Hey! My name is Ivy and I’m new to DMing looking for a bit of help! So as the title above says, I’m making this post trying to learn how to make an encounter that I have in mind, without making it too hard or too easy for the players!

So for a little bit of context, I’m a player in my first ever campaign where the DM had the idea of between major events in the story, we could all have the option of doing our own little one-session story as DM, and I volunteered as the first person! The only issue is I have never DMed before and I’m not sure how to balance the scenario I had in mind around the players.

For the details of it all, the players are all going to be level 5 at this point, and the idea in my head would be going through a cave system/lair of a few blue dragon wyrmlings, fighting them and a mysterious person as well. What I’m not sure is if that’s really feasible? I tried to look stuff up on my own with how to measure difficulty via XP measures, and it came out that they’d be alright against at least 4 of the wyrmlings, but I’m just worried of it actually being way too much.

Also I should note, the goal isn’t to have them necessarily able to beat the dragons, as I was thinking something would be coming in and they’d have to survive ten rounds while an npc casts a teleport circle spell to get them out.

Anyway I’m just looking for help on how to do this encounter in a way that they do not all die or if it sounds like a terrible idea that I should not do.

Thanks in advance for any assistance!