Encounter balance and CR

There are some fairly sensible rules of thumb for "how challenging is this monster". Things like "this amount of hit points and armour class are roughly equivalent to this amount of hit points and armour class" and "if it has good saves, treat the effective hp as this much higher". And the same for attacks, and, how to use monsters with attacks stronger than defences and vice versa, and how not to depart too far from equivalence or you get monsters that are really boring (if they odn't do much damage but take forever to kill) or really swingy (if they do lots of damage but are very fragile).

But it seems like Dungeon Master's Guide always makes a dog's breakfast of explaining these. It presents a bunch of rules as a rigid algorithm and says "you can tweak it", whereas I feel like someone who understands the rules of thumb could have provided a template beginners could use. I may try to write that up, but in practice GMs usually use a lot of intuition to tune monsters and I may not have enough experience with 5e yet.

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Roleplaying Feelings

OK, after running a couple of sessions, my massive role-playing kick is ebbing a bit. Now I've been through enough obsessions to ride the wave a bit rather than just being confused. The important things are, finish off what I was planning and continuing to run sessions, which I will enjoy even if I don't have "absolutely must right this second" obsession, giving myself some space to do chores and passive relaxation like books and tv, and have a next "thing" ready, because if I don't have something I'm anticipating I lose all motivation for anything.

Or another way to look at it is, I've achieved what I never quite managed for embarrassingly long, of sitting down to GM some roleplaying with the confidence that I could advertise a one-shot and have it go well, and not worry that I can't manage to learn a new system and get my GMing up to a non-beginner standard at the same time. And now I can think about what I'm excited to run, stories and systems that I can hopefully build up to (DnD world with a rich history which I've developed, vorkosigan-esque roleplaying).

As it happens my second session running the superheroes was pretty fun, and introduced some people to simple 5e DnD mechanics when they'd roleplaying before, but not played DnD any time recently, and the players had pretty cool characters. But partly because the characters didn't happen to gel as well, and partly because I ran it on short notice, it wasn't quite as memorable as the first session. Oh well, I'm glad it was that way round, and now I'm more confident running variants on the theme.

And I did enjoy bringing one of the last session PCs in briefly as a cameo as a superhero much more experienced with these enemies: the dice were great at delivering deadly ninja effectiveness, but also in-character pratfalls :)