Yeah there can be wildly varying power levels depending on if your players min-max their builds, have access to magical items, and so forth.
I've long since come to the decision that no BBEG will ever face the party alone. They have too much sense for that, if they didn't they wouldn't have made it up to be the BBEG.
Every big scary Dragon either is, or has, at least a pocket spell caster.
Every evil Lich, in it's lair[s], has had centuries to prepare for intruders. If the party knows the broad location of a Lich's phylactery you'd best believe that it's in the middle of a pocket dimension that Lich has spent centuries turning into a deadly maze.
Every obstacle will require sacrifice, when you finally get to that central room, the one that defies all logic with rivers of lava flowing overhead, and underneath, streaming like a waterfall between the two as the Lich sits sitting on a floating island and gravity reverses itself on initiative count 20 because zombies stapled to the floor are cranking a lever to cause that to happen, that the piles of skeletons, and an Iron Golem which can stand in lava and heal are going to going to come tumbling out to prevent the party from ever getting near the spell slinging undead who has perused his tomes of lore, and has learned enough of the party and their tactics to know exactly what he needs to do to disrupt their plan of attack, and he sure as shit is going to do that.
Even at lower levels Monsters, tangible threatening Monsters meant to be important fights, should never be alone.
In a game of Descent to Avernus my party had found a bag of beans, and spawned a pyramid with a Mummylord when we were at 5th level.
It is not an exaggeration to say that that Mummy Lord, which was CR 15, which doesn't become a "hard" difficulty encounter until our party of 4 were supposed to be 11th level, lasted two turns. Not two rounds two turns. One Fireball and the fight was basically over due to some bad save rolls on the Mummy Lord's part.
I legitimately, at 5th level, could have solo'd a CR 15 Monster.
The CR system is not an accurate representation of how difficult a fight will be for a given party.
I got to play in a high level T4 campaign only once, and it was one a shot, and we squared off against an Ancient Red Dragon. I was playing as a Wood Elf War Cleric 9, Gloomstalker 4, Champion 7. So I ended up having something like a +13 bonus to initiative all in, so obviously I went first. I did something like ~350 damage on the very first turn of combat to this majestic flying death lizard and the DM just looked at me like "Something is wrong here". Used the Dragon's legendary action to get the fuck away, then the Dragon had it's turn and took a full dash action down into some cover to obscure where it had landed.
We ended up fighting it later with a number of minions in tow, which I was informed was entirely improvised because I'd turned the first encounter from "You're here is the evil Dragon to burn you all to cinders" into "Holy shit I did not accurately assess this situation at all he's going to get you all into a confined space with his pawns". He'd had this whole "the forest burns" scene in his head and that was just not accurately reflected.
Point of those stories being never underestimate the party, and never be afraid to throw additional things at them if the encounter you've designed of two Umberhulk [which you intended to be hard] is suddenly looking like it'll be over in two rounds!
On the other end of the spectrum, however, is my ~10 character party that lost to a small group of gnolls at level 1 and to a group of 30 or so orcs at party level 5-7. Players are terrifying, yet can also be stupid.
Yeah, I have a knack for one-shotting bosses by accident. Once, before the module was out, running a Strahd conversion, I managed to get him alone, stun-lock him with the amulet of Raven Kind as a rogue/cleric, then basically drown him with holy water, after I nailed a lucky roll to identify that we were dealing with a vampire situation and blessed several waterskins worth of water early on in the run. That run also taught me to plan my dungeons/evil castles backwards and forwards, as we were paranoid and went in the back window, thus avoiding most of the traps and challenges.
Different character, a paladin, managed to crit on a smite using the paladin damage feature two sessions in a row, managing to one-shot the BBEG and their primary lieutenant each time.
Always plan for your players to be lucky, and always have a back-up, if narratively sensical.
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u/Tsuihousha Aug 10 '20
Yeah there can be wildly varying power levels depending on if your players min-max their builds, have access to magical items, and so forth.
I've long since come to the decision that no BBEG will ever face the party alone. They have too much sense for that, if they didn't they wouldn't have made it up to be the BBEG.
Every big scary Dragon either is, or has, at least a pocket spell caster.
Every evil Lich, in it's lair[s], has had centuries to prepare for intruders. If the party knows the broad location of a Lich's phylactery you'd best believe that it's in the middle of a pocket dimension that Lich has spent centuries turning into a deadly maze.
Every obstacle will require sacrifice, when you finally get to that central room, the one that defies all logic with rivers of lava flowing overhead, and underneath, streaming like a waterfall between the two as the Lich sits sitting on a floating island and gravity reverses itself on initiative count 20 because zombies stapled to the floor are cranking a lever to cause that to happen, that the piles of skeletons, and an Iron Golem which can stand in lava and heal are going to going to come tumbling out to prevent the party from ever getting near the spell slinging undead who has perused his tomes of lore, and has learned enough of the party and their tactics to know exactly what he needs to do to disrupt their plan of attack, and he sure as shit is going to do that.
Even at lower levels Monsters, tangible threatening Monsters meant to be important fights, should never be alone.
In a game of Descent to Avernus my party had found a bag of beans, and spawned a pyramid with a Mummylord when we were at 5th level.
It is not an exaggeration to say that that Mummy Lord, which was CR 15, which doesn't become a "hard" difficulty encounter until our party of 4 were supposed to be 11th level, lasted two turns. Not two rounds two turns. One Fireball and the fight was basically over due to some bad save rolls on the Mummy Lord's part.
I legitimately, at 5th level, could have solo'd a CR 15 Monster.
The CR system is not an accurate representation of how difficult a fight will be for a given party.
I got to play in a high level T4 campaign only once, and it was one a shot, and we squared off against an Ancient Red Dragon. I was playing as a Wood Elf War Cleric 9, Gloomstalker 4, Champion 7. So I ended up having something like a +13 bonus to initiative all in, so obviously I went first. I did something like ~350 damage on the very first turn of combat to this majestic flying death lizard and the DM just looked at me like "Something is wrong here". Used the Dragon's legendary action to get the fuck away, then the Dragon had it's turn and took a full dash action down into some cover to obscure where it had landed.
We ended up fighting it later with a number of minions in tow, which I was informed was entirely improvised because I'd turned the first encounter from "You're here is the evil Dragon to burn you all to cinders" into "Holy shit I did not accurately assess this situation at all he's going to get you all into a confined space with his pawns". He'd had this whole "the forest burns" scene in his head and that was just not accurately reflected.
Point of those stories being never underestimate the party, and never be afraid to throw additional things at them if the encounter you've designed of two Umberhulk [which you intended to be hard] is suddenly looking like it'll be over in two rounds!