Spent 4 hours trying to balance a single D&D encounter last night

I was running a boss fight for my group and I kept tweaking the HP and damage numbers over and over. The whole thing was supposed to be a quick tough fight but I ended up rewriting the stat block like 6 times. Then I realized I had forgotten to even check the party's daily spell slots and they were mostly tapped out. So I had to restart from scratch and adjust everything down to like half the original difficulty. Total time from start to finish was about 4 hours for what should have been a 20 minute prep job. Has anyone else gotten stuck in a loop like that where you just keep second guessing your own numbers?

2 comments

2 Comments

blairwhite1mo ago

Did you ever try just running the original stat block as-is to see if maybe your party would have handled it fine? I find I waste most of my time fixing problems that don't exist yet.

joelthomas1mo ago

I mean, the "rewriting the stat block like 6 times" part really hit home for me. Last session I spent a whole afternoon trying to figure out the perfect DC for a locked door, only to have the rogue roll a natural 20 on his first try and basically make all that work pointless. Idk, I think sometimes we just get in our heads about this stuff when a simple gut check would probably work fine.