XP adjustments in encounter building

[Demonic Spoon]

So, we know that groups of monsters count towards the XP budget of the encounter more than the sum of their parts, due to the intrinsic action economy advantages of a lot of opponents.

However, these extra monsters don't count towards the XP rewarded by the players. This means that, for the same XP budget and presumably the same difficulty of encounter, players earn more XP fighting single, big monsters than many small ones.


What do you all think of this? Do you think it has the potential to screw up the leveling curve based on what kinds of encounters the DM selects? Do you think it's an intended mechanic to emphasize "boss fights"? Or am I completely wrong in this?

[MaxWilson]

Minor note: in the 0.2 version of the DM basic rules, extra monsters don't increase the multiplier if they are much weaker than the strong monsters in the encounter (DM's call as to when this applies).

In general I want to say that you should earn the adjusted XP for larger groups, but the new DM's guide also calls out other things that can affect the rated difficulty of the encounter: each situational advantage (enemy attacks from ambush, party's mobility is hindered because of difficulty terrain, etc.) increases rated difficulty by one step in the same way that increased XP does. Likewise, if the party is doing the ambushing, rated difficulty comes down one step, which can counter increased numbers of monsters. So what would you do in these cases, adjust the difficulty of the encounter for situational factors as well?

I think the answer is probably "Yes." If I choose to award XP based on fighting instead of storyline or milestones, fighting large mobs of creature or fighting at a disadvantage should grant additional XP. I don't have a formula for that XP but I should create one, or hope that the DMG has one.

[odigity]

I think the answer is probably "Yes." If I choose to award XP based on fighting instead of storyline or milestones, fighting large mobs of creature or fighting at a disadvantage should grant additional XP. I don't have a formula for that XP but I should create one, or hope that the DMG has one.

The basic rules for DMs already includes the section at the end with the various rules for calculating the adjusted XP for an encounter to see what difficulty category it falls into. Why not just use that same value to reward the players with XP after the encounter? You've already done the work once...

[Easy_Lee]

I would personally just award XP based on the challenege rating of an encounter (groups have higher CR than the sum of their parts). That's the simplest thing to do, doesn't punish the players for taking steps to make the fight easier, and doesn't make the players feel cheated when attacked by large groups instead of individually powerful creatures.

I might be inclined to handle treasure the same way (one of the gobs had a shiny!) but that's more debatable.

[odigity]

I would personally just award XP based on the challenege rating of an encounter (groups have higher CR than the sum of their parts). That's the simplest thing to do, doesn't punish the players for taking steps to make the fight easier, and doesn't make the players feel cheated when attacked by large groups instead of individually powerful creatures.

I might be inclined to handle treasure the same way (one of the gobs had a shiny!) but that's more debatable.

Thanks for reminding me.

I do not understand Challenge Rating at all. I thought it was a way to see what monsters are appropriate for what parties, and then calculating the XP that should be awarded. But it's not that at all.

The rules for constructing encounters work entirely of XP budgets. You figure out the XP thresholds for the party for easy, medium, hard, and deadly encounters. You figure out the adjusted XP for an encounter based on the sum of the monsters invidiaul XP, the quantity of monsters, the quantity of players, and other situational factors, then compare it to the threshholds. If the players win, XP is awarded based on the simple sum of monster XP dividided evenly among players.

At no point in the above paragraph did I have to mention CR. So what the frack is the point of having CR at all? It seems incredibly redundant and useless so far. I assume I'm missing something?

[MaxWilson]

The basic rules for DMs already includes the section at the end with the various rules for calculating the adjusted XP for an encounter to see what difficulty category it falls into. Why not just use that same value to reward the players with XP after the encounter? You've already done the work once...

Because then they're only getting extra XP for some kinds of increased difficulty. They're getting 1.5x XP for fighting two magma mephits at once, but nothing for being ambushed by two magma mephits in the middle of a volcano that does 1d8 per round to each PC, even though that increases the difficulty of the encounter from Hard to Deadly. That's inconsistent and needs fixing.


At no point in the above paragraph did I have to mention CR. So what the frack is the point of having CR at all? It seems incredibly redundant and useless so far. I assume I'm missing something?

I ignore CR entirely except as it affects summoning/shapechanging. It doesn't really mean anything.

[Demonic Spoon]

At no point in the above paragraph did I have to mention CR. So what the frack is the point of having CR at all? It seems incredibly redundant and useless so far. I assume I'm missing something?
It's explained in the basic rules. You don't want to throw a creature of CR higher than the party at the party.

The example they gave was that a CR 2 ogre isn't a good fight for a level 1 party because even though it's within reasonable XP budgets for a level 1 party to fight, it can one-hit-kill a level 1 wizard.

[odigity]

It's explained in the basic rules. You don't want to throw a creature of CR higher than the party at the party.

The example they gave was that a CR 2 ogre isn't a good fight for a level 1 party because even though it's within reasonable XP budgets for a level 1 party to fight, it can one-hit-kill a level 1 wizard.

Good point. Is that and summoning literally the only purposes of CR?

[Demonic Spoon]

Good point. Is that and summoning literally the only purposes of CR?

Yup.

XP budgets, in my opinion, are a much better way of doing this anyway.

[MaxWilson]

It's explained in the basic rules. You don't want to throw a creature of CR higher than the party at the party.

The example they gave was that a CR 2 ogre isn't a good fight for a level 1 party because even though it's within reasonable XP budgets for a level 1 party to fight, it can one-hit-kill a level 1 wizard.

That's a terrible example for them to use, because an ogre isn't within reasonable XP budgets for a level 1 party in the first place. It's 450 XP, when a Deadly encounter for 4 level 1 PCs maxes out at 400 XP.


XP budgets, in my opinion, are a much better way of doing this anyway.

Yeah, CR didn't even exist until 3rd edition anyway. Nobody in 2nd edition ever thought it was somehow undignified for a 14th level fighter to be fighting three trolls just because the trolls only had 6+6 HD ("CR 6"). Trolls come in packs of 1-4, and they are nasty, and if you're a 14th level fighter you're just lucky it will be somewhat easier for you than for a 6th level fighter. End of story.

[hymer]

What do you all think of this? Do you think it has the potential to screw up the leveling curve based on what kinds of encounters the DM selects? Do you think it's an intended mechanic to emphasize "boss fights"? Or am I completely wrong in this?

I love this. It rewards players who fight smart. The alternative would mean that it would make a certain amount of sense to gather as many enemies as you can beat and fight them all at once. I prefer that splitting the enemy is the better thing to do.

[GWJ_DanyBoy]

Edit: I type slow, so others have basically said this already.

CR is just a "You must be this tall to ride" guideline. XP budgets are the main guideline when encounter building, but the idea is to build them only selecting from monsters with a CR near or below the party level.

Sure a party of 5 or 6 first level PCs can and will take down a lone Ogre (CR 2), but the ogre is likely to instantly kill anyone he gets a hit on.

[MaxWilson]

I love this. It rewards players who fight smart. The alternative would mean that it would make a certain amount of sense to gather as many enemies as you can beat and fight them all at once. I prefer that splitting the enemy is the better thing to do.

What's the "this" here? The new rules for encounter building aren't dependent on player actions at all, and it was always easier to pick the enemy off piecemeal than to fight them in a big mob. (Modulo AoE effects.) What's the "this" which has changed that you refer to?


Sure a party of 5 or 6 first level PCs can and will take down a lone Ogre (CR 2), but the ogre is likely to instantly kill anyone he gets a hit on.

On the other hand, it is a sweet, sweet feeling to know that you've vastly exceeded your difficulty rating by killing something with a CR twice your level plus a handful of minions with CR around your level. My favorite use of the encounter building rules is, as a player, to calculate the difficulty rating of an encounter that we just finished and see how many times worse than "Deadly" it was.

[Demonic Spoon]

His point is that if you have players who want to game the XP system, they can do by fighting as many enemies as they can handle in one encounter to get that sweet XP multiplier.

The DM can work around this by considering a large group of enemies that can be split up one "encounter" for the purposes of handing out XP to players.

[MaxWilson]

His point is that if you have players who want to game the XP system, they can do by fighting as many enemies as they can handle in one encounter to get that sweet XP multiplier.

You mean, if the suggested house rule were implemented?

I don't see that as a great strategy really, unless you think that the multipliers are too generous. It does raise an interesting possibility though: could someone purposefully handicap themselves during a fight to get more XP? "Now, I will fight you blindfolded and left-handed!" I don't think I would object if they did. But then, I don't really like "XP for defeating things" anyway, since logically the best way to gain XP is actually to train in mock-fights with other PCs and friendlies--and it even makes sense! Therefore, most levelling should happen off-screen between adventures.

"It's been a year since the last royal emergency and you've learned some new tricks. You're now a level 8 fighter and you've been promoted to Captain. Then you get a note from the king requesting an urgent meeting, and when you get there you see your old friends Xamji the Conjuror, who is the new Court Wizard, and Mialee the Rogue. You begin to suspect that something may be up..."

[Person_Man]

In 1E/2E I used the gp = xp method, which strongly encouraged players to focus on exploring and stealing while avoiding combat, which was much more fun then just grinding through all the monsters in a dungeon.

I never DM'd in 4E. The DMs I played with seemed to use the RAW, which worked fine, though they strongly encouraged strait up combat.

In 3.X/PF and so far in 5E I use DM fiat for level ups. The RAW xp systems don't feel quite right to me, though I can't say exactly why, other then to say that I hate book keeping and like to encourage creative non-combat oriented solutions.

[archaeo]

Minor note: in the 0.2 version of the DM basic rules, extra monsters don't increase the multiplier if they are much weaker than the strong monsters in the encounter (DM's call as to when this applies).

Oh, hey! These just got updated yesterday. I notice that they've removed the "work in progress" box; I think we can now safely assume these are exactly the same pages that will appear in the DMG.

[odigity]

His point is that if you have players who want to game the XP system, they can do by fighting as many enemies as they can handle in one encounter to get that sweet XP multiplier.

The DM can work around this by considering a large group of enemies that can be split up one "encounter" for the purposes of handing out XP to players.

You mean like running around, stumbling into enemies, then running away into more enemies, and keep repeating this until you have a parade of enemies trailing behind you like the end of Blazing Saddles, then run them all into a ravine where you've set up a rock fall trap?

Instant promotion from level 1 to 17!

[hymer]

The DM can work around this by considering a large group of enemies that can be split up one "encounter" for the purposes of handing out XP to players.

Or the players can just not metagame, that would work too. I'm mostly talking about how it feels, because I don't think it will make a huge actual difference anyway; I'm sure the DM will be encouraged to speed up or slow down XP gains to the group's taste anyway when we get the DMG. If the players have the uneasy feeling that they get penalized for trying to lure some of the guards away before striking, that'd be sad. Or if Leeroy Jenkins gets rewarded for charging in heedlessly.

[MaxWilson]

Or the players can just not metagame, that would work too. I'm mostly talking about how it feels, because I don't think it will make a huge actual difference anyway; I'm sure the DM will be endouraged to speed up or slow down XP gains to the group's taste anyway when we get the DMG. If the players have the uneasy feeling that they get penalized for trying to lure some of the guards away before striking, that'd be sad. Or if Leeroy Jenkins gets rewarded for charging in heedlessly.

Luring some guards away before striking sounds like one encounter to me, unless you're talking about luring them away in a strategic sense by setting up a diversion in another part of the kingdom that causes the castle commander to dispatch reinforcements elsewhere, thus weakening the castle defenses.

[Rezby]

Good point. Is that and summoning literally the only purposes of CR?

For now, anyways. We don't have the full DMG out yet, only the basic rules.

[Safety Sword]

Luring some guards away before striking sounds like one encounter to me, unless you're talking about luring them away in a strategic sense by setting up a diversion in another part of the kingdom that causes the castle commander to dispatch reinforcements elsewhere, thus weakening the castle defenses.

That sounds like game play that should be rewarded with extra XP, not penalised for fighting less NPCs in combat encounters.

[MaxWilson]

That sounds like game play that should be rewarded with extra XP, not penalised for fighting less NPCs in combat encounters.

I said "one encounter," so no change to XP even with the house rule in place. Definitely no change under RAW, since RAW doesn't give extra XP for hard encounters.

Also, reduction in danger is its own reward because it prevents you from losing all your XP through dying...

[JoeJ]

I'm really hoping the DMG will have guidelines for using story awards instead of xp for killing monsters. I would definitely use that, and keep the monster xp as just a guideline to help balance fights.

[mephnick]

I'm really hoping the DMG will have guidelines for using story awards instead of xp for killing monsters. I would definitely use that, and keep the monster xp as just a guideline to help balance fights.

I wouldn't wait for rules, just do it via fiat. As a DM you should have a good enough grasp of the players and story to figure out when a good level up milestone is reached.

Monster XP is still useful as an encounter building mechanism, but it's really a horrible system for levelling up. Like..literally the worst in all of gaming.

[Easy_Lee]

Monster XP is still useful as an encounter building mechanism, but it's really a horrible system for levelling up. Like..literally the worst in all of gaming.

I dunno about that. Back in classic Everquest, the formula for experience total by the end of a given level was something like h*c*r*(L^3), where L was level, C was class modifier, and R was race modifier. That's right, different classes and races leveled at different rates. And it was multiplicative; troll was 1.2 and shadowknight was 1.4, but troll sk was 1.64.

It gets worse; experience granted for defeating a mob was square, so every new level took longer.

It gets even worse; h stood for hell-level modifier, which jumped up by .1 every 5 levels starting at 30. This modified total experience by the end of a level. Every time you hit a hell level, you had to gain an extra 10% experience for that level and every level that came before. Usually such "hell-levels" had higher experience requirements than the next two levels after, and you had to fight weaker mobs.

And it gets worse; every time you died, you ended up naked back at your bind point and lost ~10% of a level, and could de-level. You then had to get your corpse out of the dungeon, naked.

And the coup de grace, group experience was awarded not by level, but experience totals. If you had more total experience than your partner, you got a bigger chunk of the experience regardless of contribution. Characters with heavy XP penalties (like troll sks, who required 64% more experience than a human cleric to gain a level) had higher totals at a given level. So nobody wanted to group with hybrids once they figured it out. Furthermore, grouping didn't increase total experience gained. You wanted to keep your group only as large as it needed to be for the task, and tell everyone else to go away.

Experience in D&D is actually pretty nice.

[mephnick]

Ok, maybe it's not the worst.

[Doug Lampert]

Minor note: in the 0.2 version of the DM basic rules, extra monsters don't increase the multiplier if they are much weaker than the strong monsters in the encounter (DM's call as to when this applies).

They could have avoided this:
First monster is normal.
Second monster counts double.
Monsters 3-6 count triple.
Additional monsters count x4.

Same result for 1-3 monsters of identical type.
No sudden breaks at odd points because the multiplier went up.
Approximately the same XP for larger groups.
Minions automatically don't vastly bloat the XP needed for the boss.

[MaxWilson]

Doug, I like it.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

that kinda breaks down when you are doing anything but groups of the same monster

[Shadow]

I haven't read the entire thread and perhaps someone has already stated something similar.
In my opinion your best games always come from ignoring XP.
You level up when the DM tells you that you leveled up. No keeping track of XP.
This promotes actual role play and solutions besides combat, as opposed to the murder hobo attitude that comes hand in hand with XP for killing everything you come across.

Case in point:
Two weeks ago, we followed a nasty little gnome to a warehouse in Waterdeep. Outside the warehouse there were two city guards standing watch.
Two city guards. They're basically cops.
One of the members of the group threw an axe at them because they wouldn't let us pass after a whole ten seconds of conversation.... because he wanted the XP for them.
He turned us into cop killers in Waterdeep because he wanted the XP. I did not join in the fight, and I got flack for it.
Had there not been any XP for killing the guards, he almost certainly would have found another solution.

[cobaltstarfire]

For example, if an encounter includes four monsters worth a total of 500 XP, you would multiply the total XP of the monsters by 2, for an adjusted value of 1,000 XP. This adjusted value is not what the monsters are worth in terms of XP; the adjusted value’s only purpose is to help you accurately assess the encounter’s difficulty.

One shouldn't be worried about players "gaming" the xp system to get more xp, because the mulitplier is only for determining difficulty, it doesn't apply to xp actually awarded. In the example above, the PC's should still only be getting 500 xp.

[Demonic Spoon]

One shouldn't be worried about players "gaming" the xp system to get more xp, because the mulitplier is only for determining difficulty, it doesn't apply to xp actually awarded. In the example above, the PC's should still only be getting 500 xp.


This is exactly the point of the thread. Many people in this thread suggest explicitly ignoring that rule because otherwise it causes some problems.


This promotes actual role play and solutions besides combat, as opposed to the murder hobo attitude that comes hand in hand with XP for killing everything you come across.

Case in point:
Two weeks ago, we followed a nasty little gnome to a warehouse in Waterdeep. Outside the warehouse there were two city guards standing watch.
Two city guards. They're basically cops.
One of the members of the group threw an axe at them because they wouldn't let us pass after a whole ten seconds of conversation.... because he wanted the XP for them.
He turned us into cop killers in Waterdeep because he wanted the XP. I did not join in the fight, and I got flack for it.
Had there not been any XP for killing the guards, he almost certainly would have found another solution.


Not if the DM awards XP for circumventing encounters as well as defeating them in combat.

With regards to your example: At that point, I would expect the other PCs to distance themselves from this guy entirely, at which point he is captured and summarily executed by waves of guards that come to grab him.

[JoeJ]

With regards to your example: At that point, I would expect the other PCs to distance themselves from this guy entirely, at which point he is captured and summarily executed by waves of guards that come to grab him.

Wouldn't it be better to be proactive (i.e. turn him in for the reward)?