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Balance in extremely creative combat encounters
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this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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The more creative the encounter is the more ways you have to adjust on the fly and the less CR is accurate. Sure it gives you an idea on which ballpark you are in.
For example you have multiple lair actions and a selection of those activate each round. If the PCs are hurting then you can choose a few soft ones to give then a chance to regroup and recover. If reinforcements are coming perhaps there are a few less. Similarly if the PCs are cruising, hit 'em hard.
Whether or not this crosses the border into DM fiat/fudging I'll leave up to you.
Also remember you don't have to use the highest DPR actions in general.
This is a good answer. DMs have a lot of dials to turn to adjust the difficulty of an encounter even just with how they play the enemies. Really I think there are few DMs who play enemies as deadly as possible all the time.
I know I'll sometimes play enemies more aggressively if the PCs are doing better in the fight, like attacking downed PCs or counterspelling healing. Whereas if they're struggling, I might find other things for the enemies to do that'll be a little less mean.
I mean, if there are downed PCs, they're struggling already, IMO.
Well, somewhat. With the way healing works in 5E it's pretty easy to get people back up, and you can often have one PC be downed and still have the rest of the party doing pretty well. If I'm running an enemy that wants to kill the entire party, and the party is trying to kill the enemy, having one at least person go unconscious is pretty common to make it actually feel challenging. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the party is actually in danger of losing the fight.