You can also use a monster book right at the table. When selecting possible monsters for a session, bookmark the relevant pages to save time during your game.
Think of Challenge Ratings as a Loose Gauge
Along with understanding what monsters you have available, it helps to understand the relationship between a monster’s challenge rating and a character’s level. You’re not looking for a perfect mathematical formula to help you balance encounters. (Spoiler alert: There isn’t one.) You just want a rough understanding of whether a battle will be easy or deadly. This understanding should be simple enough that you can keep it in your head as a loose gauge, allowing you to refer to it without having to consult numerous charts and tables.
For example, from the rules of fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, it’s possible to simplify the challenge rating of a monster to the following guideline:
The challenge rating for a single monster is roughly equivalent to one-quarter of a character’s level, or to half a character’s level if that level is 5th or higher.
Thus, a challenge 3 creature in D&D is roughly equivalent to a 6th-level character. For the Pathfinder rules, the challenge rating of a monster is roughly equivalent to the level of a character minus two. So a challenge 3 monster in a Pathfinder game is roughly equivalent to a 5th-level character.
You can use this rough gauge to estimate the difficulty of any given combat encounter without resorting to complicated math or calculators. Because your goal isn’t to build perfectly balanced battles but to choose monsters that make sense for the story, you want to use challenge ratings as a loose gauge to understand the potential difficulty of a combat encounter.
According to a poll on this topic posted to the Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition Facebook group, 57 percent of 276 respondents use monster challenge ratings as a rough gauge of difficulty, then improvise encounters from there. Another 26 percent don’t balance encounters at all, instead choosing the type and number of monsters based on the story and situation.
So taking the Lazy Dungeon Master’s approach to thinking about challenge ratings puts you in good company.
Prepare to Improvise Combat Encounters
“Throw it all out and wing it and see what happens.”
—Matthew Colville
As with most of the tools of the Lazy Dungeon Master, you want your preparation and selection of monsters to help you improvise combat encounters at the table. You don’t need to build perfectly balanced encounters ahead of time. Instead, you let the story and the situation guide how events unfold.
Sometimes you might tie monsters directly to a fantastic location—for example, setting up a nest of ice spiders in a frozen cavern. Taken together, two bits of improvisation might create something that feels a lot like a preconstructed encounter. Most of the time, though, you don’t know how many monsters the characters will encounter or where they might do so. You let the game decide that for you.
Prepare Boss Fights
This style of organic combat-encounter building works well most of the time—but not for boss fights. When the characters face off against a longtime villain, you’ll want to do more work ahead of time, particularly for high-level characters.
Your goal for boss fights is always to maintain a high level of challenge without robbing the characters of agency. As such, to run a good boss fight, you need to understand the capabilities of the characters. Do they hammer out insane amounts of damage in the first round? Do they lock down monsters with powerful spells and abilities? Are their defenses so good that nothing can break through?
When you’re building a boss fight, you need to know these capabilities—but not so you can counteract them. You want to let the characters show off. However, you also want to avoid having a powerful boss get killed in the first round of combat.
Test fights can be a fun way to run boss encounters. Powerful villains might create clones or have a guaranteed way to escape if they’re ever defeated. Vampires and liches are perhaps the best example of guaranteed escape, with both having built-in ways to restore themselves after being destroyed. Whatever game mechanic is behind it, having a boss face off against the characters in a trial battle can give the boss—and you—a view into how effective the characters can be in combat.
As to how the boss handles combat, a number of different techniques can help make boss fights memorable. You can use fantastic terrain like magical crystals that shield the boss, or a chamber that slowly fills up with poison gas to hinder the heroes. Or you can protect the boss with powerful guardians that absorb damage or powerful effects. And it’s worth remembering that no boss should ever fight alone. The challenge in any battle comes from the number of monsters the characters face—but in boss battles, this becomes even more important.
The side that can take more actions in combat has a huge advantage over the side that takes fewer. In a meta-analysis of discussions about boss fights in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, advice on this topic focused on the following seven recommendations:
Add more monsters to the fight.
Drain character resources before the fight.
Use the environment.
Focus on story-based challenges.
Improve boss tactics.
Understand the capabilities of the characters.
Increase the boss’s hit points.
Carefully planning boss fights isn’t exactly the lazy way to do things, however. Instead of spending extra time on boss fights, you can always just let the battle go how it goes. After all, the players can enjoy a surprise easy victory just as much as overcoming a powerful challenge. You can build big dynamic battle arenas for your boss fights, or you can run them just as organically as you run the rest of your encounters. Focus on the evolving story and choose what feels fun.
Choosing Monsters for “The Scourge of Volixus”
Let’s break down the process of choosing monsters that make sense for our “Scourge of Volixus” adventure. Volixus has taken over Grayspire, an old ruined fortress with a number of sewers and tunnels below it. He brought a small army of hobgoblins with him—so let’s go with two dozen. He also has a bunch of goblin combat fodder as well—let’s say three dozen goblins. He has a pair of hellhounds gifted to him from his infernal lord. He also hired a band of ogres called the Bonemashers, so let’s go with six of those.
To build his infernal war machine, Volixus also had to bring in maybe six gnome engineers and six alchemists for the job. The gnomes might not be hostile to the characters, but you never know. Then finally, we’ll stick six cultists and four wraiths up at the Watchtower of Set.
These numbers aren’t set in stone, though—and we might skip assigning a specific quantity of monsters altogether. The number of monsters can be increased or reduced based on specific situations during the game, or even a gut feeling of how the game is going. Would it be more fun with fewer goblins? Go with fewer.
Now, without considering challenge ratings or any need to balance encounters, we have a rough idea which monsters have a place in the adventure and how many there’ll be—and we did it all by looking at what makes sense for the situation.
Here’s the abbreviated list:
Monsters: 24 hobgoblins, 36 goblins, 12 gnomes, 6 cultists, 4 wraiths, 2 hell hounds, 6 ogres, Volixus the hobgoblin half-dragon mercenary
Checklist for Choosing Relevant Monsters
Choose monsters that make sense for the story, situation, and location.
Read monster books to prime your brain with new ideas and information for improvisation.
Keep a loose gauge of monster difficulty and character levels in mind.
Improvise encounters based on the story and situation during the game.
Spend time building boss fights that account for character capabilities without negating those capabilities—or instead, let boss fights play out like other encounters.
Chapter 10: Select Magic Item Rewards
Players love magic items. But as GMs, we always have a l
ot on our collective plate, and we might not give magic item rewards the attention they deserve. We’re often too focused on the story, the monsters, the villains, and other details to worry about whether Ryld the sorcerer should find a cool staff or not.
If we don’t pay attention to magic item rewards, we’re missing a great opportunity to spotlight characters and make players happy. We’re also missing opportunities to draw players into the story through these rewards—and to have them really invest in the story.
There are many ways to reward magic items, but we’re going to focus on two methods particularly useful to the Lazy Dungeon Master: the loose wish list and randomly selected rewards. Many GMs already use these two styles of loot distribution, and for good reason. They’re easy and effective.
The Loose Wish List
How do you know what sort of item a character will want, or what items the players are interested in? Ask them.
More specifically, ask them what types of items they want. Do they like heavy armor? Big swords? Wands that do weird things? Do they prefer to always see their combat modifiers go up, or do they like items that let them interact with the world in new and strange ways?
You might not know this unless you ask. So raise this question at the beginning of a campaign, and then every six sessions or so afterwards. When the players tell you what they want, write it down—ideally in the same place you’re keeping track of the rest of your game’s character information. That way, you’ll be able to review these wish lists when you’re reviewing the characters as the first step of your Lazy Dungeon Master preparation.
Even better, as you build the rest of your session, you can see if there’s a good place to drop in an item for one of the characters by keeping two questions in mind. Does it make sense for the story? And has it been a while since the characters received any magic? As a general rule, it’s nice to drop one useful magic item into each session of play.
Choosing Items Randomly
Along with the loose wish list, you can use random treasure lists in RPG sourcebooks and online treasure generators to provide ideas for loot you might not otherwise consider. You can roll for random treasure right at the table if you like. Or you can roll ahead of time and curate the results to avoid useless or inappropriate items. Either way, by using a random generator, you get a chance to bring interesting items into your world that might surprise you and the players alike.
Tying Magic Items to the Story
When you give out magic items, the tangible benefits to the players’ side of the game are immediately obvious. Magic items make players happy. They make characters more powerful and more versatile. In fact, in many cases, the right magic item can come to define a character.
From the GM’s side of the table, there’s an even more important benefit. Magic items can become physical anchors to the story—and by tying magic items to the story, it helps you tie the characters to the campaign.
Magic items can fit into the story in two different ways. First and perhaps most commonly, a magic item might become the purpose of a quest. It is said that the hobgoblin half-dragon Volixus wields a greatsword known as Stonehewer, forged for the long-dead High Lord Grandel Whitesparrow. The current Lord Marlin Whitesparrow desperately wants to get the sword out of the hands of the villainous hobgoblin, offering a handsome reward to anyone who can slay Volixus—and promising to bequeath the blade to the characters who reclaim it from the hands of evil.
Magic items used to define quests offer a two-pronged benefit. They draw the players in for the sake of the tangible benefit of the item, even as they help drive the story. Few players will pass over a quest to acquire a magic item that’s both central to the story and beneficial to the party.
Magic items can also act as vehicles for secrets and clues. When the characters find a new magic item—whether selected from a wish list or randomly generated— you can tie one of the campaign’s secrets and clues directly to the item. When the characters reclaim the sword from the body of Volixus, they might learn how it was lost from the hand of Grandel Whitesparrow centuries ago during the last battles of Grayspire. Secrets and clues tied to magic items can easily and effectively expose the characters to the history of your world and the ongoing story.
Magic Items for “The Scourge of Volixus”
For our “Scourge of Volixus” adventure, we’ll probably have one major item—the greatsword of High Lord Grandel Whitesparrow, known as Stonehewer. It’s a greatsword of sharpness forged for Grandel some four hundred years ago. Though the lost sword has strong ties to the Whitesparrow line, Lord Marlin Whitesparrow will reward it to the characters who defeat Volixus, hoping to see them use it in the cause of good as his ancestor did.
We’ll also roll up a random item to throw into the adventure. It turns out that Volixus wears a pair of gauntlets of ogre power. These were claimed by the half-dragon when he defeated the former hobgoblin war chief Thorash Hellfang in single combat, then took over the tribe.
Checklist for Selecting Magic Item Rewards
Players love magic items. It’s worth your time to consider magic items during prep.
At the beginning of a campaign and every six sessions thereafter, ask the players what sorts of items they’d like for their characters.
Write down their answers, then review those answers when you’re reviewing the characters during step one on the Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist.
When it fits the story, select an interesting item for one of the characters and plan to drop it into the game.
You might also randomly select magic items to drop into the game.
Tie magic items to the story, either by using them as the focus of a quest, or as a connection to a secret or clue.
Chapter 11: Our Preparation Notes So Far
We’ve now gone through the full Lazy Dungeon Master preparation process for our “Scourge of Volixus” adventure. So what do our notes look like at this point? We don’t actually have any characters for this adventure yet, so we need to assume that we’ll have reviewed the characters before writing down these notes. But we can have a look at the rest.
The Strong Start
During the last great trade-day before winter falls upon the village of Whitesparrow, an iron-armored caravan filled with hooded hobgoblins attacks the bazaar. Their goal is to steal weapons and armor—as well as an old book possessed by Paula Dustyfingers, the curio vendor.
Potential Scenes
Investigate the armored caravan.
Talk to Paula Dustyfingers the curio seller about the book the hobgoblins wanted.
Talk to the archivist Aluvena the Keeper, the custodian of Whitesparrow history.
Find Littletoes, a goblin who escaped from the battle.
Follow the hobgoblins’ trail back to the Watchtower of Set.
Travel through the goblin warrens beneath the tower.
Sneak into the inner keep of Grayspire, the hobgoblins’ mountain fortress.
Face the hobgoblin leader Volixus in the throne room.
Secrets and Clues
The hobgoblins are building a terrible city-destroying war machine in the western mountains.
The war machine was forged in the fires of the Nine Hells centuries ago, and was lost in a great battle.
The hobgoblins have gnome tinkerers and alchemists working on the war machine, but it isn’t clear whether those are prisoners or allies.
A hobgoblin half-dragon veteran known as Volixus the Burning Rage leads the hobgoblins.
In addition to his goblin and hobgoblin army, Volixus has hired a band of ogre mercenaries known as the Bonemashers.
The hobgoblins have taken over a ruined mountain fortress known as Grayspire.
Centuries past, Grayspire served as the fortress headquarters of High Lord Grandel Whitesparrow, but it fell into ruin long ago.
A nearly limitless series of sewers and catacombs spreads out beneath Grayspire—including some caverns and ancient ruins said to predate the construction of the cit
adel.
Wraiths haunt the old Watchtower of Set, which sits above tunnels connecting it to the lower levels of Grayspire.
The library of Lord Whitesparrow might hold old maps or clues to navigating the sewers and tunnels beneath Grayspire.
Fantastic Locations
Watchtower of Set: Narrow goat-path leads to a ruined watchtower; shattered and crumbling stone covered in strange black oil; collapsed floor leads one hundred feet down into tunnels below the mountains
Goblin Hovels: Network of caves beneath Grayspire; shrine to a goblin god of servitude called Irons; cascades of oily black water
Courtyard of Bones: Ruined courtyard filled with the bones and rusted armor of the dead; bones of devils rumored to growl in anger; great spiked wheels from the remnants of shattered infernal war machines
War Engine: Juggernaut set with black iron skull; huge spiked wheels in the front; vast burning engine of glowing green hellfire
Molten Keep: Keep of granite half-melted by intense otherworldly heat; petrified bodies reaching out from the molten walls; throne of iron and steel flanked by huge black-armored statues
NPCs
Paula Dustyfingers: Seller of old curios and relics. Marcus Brody from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Volixus the Burning Rage: Leader of the hobgoblins. Bane from Batman.
Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master Page 5
