https://www.reddit.com/r/mattcolville/comments/k6l0dv/how_much_damage_should_your_monsters_be_doing/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTD2RZz6mlo&list=PLlUk42GiU2guNzWBzxn7hs8MaV7ELLCP_&index=2

5 encounters is 3-4 hours??

DMG, page 84. If you run the numbers you get roughly 6 to 8 encounters, depending on difficulty, number of monsters, whether the party is mixed level, factors like that. You're also expected to have two short rests at about one-third and two-thirds into the day.

I was rewatching Matt's Livestream where he made the Blackiron Pact recently, and he made an offhand commend about knowing how much damage a creature should do. It got me thinking - what does WotC think the answer to that question should be?

https://preview.redd.it/barlk9p7a6361.png?width=1276&format=png&auto=webp&s=48df8660f79c5b73e90959eaf72c1285d58390ed

Well, here is the answer! This is every monster inside the monster manual - with their CR and the amount of damage they have the potential of doing with their best but most basic action each round. This makes many assumptions as to the players always failing saves and attacks always hitting, but I think that's as good as we are going to get.

The question then becomes how do we turn this into useful information that we, as Dungeon Masters, can use?

https://preview.redd.it/4rtg3nhna6361.png?width=1273&format=png&auto=webp&s=2e2a206d19fc85876bfbd8990165c06a7729ad09

After taking the means of the average damage per round, we can fit this not-awful linear line. We could fit something quadratic to make a more accurate simulation, but then every time we wanted to make a monster we'd have to do way more maths than I'd want to have to do.

This provides us with the equation: Average Damage per Round = 5.85 + 2.95 _ CR. This is great, because we can simplify this very very easily to 6 + 3 _ CR.

How good of a scale CR is - that's a much wider topic which I have some very personal and strong opinions on. However, hopefully this information will make 1 DM's job easier.

TL;DR: Your monsters should be doing average damage equal to 6, + 3 times their CR

Edit: This formula is for their standard action on their turn, and doesn't include things like fireballs, dragon breaths & legendary actions. For a nice demonstration of this, see my suggested line against what WotC have on page 274 of the DMG: https://i.imgur.com/vk5kSI3.png

This is a nice simple formula to tuck away, thanks.

I have found that the Average Damage per Round can be a little tricky to calculate correctly, especially with custom monster with cycling attacks and skills, especially with how it relates to calculating CR. Many of the MM monsters have some baked in assumptions that simply don't play out at the table.

Steve Winter from Kobold Press has some tricks on developing a more realistic AVG DPR and a similar formula, but it serves as a second proof for your math. Hooray validation!

There's a great series on the Blog of Holding about how WotC uses a different set of rules than what's found in the DMG compared to the monsters they create in the MM and other adventure books. Worth looking into if you want to build monsters whose stats are closer to "actual" monsters. I've found that if you build a monster using the DMG rules it will have a much larger pool of hit points but also do quite a bit less damage. Not that that's a bad thing, but it is a thing.

I myself have been working on a project to reverse-engineer "ideal" monster stats by CR based on a "standard adventuring party", which (for simplicity's sake) is a group of 5 Thief Rogues, each of which uses the standard array of ability scores and puts their second-highest ability score into Constitution. The reason being is the Rogue gains ability score improvements quicker than most other classes (except the Fighter, of course), and their main source of damage scales predictably which makes the math a whole lot simpler to work out. For the ASIs, I assumed that the characters would increase their primary ability score (Dexterity) first and then increase their secondary ability score (Constitution) afterwards.

I worked off of the assumption that a single monster of a given CR is a "medium encounter" for a party of 5 (since the rules assume a party is between 4-6 players) and that a medium encounter lasts a number of rounds equal to the monster's proficiency bonus. The number of rounds increases by 0.5 ever few levels though, just to smooth out the final numbers.

Basically, a monster should have enough HP wherein it can absorb the damage of 5 rogues hitting approximately 60% of the time for the given number of rounds. It will also do enough damage to kill off the entire party after 1 more round than it's expected to survive, assuming that they hit the characters 50% of the time.

For monsters of CR 21+, I assumed that the party would continue to level up past level 20 using the Epic Boons rules in the DMG, and instead of gaining any of the boons found there they would increase their primary and secondary ability scores by 1 at every level. It also helps that Sneak Attack damage increases at a predictable rate, so we can extrapolate how it would increase past level 20 pretty easily.

Of course your normal D&D party will NOT be a bunch of Thieves, nor will they all have the same ability scores nor take the same bonuses/feats/boons at the same time. But you have to start somewhere, and I chose what works out to be the easiest to calculate. I've built monsters using these stats for several campaigns, and it offered a pretty decent challenge without completely overwhelming my players. Exactly what a medium encounter should be!

You can find the result of my work on my Google Drive. Unfortunately I don't have a better explanation of how I arrived at each value on the table. I plan on making a post on Reddit walking through everything in detail at some point in the future.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14AjFwv6fCr2LTmiWJmtbIZ3mC4KtbtuaZ2Mbn-saGl0/edit?usp=sharing