Balance Encounters with Waves of Monsters in D&D

Mike offers tips for using the Lazy Encounter Benchmark to balance waves of encounters in D&D
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[@hillseason]

I was talking to my players that they need a shared excel spreadsheet with all the loot they got. But I was also thinking that I already have all of those notes and items in my database. It would be cool to be able to share my notebook with them in a way that I don't expose secret information. I am a developer I am on the cusp of developing my own tool for taking DM notes, building on top of the lazy dm notion template ideas

[@arsonor]

Perfect timing. Planning some waves of enemies in the near future.

[@neem4138]

Another banger video, thank you Mike, new year, good old solid advice!

[@MemphiStig]

Thanks. I'm gonna to look this over soon. Really like the ideas tho.

[@artistpoet5253]

This is pretty cool. Honestly, I don't use CR.

[@thisiscait]

Any tips (including fellow commenters) on handing large battles? Not large in physical scale, but a few dozen guards, a dozen or so NPCs, plus six player characters, I get overwhelmed just thinking about it! I'm going to mostly treat the guards as swarms, but any help handling large groups of different stat blocks would be amazing. I can generally handle it on pen and paper but I struggle online, and tracking all of it is tough, especially as the levels go up and I'm managing vastly different spells, legendary actions and so on. Thanks so much for any advice!

[@RebelMime]

I know there are a variety of online tools to do it, but my favorite way to handle multiple statblocks while playing online was to actually take the statblocks offline. Print them out and make the notes directly on them. I was having too much trouble tracking multiple tabs/windows with rules, VTT, story notes, etc. and separating the statblocks into a physical form again helped a ton.

[@SlyFlourish]

slyflourish.com/running_hordes.html

[@tripp4130]

Or you can switch over to PF2E like I did and avoid all of crazy 5E work arounds to make encounters challenging.

[@BenjaminEarlMusic]

With CR being that confusing it's no wonder a lot of GMs just ignore it