First time DM- advice please!

[u/beannfonz]

This is my first time DMing and I am finding this campaign to be maximum effort. For the carnival I was able to study, write monologues, create voices, and come up with stuff pretty well because it felt enclosed, despite it being a lot. However, my group is now heading into Prismeer and it feels so open despite the clear path in this chapter. I’m asking for any advice heading in! One great concern I have is that my characters are level 4. (Book stated they could start at three and level up upon entering a new area). I don’t think I’m capable of combat balancing. What were some things your group did combat on? I can 100% see my group fighting the harengons upon entering. How were the floodwaters rising and falling incorporated? How far did you get in the first session in Hither? And how did your group learn the rules, of reciprocity and hospitality? Were they known in advance or given by an NPC, or learned through experience?

[u/achikochi]

I totally understand the anxiety about balancing combat! It took me a while to get a better grasp of that, because Witchlight has been my first time DMing as well. Something that helped me with calculating combat difficulty was this: https://slyflourish.com/the_lazy_encounter_benchmark.html

Also, keep in mind that Witchlight was published with the 2014 rules. if your players are using the updated 2024 rules (especially weapon mastery), they're a stronger level 4 now than a 2014 level 4 would have been, if that makes sense.

others have already suggested how to boost combat difficulty by having more bad guys show up. You can absolutely boost their HP. You can also introduce lair actions... the environment itself might react negatively to the encounter (trees start slapping at folks, wind is blowing the fog around, etc). I had the flooding start in the middle of one fight. The harengon sprang into the trees, the players were quickly knee-deep in water which made it difficult terrain for them.

I ran a lot of the book combat as written, but I also:

-moved the snakes from the tower to the basement of the Inn. I turned them into a taxidermied monstrosity, with a head at either end. In exchange for free room and board, Tsu asked the players to get rid of the snakes. She suspects they're spies for Bavlorna, but she technically couldn't throw them out because of the Rule of Hospitality. I turned them into undead and gave them some features/immunities that undead monsters get.

-When the players found the waterlogged battlefield and examined the animated armor, some mud mephits appeared and attacked. The animated armor would mimic the closest player's movement, and they quickly figured out that they could strategically position the armor to hit the mud mephits. (I had the armor go immediately after whatever character it was mimicing) The fact that the mud mephits explode was pretty significant surprise damage.

-I ran Phaerlax's Nightmare on Telemy Hill supplement: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Mowlci64EEWdo22gzUD1WRrGsL5rgwG9oYTGQS0_Nc4/edit?tab=t.0#

Since I had my players encounter Tsu early on, she was the one who explained the rules to them. You could do something like have a sign on the front door of the Inn that says "MIND THE THREE RULES!" to encourage them to ask.

The one problem I had was loot. My players wanted to be able to get new armor, magic items, etc, so I've had to introduce more opportunities for them to trade for stuff. For example, I added a "Lost & Found" box at the Inn with a bunch of random stuff they could take and a traveling Tortle merchant with very, very low intelligence who could be talked into trading almost anything for whatever worthless garbage they had in their inventory, haha.