What are your tips for creating balanced combat? lately whenever i do a combat for my players, either i make it too easy and they barely take damage, or too hard and 1-2 of them die.

I don't know your exact details, but just to reiterate.

Combat in DND does not assume you do one each day.

There is a thing called "adventuring day" that establishes a number of encounters to be made each day of proper adventuring.

This is because DND is not much about combat by itself, but rather about adventuring with combat.

This basically means that yeah, your players will obliterate most enemies they face unless they are absurdly strong as long as that's the first encounter of the day. The issue arises when more than one encounter are to be made each day.

Think about an adventuring day as being like a dungeon floor - players can take short rest, make several encounters, and when the floor ends the day is over. It's more or less the same structure.

I do suggest to read this better in the DMG tho.

It's very hard to create a singular combat encounter thats balanced, since any given combat is probably going to only last a few rounds the only way the players will be in danger is if the monsters are capable of killing them in a few rounds, and when thats the case it also means they're probably capable of killing a player in a single crit.

The better way to balance the game is to try and have at least a few different combat encounters per long rest, this stops players from easily winning encounters by blowing their strongest abilities immediately, but also lets you challenge them with attrition damage, with monsters doing smaller amounts of damage over time threatening players without the risk of them being instantly killed.

Bear in mind that the dice, and how many encounters they've had previously, play a large role.

An adult black dragon as the first fight of the day is going to land differently than an adult black dragon as the fourth of the day, even if the exact same encounter is run.

Sometimes the players will roll poorly and the monsters will roll well, so again , you might run the exact same encounter twice, and have very different results.

It's difficult to comment, IMO, on your encounters, specifically, because we don't know anything about what you're using / your player party, but probably the most general advice I can think of is :

1. making sure enemies (typically) have enough actions to match the party (a single powerful enemy only able to take one regular action per round is just gonna get stomped out)
2. If you're not using abilities that cause Saving throws, you probably should be
3. If you want add juice to an encounter that's getting wiped more easily than you'd like, consider adding a second wave, or have a weakened enemy break out a surprise "escape hatch" sort of ability - players don't know all what an enemy can do until it does it, typically
4. If you want to lighten up on an encounter that's getting a bit too spicy, just pull back a little - the players don't know how much damage an attack does until you tell them, typically! If an attack would knock a PC unconscious, consider having it only knock them single digit, instead. If a sentient enemy has downed a PC, RP it's decision to switch targets, rather than double-tapped the downed player. PC's are, as a rule, pretty resilient by the end of T1 gameplay, so it's really your thumb on the scale that determines how lethal your game is.

TL;DR, encounter design doesn't end when Initiative is rolled - consider changing your plan a little, if an encounter isn't quite hitting the mark, in some way.

Obligatory also also, it's okay for encounters not to be balanced, too! Sometimes the party should be able to wipe the floor with some dudes, or get nearly wiped by a goose.

I don't.

They either live or they die.

They die or go unconscious? There is a big difference there...

First things first, not every combat needs to be balanced. By this I mean not every fight you encounter along the way to get to a goal needs to be super challenging. Having the party be able to stomp a couple of bandits on their way to kill a much tougher threat can be a good thing, as the name of the game is resource management. It is a lot harder to have a satisfying and balanced encounter if the party has all of their resources at their disposal, so smaller encounters that get them to spend a bit here or there helps out a lot. If you want to have an encounter where a young dragon is the main threat, having the party need to deal with a couple gangs of kobolds of varying degrees of power can get them to spend spell slots, tank some hits, and in general weaken them just a bit where normally if they went in completely fresh they could destroy the dragon.

Another tip is that enemies don't need to have the average health. If there is something threatening that can seriously output damage and kill the party quickly, lowering its health pool can make it more of a glass cannon encounter rather than it being very tanky and very deadly. If there is an enemy that doesn't do the most damage round over round, giving it more health will make it able to survive an extra round or two.

Try to avoid over reliance on a lot of save or suck abilities when designing the encounter. Having an enemy that uses something like Dominate Person against a party member as their entire action be the primary threat in an encounter causes it to boil down to a coin flip. If the party member fails, the party is down a character and up an enemy which seriously throws off the balance of the encounter. If the party member succeeds, then the enemy spent its turn and likely one of its big resources doing nothing effectively. Using these is fine in moderation, but if the entire encounter changes drastically on a single success or failure then it can run the risk of being a TPK or a breeze.

This is more of a tip for a session zero so it may not help in your current situation, but having players make their characters to be roughly on par with each other can seriously help deal with encounter balance issues before they start. A sharpshooter variant human fighter is likely going to be a lot more of an issue to balance around when they are on the same party as a beast master ranger for instance. This is not to say that people shouldn't play powerful or weak classes, just that if one person is going for something very strong and the other is going for something a lot weaker balancing with both of those in mind is a nightmare.

1. Use the encounter calculation method (or an online encounter calculator) to find the difficulty of the encounter. Remember that you need to adjust for situational factors, the number of strong enemies, and the number of PCs.
2. There are a small number of creatures that can be unexpectedly difficult to fight. Generally, anything that can incapacitate or kill PCs without having to reduce them to 0 hit points, but especially shadows, banshees, and intellect devourers. Use these monsters carefully.
3. The number of encounters in a day matters. After 6 Medium encounters, or 3 Deadly ones, the party will probably need to take a long rest. But if there's just one encounter per long rest, it will probably seem easy.
4. Remember short rests: if the party is facing difficult combats, they will probably need 2 short rests in between long rests.
5. Every party is different. If your players are new, they might not know how to fight as effectively. If they are more experienced, or they have designed their characters to be especially powerful, or they have any magic items that aid them in combat, then they'll have an easier time.
6. Even if you plan perfectly, the dice can still cause things to take an unexpected turn, and that's okay.

Create an encounter budget for the adventuring day, rather than simply a case by case basis of encounters. This gives you some more wriggle room to add or subtract challenge from within the day as you see fitting, rather than separated encounters. I personally prefer to only use hard/ deadly encounters and make a budget around something like two hard combats and a deadly combat in the day. With a short rest separating each fight if the party is playing there cards right.

Even if a legendary or mythic creature is involved in a fight. The action economy is rthe key to a victory. Padding encounters with a fair number of weaker hp but impactful damage creatures can help provide staying power to any encounter and are easy to clear out. To borrow the term from 4e. We'll call these minions. They can be very helpful.

I like to make use of "commander" style enemies. Creatures that provide a set of abilities that effect a fight in a similar fashion to lair actions when their turn starts. The difference being that if you kill a commander, you remove these "commander actions" from the encounter. As a general rule I make such creatures "second in command" and don't also make them legendary/mythic. they're meant to be elite foes that become priority targets among the minions. The dragon wrought kobold that's put in charge of the normal kobolds, but still obeying the master dragon.

A piece of advise for encounter design I've found very useful is from the game "Electric Bastionland." It's a good guiding principle for designing encounters for an adventure. Obviously the amount of encounters can be adjusted, along the roll method to suit your needs but it's a great baseline.

ENCOUNTERS

○ Create a table of 6 encounters, calling for a roll of d6 when a random encounter is triggered. Different results can represent the same type of person/ creature varying in their behaviour or group composition.

○ Make at least one of these results very dangerous.

○ All pose at least a potential threat, but always have a purpose beyond hostility. Give them something they’re already doing.

It's more art than science and just gets easier with practice. There's unfortunately no silver bullet to easily answer it you just have to keep working on it. While we can give some advice, we don't know your players' personalities or strategies. Combat is a dance, and figuring out how to gell with your group and make that dance feel right just comes with practice and time.

Use https://koboldplus.club/#/encounter-builder to balance encounters and aim for hard encounters if you want them to be difficult but not likely to kill anyone. medium/easy encounters are basically face roll. Things that just enter the deadly category have a chance of death but are still beatable without any loses and the more you pile on after that the more likely death is. Some encounters will be randomly harder or easier though because of dice.

Spread things out across multiple encounters. A party that rations resources over many combats with 1-2 short rests throughout the day is very easy to balance for. Like, the easy, medium, hard, deadly ratings actually mean what they say they are when you do.

Welcome to 5e combat. Get on your eyeballin' glasses and pray.

Try offloading some of the challenge off monster numbers and into secondary objectives or giving your players something they can manipulate to their advantage when the combat challenge is not where you want it.

Sure this boss monster may not be powerful enough to last enough rounds but your players won't be able to hurt it if a couple of them don't keep the forcefield crystals the minions are using under control.

They seem to be lacking damage? Have them roll perception to see if one of them spots the barrel of gunpowder in the shadows of a corner of the castle's battlements.

Or maybe they will go into a fight realistically expecting to win but can they keep their favorite NPC safe while still winning?

The difficulty of a combat does not have to come solely from numbers and it's a wise idea to throw a tactical advantage/disadvantage to compliment the numerical one.

A bit of a dirty secret. I never fudge dice, but do sometimes hold back certain elements of a combat at the beginning to see how the characters do.

So, the start of the fight might be balanced to be "normal" for the PCs, but:

-On the beginning of turn 2, reinforcements are planned to arrive

-On the beginning of turn 3, the boss unveils their one-shot special move (see Matt Colville's Action Oriented Monsters).

If the fight is going poorly for the PCs, those reinforcements... well I guess they never existed in the first place, or are fewer in number than planned. The boss's planned special move? Well, if I don't use it, the players are none the wiser.

Of course, once I DO introduce something to the players, its there, and let the dice fall as they may.

Another tactic I use is to be a bit more lenient (set lower DCs) with creative/unexpected tactics the players might try, if the fight is going poorly.

Combat involves dice. Dice are random

At low levels (first gameplay tier), err on the side of caution and stick religiously to CR. An encounter with a CR equal to the party's level is probably doable as the first fight of the day, but afterwards it can quickly turn against them. From levels 5-11 you have considerably more leeway and can throw more complex fights at them. Certain PC builds and party compositions get very strong at this point, and beyond level 11 they're insanely powerful. My suggestion would be to focus on making battles memorable, not difficult. Stick to CR ar first, see how they fare, and go from there. By this point you should have a good idea of their capabilities, strengths and weaknesses. Also keep in mind that 5e doesn't really do the "one encounter adventuring day" very well. Players classes have a lot of resources because the system is built for them to face several groups of enemies between long rests. If you are making custom enemies, follow the guidelines in the DMG. The numbers in that table actually work surprisingly well and you'll discover that the monsters in the MM aren't really built following them; they're either too weak or hit way above their CR.

I think balance is not something worth caring too much. Players should use their head and evaluate the danger before engaging. There should not be a guarantee that every encounter is solvable by force.

Make it a puzzle.

If youre trying to balance combat by fidling with raw stats, you end up with battles mathematucally decided from the start.

If you design combat as a puzzle, players barely take damage only if they are clever, and die only if they are reckless.

The players can feel proud when combat was "easy" because they earned it by solving a puzzle, and the players cant be mad when combat is "hard" because they made it hard by trying to take the simple route.

Alter things on the fly!

DM's often get stuck with what is "set" when they start. Don't be afraid to change things up a bit on the fly to help the intended effect (although this should always be to the benefit of the players). A few examples:

• Encounter too easy? Have a two or three more minions show up to help apply *just a little* more pressure. Still too easy? maybe a few more show up as the sound of battle rages on! Starts tilting towards the baddie? maybe a couple of the minions don't have as much health as they otherwise should and die.
• BBEG dying faster than expected? Perhaps bump up his/her hitpoints a bit to make it last for an extra turn or two
• Monster about the killing blow on a character? Perhaps they *just* happen to dramatically miss that attacked (not usable if you normally roll your dice in front of the party)

Some of these are a bit... divisive to say the least. But, you absolutely can slightly adjust things on the fly to find that middle ground between hard and easy. Lots of it is also just plain experience. I've been DMing now for three years, and I do still find it a struggle at times to really balance fights.

I don’t balance combat around an “even” fight. The “fair fight” is the boss of the adventuring day, when they’re at about half resources or so. Each encounter I design is meant to give the players a choice: use HP or spell slots/ features to overcome it. They can usually blast most combat in 1-2 rounds if they choose to. If they underestimate a fight and decide the “Cantrip and use some HP” route, they’ll find themselves taking more damage than they intended. If the underestimate, they just blew a fireball on some CR 1/8th bandits thinking there were more than 4 of them.

Sometimes I want them to go crazy and slaughter 30 kobolds at level 9 because that’s fun as hell. But I found pretty good success in hitting them with a just borderline deadly encounter when they’re half resources. That’s usually a fight where someone gets KOd or close, and then they start sitting up in their chairs. Every time initiative is rolled, you should have a desired outcome in mind.

Is this a narrative fight? One that exists solely so the PCs find a clue after? Does it have to happen because these npcs crossed the wrong person?

Drain resources: most common I use. Either you want them to use some slots, hp or both. Eventually, after a few of these. They’ll want to rest. But can they? Are they against a clock? Have them weigh pressing on or resting and risking being too late. Time is a resource they have precious little of

Comedy. My players LOVE when a band of goblins tries to rob them because they have NO clue these idiots are level 10PCs who just got done shopping.