question about EL?

[Drinzor]

I was reading one of the premade adventures made by WotC there is placed on there homepage called

A dark and stormy Knight, and realized that at each room (there had an Encounter) there was like a number like EL: 2 or EL: 1 (those mostly)

and I asked my friend what it mend and the only thing he could say was..


"its a way of determent when to level"


I get you need to go though a number of Encounter Levels (EL) before you level..

but how do I know how many for each level and how do I calculate it...?


if someone can tell me how or tell me what book to look in at what page i would be grateful.

and yes my google-fu failed me again, and my Skype-jutsu to my DND geek friends they are a sleep :(

[HunterOfJello]

I thought that was just a system used to show DMs the estimated difficultly of each room/encounter overall like a group CR. There can be great variances between how difficult a group of three CR 1 and two CR 2 monsters are depending on the configuration of the area and different monsters that can be put there. I figured that's what the EL thing was for, but I could be off.

[Drinzor]

I don't know thats why I ask :)

[Tar Palantir]

Encounter Level is used as a measure of the expected difficulty of a fight relative to PCs of a given level. Most fights will hover around EL=party level, but boss fights tend to go a couple points higher. Experience is calculated off of CR, which is essentially the single-monster equivalent. EL has no relation to XP gain; it's just a tool to help gauge encounter difficulty.

[Salanmander]

Actually the total experience granted for any given EL encounter is constant, no matter what creatures make it up (assuming you're staying with in the range the DMG gives experience for). This is because the experience for a CR N creature is twice the experience for a CR N-2 creature in all such cases.

However, this means that you don't need to go through a certain number of "ELs", really. For example, and EL 6 encounter takes you twice as far towards the next level as an EL 4 encounter.

The best way to think of it is what HunterOfJello said: The EL of an encounter is a way to gauge roughly how difficult the encounter will be. It should be roughly as challenging as a single monster of the same CR (or a single character of the same level, but that varies much more widely, for obvious reasons).

[LaughingRogue]

EL is supposed to be a comparison to the groups current level to show how hard the encounter should be for a group

if the average group level is 10 then EL 13 should be a challenging encounter for them.

[Drinzor]

okay got thank you guys :)

[Urpriest]

You may also want to look at the guide to monsters in my sig, which covers this and a lot of other things that all DMs (and players!) should know when using monsters.