Are you having trouble deciding what monsters to put your players up against? Do you struggle with trying to figure out whether or not you’ll decimate your players with the monsters you’ve chosen? Or maybe you’re concerned that you’re giving out too much treasure when your players succeed. Making the right choices around monsters and treasure can be difficult if you want to make it challenging and rewarding to your players without a guaranteed total party kill.
This week,John and Felicia talk about how to incorporate monsters and treasure into your game to make it challenging and rewarding for players, but not too challenging and rewarding. Whether it’s understanding the challenge rating system or making decisions for treasure that is thematically appropriate for your location, we discuss the ins and outs of planning these two aspects of your campaign.
As always,if you have ideas for future episodes, make sure to reach out to us and let us know! Just click contact above to reach out!
Episode 4- Incorporating Monsters and Treasure Into Your Campaign
J: As you move forward, you come across a goblin.
F: Oh, okay, that should be easy.
J: And an owlbear.
F: Wait, wait, what?
J: And some skeletons and a dragon!
F: Wait, aren’t we in a cellar?
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J: In this episode of becoming DM, we’re talking about how to interweave monsters and treasures into your campaign.
F: Hey guys, this is Felicia.
J: And this is John.
F: And this episode we are talking about incorporating monsters and treasures into your campaign. And I think for me when I think about how to best do this for my players, the first thing that comes to my mind is player level.
J: Right. And when you take player level into account and more specifically the party level, D&D, when they represent monsters as well as Pathfinder, they have this thing called challenge rating or CR. So the CR is s basically a numerical value that you’re supposed to make against your player party level and be able to come up with a challenge that is equal to or more challenging than what their players can do, to have something that doesn’t kill them.
F: Assuming that’s what you want.
J: Yeah, but when we talk about the CR, there’s definitely some things that you have to take into account.
F: Yes.
J: So things like your party size, I think you’ve experienced this quite a bit. If you don’t have a party size of maybe three to five people, that CR can really not be accurate. If you’ve got more or less than that you can really be way off base.
F: Yeah, I think, honestly, most of the campaigns that I’ve run tend to be on the larger side, six to seven people and varied in skill levels as well just because, again, I have people that come in and out of my group. So, it tends to stay the same number but always different skill levels.
J: Yeah, and so for those at home who may not be as familiar with the challenge rating before we get too far along, I want to just really briefly talk about how it works. And I’m going to be talking from the Pathfinder, because those are the rules that I’m most familiar with. But as I understand it, D&D is pretty similar. So what you do is you take the average level of your party. So if you’ve got all level one people, your average level is one. And then you take a challenge rating and if you want it to be a fairly even battle, then you take a challenge rating of a monsters that equals one, so maybe you have some skeletons that are worth one third, you could do three skeletons and it’d be pretty okay there. Now, if you want more of a challenge, you can add to that challenge rating and build your encounter on that. But we were still talking about, (sorry for the little breakout there) but we were still talking about the assumptions of the CR.
One of the things that I’m pretty sure is that they assume that you’re doing it on point by. And we were talking about this beforehand about why that might be different than your traditional rolling, you want to run through that real quick?
F: Well, you know, when you’re first building characters, and deciding what your abilities are going to be and the different points that you’re going to assign, you always have the option of, you can just have a set number of points and you distribute amongst your abilities or you roll for it. And depending on those is sort of how your campaign goes from there. I like to build my characters based off of rolling, it’s just my preference.
F: So the thrill of it a little bit.
J: Yeah.
F: It’s kind of like life, you get what you’re dealt and you don’t always have the choice of picking and choosing the ideal numbers. So for me, I kind of like that. And that sort of makes encounters overall in the campaign just that much more engaging. It’s that much more interesting because I’m not always working with something that’s a perfect scenario.
F: Right, and, obviously, the way that CR is based, as I understand it, is based off of doing that point by so yes, as you roll dice, you could potentially have much higher stats than you would with point blank. And that’s going to affect the difficulty of your challenge and where you need to have that at.
F: And then relatedly, the experience points that you get from those encounters, of course, impact you leveling up.
J: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, now that we talked a little bit about the challenge rating, let’s kind of delve in to how to build those encounters with your challenge ratings. How do we make those encounters more challenging for our players so that they’re not just walking through things and going, “Man, I’m just, I’m bored? All we do is just slaughter people”?
F: Yeah, there’s no cliffhanger.
J: Yeah. And one of the things that I really like to do in this vein is you’ve got your challenge rating or whatever you’ve determined is the appropriate challenge rating based upon our previous factors. My preference is rather than build one big monster or one big NPC that they’re going to go against, is to have multiples. So, rather than have one or two, you could have four or five lower level monsters. And then we’ve got the action economy where you have your initiative lineup and everybody gets a certain amount of actions per round, so you don’t have four people wiping out your one or two enemies because they all get attacks before that before that guy does just by initiative sake.
F: I think the thing also to keep in mind, going back to party size, is if you’re in that very unique situation where you have a large party there’s you know there’s some tweaks that you have to make so that, in that particular case, having one higher level enemy is more conducive to the campaign because you have such a large party size.
J: But under normal circumstances a three to five member party, having those lower level enemies makes sense. And if you have a larger party and you’re let’s say, increasing the challenge rating of an encounter by one as a result, you can have that increase be your bigger monsters and have the smaller monsters fill in those gaps for the regular challenge rating.
F: I think it’s definitely something that you keep in mind, you know, the amount of people and try to tailor those encounters to that.
J: The next kind of thing to make things more challenging is using enemy tactics. Have you had any enemies that you’ve recently dealt with where you’ve really used tactics and made players kind of scratch their head with how to deal with the situation?
F: I mean I’m not overly clever when it comes to my enemy tactics or maybe I just haven’t gotten as much experience in doing that, but we have a pretty well rounded group you where there’s a combination of squishy and non-squishy characters. So, we have our very physically strong meat shield characters (our dwarf warriors), but we’ve also got our physically weaker but can shoot from a distance spells kind of sorcerers and wizards and whatnot. So, if I were to create a campaign tailoring to that, because again, I’ve only done the pre-done stories and I haven’t quite gone into creating my own campaigns, I’d probably take into consideration exactly what kind of players I have. I know I have a group that’s mostly spell casters, but that aren’t of a race that gives them that strength inclination I might try to go for like enemies or monsters that go for like physical attacks versus other spell casters. And of course, depending on the situation or the locale, I might try to have those enemies specific to that. Maybe I have evil plants that anchor everyone into place and because they’re not all that strong, it’s harder for them to get out of it. Or have spider webs that catch flying characters, things like that.
J: And one of the things especially if you have more intelligent enemies, is once they see how the NPCs are acting, they can do things like identify, “Hey, that person is casting a spell they’re a spell caster, we need to take care of them first.”
F: Yeah
J: And target them, a) They’re more squishy and they can reduce the numbers, but also because spell casters, if put in the right circumstances, can be pretty devastating.
F: Oh yeah, absolutely. You can get lightning bolted like crazy.
J: So if you have an intelligent enemy, definitely think about how they would perceive the group that’s coming to attack them and how they would react.
F: Yeah.
J: But on the tactics front, one of the more popular things out there lately that I really found entertaining was (I don’t know if you’ve heard of it) TechCrunch Tucker’s Cobalts?
F: No.
J: Basically it was this adventure that was run by this guy named Tucker and this higher level party had to go into this cobalt den. And cobalts are notoriously fairly low level enemies.
F: One would think.
J: But he played them to the nines with how they did their tactics, which is you set traps you maybe engage a little bit and you run away, you circle back in behind people. And so this high level party was just really sweating whether they were going to get out of this this den of cobalts just because of all the traps and tricks and things that were deployed there. So, I think in a lot of the monster manual type books where they have descriptions of your monsters, they’ll also provide some guidance on tactics and what they sort of do. So really, my advice to the listeners is really try to leverage that, to make your encounters (even though these are monsters that maybe the party would normally walk through in just a toe to toe battle), maybe that’s not what they get into. Maybe they get into this ‘fight and flee’ kind of thing.
F: Yeah, I think that’s a really important thing to keep in mind. Actually, now that you said something it kind of jog my memory when you talk about really maximizing, you know, your enemies to make it an engaging encounter for your players. You know, there’s some characters that you know, are resistant to certain things, you know, maybe poisonous gas doesn’t work, but a lightning bolt does or maybe they’re resistant to fire, but not so much to ice. Or the undead, where you actually can do more damage with healing than you can with a regular blow. And those kinds of things, especially if you vary it up, can definitely keep your players on their toes and be like, ‘Hey, we can’t just blow them up like normal. There’s like strategies that we would have to use to be able to successfully overcome these enemies.” Smart.
J: So another challenging thing I like to do is what I like to call ‘late comers.’ So the group of enemies that you’re your party sees at the beginning of the encounter may not be the group that they’re encountering at the end, whether because you’ve got some that are hidden or some that hear the noise and come fight to find out what’s going on. What we were talking about before we started recording, I did a recent game where the players came into a room and they see these three skeletons attacking this guy and they rushing to help the guy. And there’s all there’s another three skeletal archers up on a shelf that they couldn’t see because it was above the doorway. So suddenly the tactics that the players have to engage in is very different than what they thought it was going to be.
F: Yeah, absolutely. And I think along those similar lines, when I was doing another campaign, or when I was playing another DM’s campaign, his little tactic that kind of threw us off was we were fighting this horde of undead. And we thought we would had killed one and then he reanimated it. And animated it again. And it took us three times before we could kill each undead, just because it had that reanimation effect and that was something where it was like, you know, we thought it was easy undead, you know, knock their head off, they’re dead. But, no, not even close. So that was definitely some of those like, “Ah, totally caught us by surprise moments.
J: Yeah.
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J: One of the other things about making these encounters more challenging to your players, if you’re going to give out a magic item as part of the encounter (and we’ll talk about treasure later), make sure that your enemies are using them. Don’t just have them carrying it and die with this powerful item that could have turned the tide of battle. Have you had any monsters where you’ve really leveraged that magic item?
F: We did, though not one that I ran. Again, I was playing a campaign of another DM and he had it that we were fighting. I forget exactly what it was the magical enemy, some sort of spell caster, I think it might have been a warlock or something along those lines. But this individually fought and we defeated and he had this long bow and it was a magical longbow. And in order to use it, you had to give it like a blood offering. So every time you used it, it took a certain amount of essentially like life essence from you in order for you to use it. But it gave a very, very strong attack when you did and so we end up fighting and our Druid got it and she was the one that would use it. But every time she did use it, she had to understand that it took like a hit from her every time she used it. So, that was a very interesting weapon that was sort of like a double edged sword if you will. But one that we would have not been able to have gotten unless we had defeated our enemy first. So it wasn’t just lying around for us to discover in a treasure room, it was, “Hey, it’s this very special weapon that you happen to earn because you defeated someone else who was able to wield it and only a certain type of character could wield it.”
J: So yeah, I had an encounter in the game that I always running that they were fighting. It was the big, bad, evil guy battle where they had this guy and his minions and one of his minions was a rogue. And she was wearing this cloak that allowed her to step from shadow to shadow a couple of times a day. And so she used that and they didn’t know what was going on. They just saw her step into the shadow and disappear. And then the next round she was attacking them from behind again, making it more challenging. But they got this cool magic item when they defeated them, but it was definitely being used to the advantage of the NPC at the time.
F: Exactly.
J: And the other thing I would say, is to think about pairing. So, not every monster that you put out in the field has to be the exact same. Like, if you are encountering the undead, they don’t all have to be skeletons. You could have skeletons mixed in with zombies mixed in with ghouls or whatever. Because they all have their own strengths and weaknesses. And I think you were talking about something recently, where you had mixed those two together because of the different damage types.
F: I mean, yeah, I have run a couple of campaigns where I had the skeletons versus the undead. But I kind of took a page from my other book, the one that we did the campaign for, in kind of implementing that reanimation feature, when we had zombies, and kind of pairing that with skeletons. The skeletons themselves didn’t reanimate, but I did have the undead zombies. So, there is sort of that unique encounter of a lot of lower level monsters, but they had very specific abilities that were very unique to their type. But I mean, we could definitely say that you know, while those might work really well with each other, I’m pretty sure that the goblin, the owl bear, and the dragon in the cellar may not be the ideal trifecta to put on your players.
J: Yeah, and there’s also in those monster companions, allies and enemies listed, if I’m not mistaken. So you can really quickly say, “Oh, yeah, well you wouldn’t see a goblin hanging out with a bunch of skeletons necessarily.” So, yeah, I mean, you wouldn’t always have you know, a dragon working with that out there or spiders. You know, it definitely wouldn’t have them working with them either. Always the spiders.
F: Always with the spiders.
J: So I think that really deals with a lot of the designing challenging encounters with the monsters, but that that kind of brings us into the next topic of treasure.
F: Treasure!
J: And when you think about treasure for the party, we’ll start off kind of like we did the monsters. You have to think about the party level.
F: Yeah.
J: And what’s appropriate for that party at that level. And now, I know Pathfinder, they have charts with anticipated gold per character per level and things like that now, I’m thinking that D&D probably does as well. But really, you need to think of it in terms of your campaign and what is going to be acceptable? What’s going to break things?
F: Yeah. And that they’re not going to come across like, a mountain of gold pieces (unless they, I guess, came across like a dragon’s lair).
J: But if they did that, they’re probably an appropriate level that’s not going to really going to take all of it with them.
F: No, I definitely agree. I have had the luxury of doing pre-made campaigns that set exactly what the players will come across when they either explore a room or they defeat an enemy. And it’ll have a little treasure section on it and says, “Hey, this is the treasure that can be found from this encounter that your players can get.” And for me, I just try in my attempts to distribute it fairly. I will normally have my players roll and the players with the higher rolls are the ones that get the better parts of the treasure. And the players that roll low tend to usually get a crusty sock.
J: So, the reason that this is important is because if you’ve got a group of say, level two or level three players that have hundreds of thousands of gold just to take it way, way far, they could pretty much buy any magic item that they wanted to or any weapon. They could hire an army, so to speak.
F: Yeah.
J: And so, when you start designing challenges for them, it really kind of tips the scales massively in their favor because they can pretty much do whatever they want with that much wealth at that level.
F: Yeah, it’s not even reasonable.
J: So just keeping that in mind and understanding that your players are going to use that goal to do things to make their character more effective. And that’s fine, but you need to make sure that it’s within the bounds of what you’re trying to present to them as a campaign. But you mentioned the sock, and that kind of fits nicely into the next thing here, which is, when you’re giving out treasure, you need to vary the treasure. Yeah, it’s not always going to be gold. It’s not always going to be weapons. It can be a variety of different things. You said that you use socks. Is there anything else that you’ve done? That has been like a, let’s say, relatively worthless item that that?
F: Yeah, I mean, sometimes it’d be like a rusty helmet, you know or an old piece of parchment paper or completely unreadable old scrolls or books, you know, things like that. Some hardened clay that, maybe they thought it was like a little cluster of gems or whatever. But when they break it open, there’s nothing there. Just little things like that. Like I said, the sock is really my go to, you know. I mean, who wouldn’t enjoy a good laugh with a good sock? I’m just saying.
J: Well and sometimes, you can make those low value items have personal value to the characters. So, someone gives someone an honorary title that doesn’t give them anything extra. But they can now be called Lord Feather Bottom or whatever. So, when you give out treasure, (especially if you’re doing it as a reward for quests) and you get to the end of the quest, and you’re like, “Oh, we’ve had all these encounters. They got all this goal. I really need to dial it back,” you can do things like, “Oh, we’re going to make you an honorary Lord or something like that.”
F: And that’s a really good way to maybe plant those nuggets further into your campaign as you go along because things like honorary titles may not be tangible, but it may give you other advantages like accessibility. You have this title and maybe this title gains access to a certain group or location or information that they can get from someone because they have this title. And they know the special handshake and they know if they go in the forest at this time and turn left and go straight down to the fir tree, they’ll find the secret message. So, because they have this title then they get some sort of information. So, it’s something that you can build upon. And it may not mean anything in the moment, but it’s definitely something that can come with continued benefits further down the campaign.
J: And that title can be used by you the DM to make more story arcs.
F: Exactly, exactly. And so that’s important as a DM to realize that not all treasure is tangible.
J: And one other thing to talk about when you talk about treasures, a lot of parties use group funds. So, when you give them this pile of gold, they’re going to take, I don’t know 10% or 20% and put it into the party fund to do things like buy healing potions or pay for ship passage to get from one point to another. So, that’s another thing to keep in mind is, even though it may not be the players wealth, depending upon how the party operates, they could potentially pull that wealth in to make their next big purchase, if you’ve convinced the party that it’s for the good.
F: Yeah, and every time I run a new campaign, that’s the first thing that I try to encourage my players to do is just to discuss, do they or do they not want a group fund? If so, how much or what percentage of their treasure will go towards that fund and who will keep track of it?
J: And you really have to have this before the first treasurer’s awarded because it can cause someone’s feelings to get butt hurt. So, I think that’s a good discussion on the treasure. The next thing we’re going to talk about kind of applies to both monsters and treasure. And it’s thinking about where you’re at, when you’re placing these things. So, geography is important. As you heard in our opener, we were in the cellar, so you wouldn’t necessarily expect to see a dragon and an owl bear and all this other stuff there.
F: Nope!
J: But that also applies to the term geography. So, if you’re in mountains or caves in the desert, you probably aren’t going to see an ice ghoul in the desert. Just like you’re not going to see probably horse type creatures, like centaurs, in caves. So, that’s really something to think about and you need to think about geographically appropriate monsters. So, I know in your game that you’re running, you recently had some characters in a burned out village and you had some monsters that were appropriate for that.
F: Yeah, so we did one recently where they came across an old abandoned village and the initial encounters were pretty much all either undead or skeleton because the history of that particular village was that it had been just annihilated by lava, like a volcano, and everyone and everything was destroyed. And so we had like these lava zombies and we had those in the village. But then we also found out that over in the tower that there was a dragon that had taken up residence in the tower and was just creating a whole bunch of nuisance and for a druid that would go there and use the tower as his lookout to kind of make sure things were staying as they should be in the forest surrounding the village. So, you wouldn’t normally think that those two things would be in the same vicinity, but in this particular instance, it kind of worked out that that village was taken over by those particular monsters. But then you also had the additional challenge of a dragon that had just happened to take it upon himself to make a mess there. And that was his thing.
J: And I think the key to that is as long as the story fits to why those things are there in the same locale, you can make it work. But you do need to have a reason or you’ll start to get some sideways glances from your players.
F: Yeah, exactly. Well, when we even had giant spiders in that as well, because the spiders had lived in the tower first and then when the dragon decided to take residence, he went ahead and kind of eradicated the spiders first, and then made his nest.
J: So, much like having monsters appropriate to locale sometimes there can be location specific thing for treasures as well. So, for instance, as we were talking before, if you liberate a bunch of slaves from a slave pit of some guy, you’re probably not going to find really valuable jewelry or piles of gold. Again, unless the story kind of has a reason for it.
F: It’d be stretching pretty hard there.
J: But it’s possible in next room over you have all that treasure. But you can also go so far as to have it based upon, “We’re in a forest and maybe we have some more nature-related things that we find,” or “You’re in the desert and you find some sort of thing that helps you find water,” or something like that.
F: Yeah. Or we did one where we had them stumble across a wizard’s workshop. And so within that workshop, there were a couple of magical scrolls that allowed them certain spell casting abilities. You know, you wouldn’t find normally something like a magical scroll in a blacksmith’s workshop. It was a wizard’s workshop. So the rewards, the things that they come across come across are going to be relative to that location.
J: Yeah, absolutely. So, I think a good place to wrap up our discussion. So, thanks, everybody for listening in. And as always, if you’ve got some suggestions for future throws and questions that you’d like to ask about dungeon mastering, please go to our website, becomingDM.com or follow us on Twitter at becomingDM or go to our Facebook page facebook.com/becomingDM and feel free to ask us. But until then…
J/F: Stay nerdy, friends!