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Advice needed: encounter balancing for a party with 3 paladins (ttrpg.network)

submitted 1 year ago by gerusz@ttrpg.network to c/askgamemasters@ttrpg.network

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Hi there, fellow DMs!

I'm a fairly new DM (as in: I have around 20 sessions behind my back), and while my players seem to be enjoying the campaign, I've run into a bit of a problem.

Namely, that the three godsdamned paladins are trivializing most combat encounters.

They just leveled up to level 8, but even at level 7:

Attack rolls against them? LOL, CR 7-9 enemies usually have +6-+8 to hit at most; they will miss the paladins (and the cleric) in plate armor + shield 60-75% of the time.
Saving throw abilities and spells? Fuck me, aura of protection, everybody gets +2 or more to all their saves.
Even if a spell slips through? Ancients paladin. Whoever came up with the Aura of Warding at WotC deserves a kick in the head. Everybody near the paladin takes half damage from every spell (quarter if they make the save) because balancing encounters is soooooooooooooo easy!

And that is just their passive abilities. There's of course the usual issue of smites (the three of them can easily deal 24d8 damage in one turn, that's 108 on average - and that's without accounting for crits or them stacking a smite spell on it too). Ranged enemies? LOL, orbital laser goes BZOT! (Moonbeam) Or they'll just leave them to the ranger, cleric, and the warlock. And if they still get banged up, they have 105 HP of dedicated healing between them (plus the cleric and the ranger).

Is there any way to make combat encounters challenging for this party besides trying to overwhelm them through action economy (it's a party of 6, so that would take a shitton of monsters and turn the combat into a slog), finding a way to force them into 6-8 encounters between long rests (wouldn't do anything about the passive abilities but it would at least curtail the smite-nukes), or turning the game into Dark Souls with every monster being a horrible damage sponge that can one-shot any player on a hit?

Because at this point I'm afraid that anything shy of a tarrasque would be a minor inconvenience at best instead of a challenge or a boss.

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[–] gerusz@ttrpg.network 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the tips! Though I'm not too sure how to implement them more than I already am:

It's a homebrew campaign and I'm trying to use the encounter balance tool from 5e tools. But it's still worthless; I threw "absurd" encounters at them and they still obliterated it.
Unfortunately I'm not sure how to create an alternate objective for a combat encounter that isn't also achieved by just destroying the enemy in 2-3 turns. Kind-of like Counter Strike; sure, you can try to rescue the hostages or plant the bomb but it's often easier to just kill the opposing team. Sure, I did manage to run a boss fight that lasted longer because they had to complete secondary objectives (get some of his blood with a special dagger, then defend the allied casters conducting a ritual that would turn off his insane regeneration) before they got to nuke him, and the fight had two more phases after that. But that's not an amount of prep that I'm willing to do for any run-on-the-mill difficult encounter, it was the arc-villain of one of their backstories.
Misty step. :(
Sure, if they murder the shit out of a gang of bandits who gave them some trouble in the second session, that's fine. The problem is when they take down the homebrew CR17 fire giant lord in less than two turns in-game, and less time IRL than it took to actually homebrew it. (At least I learned that 3 legendary actions are only adequate for a party of 4; for a party of N the number of legendary actions for a boss should be N-1.)

The next big quest they will probably undertake is slaying a dragon. (They know about the dragon, it's a known problem in the region, and they expressed interest in slaying it both in and out of character.) I plan to introduce the dragon by having it wreck a related side mission they are sent on, but I can only hope and pray to Tymora, the Lady, and any other deity of dice rolls that I won't have to tear up the prep for the next 9-10 sessions thanks to some lucky dice rolls from the players' part.