So far, playing with one of my DMs has been stressful as fuck. He set a group of 5 PCs and 1 NPC (All level 10) against a CR 15 monster that had three attacks per turn and did around 33-40 damage PER HIT. (The average amount of HP was around 80-barely 100)
The session before that? 5 Mutated elves against 5 level 10s. No idea what CR they were but considering they downed half the party and seriously wounded the rest, they were probably CR 9-10.
A random encounter during a long rest? 2 Apes vs a level 10 party of 5. Easy, right? NOPE. Nearly downed 2 players and we only won because of the other paladins channel divinity option, rebuke the violent. CR? Apparently 7. Didn’t fucking feel like it.
This DM has a bad habit of bumping up the CR of the creatures because he thinks he gave us too many magical items. He gives us basically no loot at the moment. For the CR 15 and CR 10ish fight we got a total of 1 platinum each (Worth 100gp I think, can’t remember)
He’s a kinda new DM so I can forgive him a little bit, but when you do it EVERY FUCKING GAME it gets a bit annoying, yanno?
Oh but I didn’t mention the Creme A La CREME of the bullshit. The CR 15 fight? A cracked version of an Elder Wendigo sheet he found. We lost:
30 Platinum (3,000gp)
All of our magical gear became mundane, apart from a couple of items (so about 30,000gp worth of gear)
When attacking this thing with a melee weapon, your weapon would slowly disintegrate (Another 12,000gp gone)
16 hit dice between us
Enough HP to kill a Behir or two (give or take a few)
Divine health was also for some reason negated????? When you pull that shit with a party and then pay them fucking nothing, you can’t expect all of them to be OK with it. I DID talk to the DM about it, and he’s reimbursed some of the items or just given us better ones, but still. New DMs, PLEASE DO NOT ASSUME A PARTY CAN HANDLE HIGH CR MONSTERS JUST BECAUSE YOU GAVE THEM A LOT OF MAGICAL GEAR. THERE ARE OTHER WAYS AROUND IT. Some tips:
Plan the items you know you want to give them before they are given to them. Ask people on forums or message boards or even discords if an item might make things too easy on the party, and keep track of what they have, what they sold, what they got rid of and what they ignored. (Checklists are useful for this)
If a fight feels too easy on your end, it’s too hard for the players.
Try not to negate abilities like divine health without telling the players first, or at least making them do a perception roll. It kinda seems like you’re just conveniently removing it otherwise.
KEEP A TRACK OF DCS FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, THEY’RE IMPORTANT. This DM forgot that the DC was 19 for the Wendigo Psychosis, so when I rolled a 19 (The defender always wins with saves that equal the DC), he thought the DC was 20. Only later on did he realize the mistake.
This game is called DUNGEONS & Dragons for a reason. Don’t be afraid to go dungeon crawling with your party once in a while, but don’t make every encounter nearly impossible. Save harder fights in dungeons for the final encounter.
Players do need downtime/breaks from combat. This also gives you extra time to plan things out or set up maps without taking away from game time. Some DMs don’t like it that much, but it’s nice to have players interact to learn more about each others characters so they have reasons to give a shit about each other in battle.
Don’t blow your PC backstory quests all in one load. Scatter the backstory reveal quests out a bit, but not so they’re few and far between.
Try not to hyper-focus on one PC. It might be hard to not do that in some groups, but this is a team-based game, and other players might act out to try and draw the spotlight if you don’t even attempt to give them equal attention.
If you have a physical plot device, don’t give it to only one player. I play a campaign where only one character has access to a plot device that allows us to know the location of the other plot maguffins, so we have to ask him to figure out where the next one is, or we just have to follow him because he’s the only one able to point us in the right direction. This can be especially annoying if that player or character is away from the group/party and you need to figure everything out.
Throw a couple of easy fights at the players once in a while. When a quest or a side mission sounds simple at first (”The cemetery is full of undead, go clear it out and find the source” as an example), there is nothing more frustrating to me when every single little mission has some extra layers of complexity that seem totally unnecessary. (Turns out theres a giant undead maguffin that reanimates the corpses and it needs a specific item to kill it forever)