One of the bits of advice I give new DMs is this: Have more than one foe in a fight.

The trouble with solo monsters is that they’re often underwhelming or, alternatively, far too powerful.

This can derive from their ability to focus fire on one hero.

In a fight against four goblins, it is very difficult for those goblins to all attack the same hero if there’s even a modicum of good player tactics occurring. In a fight against six goblins, even less so.

The solo monster is, in theory, the equivalent of four regular foes, so say it gets two attacks each dealing double goblin damage. At this point, it has the same “lethality”. However, because it’s a single creature, it’s most likely attacking just one target. And that can quickly drop a character.

So that’s the side of things where solo monsters are problematic.

But having a horde of monsters – say six or eight – can also quickly go badly for the characters. There are reasons that the 5E rules suggest that you include a numbers multiplier to determine the difficulty of a challenge.

This goes both ways – more heroes can very quickly make an encounter you thought difficult much easier.

I asked on Twitter earlier today what people thought which eight monsters would be a good challenge for a party of four 8^th level characters would be. The consensus seemed to be around CR 2, with possibly CR 3. And not CR 4 unless you were very careful about what monsters were chosen.

I tend to lean towards the higher side of these numbers, but to a large extent, this is due to my groups often being well-equipped with area-effect spells such as fireball.

Also waves. Waves of enemies are cool.

All of this can go wrong quickly. You’ll find a lot of people unhappy that balancing encounters isn’t an exact science. I’m not – without the variability of play, I’m not so sure it’d be so entertaining. The tolerance between a balanced encounter and an unbalanced encounter is greater than you fear, and you learn by doing. Not everyone has the same characters and players – and so any “precise” system would quickly fall apart.

As a DM, it helps when you learn how to recover from bad situations. Let the heroes flee. If they don’t and die, do they mind starting again with new characters, or perhaps an expedition to recover and raise their old characters – and perhaps a quest to pay off the debt. If the monsters die too easily; that’s not as much of a problem. Just try some more dangerous foes next time!

Also, be wary of initiative. The more monsters you have, the better it is to have some of them act at different times. If you roll once for initiative for a group of eight orcs and roll a natural 20 on the die, things may go very badly, very quickly.

I grew up with the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books, and thus a lot of my assumptions about the game come from that era. And in those days, parties of nine were assumed, and the adventures still were mostly written for six or more characters. So, it feels odd when there are fewer monsters.

I still dislike solo monsters for the most part at lower levels. Too easy for the characters to always miss them or feel like they’re not contributing.

But I do have to restrain myself from sending twenty goblins at a low-level party. Or even a mid-level party. Numbers count, even more so when the party is now only three or four big!

I have a sneaking suspicion that in most cases, you should aim for most fights to be between one and eight foes, with exceptions when the party are significantly superior. Sending 50 skeletons against a level 10 cleric is fun due to the cleric’s ability to destroy them.

So much time playing Dungeons & Dragons and I am still not sure of where all the boundaries lie!