[5e]Boss monsters with minions are too difficult

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alhoon
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[5e]Boss monsters with minions are too difficult

Post by alhoon »

I was thinking, cause of Strahd, the boss monsters of D&D next.
Leave aside the adventure that gives the PCs assistance to fight Strahd for a moment.

A vampire boss is nowdays CR13 as written in the book. And it is cause it plays 4 times each round, has dominate, regenerates etc etc.
A Vampire spawn is CR5.

So, using an adjustment of the rules, a Vampire + 3 vampire spawns is an encounter worth ~20K XP, or a deadly encounter for a party of 4 13th lvl PCs. :?
(Vampire Spawns are much lower in difficulty than a Vampire so I had them contribute less to the XP bucket; they are worthy opponents so I didn't eliminate their difficulty from the encounter).

And that's not Strahd, mind you, that's a default, Monster Manual Vampire.

Let's not move to the lich, that's a CR 21 creature and a deadly encounter for 16th lvl chars by itself picking up components in mountainside, so along with a couple of stone golems in its lair becomes simply unkillable even by 20th level characters...


HOWEVER: Is that a bad thing? There's a whole 256 page adventure just to gather the allies and items required to defeat a CR 15 monster (Strahd). The rules of D&D next even at very high levels require the DM and PCs to find alternative ways instead of bashing the door and beating the villain in his home turf.
What I do? Well, so far I have just been avoiding the high CR bosses. I've downgraded vampires to CR 8-9 so they're more than manageable with a few minions. Liches? Weeeeeell... while in my campaign the PCs had defeat a lich, it was because of extreme circumstances on their favor (and the help of a deity) that the lich was down to CR 12-13.

However, again motivated by CoS, I was thinking that perhaps I should approach this sunject more now that my PCs are high level and that I should look to include very difficult encounters that require a large number of adventures to be viable.
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