaller than 1.
In effect, the modifications to the action ratio for damage modify it to the value it would be if the number of players was halved. If that is easier, you can also think of it that way. A monster balanced for three players has thrice the number of hit points, but it deals only 3 ÷ 2 = 1.5 times as much damage.
A Note on Math
At the risk of sounding condescending, I, myself always have trouble visualizing numbers, so for those that suffer from the same curse, I've included some examples at the end of this document.
If you're having trouble with the actual dice math, there's a great video out there by Matthew Colville on the subject, and the set of AngryGM articles linked above also explains a lot of the process as described in the DMG with some pretty good examples.
How it works
I started with a few assumptions that are also named in the Reddit post linked at the beginning of this document. A monster of a level equal to a player has a number of hit points equal to the damage output per round of a player character. Since each class is different, and some of them excel at other things than dealing damage, I've taken four simpler player characters: a fighter wielding a longsword with the dueling fighting style, a warlock with the Agonizing Blast invocation, a rogue attacking with a light crossbow and sneak attack, and a red draconic sorcerer attacking with chromatic orb, fireball and firestorm. I've averaged out all of these for each level, and then smoothed the distribution somewhat for every tier of play.
Damage per round was computed in the same way: each character started with a 16 in their primary stat and a 16 or 14 in constitution, and I've used ASIs on levelups to increase primary stats first and Dexterity or Constitution afterwards, depending on the class. Damage per round was set as the total health pool of a character divided by four, where the total health pool is set to a character's average hit die result on levelup + their Constitution modifier, plus half of the total damage they can heal on a short rest, since a character heals half of their hit dice on a long rest.
The other columns of the table were taken from the DMG. Hit point/damage values for levels higher than 20 and lower than 1 were extrapolated from the DMG table and some testing.
Evaluation and Testing
By pure fluke (or great 5e designers!) the entire table appears to work pretty well using the system that already exists, which makes things a lot easier. I've tested a pretty decent number of monsters from the MM by calculating their respective levels, then building 'correct' encounters using their CR rating. That seems to work in a lot of the cases. There are some exceptions - from the ones I've tried, the hobgoblin warlord and the ogre don't quite conform to the rules, but checking their CR with the DMG method reveals that the MM CR values do not always line up with that table anyway.
I've spent an afternoon with a friend playing combat encounters with custom monsters against player characters of his design, where we've tested different encounters. We've tested at levels 1 and 5, and a lot of different options, such as, against a party of four player characters of level 5:
- 4 level 5 monsters
- 16 level 5 minions (1/4 action ratio)
- 2 to 3 level 5 elites (2/1 action ratio)
- 1 level 5 solo (actually 7/1 action ratio 'cause we were being silly)
Testing went great, and will definitely be running more tests in my own campaign. It's important to note that action economy is still a thing - 16 minions is a lot for a party of 4, even if their hit points and damage potential are neutered. The same thing goes for large boss monsters. If your players are completely fresh, you're probably going to want to tack on some extra levels to compensate, but minions and earlier encounters go a long way in giving you that genuine, life-threatening, oh-my-god-did-I-just-cause-a-TPK experience.
As a last thing - make sure you give your boss an appropriate amount of stuff to do, as well as legendary resistances if that's necessary. It's no fun for you as a GM to have all of your bosses get Stunning Strike'd Every. Single. Time. The same thing goes for multi-target spells and legendary actions. Players don't like getting slaughtered by a single 20d10 attack, or so I've heard. Spread that damage out a bit, try to keep it reasonable.
If you're iffy on the balance of something you've made, there's always the original CR calculations from the DMG as a second opinion. Remember that CR is just a guideline, that it doesn't tell you everything about the outcome of a battle, and that that medium encounter CR 5 sahuagin baron might actually be a much bigger threat if you fight it underwater.
Existing Monster Conversion
A hobgoblin captain has a defensive level of 5, and an offensive level of 9, for a final level of 7. Four of them would be a medium challenge to a party of four of the same level.
We can also calculate what level it would be if we want to use one hobgoblin captain for three players: in that case, its effective hit points are divided by 3, and its damage is divided by 3 ÷ 2 = 1.5. This drops its def. and off. levels to 1 and 6 respectively, meaning that this a hobgoblin captain is a level 4 monster to a group of three players.
Building an Encounter
Let's assume have a party of five level 5 characters, and we want to make a boss fight against a powerful pirate captain and her crew. We want the captain to be especially tough, but her crew should be flimsy and easy to cut down to make our players feel awesome wading through a sea of pirates.
If we decide on a total 'encounter budget' of 12 actions per round, then we might decide that the captain gets eight, while every two crew members share one action, for a total encounter of 1 captain and 8 pirates.
The pirate captain's action ratio is 8 ÷ 1 = 8. We like the idea of her jumping into the fray, disarming and wounding people while parrying incoming attacks with an off-hand dagger. We choose her defensive level to be 3 and her offensive level to be 7, for an average of (3 + 7) ÷ 2 = 5.
We want her to have decent AC, so we choose 16 + 1 from her Parry ability (DMG p. 281). We choose her hit point range to be 29-34 (level 1 compensated by higher AC). We multiply that by 8 for a total number of hit points between 232 and 280.
As for offense, we decide that she has a +8 to hit with her cutlass, and we choose her damage range to be from 15 to 16, which we multiply with half her action ratio (8 ÷ 2 = 4) to end up with a range of 60-64.
All of the normal pirates have an action ratio of 1 ÷ 2 = 0.5, so we use the same process but we multiply their final hit points with 0.5, and we multiply their damage per round with 0.5 × 2 = 1.
Credits
- Zeazecca's Enhanced Action-based Levels (ZEAL) (look, I just wanted an acronym) was made by u/zeazecca on Reddit, who makes absolutely no guarantees that evil GMs won't slaughter/maim/devour/otherwise harm any part of your player character.
- ZEAL is unofficial Fan Content permitted under the Fan Content Policy. Not approved/endorsed by Wizards. Portions of the materials used are property of Wizards of the Coast. ©Wizards of the Coast LLC.
- This document was made with the help of GMBinder to make everything look nice and shiny.