Is the Balance Point in D&D Next too High?

[GreatWyrmGold]

My gaming group finished Storm King's Thunder tonight. We had a final encounter with the blue dragon who masterminded the war between giantkind and the smallfolk, with the storm giants sending four of their finest warriors and their king (as well as giving the party some buffing potions and another magic item). It was us versus the gargoyles, yuan-ti, and gods know what other minions she had. It was...
Boring, and disappointing. We slogged through about half of the aboveground encounter before the DM called it, with the only interesting bits being one of the giants turning on his king for refusing to keep moving forward after being crippled1 and one of the minor NPCs which we'd always joked about not trusting turning on the guy who just picked him up and ran off2. Then we went underground, fought an elemental (not all of our party even got into position to attack before it died), and found the dragon. It was a slow fight, wherein we discovered the downside of having a Huge party when fighting a blue dragon3 but still ground her down. My character4 threw a few blasting spells and once used Mass Healing Word, mostly to wake one of the secondary NPCs5 from unconsciousness.

After the wrapup, the DM contrasted this with a boss fight we'd had much, much earlier in the campaign. After a series of odd events6, we were facing Chief Guh two levels early. It was an epic battle against wave after wave of minions, from goblins to ogres to hill giants. All but one of the PCs, as well as the NPC we brought along5, were knocked down to 0 hit points at least once; the party felt like they were in mortal peril. I usually find combat in TRPGs kinda boring; this time, I was having a blast, carefully splitting my spell slots between fireballs, scorching rays, cues, etc, and even acting as an emergency tank when our main tanks were unconscious and/or on another plane7.
It was fun, even though we didn't recognize the magical artifact we would need two levels later. And while I personally think the journey to Guh's Lair was more fun than the boss battle itself8, I don't think that's the only reason I found the boss battle more enjoyable than the campaign's final boss.

Anyways, the point I was making before getting drawn out on tangents within tangents was that we didn't die fighting Guh, and had a lot more fun fighting her early than expected than fighting the final boss more or less as intended. We're not sure how typical this is; our only other D&D Next experience has been with either a DM who ignores RAW and common sense alike (often both at once) to keep characters alive and one who homebrews badly9.
For the record: Our gaming group's members changed a bit over the year-and-change we ran Storm King's Thunder, but was typically 5 and sometimes 6 players plus a DM. Some characters used Unearthed Arcana and the like, but most stuck to core and I'm pretty sure none were particularly optimized. This might be a bit above the power curve, but it can't be two levels above the power curve, can it?

So I ask the question to you, the Playground. Is this an unusual, isolated incident, or are others having similar experiences? Is the balance point of 5e too high, such that "level-appropriate" challenges and "challenging" bosses are too weak, or was our party more powerful than I realized?


1: The DM's excuse for why he didn't follow. His logic was that he had enough to worry about without having an NPC he had to control on the players' side. (And while I'm in a footnote, I should mention that the giant in question was one whose roleplaying notes said he'd try to betray the king at some point. Something to do with being in love with the princess? I dunno, I was stuck with the trees.)
2: This requires more explanation. The NPC was a shrub, and the PC was an ettin. That's probably all the explanation needed, aside from the fact that the PC controlling the shrub pointed out that we never found out whether the shrub was a traitor or if it was just pissed at its treatment.
3: Specifically, how hard it is to avoid accidentally being in "lightning bolt formation" all the time.
4: A wood elf light cleric, from some noble family. Kinda boring to play, aside from how he interacted with his more unruly party members.
5: A tree.
6: First, we had a random encounter with a brass dragon who we flagged down. He pointed us in the direction of a hill giantess to slay. Then, when we heard her sobbing, we talked with her and discovered that her husband had been taken by Chief Guh. We decided to rescue the giantess, because our party always tried to do the good thing but never thought too hard about it (so we wouldn't be too anti-genocide to finish the adventures). The giantess lead us to Chief Guh's lodge8 So it was a weird decision within a weird decision within a random encounter.
7: The ettin was half-barbarian, half-warlock. (He was actually two characters.) The warlock half liked to cast blink in combat, which certainly keeps our tank alive longer! (It didn't keep him from being knocked unconscious once or twice in the Guh fight.)

8: Long tangent: There were some amusing things which happened along the way. For instance, the giantess got hungry and violent every morning until we calmed her down, reminded her why we were there, and got her food. My cleric cast create food and water a lot that journey, to the point that he'd sometimes just cast it and go back to sleep if a loud noise disturbed his sleep10.
Early one morning, we met some people who were chained up running through the forest, directed by a midget with a whip. Before the party could ask follow-up questions about if they really paid him to do this,11 the giantess woke up and decided the chained-up people looked tasty. So our paladin of vengeance chases the fleeing supposedly-not-slaves while the rest of the party tris to subdue the giantess. He tries to cut them apart and is told "Don't roll a 1." The first attempt is fine, but the next two (surprise surprise) are natural 1's. Naturally, his damage is more than sufficient to knock them unconscious, and he even auto-kills one. So my character asks what he's doing, the paladin says he's helping, and my character has what the DM calls the best line of the campaign: "Then stop helping!"12
Anyways, that episode lead to the paladin 's player worrying that he would lose his powers. As the DM assured him that the gods would consider this an act of incompetence, not malice, another player looked up the oaths, asked the first player some questions, and they realized that he technically couldn't have agreed to help the giantess, since he hates giants and stuff13. So the paladin tries to kill the giantess, leading to an amusing fight where he keeps attacking the giantess to knock her out and I keep healing her above 0 hit points; he then decides to leave14, forcing the other Lord's Alliance characters (including mine15) to chase him down, threaten to charge him with desertion, and drag him back. That didn't go anywhere, since he died jumping at Chief Guh and missing16.
Oh, and I should mention that the ettin cased the joint by taking one of our horses to Chief Guh as "tribute" and wandering anywhere he was allowed. He met another ettin named Oinker-Boinker. Nobody believed that that was his actual book-name, at first, which is probably the only reason I remember it.

9: Have you read the above footnote? If so, then I can just say "it was the paladin's player" and it'll make sense.
10: ...Wait a second, elves trance! Dammit, that funny moment was against the rules.
11: The DM later said it was some kind of exercise program. 75% of them got a lot more exercise than they bargained for...
12: Luckily, my cleric had not only cure wounds but a revivify diamond.
13: Something like that. It wasn't my class ability, I don't remember the details.
14: Mind, this was at the start of the next session and he had no backup character. If we didn't drag him back, he would have had to sit out the big boss fight.
15: One of only two characters who made it from the start of the game to the end. Both this paladin and the other Lord's Alliance characters (the ettin mentioned in 2) were introduced as reinforcements for my character. Since he was already the de facto leader of the party since he took charge in session #1, this didn't affect much of the intraparty dynamics.
16: Which we all deliberately misremembered as dying from jumping onto Guh, because that's a funnier mental image.


Sheriff: Spoiler tags added.

[Snowbluff]

My team was quite small as I put them through the Hardcover. Chief Guh was taken down early for similar reasons. However, I didn’t give the team special items to fight the final dragon and it was a grueling fight as it was intended to be. The fighter died holding the dragon back with sentinel from clawing up the squishy sorclock.

I think SKT is weirdly balanced. I had a hard time when I played it as a goblin cleric. Basically every fight I got a rock thrown at me because I wasn’t the only character hiding and I spent most gifts unconscious. Party make up and optimization and tactics will greatly affect how these fights go.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I'm not clear on exactly what happened.

From what I can tell, you had:

* A large party (5-6 PCs) of the same tier as the intended fight.
* Significant allied support (4-5 storm giants)
* Significant item support (potions, items, etc).
* 3 major combats (aboveground, elemental, dragon)
* Chances to take short rests between combats (?)

If that's all true, you absolutely should have rofl-stomped that adventuring day. Every single thing points in that direction. 6 PCs vs 4 (the "intended" balance point) is already a large advantage, basically turning a deadly fight into a hard one, a hard into a medium, etc unless they're adjusted. Adding in 4-5 high-CR NPCs tilts things tremendously in your favor, just on action-economy terms. Adding in major magical items (which the hardcovers always give out) tilts things even more that way (I generally consider everyone having a +2 weapon as being basically +1 level, although that's very rough). A short adventuring day on top of this (only 1 fight per SR) lets you nova extra hard, especially if there are any warlocks or monks (or other SR-dependent classes) along.

A two-level difference really isn't that big, as long as you're all in the same tier as the fight is designed for (and not level 1-3). If it's designed for level 15, and you're level 13, you shouldn't have a big issue. Designed for level 11 and you're level 9, it'll be rougher because there's a power spike at 11 that is accounted for in the encounter math.

Not to mention, "deadly" encounters are those with a chance of killing someone, by design. Not a guarantee, just a noticeable chance.

Try it again with only 4 of you, with no +X items, and no allies. That's what it was balanced for.

An additional note: All the hardcovers are notoriously under-tuned (to avoid TPKs on bad rolls). That's by design, and it's not a system thing, it's a conscious adventure-design choice.

Last note: no one calls it D&D Next anymore. Just no one.

[Torgairon]

could you maybe mark spoilers next time? you spoiled the end of the campaign I'm playing in, full stop, on the second line of your post with no warning. I'm not usually that guy about spoilers but this seems a little egregious.

[Willie the Duck]

I think you are using the term 'balance point too high' regarding 5e (which is what everyone calls it now) to mean you think the game is a little too easy. I would say not specifically... but... it is very easy for a party who survives a fight to lick their wounds and return to full fighting trim very quickly, unless the DM is putting them on a clock or hounding their places of respite relatively frequently. That means an inexperienced DM can readily make the game seem very easy unintentionally.

Beyond that, I do think that the default rules are set a little towards the 'relatively survivable (past level 1-2)' end of things, as compared to other editions. That makes sense, as people get attached to their characters a little more readily than we did in TSR-era days. Fortunately, there are plenty of listed options on making it less so, if one so desires (starting with harder recharges and slower healing, etc.).
*and 3e days whe you spent 40 minutes crafting a character and then the could die to a save or die was a real head-scratcher.

[MaxWilson]

So I ask the question to you, the Playground. Is this an unusual, isolated incident, or are others having similar experiences? Is the balance point of 5e too high, such that "level-appropriate" challenges and "challenging" bosses are too weak, or was our party more powerful than I realized?

The game is extremely easy by default, which is fine for new and casual players, but if you play because you like a challenge I recommend sticking to Deadly+ encounters and 150%+ of adventuring day XP budgets. I find that Deadly x3-4 is approximately a fair fight (in the sense that either PCs or monsters could win if the players don't fight smart--which gives the PCs an incentive to fight smart) and Deadly x5-6 is still beatable but skews a little bit in the monsters' favor. Deadly x10 can be won but I wouldn't use it except for a battle intended to be extremely difficult and in some sense climactic.

All of these are just approximations, since difficulty levels are not really exact anyway. Some "Easy" fights are actually extremely difficult, and some Deadly x10 fights would be extremely easy--you have to eyeball things as a DM to know how monsters match up against PC strengths and weaknesses.

[Keravath]

So far I personally haven’t found balance issues and as far as I know the rest of the folks I play with are the same.

I suspect that the big reason for this is that the balance in every encounter is ultimately up to the DM to manage.

Balance is a combination of the static/average cababilities of the players Vs the monsters and the dynamic aspect of how a particular battle is turning out which depends on the die rolls.

The DM dynamically balances the encounter by adjusting creature hit points as well as any waves of reinforcements that may or may not arrive. The DM also makes the choices for the creatures and those decisions may or may not be optimal depending on how the battle is going.

In the current case, it seems to me the DM was quite concerned the fight was going to be too tough so he over-buffed your NPC support and items .. to such an extent that it became difficult for the final encounter to feel really challenging.

[ad_hoc]

Every time I have seen this topic raised one of two (or both) are occurring.

1) The DM doesn't play the enemy creatures with the same care they would a PC. Usually they opt for giving PCs a chance for cinematic finishes. For example, in one thread the DM complained that the game was far too easy. When asked about the specifics of the fight it turns out he had the high CR boss enemy cast Levitate on herself rather than the Insect Plague she had that would wipe the party out. There were lots of other things going on there too.

2) There are 6 or more PCs.

[Malifice]

I find that Deadly x3-4 is approximately a fair fight (in the sense that either PCs or monsters could win if the players don't fight smart

A 'fair fight' is '50 percent chance of a TPK'?

That... sounds like an awful campaign. And I use the word 'campaign' lightly seeing as I highly doubt any PCs survive more than a handful of encounters before death.

[Theodoxus]

could you maybe mark spoilers next time? you spoiled the end of the campaign I'm playing in, full stop, on the second line of your post with no warning. I'm not usually that guy about spoilers but this seems a little egregious.

This. I came expecting a discussion on balance, instead I get a dissertation on how SKT ends -and like Torgairon, I'm currently playing it and had no idea there was a dragon mastermind.

I feel a bit of a bait and switch with your title and body. **** move is dickish.

[Ignimortis]

In my 5e experience a group of 6 3rd level PCs won a Deadly x8 or x9 fight once, and a group of 5 9th level PCs almost lost a Hard fight once. It's all about luck, tactics, and how appropriate your setup is to the current situation.

[Malifice]

In my 5e experience a group of 6 3rd level PCs won a Deadly x8 or x9 fight once, and a group of 5 9th level PCs almost lost a Hard fight once. It's all about luck, tactics, and how appropriate your setup is to the current situation.

And how many encounters you have already had that adventuring day.

[CantigThimble]

A 'fair fight' is '50 percent chance of a TPK'?

That... sounds like an awful campaign. And I use the word 'campaign' lightly seeing as I highly doubt any PCs survive more than a handful of encounters before death.

50/50 if players aren't thinking and just charge in hoping the dice gods carry them through. You can swing those odds in the party's favor heavily using terrain and tactics.

I've played through adventuring days like that and I find them much more enjoyable than medium/hard encounter grindfests.

To the OP: I do think 5e PCs are a bit overpowered. Or rather, I think the overemphasis on the adventuring day in the design makes it difficult to have individual fights that are interesting in their own right without bending and stretching the system quite a bit, like MaxWilson suggests. Players tend to either roflstomp or TPK in dangerous fights depending on how much their resources have been drained. In addition, the system doesn't offer any potential consequences for a bad fight between 'TPK' and 'scratches that heal the next morning'. Making individual fights have any consequence without nearly killing everyone requires story consequences or loss of rewards for poor performance, and there's only so many times you can force that to happen.

[ad_hoc]

Making individual fights have any consequence without nearly killing everyone requires story consequences or loss of rewards for poor performance, and there's only so many times you can force that to happen.

That happens every time at our table.

If the PCs can't accomplish their task then they lose out. Usually it involves them retreating early but sometimes they do it mid-combat before the reinforcements arrive. Either way they fail their goal. If there is no goal, what are they doing?

[Malifice]

50/50 if players aren't thinking and just charge in hoping the dice gods carry them through. You can swing those odds in the party's favor heavily using terrain and tactics.

I've played through adventuring days like that and I find them much more enjoyable than medium/hard encounter grindfests.

Medium-Hard encounters are not a 'grindfest'.

As always, more than happy to stat out a 6-8 encounter adventuring day featuring mainly medium-hard encounters for an adventuring party that is anything but.

[CantigThimble]

Medium-Hard encounters are not a 'grindfest'.

As always, more than happy to stat out a 6-8 encounter adventuring day featuring mainly medium-hard encounters for an adventuring party that is anything but.

:smallconfused: You know what, sure. Show me an adventuring day for an 8th level party that won't put me or my players to sleep.

[Ignimortis]

And how many encounters you have already had that adventuring day.

Two medium or hard ones (I don't know exactly, the DM didn't disclose those, he was genuinely surprised when we pulled through in the third one and calculated the precise number of Deadly stacks) in the first instance, and zero in the second one.

[Wilb]

I've been part of a campaign that recently ended and we went 1-20. After level 15 most combats were super boring, and when we fought a relevant enemy it was 50% meh as any other combat 50% we got our asses handed to us so hard we barely avoided TPK.

One thing I've noticed is that we never felt something like a "death by a thousand cuts" while fighting, it was almost always a miss or a grievous wound, because most weak mobs hit us only when critting while the bbeg hit us normally, but it usually escalated too harshly, and when we had time to prepare ourselves to achieve "optimal performance" for a single battle, every one of them was a cakewalk.

The exception was the Tough Hill Dwarf bearbarian, who never felt threatened at all for the whole campaign.

[Sir_Leorik]

First, add my displeasure with having SKT spoiled. Use spoiler tags, or hide the spoilers next time.

Secondly, the players in my current campaign are 15th level. I feel that at this level I need to customize monsters and NPCs to provide a basic challenge. Most of the group have optimized PCs and use optimized tactics, and they can easily take down high CR monsters with ease. At this point I am considering bringing the campaign to a conclusion and starting over.

[mephnick]

Even using a full adventuring day it's a bit easy if you have experienced players. However, I'm not sure anyone writing any of the 5e modules have read the actual system, because the few I've played mostly involve either travel one per day encounters you can nova in your sleep, or events with 10 encounters that go on and on with no chance of even a short rest. A level 15 party going all out on full rest for one encounter can destroy anything in the monster manual in two rounds, so "boss fights" without attrition leading up to them will always fall flat.

[Anonymouswizard]

First off, I don't think that dragon was fighting like a dragon would fight (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFnTRfR46Gc).

While I disagree with Spoony on many things, he's right on the nose here. GMs tend to have dragons not take advantage of their abilities, and even worse it sounds like the adventure places the dragon in a cave which makes it harder.

A dragon that gets into a fight underground will teleport* out and circle the entrance from the sky, or burst through the cieling, collapsing the cieling and getting into their preferred combat environment. They'll force the party to decide between ranged combat (and a dragon probably has the Fly speed to get into long range in a turn**) or sacrificing a concentration buff for a fly spell (at which point not only does the dragon outpace you, it's got you out of your preferred combat environment). Those with a cone breath weapon probably will use it to keep characters seperated, those with a line weapon will swoop down to get maximum use before returning to a decent altitude to get out of melee range. When their breath weapon is recharging they'll either fly out to long range (using their flight adapted eyes to keep the party in sight) or throw down debuffs and SoS spells, while keeping either a breath-weapon increasing buff, a defensive spell, or a nasty debuff in their concentration slot (assuming they don't try to use an antimagic field to keep as many spells as possible off of them). They'll concentrate their attacks on spellcasters to disable the party's buffs, followed by the dedicated archers (the ones that are actually hitting a lot). They'll potentially had shield set up, and if they access to the contingency spell you can bet that they have a contingency up. They will come down to claw/claw/bite/kick/belly flop/tail slap only when they've got a target low on health and want to get them down while their breath weapon is recharging, but if at all possible they'll be up and back into the air by the end of the round. If they get low enough on hp, they will just teleport or fly away, rest up, then come back and set fire to the inn you're staying in (they used a divination spell to find your location).

If the dragon gets out and sees it's faced with an army? It immediately flees. It can come back and reclaim it's hoard later, once it has a new horde.

So if you're fighting a dragon and your first order of business isn't to ground it, something has gone wrong. Which is probably half the reason the fight was so easy (removing the dragon's largest tactical advantage), the other half is being incredibly prepared to fight it.

Although I will say I think that 5e is set up in rules and encounter guidelines to be too unlethal. But I actively enjoy games that discourage drawing your weapon unless you've got to the point where you can curb stomp them.

* Assuming 5e dragons get 7th level spells, otherwise they have a way to get out ASAP.
** Unless 5e dragons aren't flying at 120ft a turn, which means only people with longbows get short range unless the dragon was closing in.

[Unoriginal]

5e dragons have one reason to go fight in melee, though.

They don't control how fast their breath recharge, so if a dragon just breath at the enemies once, and then **** until their breath recharge, they're giving the party potentially several rounds to heal, buff, summon creatures, etc.


So yeah, unless the dragon has enough spells to still keep the pressure up at very long range (and most dragons don't), or has no reason to worry about anything the adventurers do, going in melee and keep demolishing them is a strategy they'll have to adopt.

That being said, it's a "battle" strategy, which aplies only if the dragon has to defend or to kill people quickly. If the dragon is outside and hunting, for example, then leaving and coming back only when their breath is ready, again and again, works.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Even using a full adventuring day it's a bit easy if you have experienced players. However, I'm not sure anyone writing any of the 5e modules have read the actual system, because the few I've played mostly involve either travel one per day encounters you can nova in your sleep, or events with 10 encounters that go on and on with no chance of even a short rest. A level 15 party going all out on full rest for one encounter can destroy anything in the monster manual in two rounds, so "boss fights" without attrition leading up to them will always fall flat.

I've only played (part) of one hardcover (PotA) and while there are days with only one fight (travel, mostly), the real days have multiple fights and a chance to rest (depending on how you do it.

We triggered one fight (spoilers) such that we had 22 rounds of combat (fought the whole darn place piecemeal due to a chokepoint), but that could have been done in stages if we had done things differently. Others generally have multiple fights between rests, and space for rests.

I do agree with the last sentence--most of the "too easy" issue comes from one of a few things:
* Using solo monsters inappropriately.
* Too few fights/rest
* Strong optimization (including significant magic items, especially those with +ATK/+AC).

I'm noodling through some work to figure out approximately how much of a boost a given +X bonus is worth in level-equivalents, but a +2 item is significant. The CR math was designed around having none of those (but possibly weapons that pierce magic resistance in T3+), so any such items are a boost, the question is how much of one.

[Willie the Duck]

A 'fair fight' is '50 percent chance of a TPK'?

That... sounds like an awful campaign. And I use the word 'campaign' lightly seeing as I highly doubt any PCs survive more than a handful of encounters before death.

To be fair, Max never said anything about structuring a campaign around Deadly x3-4 fights, he just indicated where he thought the break-point was for 50-50 odds between the party and the encounter.

As to a TPK, there are ways to be defeated in the game without a TPK (although, with jack-in-the-box healing, one could say that this edition does encourage 'the fight that was too much' to be a wipe, rather than a route with 1-2 dead or the like as previous editions had). One would hope that your PCs would run (/fly/teleport) if things were going against them. If that's not the case (or the confluence of the rules and DMing style make the party unlikely to succeed at retreating), that probably needs to be addressed before fine tuning of encounter difficulty.




To the OP: I do think 5e PCs are a bit overpowered. Or rather, I think the overemphasis on the adventuring day in the design makes it difficult to have individual fights that are interesting in their own right without bending and stretching the system quite a bit, like MaxWilson suggests. Players tend to either roflstomp or TPK in dangerous fights depending on how much their resources have been drained. In addition, the system doesn't offer any potential consequences for a bad fight between 'TPK' and 'scratches that heal the next morning'. Making individual fights have any consequence without nearly killing everyone requires story consequences or loss of rewards for poor performance, and there's only so many times you can force that to happen.

I do feel that perhaps 5e's default mode was meant for the first few campaigns that a DM and players play together, where they are calibrating themselves to each other's style, and once that happens one is expected to start using one of the options where resources are not replenished quite so easily. Not that I mind eliminating tracking missing xp from level drain (which you may or may not get restored) and all the other semi-permanent (to permanent) losses of other editions, nor the ridiculous slow natural healing of the TSR and 3e era, but there needs to be a middle ground or else yes, as a DM you need to always put in any middle ground between death and 'scratches that heal the next morning.' The Gritty rest rules are my usual method, or 'no natural healing, long rests just recharge your HD, use those to heal.'

[2D8HP]

There's way to many words and not enough paragraph breaks for me to follow much of that thread starting post, but I skimmed enough to get:


......
So I ask the question to you, the Playground. Is this an unusual, isolated incident, or are others having similar experiences? Is the balance point of 5e too high, such that "level-appropriate" challenges and "challenging" bosses are too weak, or was our party more powerful than I realized?......


Which I'm going to pretend asks "Does combat in 5e D&D feel too easy for PC's?"

Yes.

Most of the time, with most DM's, 5e combat feel too easy for the PC's, in my experience.

After a couple of years playing 5e, and with one year of playing with one DM and a conga line of cakewalk combat I played a week with a new DM who brought my PC down to 0 HP (because like a chump I had my PC get into melee range to try to rescue another PC).

It was glorious.

D&D felt like D&D again.

I quit my other 5e games.

Then that new great DM disappeared. :annoyed:


History time!


"D&D IS ONLY AS GOOD AS THE DM

Successful play of D&D is a blend of desire, skill and luck. Desire is often initiated by actually participating in a game. It is absolutely a reflection of the referee's ability to maintain an interesting and challenging game. Skill is a blend of knowledge of the rules and game background as applied to the particular game circumstances favored by the referee. Memory or recall is often a skill function. Luck is the least important of the three, but it is a (actor in successful play nonetheless. Using the above criteria it would seem that players who have attained a score or more of levels in their respective campaigns are successful indeed. This is generally quite untrue. Usually such meteoric rise simply reflects an incompetent Dungeonmaster.

While adventurers in a D&D campaign must grade their play to their referee, it is also incumbent upon the Dungeonmaster to suit his campaign to the participants. This interaction is absolutely necessary if the campaign is to continue to be of interest to all parties. It is often a temptation to the referee to turn his dungeons into a veritable gift shoppe of magical goodies, ripe for plucking by his players. Similarly, by a bit of fudging, outdoor expeditions become trips to the welfare department for heaps of loot. Monsters exist for the slaying of the adventurers — whether of the sort who "guard" treasure, or of the wandering variety. Experience points are heaped upon the undeserving heads of players, levels accumulate like dead leaves in autumn, and if players with standings in the 20's. 30's and 40's of levels do not become bored, they typically become filled with an entirely false sense of accomplishment, and they are puffed up with hubris. As they have not really earned their standings, and their actual ability has no reflection on their campaign level, they are easily deflated (killed) in a game which demands competence in proportionate measure to players' levels.

It is therefore, time that referees reconsider their judging. First, is magic actually quite scarce in your dungeons? It should be! Likewise, treasures should be proportionate both to the levels of the dungeon and the monsters guarding them. Second, absolute disinterest mast be exercised by the Dungeonmaster, and if a favorite player stupidly puts himself into a situation where he is about to be killed, let the dice tell the story and KILL him. This is not to say that you should never temper chance with a bit of "Divine Intervention," but helping players should be a rare act on the referee's part, and the action should only be taken when fate seems to have unjustly condemned an otherwise good player, and then not in every circumstance should the referee intervene. Third, create personas for the inhabitants of your dungeon — if they are intelligent they would act cleverly to preserve themselves and slay intruding expeditions out to do them in and steal their treasures. The same is true for wandering monsters. Fourth, there should be some high-level, very tricky and clever chaps in the nearest inhabitation to the dungeon, folks who skin adventures out of their wealth just as prospectors were generally fleeced for their gold in the Old West. When the campaign turkies flock to town trying to buy magical weapons, potions, scrolls, various other items of magical nature, get a chum turned back to flesh, have a corpse resurrected, or whatever, make them pay through their proverbial noses. For example, what would a player charge for like items or services? Find out, add a good bit, and that is the cost you as referee will make your personas charge. This will certainly be entertaining to you and laying little traps in addition will keep the players on their collective toes. After all, Dungeon masters are entitled to a little fun too! Another point to remember is that you should keep a strict account of time. The wizard who spends six months writing scrolls and enchanting items is OUT of the campaign for six months, he cannot play during these six game months, and if the time system is anywhere reflective of the proper scale that means a period of actual time in the neighborhood of three months. That will pretty well eliminate all that sort of foolishness. Ingredients for scroll writing and potion making should also be stipulated (we will treat this in an upcoming issue of SR or in a D&D supplement as it should be dealt with at length) so that it is no easy task to prepare scrolls or duplicate potions.

When players no longer have reams of goodies at their fingertips they must use their abilities instead, and as you will have made your dungeons and wildernesses far more difficult and demanding, it will require considerable skill, imagination, and intellectual exercise to actually gain from the course of an adventure. Furthermore, when magic is rare it is valuable, and only if it is scarce will there be real interest in seeking it. When it is difficult to survive, a long process to gain levels, when there are many desired items of magical nature to seek for, then a campaign is interesting and challenging. Think about how much fun it is to have something handed to you on a silver platter — nice once in a while but unappreciated when it becomes common occurrence. This analogy applies to experience and treasure in the D&D campaign.

It requires no careful study to determine that D&D is aimed at progression which is geared to the approach noted above. There are no monsters to challenge the capabilities of 30th level lords, 40th level patriarchs, and so on. Now I know of the games played at CalTech where the rules have been expanded and changed to reflect incredibly high levels, comic book characters and spells, and so on. Okay. Different strokes for different folks, but that is not D&D. While D&D is pretty flexible, that sort of thing stretches it too far, and the boys out there are playing something entirely different — perhaps their own name "Dungeons & Beavers," tells it best.*It is reasonable to calculate that if a fair player takes part in 50 to 75 games in the course of a year he should acquire sufficient experience points to make him about 9th to 11th level, assuming that he manages to survive all that play. The acquisition of successively higher levels will be proportionate to enhanced power and the number of experience points necessary to attain them, so another year of play will by no means mean a doubling of levels but rather the addition of perhaps two or three levels. Using this gauge, it should take four or five years to see 20th level. As BLACKMOOR is the only campaign with a life of five years, and GREYHAWK with a life of four is the second longest running campaign, the most able adventurers should not yet have attained 20th level except in the two named campaigns. To my certain knowledge no player in either BLACKMOOR or GREYHAWK has risen above 14th level.

By requiring players to work for experience, to earn their treasure, means that the opportunity to retain interest will remain. It will also mean that the rules will fit the existing situation, a dragon, balrog, or whatever will be a fearsome challenge rather than a pushover. It is still up to the Dungeonmaster to make the campaign really interesting to his players by adding imaginative touches, through exertion to develop background and detailed data regarding the campaign, and to make certain that there is always something new and exciting to learn about or acquire. It will, however, be an easier task. So if a 33rd level wizard reflects a poorly managed campaign, a continuing mortality rate of 50% per expedition generally reflects over-reaction and likewise a poorly managed campaign. It is unreasonable to place three blue dragons on the first dungeon level, just as unreasonable as it is to allow a 10th level fighter to rampage through the upper levels of a dungeon rousting kobolds and giant rats to gain easy loot and experience. When you tighten up your refereeing be careful not to go too far the other way."

-Gygax
THE STRATEGIC REVIEW APRIL 1976


Tim Kask, first employee of TSR:

"Time passed and the game continued to grow as well as expand in unexpected directions. Level-creep--PC’s at high Levels that were never considered, let alone allowed for, began to proliferate. In the early years PC’s “retired” at Lvl 9 or 10 and a new PC started; this level-creep was eating up the game. We were getting pleas for help from DM’s and players alike.

The tipping point came one day in a letter I had to open *that day that spurred a supplement almost that very week. (I must have “had the duty” that day; we took turns opening and reading mail to TSR.) In this powerful thought provoker, a bewildered DM wrote the following, more or less (I will paraphrase a bit):

“Dear TSR, I don’t know where to go with my campaign next. Last session, my players went to Valhalla. They killed Loki, all the Valar, a dozen Valkyries, Thor and Odin and destroyed the Bifrost Bridge. “

I read this aloud to Gary and Brian; when we picked ourselves up off the floor or regained our senses, as the case may have been, ( I swear to you that this is true) we knew level-creep had gone too far. That week saw the impetus for one more supplement gather enough steam that I set out to edit the last of the RPG-oriented supplements,*Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes. This was the closest to a rule book that we came; we felt that PC’s should not be powerful enough to knock off gods. So we gave them really high amounts of HP: Odin 300, Thor 275. We charted out character levels undreamed of in the original game."

(The source of the quote is here (http://kaskoid.blogspot.com/2016/02/how-i-helped-to-pull-rope-that-tolled.html?m=1))


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X9vECzikqpY[


Anyway, D&D is still "only as good as it's DM" whatever the rules, they have the power to make the game exiting.



Now excuse me while I light some incense, turn on the black light, put "Houses of the Holy" by Led Zeppelin on my Hi-Fi after I get off my CB radio.

10-4 good buddy!

[Anonymouswizard]

5e dragons have one reason to go fight in melee, though.

They don't control how fast their breath recharge, so if a dragon just breath at the enemies once, and then **** until their breath recharge, they're giving the party potentially several rounds to heal, buff, summon creatures, etc.


So yeah, unless the dragon has enough spells to still keep the pressure up at very long range (and most dragons don't), or has no reason to worry about anything the adventurers do, going in melee and keep demolishing them is a strategy they'll have to adopt.

That being said, it's a "battle" strategy, which aplies only if the dragon has to defend or to kill people quickly. If the dragon is outside and hunting, for example, then leaving and coming back only when their breath is ready, again and again, works.

Yeah, dragons can be forced into melee if they're under time constraints. As it is most buffs require concentration so there will only be one big one per caster and you keep out of the range of nasty debuffs, the only real problem is if the party summons flying creatures.

My point is that dragons have a lot more options than 'stand there and claw/claw/bite/tail slap/jig with a breath weapon every few rounds'. A dragon's primary advantage is that it's a very tough creature in a situation where it can hit and run. It can wait out any buff of less than an hour, and can harrass a group of adventurers to stop them from getting short rests. I'd argue that if a dragon is fighting directly then it's essentially lost already.

Plus in an ideal environment the dragon has a lot more options. Fly away and cause a landslide, start hurling trees at the PCs, set a forest on fire, fly up to a high altitude and fall on them...

[KorvinStarmast]

My gaming group finished Storm King's Thunder tonight. We had a final encounter with the blue dragon who masterminded the war between giantkind and the smallfolk, with the storm giants sending four of their finest warriors and their king (as well as giving the party some buffing potions and another magic item). It was us versus the gargoyles, yuan-ti, and gods know what other minions she had. It was...
Boring, and disappointing. We slogged through about half of the aboveground encounter before the DM called it, with the only interesting bits being one of the giants turning on his king for refusing to keep moving forward after being crippled1 and one of the minor NPCs which we'd always joked about not trusting turning on the guy who just picked him up and ran off2. Then we went underground, fought an elemental (not all of our party even got into position to attack before it died), and found the dragon. It was a slow fight, wherein we discovered the downside of having a Huge party when fighting a blue dragon3 but still ground her down. My character4 threw a few blasting spells and once used Mass Healing Word, mostly to wake one of the secondary NPCs5 from unconsciousness.

After the wrapup, the DM contrasted this with a boss fight we'd had much, much earlier in the campaign. After a series of odd events6, we were facing Chief Guh two levels early. It was an epic battle against wave after wave of minions, from goblins to ogres to hill giants. All but one of the PCs, as well as the NPC we brought along5, were knocked down to 0 hit points at least once; the party felt like they were in mortal peril. I usually find combat in TRPGs kinda boring; this time, I was having a blast, carefully splitting my spell slots between fireballs, scorching rays, cues, etc, and even acting as an emergency tank when our main tanks were unconscious and/or on another plane7.
It was fun, even though we didn't recognize the magical artifact we would need two levels later. And while I personally think the journey to Guh's Lair was more fun than the boss battle itself8, I don't think that's the only reason I found the boss battle more enjoyable than the campaign's final boss.

Anyways, the point I was making before getting drawn out on tangents within tangents was that we didn't die fighting Guh, and had a lot more fun fighting her early than expected than fighting the final boss more or less as intended. We're not sure how typical this is; our only other D&D Next experience has been with either a DM who ignores RAW and common sense alike (often both at once) to keep characters alive and one who homebrews badly9.
For the record: Our gaming group's members changed a bit over the year-and-change we ran Storm King's Thunder, but was typically 5 and sometimes 6 players plus a DM. Some characters used Unearthed Arcana and the like, but most stuck to core and I'm pretty sure none were particularly optimized. This might be a bit above the power curve, but it can't be two levels above the power curve, can it?

So I ask the question to you, the Playground. Is this an unusual, isolated incident, or are others having similar experiences? Is the balance point of 5e too high, such that "level-appropriate" challenges and "challenging" bosses are too weak, or was our party more powerful than I realized?


1: The DM's excuse for why he didn't follow. His logic was that he had enough to worry about without having an NPC he had to control on the players' side. (And while I'm in a footnote, I should mention that the giant in question was one whose roleplaying notes said he'd try to betray the king at some point. Something to do with being in love with the princess? I dunno, I was stuck with the trees.)
2: This requires more explanation. The NPC was a shrub, and the PC was an ettin. That's probably all the explanation needed, aside from the fact that the PC controlling the shrub pointed out that we never found out whether the shrub was a traitor or if it was just pissed at its treatment.
3: Specifically, how hard it is to avoid accidentally being in "lightning bolt formation" all the time.
4: A wood elf light cleric, from some noble family. Kinda boring to play, aside from how he interacted with his more unruly party members.
5: A tree.
6: First, we had a random encounter with a brass dragon who we flagged down. He pointed us in the direction of a hill giantess to slay. Then, when we heard her sobbing, we talked with her and discovered that her husband had been taken by Chief Guh. We decided to rescue the giantess, because our party always tried to do the good thing but never thought too hard about it (so we wouldn't be too anti-genocide to finish the adventures). The giantess lead us to Chief Guh's lodge8 So it was a weird decision within a weird decision within a random encounter.
7: The ettin was half-barbarian, half-warlock. (He was actually two characters.) The warlock half liked to cast blink in combat, which certainly keeps our tank alive longer! (It didn't keep him from being knocked unconscious once or twice in the Guh fight.)

8: Long tangent: There were some amusing things which happened along the way. For instance, the giantess got hungry and violent every morning until we calmed her down, reminded her why we were there, and got her food. My cleric cast create food and water a lot that journey, to the point that he'd sometimes just cast it and go back to sleep if a loud noise disturbed his sleep10.
Early one morning, we met some people who were chained up running through the forest, directed by a midget with a whip. Before the party could ask follow-up questions about if they really paid him to do this,11 the giantess woke up and decided the chained-up people looked tasty. So our paladin of vengeance chases the fleeing supposedly-not-slaves while the rest of the party tris to subdue the giantess. He tries to cut them apart and is told "Don't roll a 1." The first attempt is fine, but the next two (surprise surprise) are natural 1's. Naturally, his damage is more than sufficient to knock them unconscious, and he even auto-kills one. So my character asks what he's doing, the paladin says he's helping, and my character has what the DM calls the best line of the campaign: "Then stop helping!"12
Anyways, that episode lead to the paladin 's player worrying that he would lose his powers. As the DM assured him that the gods would consider this an act of incompetence, not malice, another player looked up the oaths, asked the first player some questions, and they realized that he technically couldn't have agreed to help the giantess, since he hates giants and stuff13. So the paladin tries to kill the giantess, leading to an amusing fight where he keeps attacking the giantess to knock her out and I keep healing her above 0 hit points; he then decides to leave14, forcing the other Lord's Alliance characters (including mine15) to chase him down, threaten to charge him with desertion, and drag him back. That didn't go anywhere, since he died jumping at Chief Guh and missing16.
Oh, and I should mention that the ettin cased the joint by taking one of our horses to Chief Guh as "tribute" and wandering anywhere he was allowed. He met another ettin named Oinker-Boinker. Nobody believed that that was his actual book-name, at first, which is probably the only reason I remember it.

9: Have you read the above footnote? If so, then I can just say "it was the paladin's player" and it'll make sense.
10: ...Wait a second, elves trance! Dammit, that funny moment was against the rules.
11: The DM later said it was some kind of exercise program. 75% of them got a lot more exercise than they bargained for...
12: Luckily, my cleric had not only cure wounds but a revivify diamond.
13: Something like that. It wasn't my class ability, I don't remember the details.
14: Mind, this was at the start of the next session and he had no backup character. If we didn't drag him back, he would have had to sit out the big boss fight.
15: One of only two characters who made it from the start of the game to the end. Both this paladin and the other Lord's Alliance characters (the ettin mentioned in 2) were introduced as reinforcements for my character. Since he was already the de facto leader of the party since he took charge in session #1, this didn't affect much of the intraparty dynamics.
16: Which we all deliberately misremembered as dying from jumping onto Guh, because that's a funnier mental image.

You need to use the spoiler tag for actual spoilers, not just for extended footnotes.
Game balanced around 4 players, or 4-5. Six (I have found) makes a difference; check the DM guide on how to balance encounters on an XP budget. Having 6 PC's actually is a break point in terms of multiples going down.

If the party contains six or more characters, use the next lowest multiplier on the table. Use a multiplier of 0.5 for a single monster.

[Malifice]

:smallconfused: You know what, sure. Show me an adventuring day for an 8th level party that won't put me or my players to sleep.

OK mate, I will do.

How many 8th level PCs, what are the classes, and core magic items of those PCs?

(Magic items are not factored into CR like they were in 3-4E so they need to be accounted for in encounter design)

[NaughtyTiger]

Every time I have seen this topic raised one of two (or both) are occurring.

1) The DM doesn't play the enemy creatures with the same care they would a PC. Usually they opt for giving PCs a chance for cinematic finishes. For example, in one thread the DM complained that the game was far too easy. When asked about the specifics of the fight it turns out he had the high CR boss enemy cast Levitate on herself rather than the Insect Plague she had that would wipe the party out. There were lots of other things going on there too.

2) There are 6 or more PCs.

this was me during my first DM... i whined about not dropping folks, but clearly pass up opportunities because i didn't want to upset my players. (and it was at FLGS, so always 7 at a table)

[Malifice]

Mainly Medium-Hard Adventuring Day for 5 x 8th level PCs, presuming 1 attuned magic item each (roughly 5 x 8+1 level PCs).

The Tower of Azagor the Archmage

Hook:

While enjoying some much needed downtime at the conclusion of their last adventure, the party see a sudden bright flash and hear a commotion coming from outside the tavern they are holed up in. Upon investigating they notice a strange sight.

There, in the middle of the town square, stands a strange glowing tower!

The tower is made of some odd grey stone, flecked through with an ore of adamantine, and covered in runes of power. A Wizard (or any PC proficient in the Arcana skill) immediately recognises the Mage-Rune of Azaghor the Arcanist, a fabled Wizard of old, who specialized in conjuration and dimensional magic, placed prominently over the door arch.

Have the PCs make an Arcana (or History) check; Conjuration Wizards have advantage on the check:

DC 10: Azagor was last seen some 1000 years ago. He built a grand tower, and in it he stored all his most potent magic items and treasure. The tower contained a built in security measure; it whisks itself away to other locations in the multi-verse at random times and to random locations. It is never in the same place for more than precisely 4 hours; after which it vanishes to an entirely random location in the planes!
DC 15: Azagor was a collector of potent items. The tower is sure to contain a wealth of loot; including the fabled 'Robes of Azagor'. Many adventurers across the planes have tried to loot it; none have been successful. Any adventurers that succeeded would be wealthy and famous beyond their wildest dreams.
DC 20: The Robes of Azagor are none other than a Robe of the Archmagi! They are likely protected by potent warding magics; Azagor was famous for guarding his treasures well.

If the PCs fail the above check, have a NPC (a local sage or scholar investigating the disturbance, wide eyed at the towers appearance!) give them the information above at DC 10, but with one difference. The wizened old sage that recounts the information to them, recalls (incorrectly) that the tower only sticks around for 3 hours before teleporting away.

Regardless, the Sage offers the PCs a reward of 50,000 gp if they can recover the Robes for him.

----------------------------------------------

NB: The above adventure frames the encounters to follow in a nice convenient doom clock, and thrilling race against time. The PCs have 4 hours (though they might only think they have 3 hours!) to loot the tower, recover the treasure, and escape the tower before they get whisked off to another plane... and another adventure of the DMs design).

Also, I dont know your players, or their characters so I havent been able to tailor the hook to them specifically, so hopefully 'loot the tower' is something that appeals to them.

Adventure to follow.

[Malifice]

For a party of 5 x 8th level PCs, each with 1 attuned magic item (and a few lesser ones), making them around equal to 9th level PCs, we come out with the following encounter budget:

Easy: 2750-5499 XP
Medium: 5500-7999 XP
Hard: 8000-1199 XP
Deadly: 12000+ XP

Again, even though 8th level PCs, I increased their level by +1 to account for Magic items. Parties with a lot of magical gear might find the adventure easy; without magical gear will likely find it quite hard.
------------------------

Map: Go nuts. The entire tower is in reality a demi-plane, so go full blow 'Dr Who' and have the insides of the tower look like whatever you want.

Note though, the tower has no connection to the border ethereal, so no teleportation magic in the tower. Spells like misty step, blink and other spells that require access to the border ethereal do not work, and ghosts and other creatures that are incorporeal special ability, cannot enter the tower.

A caster that tries to cast any spell that relies on the Border Ethereal while in the tower finds the spell fails, and the slot is expended (but a DC 15 Arcana check tells the caster why).

-----------------------------

Encounters to follow.

[ProseBeforeHos]

In my 5e experience a group of 6 3rd level PCs won a Deadly x8 or x9 fight once, and a group of 5 9th level PCs almost lost a Hard fight once. It's all about luck, tactics, and how appropriate your setup is to the current situation.

I'd just like to 2nd this. In OOTA my players at level 4 ambushed a CR8 drow priestess, two CR 5 elite drow and their 8 CR 1/4 mooks and absolutely destroyed them with terrain advantage and good tactics.

The same party almost died a level later to an ambush by giant spiders led by a Drider.

I've almost given up trying to balance 5e combat since so often it develops in ways you cannot predict.

[Malifice]

Encounter 1:

Bork'lai and his warband.

Bork'lai is a Githyanki knight who has been seraching for the tower for some time, at the behest of his Lichqueen master (to whom he is totally devoted). He has recently discovered its location, and Plane Shifts in, right as the party reach the second room of the dungeon

Read aloud:

As you move past the first room, a strange sound envelops you, and a noise like paper tearing can be heard. Suddently 5 grotesque humanoids in gleaming armor appear standing in a formation 20' in front of you, twirling silver greatswords menacingly. The leader smirks at you and (unless the PCs speak Gith) barks orders in a strange language to his men, who move to attack!

[roll initiative]

Encounter:

1) Bork'lai - Githyanki Knight (replace jump 3/day with shield 3/day, cannot use misty step in the tower, increase Strength to 18, increase attack to Greatsword +10 to hit, 2d7+7 slashing (and 3d6 psychic), [x2 attacks].

Add the following action: Leadership (Recharges after a Short or Long Rest). For 1 minute, Bork'lai can utter a special command or warning whenever a nonhostile creature that it can see within 30 feet of it makes an attack roll or a saving throw. The creature can add a d4 to its roll provided it can hear and understand Bork'lai. A creature can benefit from only one Leadership die at a time. This effect ends i Bork'lai is incapacitated.

Bork'lai is immune to the Charmed condition due to his fantical devotion to the Lich queen. He has used his Pane Shift ability to reach the tower, and cannot do so again this day.

2) 4 x Githyanki Warriors (replace jump 3/day with shield 3/day, cannot use misty step in the tower, increase Strength to 16; increase attacks to Greatsword +5 to hit, 2d6+3 slashing and 2d6 psychic [multi-attack 2]

All the Gith (including Bork'lai) come from the Zarch school of sword-fighting and can treat their greatswords as if they had the thrown and returning properties (returning to their hands automatically), and a range of 30/60'. Allow a Fighter PC a DC 15 Intelligence Ability check at the start of combat to notice this from their stance. Battlemasters gain advantage on this check.

Encounter notes:

XP = 2,800 for the warriors, and 3,900 for the Knight. The Warriors XP value does not contribute to multiplying the total XP value for the encounter due to being 5 CR lower than the average party level. Instead they were treated as one singlular creature and XP value was instead multiplied by 1.5 to determine encounter difficulty.

XP to award = 6,700.

Adjusted encounter difficulty = 10,050 [Hard].

[Malifice]

Encounter 2:

Borgabill the Bloated Beholder.

Read aloud:

This room is cathedral like in proportions, with the roof disappearing into darkness above. In the middle of the room, and about 40' from the entrance, you notice six undead creatures milling about, apparently engaged in some kind of macabre dance! They bow and nod to each other before lurching about arm in arm, in a morbid parody of some kind of silent classical dance.

Hovering 60' above the zombies (and 40' from the entrance to the room) watching the dance is Borgabill (a Death Tyrant Beholder). These are his prior victims and Borgabill (Bill for short) gains great amusement watching them dance. The current dance has gone on for some centuries now, and Bill desires some 'fresh meat' for his dance spectacle.

Fortunately the PCs have arrived just in time.

If the PCs are able to see in darkness 80' or more (via darkvision or similar) they notice the Beholder immediately. If not, his soft morbid humming can be heard by any PC with a passive perception of 17 or higher.

Borgabill attacks immediately, descending from the chamber floor, and firing his rays off at random.

Creatures:

1 x Death Tyrant Beholder (11,500 xp) and 6 x Zombies (300 xp).

Note; the Zombies add nothing to the encounter, and the XP is not multiplied by their presence.

XP to award: 11,800; encounter difficulty 11,800 [Hard]

[Malifice]

Encounter 3:

Tweedle Dum and Tweedle... OH MY GOD IM STUCK GET ME OUT OF HERE!

Set up:

This 10' wide and 60' long hallway runs East to West and is covered in plaster, which has been painted over with a fresco that covers the whole passageway (depicting the cosmos, and the Archmages attempts at exploring it). 10' in from each entrance (on the North walls, and 40' apart from each other) is a concealed alcove covered by a 2" thick plaster wall.

Inside each alcove is an inanimate shield guardian.

A PC investigating the walls determines they are plaster with a DC 10 Intelligence . If he specifically checks the area on the North wall, and 10-20' from the entrance, he notices the Plaster is hollow at this spot with a DC 15 Intelligence [investigation] check. Award him advantage if he specifically states he is knocking on the walls.

A [I]detect magic cast on the hallway also notes a faint aura of divination magic cutting across the midway point of the hallway.

Otherwise if a living creature of Small size or larger crosses the mid point of the hallway, the Shield Guardians suddenly animate and burst through the plaster and attack [surprising the PCs], and blocking off the hallway at each end. The Golems also attack if they take any damage before a PC crosses the midway point of the hallway.

On round 1 (likely while the PCs are surprised), the Constructs cast the bound spells in them. Construct one casts Evards Black tentacles in the middle of the hallway, and Construct 2 casts Sickening Radiance (also in the middle of the hallway).

The combined effect of these spells is the central 20' of the hallway is difficult terrain, and creatures that start their turn there must make a Dexterity and Constitution save or suffer those spells effects (be restrained, take 4d10 radiant damage, 3d6 bludgeoning damage, be restrained and suffer 1 level of exhaustion).

The Constructs then attack, blocking the PCs in the area at either end of the hallway!

Creatures: 2 x Shield guardians (see above for stored spells).

XP to award - 5,800

Adjusted XP - 8,700 [Hard]

[Malifice]

For encounters 4, 5 and 6 lets go with:

4 - 3 x Barbed devils - armed with great-axes (deal 1d12 damage instead of 1d6 with claw multi-attack) in a magically darkened room - Adjusted XP 10,800 [Hard]
5 - Adult Black dragon (11,500 XP, Hard)
6 - 4 x Flameskulls (Adjusted XP - 8,800 - [Hard])

I have set all encounters at 'Hard' because we like a challenge, and the PCs can leave at any time they want if it gets too tough for them (remember they are on the clock).

If you want to get nasty, you could trap them in the tower, and they have 4 hours to find the Robes of the Archmagi, and find the way to escape, before being whisked away to ???.

Oh yeah, for the final encounter, lets go crazy.

Azagor [mad Archmage] - select spells to suit, and whatever mooks you want around him. He's CR 12 (8,400 xp) so he's Hard on his own.

I'd likely include a decent 'heavy' type monster with him, and some mindless low HP mooks as well, maybe even pushing him into Deadly territory (he is the BBEG after all!).

[MaxWilson]

Medium-Hard encounters are not a 'grindfest'.

As always, more than happy to stat out a 6-8 encounter adventuring day featuring mainly medium-hard encounters for an adventuring party that is anything but.

(1) The way you calculate encounter difficulty, IIRC, is pretty questionable. You have a tendency to use difficulty multipliers that are too low, e.g. IIRC you built an encounter with something like 3 Frost Giants and 5 Winter Wolves and then chose a difficulty multiplier of x2 instead of x3 because the Winter Wolves are lower-CR than the Frost Giants. So in practice you are using harder-than-Medium encounters.

(2) IIRC you also tend towards the Combat As Sport paradigm, and you do things like make monsters pop out of the castle walls already in the players' face, with no opportunities for a PC point man like a familiar or a Shadow Monk to detect enemies before they are already in the players' face.

(3) There are monsters that punch above their weight class, as I mentioned above. I can build an Easy encounter which will probably TPK a party, simply by abusing the monster difficulty rules, but so what? What we're discussing here is "what is the right amount of any given monster to create the desired difficulty?" If I have 4 9th level PCs and I want an encounter with some wights and zombies hiding in a couple of abandoned Conestoga wagons on the prairie, and I want the encounter to be challenging and full of dramation tension, not only do I need to manipulate the circumstances (players need to search the wagons at night to find clues to the MacGuffin before Big Rival McGurk beats them to it) but I also need a rough idea of how many wights and zombies I want to use--I can't just swap them out for Intellect Devourers and Banshees and other low-CR-but-deadly monsters to increase my monster power while keeping CR artificially low, because Intellect Devourers and Banshees isn't what the scenario is about.

In reality I'd probably just eyeball it and make it a score of zombies (half in the wagons, mimicking settlers, half shambling around outside) and a score of wights (spread out all over the area) at night... and yep, when I plug that into Kobold.com I get 60,000 XP of difficulty, which is about 6.25x the Deadly threshold of 9600 XP (and BTW 200% of the daily XP budget of 30,000 XP).

If a DM stuck to only Medium-Hard encounters they'd be looking at only 4-6 wights (and 0 zombies) in order to fit under the 9600 XP Deadly threshold, which IMO would be extremely boring for skilled players. Twenty zombies and twenty wights, dispersed over an area, makes a much more interesting challenge.

Not everyone plays for challenge, and not everyone who likes a challenge wants one every time, but since the OP was asking... yes, the game is very easy by default. 6 wights for a 9th level party are not much more than a speedbump--but you can turn the difficulty way up and PCs can generally handle it, especially if they are smart.

[strangebloke]

Oh hey, another thread about 5e being too easy!

Oh look, the OP was part of a large, high-level party with NPC allies and no adventuring day!

WOW what could have made this game easy for him. SO MYSTERIOUS.

---

Seriously. STK is known for being a heavily nova-based module. It is flavorful, fun, and all other good things, but it doesn't handle the resource economy well at all.

---

Adventuring days are a must if you want to challenge your players. Use the gritty rest rules. Hand out beer and pretzels. The 'one big fight and done' is better handled in other systems. DND is all about the dungeon crash.

Of course, if you read AngryGM, you'll realize that anything can be a dungeon.

And of course, if your bad guys are smart, aggressive, and designed to be challenging you can always run a reverse dungeon crawl.

---

OP, spoil your post, or else I shall make you taste my shoe.

[MaxWilson]

I've been part of a campaign that recently ended and we went 1-20. After level 15 most combats were super boring, and when we fought a relevant enemy it was 50% meh as any other combat 50% we got our asses handed to us so hard we barely avoided TPK.

One thing I've noticed is that we never felt something like a "death by a thousand cuts" while fighting, it was almost always a miss or a grievous wound, because most weak mobs hit us only when critting while the bbeg hit us normally, but it usually escalated too harshly, and when we had time to prepare ourselves to achieve "optimal performance" for a single battle, every one of them was a cakewalk.

The exception was the Tough Hill Dwarf bearbarian, who never felt threatened at all for the whole campaign.

This. In my experience with higher-level play, most deaths come fairly suddenly. Either you're fighting three dozen hobgoblins and laughing off their blows because your Blur spell gives them disadvantage, or an enemy spellcaster you didn't see hits you with a Hold Person (and you fail your save) and suddenly you take 80d8+20d6+5 damage from hobgoblin crits all in a single turn.

This is especially true for PCs who like to wander off solo, which as a DM I do my best to tempt them into doing. Solo PCs have lots of fun and spotlight time on their solo explorations, but they also tend to be... brittle... in the face of surprises. Either they're fine or they're dead.

[strangebloke]

This. In my experience with higher-level play, most deaths come fairly suddenly. Either you're fighting three dozen hobgoblins and laughing off their blows because your Blur spell gives them disadvantage, or an enemy spellcaster you didn't see hits you with a Hold Person (and you fail your save) and suddenly you take 80d8+20d6+5 damage from hobgoblin crits all in a single turn.

This is especially true for PCs who like to wander off solo, which as a DM I do my best to tempt them into doing. Solo PCs have lots of fun and spotlight time on their solo explorations, but they also tend to be... brittle... in the face of surprises. Either they're fine or they're dead.

The attrition usually isn't HP attrition, though, it's other resources. Potions, spells, usages of abilities, etc.

Every death my party experienced over two years of my last campaign was because a PC decided to go off on their own.

[Malifice]

(1) The way you calculate encounter difficulty, IIRC, is pretty questionable. You have a tendency to use difficulty multipliers that are too low, e.g. IIRC you built an encounter with something like 3 Frost Giants and 5 Winter Wolves and then chose a difficulty multiplier of x2 instead of x3 because the Winter Wolves are lower-CR than the Frost Giants. So in practice you are using harder-than-Medium encounters.

Thats what it says to do in the DMG. So I am using the guidelines.

When using multiple lower CR monsters that do not meaningfully contribute to the encounter, you do not multiply for their presence when determining the overall XP value of the encounter. Says so in the DMG.

I clearly consider Winter Wolves (CR 2 or 3) to be low CR compared to 11th level PCs in the example you cited. They're speed bumps/ mooks that dont justify an XP multiplication of the overall encounter.

1 x CR 10 and 10 x CR 1's is not multipled by 3 (for 11 monsters) when determining overall XP budget. I wouldnt multiply it at all (simply adding the CR 10 value to the 10 x CR 1's).


(2) IIRC you also tend towards the Combat As Sport paradigm, and you do things like make monsters pop out of the castle walls already in the players' face, with no opportunities for a PC point man like a familiar or a Shadow Monk to detect enemies before they are already in the players' face.

Lol; they can have a point man. He's just the one that gets ambushed or triggers the trap. On his own.

And yes; I like to retain a level of control over my encounters (indeed over my adventure). That's not to say that encounters are always set up for 'gotcha' moments, indeed I will often include measures to avoid or defeat the encounter entirely.


6 wights for a 9th level party are not much more than a speedbump

Exactly. Wights are low CR for a 9th level party, even though there are six of them. They're CR 3.

Accordingly I wouldnt multiply the XP for there being 6 of them, so the encounter would budget out at 'easy'.

4,200 XP is an easy encounter for your average 9th level party. Its an encounter they are expected to smash with next to zero resource expenditure. Its the definition of an Easy encounter.

I would expect a party of 9th level PCs to steam-roll them in a single round, or two at most, with minimal resource expenditure (likely with a single use of Turn Undead).

[Daphne]

(1) The way you calculate encounter difficulty, IIRC, is pretty questionable. You have a tendency to use difficulty multipliers that are too low, e.g. IIRC you built an encounter with something like 3 Frost Giants and 5 Winter Wolves and then chose a difficulty multiplier of x2 instead of x3 because the Winter Wolves are lower-CR than the Frost Giants. So in practice you are using harder-than-Medium encounters.
This is actually the correct way to do it. Dungeon Master Guide, page 82: "When making this calculation [Evaluating Encounter Difficulty], don't count any monsters whose challenge rating is significantly below the average challenge rating of the other monsters in the group unless you think the weak monsters significantly contribute to the difficulty of the encounter."

[UrielAwakened]

And that doesn't sound ridiculously complicated and prone to over- and underestimating real difficulty to anyone else?

[Hooligan]

PCs who like to wander off solo

....Fools...

[MaxWilson]

The attrition usually isn't HP attrition, though, it's other resources. Potions, spells, usages of abilities, etc.

Every death my party experienced over two years of my last campaign was because a PC decided to go off on their own.

In most cases that I've seen, it is poor decisions, not attrition, which lead to PC deaths. In particular, poor threat assessment. A couple of nights ago I ran a one-shot with three Purple Dragon Knights (Sir Lancelot level 12, Sir Bedivere level 7, and Sir Kay level 6, of the Round Table) plus a Forest Land Druid (Merlin, level 10). Merlin died, and it was because he foolishly chose not to abort a clever plan when it turned out that the place he was infiltrating was guarded by a demon. So he wound up fighting a Glabrezu solo, and it Power Word: Stunned him and dropped him to 0 HP, then he failed all of his death saves and died before anyone could rescue him. (It did make the subsequent fight much easier for the other PCs though because it no longer had Power Word: Stun available. So attrition, in that case, led to player success.)

In fact the only kind of attrition I can remember arguably contributing to PC deaths is when the party has a Horn of Valhalla for emergencies--if the horn is used up, they no longer have a panic button and are no longer as able to pull of victories in hopeless-looking situations, although of course sometimes they do anyway.

[Malifice]

This is actually the correct way to do it. Dungeon Master Guide, page 82: "When making this calculation [Evaluating Encounter Difficulty], don't count any monsters whose challenge rating is significantly below the average challenge rating of the other monsters in the group unless you think the weak monsters significantly contribute to the difficulty of the encounter."

Thanks mate, that's the bit I was looking for.

Its a bit of an art and not a science (and requires the DM to know his players, their characters and capabilities to properly eyeball).

I prefer writing up adventures for players and characters I know (or at least the characters) for that reason.

In the encounters above I went into some detail on my justification for the XP budgeting.

In one I budgeted 4 x CR 3's as a single monster (in addition to the boss monster) so I multiplied by 1.5 for 'two' monsters.

I sort of had a bet each way.

[Malifice]

In most cases that I've seen, it is poor decisions, not attrition, which lead to PC deaths. In particular, poor threat assessment.

In most cases I've seen its down to bad or inexperienced DMing (over hard encounters) and/or poor luck from the players.

[MaxWilson]

Thats what it says to do in the DMG. So I am using the guidelines.

When using multiple lower CR monsters that do not meaningfully contribute to the encounter, you do not multiply for their presence when determining the overall XP value of the encounter. Says so in the DMG.

Let's take your Githyanki as an example.

Kobold.com and my reading of the DMG both agree that 1 Githyanki Knight + 4 Githyanki Warriors have a multiplier of x2.5, giving a total adjusted XP of 13,400 XP and making that encounter deadly. (And you did exactly as I predicted BTW and made the githyanki pop out of nowhere already in the players' faces.)

You rate it as a Hard encounter.

I don't think anyone could seriously argue that the Githyanki Warriors aren't contributing meaningfully to the encounter--it's not like the Death Tyrant with a few zombies for flavor--so they count toward the XP multiplier. 1 Githyanki Knight is a much less serious threat than 1 Githyanki Knight and 4 Githyanki Warriors. Therefore the encounter is Deadly (but still not all that hard really).

I also note that you're spending approximately 200% of the daily XP budget, so you're implicitly acknowledging that yes, you too find the default DMG recommendations too easy to be interesting and choose to exceed them in order to make the game more interesting.

[Malifice]

[QUOTE=MaxWilson;23279403]Let's take your Githyanki as an example.

Kobold.com and my reading of the DMG both agree that 1 Githyanki Knight + 4 Githyanki Warriors have a multiplier of x2.5, giving a total adjusted XP of 13,400 XP and making that encounter deadly. (And you did exactly as I predicted BTW and made the githyanki pop out of nowhere already in the players' faces.)

And like I said above (multiple times) the 4 x warrior mooks count as a single monster for the purposes of XP multiplication (so only a 1.5 multiplier).

They're 5 CR lower than the average level of the PCs. I dont view them as anything more than speedbumps and they dont contribue meaningfully to the encounter. A single PC should be able to drop one per round.


I don't think anyone could seriously argue that the Githyanki Warriors aren't contributing meaningfully to the encounter--it's not like the Death Tyrant with a few zombies for flavor--so they count toward the XP multiplier.


This is where you and I disagree. Its a question of opinion at this point.

Feel free to run that exact encounter with 5 x 8th level PCs (each with a decent magic item like a +1 weapon, or a staff or similar, which is what I budgeted the encounter for).

I assure you the Githyanki warriors present little more than a speedbump for a round or two against 5 x 8th level PCs with a magic item each.

If you disagree with that (and think the Warriors offer more than a speedbump) then feel free to run the encounter yourself and see how long they last.

Finally, I kind of had a bet each with with this encounter (I actually multiplied by 1.5 for 'two' monsters, treating the 4 x mooks as a single monster with the combined XP of all 4 mooks) so I didnt discount them entirely.


I also note that you're spending approximately 200% of the daily XP budget, so you're implicitly acknowledging that yes, you too find the default DMG recommendations too easy to be interesting and choose to exceed them in order to make the game more interesting.

I used a lot of solo encounters which drives the budget up for this particular adventure.

Note that the 'daily xp budget' is a median. For every day like this (that uses 200 percent of it) there will be days that use 50 percent or less (meaning the median is maintained).

Youre not trying to cram 6 encounters into every day remember, and you're not trying to hit the daily budget everyday. Just roughly hitting those figures as your median.

[Malifice]

And you did exactly as I predicted BTW and made the githyanki pop out of nowhere already in the players' faces.

They can Plane Shift Max. So thats hwo they enter the encounter.

Neither party is surprised (the Gith are as surprised to see the PCs as vice versa) so its a standard dungeon encounter (30' away, weapons drawn, throw down fight).

The plane shifting is more for flavor than anything else. Its kind of cool and presents some intresting fluff for the PCs (plane shifting Gith, with a unique fighting style).

Heck, for a Fighter that makes the DC 15 Intelligence check, and expresses intrest in the fighting style, I might provide a mechanism for him to learn it (following a quest of course)

[Anonymouswizard]

Oh hey, another thread about 5e being too easy!

While 5e certainly isn't a cake walk when competently designed, it certainly is designed to make individual encounters less dangerous than in other games, which leads to nova based adventures being difficult to design.

On the other hand if you tried to run (glances at game shelf) Unknown Armies with a 6-8 encounter day then you'd find that the intentionally swingy combat, rarity of fast healing (if you're lucky you might have a surgeon or an Avatar of the Healer), relative difficulty of generating charges (it takes hours to generate a Sig for most Adepts), and other various bits of rules will have half the party down by the third encounter, and that's only because the second one was an extended tracking sequence instead of a combat. UA is built around the idea of nova combat that's stacked in your favour.

Are there games that can do both? Sort of. Every game will lean towards one or the other, and honestly on average the preference seems to be for more nova-friendly systems than adventuring-day ones.

[Malifice]

While 5e certainly isn't a cake walk when competently designed, it certainly is designed to make individual encounters less dangerous than in other games, which leads to nova based adventures being difficult to design..

Its certainly much more forgiving than other earlier editions for sure, particularly at higher levels (less swingyness thanks to bounded accuracy and HP attrition being the main balancing factor, plentiful sources of raise dead and ressurection and at a reduced cost, instant death being harder than ever before, few if any save or die effects etc).

We had both a Cleric and Bard in my recent Age of Worms campaign, and those fellas both had raise dead. As long as one of them was still up at the end of an encounter, raising the rest of the party was an inconvenience.

Once you hit 5th level, and the cleric gets Revivify, the game changes rather dramatically.

[strangebloke]

While 5e certainly isn't a cake walk when competently designed, it certainly is designed to make individual encounters less dangerous than in other games, which leads to nova based adventures being difficult to design.

On the other hand if you tried to run (glances at game shelf) Unknown Armies with a 6-8 encounter day then you'd find that the intentionally swingy combat, rarity of fast healing (if you're lucky you might have a surgeon or an Avatar of the Healer), relative difficulty of generating charges (it takes hours to generate a Sig for most Adepts), and other various bits of rules will have half the party down by the third encounter, and that's only because the second one was an extended tracking sequence instead of a combat. UA is built around the idea of nova combat that's stacked in your favour.

Are there games that can do both? Sort of. Every game will lean towards one or the other, and honestly on average the preference seems to be for more nova-friendly systems than adventuring-day ones.

Game System.

DND is not a game. It's a game system. You can create hard games with it, or easy games. It's designed to have 3-8 encounters per long rest. UA is probably(?) not. I've never played it. But the length of the 'adventuring day' really has nothing to do with whether a game is hard or not.

In my experience most 'hard' systems are only hard because they're rigidly designed to be that way. CoC monsters are designed to have bigger modifiers than the PCs.

DND is a looser framework. There's tons of monsters, tons of methods of stat generation, tons of methods of aribitrating the results of an action.

Like, these rules are all approved variants: Roll a d12 for character class. Roll for stats, 3d6 in order. Injury rules. Encumbrance rules. Use sanity/insanity rules. Send them up against maximum XP value of encounters each day.

Run a game like that, and have the monsters be aggressive and intelligent and bloodthirsty and tell me DND is 'easy.'

[Powerfamiliar]

@Malifice

Tangential uqestion regarding “grindfest”. How long (in real time) do you think it will take a party to get through this 6 encounter (4 hours game time). I feel like if I ran this a single adventuring day my players would tune out and get glaze-y eyes half a ay thru.

[Malifice]

@Malifice

Tangential uqestion regarding “grindfest”. How long (in real time) do you think it will take a party to get through this 6 encounter (4 hours game time). I feel like if I ran this a single adventuring day my players would tune out and get glaze-y eyes half a ay thru.

An [adventuring day] is not a [game session]. You're conflating the two for some weird reason.

Why on earth would you be trying to cram an entire adventuring day into a single session? Im sure your players (and you as the DM) can record resource expenditure during a session on your character sheets for the next session.

It might be convenient to long rest 'at the end of the session' but that's not when a long rest happens by default!

If it helps (I do this) at the end of the session make a note of what resources have been expended that session (major ones, like spell slots, rages, Hit dice, Sorcery points etc) by going around the table and asking your players and noting it down. That way your players also know that you're 'watching'.

Its half a dozen combat encounters, plus exploration. Effectively its around what you would get in a single level dungeon, in any standard DnD module that has ever been produced, ever.

Depending on your party (and players; the amount of table talk and how quickly they complete turns etc), it should be able to be competed in 2 x 4 hour sessions. Thats running at 3 combat encounters in 4 hours (each combat encounter should take no more than 20-30 minutes). 2 and a half hours of exploration and roleplay, and 1 and half hours dedicated to combat.

A slow party that talk a lot, and take their time in combat, and break for snacks etc might need up to 3 sessions to complete it (which is convenient because you can hand out a short rest after each session). That's going at a slow rate of only 1 combat encounter every 2 hours of game time though. It presumes you need a whole hour to resolve a single combat (and that's waaaaaay too much time) and a 1 hour of combat to 1 hour of exploration/ role-play balance of around 50/50.

[Anonymouswizard]

Game System.

Oh noes! I used game instead of game system! Nobody will ever know what I mean!

In all seriousness, we can theoretically use 'game' as a term for 'campaign', 'session', or 'game system'. I tend to use it to mean 'game system', and it's not the end of the world that I do.


DND is not a game. It's a game system. You can create hard games with it, or easy games. It's designed to have 3-8 encounters per long rest. UA is probably(?) not. I've never played it. But the length of the 'adventuring day' really has nothing to do with whether a game is hard or not.

....Well done for saying exactly what I said.

Maybe I should have used the words 'D&D is based around Attrition gameplay rather than nova gameplay'. In a game like UA it's assumed that once you get into a fight you'll either come out of it hopping away from the victorious opposition or will be using every resource you have (except a Major Charge, if you have one of those you likely have plans, and getting a new one is't exactly easy) to gain the advantage. It's assumed that a 'day' will mainly be going around talking to people, investigating stuff, and having the Adepts Charge Up.


In my experience most 'hard' systems are only hard because they're rigidly designed to be that way. CoC monsters are designed to have bigger modifiers than the PCs.

But I wasn't talking about 'easy systems' or 'hard systems'. I was talking about if a system is based around Nova-style gameplay where you are assumed to be getting into maybe one combat between recharging sessions, or attrition based gameplay where you're supposed to be slowly losing resources through multiplt encounters.


DND is a looser framework. There's tons of monsters, tons of methods of stat generation, tons of methods of aribitrating the results of an action.

True. On the other hand GURPS is arguably an even loser framework, and very much not built around the Attrition model (either healing is slow, or healing spells allow you to regain ~10HP a day, and FP regenerates fast enough that you'll generally go into an encounter with at least 4-5 points restored). Monsters range from potentially negative points values to hundreds of times the value of the average PC.


Like, these rules are all approved variants: Roll a d12 for character class. Roll for stats, 3d6 in order. Injury rules. Encumbrance rules. Use sanity/insanity rules. Send them up against maximum XP value of encounters each day.

Run a game like that, and have the monsters be aggressive and intelligent and bloodthirsty and tell me DND is 'easy.'

Wasn't saying that. I was saying it's based around attrition gameplay, therefore fights you can nova are either incredibly easy (normal in published adventures) or run a significant risk of killing the party.

Plus yes, randomisation makes everything harder. You can also play Victoriana randomising every stat and skill placement, as well as taking randomised Talents, Assets, Privalleges, and Disadvantages. The potential disjoint will likely make the game harder.

[MaxWilson]

Exactly. Wights are low CR for a 9th level party, even though there are six of them. They're CR 3.

Accordingly I wouldnt multiply the XP for there being 6 of them, so the encounter would budget out at 'easy'.

Translation: you're not following DMG rules in the first place. No wonder you have... unusual opinions about the challenge level of Medium-Hard encounters. You're not even playing by the rules we're discussing.


4,200 XP [actually 8400 XP -Max] is an easy encounter for your average 9th level party. Its an encounter they are expected to smash with next to zero resource expenditure. Its the definition of an Easy encounter.

I would expect a party of 9th level PCs to steam-roll them in a single round, or two at most, with minimal resource expenditure (likely with a single use of Turn Undead).

Precisely. 5E is extremely easy by default. If you stick to Medium/Hard encounters, PCs will tend to steamroll enemies. The only reason you disagree is because you're breaking all the DMG rules for computing difficulty in the first place, so when you say "Medium/Hard" you don't really mean DMG Medium/Hard. As far as I can tell, there isn't anyone on this thread who seems to object to the idea of challenging four 9th level PCs with twenty wights and twenty zombies, despite that being "officially" a Deadly x6 encounter by DMG standards (and kobold.com) and 200% of the adventuring day budget.

I don't think there is anyone on this thread who wouldn't be bored silly by a combat-oriented campaign which stuck strictly to DMG Medium-Hard encounters and the DMG adventuring day budget. It's very, very easy.

You can have a good, fun campaign with easy fights (or hard-but-infrequent fights), but only if the campaign is about something other than combat. If you try to make a combat-oriented campaign where there's never any dramatic tension you will be bored out of your collective minds. No thanks, no way.

[Malifice]

Translation: you're not following DMG rules in the first place.

Yes Max, I am. Learn how to read.

The rule is posted above for you by a different poster.

6 creatures of a CR of 5 or more less than the average party level doesn't deserve a 3 x XP multiplier.

The rules are that you don't multiply for multiple monsters when they dont present much of a threat (low CR compared to party level) and the multiplication isnt justified. Also known as 'the mook rule'.

Clearly wights fit into that category vs 9th level PCs.

Read the damn rule. It's in the DMG and has been posted above for you.

You either think they are a decent challenge for 9th level PCs and that 6 of them is a hard/ deadly fight (which I strongly disagree with) or you agree they aren't and that they shouldn't be multiplied due to not being much of a threat to 9th level PCs.

If I were to run 6 wights against 9th level PCs they would be Mooks only and would not be multiplied at all, and would feature with a more powerful undead creature of around CR 8 or 9 to get my XP budget.

The wights likely disappear in round 1 to a turn undead attempt or get vaporized by a fireball or cleaved through by the party fighters. For 9th level PCs they present little if any threat on their own, even though there are six of them.

[Malifice]

Precisely. 5E is extremely easy by default.

Max, you re not applying the default rules. You're multiplying for low CR monsters, which is why you keep getting the results you do.

6 CR 2 or 3 monsters do not deserve a x3 multiplier for there being six of them, and the rules are clear about that.

You're ignoring that rule, multiplying for difficulty and then complaining that the encounter is too easy going by the encounter generation rules!

Try it again, applying the actual rule and it works out.

Apply your judgement here. If it's as obvious to you as it is to me that 6 wights with +4 to hit, low AC, 50 HP and 1d10 damage per hit are going to be steamrolled by 5 9th level PCs in a round or two with limited resource expenditure, then why are you treating them as a threat worthy of multiplication?

Apply common sense and the rule as written and you'll get a more sensible result.

[MaxWilson]

Yes Max, I am. Learn how to read.

That's uncalled for, especially when I'm the one who's reading the rule correctly. Think before you insult.


The rule is posted above for you by a different poster.

6 creatures of a CR of 5 or more less than the average party level doesn't deserve a 3 x XP multiplier.

False. Here's what the other poster actually wrote:


This is actually the correct way to do it. Dungeon Master Guide, page 82: "When making this calculation [Evaluating Encounter Difficulty], don't count any monsters whose challenge rating is significantly below the average challenge rating of the other monsters in the group unless you think the weak monsters significantly contribute to the difficulty of the encounter."

Average challenge rating of the wights? 3. Average challenge rating of a single wight. Also 3.

The fact that the average PC level is 9 is irrelevant.

Think before you insult.


The rules are that you don't multiply for multiple monsters when they dont present much of a threat (low CR compared to party level) and the multiplication isnt justified. Also known as 'the mook rule'.

False. Reread the DMG.


Read the ---- rule. It's in the DMG and has been posted above for you.

Looks like you owe me, and everyone here, an apology.

[KorvinStarmast]

Encounters to follow. Mal, the bounded accuracy model acknowledges that quantity has a quality all its own. If I remember from one of your earlier posts, your group went from 1-20 over the course of two or three years. I'd not call that an average group of players.

[Tanarii]

Mal, the bounded accuracy model acknowledges that quantity has a quality all its own. If I remember from one of your earlier posts, your group went from 1-20 over the course of two or three years. I'd not call that an average group of players.
Yeah. Sounds a little slow to me. Groups should be able to do that in about 9 months of dedicated weekly play, or 12 if they take a week off a month.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Yeah. Sounds a little slow to me. Groups should be able to do that in about 9 months of dedicated weekly play, or 12 if they take a week off a month.

I was plotting out my "ideal" leveling rate (because I use fiat leveling instead of XP), and it worked out to around 50 sessions. It went something like

Level : Sessions at level
1 : 1
2 : 1
3 : 1-2
4 : 2
5 : 3
6 : 4
7 : 4
8 : 5
9 : 5
10 : 4
11-16: 3 each
17+: 3-4 each

But it's pretty variable. I went from 1-20 in a little over a year (14 months or so), but that was with a bunch of missed sessions (two players (or their wives) having babies, plus a hurricane, will do that).

SO yeah. I agree. 9-12 months if you're playing every week and are relatively efficient about things.

[Tanarii]

My sessions are typically from 1 adventuring day to 1-1/3 adventuring days worth of content, over 1 long rest.

But I was actually extrapolating from the DMG adventuring days. It was kind of tongue in cheek. :smallamused:
Level 1-2 & 2-3: 1 days each
Level 3-: 1.5 days
Level 4-11: 2.4 days each
Level 11-17: 1.5 days each
Levels 17-20: 2 days each

IMx I'd say 5-6 months of weekly play to level 11 is accurate And from there leveling should only get faster.

Edit: The real tongue in cheek part was that 1/week play is not 'normal' groups of players IMX. That's either very dedicated players, or people in school.

[PhoenixPhyre]

My sessions are typically from 1 adventuring day to 1-1/3 adventuring days worth of content, over 1 long rest.

But I was actually extrapolating from the DMG adventuring days. It was kind of tongue in cheek. :smallamused:
Level 1-2 & 2-3: 1 days each
Level 3-: 1.5 days
Level 4-11: 2.4 days each
Level 11-17: 1.5 days each
Levels 17-20: 2 days each

IMx I'd say 5-6 months of weekly play to level 11 is accurate And from there leveling should only get faster.

Edit: The real tongue in cheek part was that 1/week play is not 'normal' groups of players IMX. That's either very dedicated players, or people in school.

My main group gets pretty close to 1/week. More (on average) than 3 weeks/month, at least during the school year. And we're all adults. When we have breaks, they tend to be longer ones (due to vacations, etc).

[ad_hoc]

My main group gets pretty close to 1/week. More (on average) than 3 weeks/month, at least during the school year. And we're all adults. When we have breaks, they tend to be longer ones (due to vacations, etc).

I would characterize you as a very dedicated player.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I would characterize you as a very dedicated player.

Me, personally? Absolutely. At any time I have 3+ games going (2 as DM, 1 as player/DM, with others sometimes).

The rest of the group, not so much. They just like playing, which I'm totally happy with. I've had a lot of success introducing my co workers to D&D.

[ad_hoc]

Me, personally? Absolutely. At any time I have 3+ games going (2 as DM, 1 as player/DM, with others sometimes).

The rest of the group, not so much. They just like playing, which I'm totally happy with. I've had a lot of success introducing my co workers to D&D.

If they play every week then calling them dedicated players is descriptive of that.

[Malifice]

Average challenge rating of the wights? 3. Average challenge rating of a single wight. Also 3.

The fact that the average PC level is 9 is irrelevant.

Oh come on Max. You're ignoring the clear intent of the rule. If encounter difficulty multiplication is relative to the strengths of the monsters as compared to each other (without reference to the PCs) then you're going to get absurd results.

The obvious and clear intent of the rule is that multiple weaker monsters (low CR relative to the strength of the party, not relative to the strength of other monsters), are not counted towards overall encounter XP difficulty multiplication.

If 6 weak monsters dont get multiplied by 3 or more to determine the threat they pose to a party of adventurers, then neither do 5 weak monsters, encountered with a slightly stronger one.

I'll grant you the guideline is worded poorly.


Mal, the bounded accuracy model acknowledges that quantity has a quality all its own.

For sure mate. And I will multiply for multiple monsters if those monsters pose a reasonable threat to the PCs.

Its a question of judgement here, not a formulaic rote mathematical process. You need to eyeball the monsters, the CR and the strength of your party (level, magic items, composition etc).


If I remember from one of your earlier posts, your group went from 1-20 over the course of two or three years. I'd not call that an average group of players.

20th, plus several Epic boons. Around half a million XP.

They ran through Age of Worms, converted to 5E. Roughly 3 sessions a month, each session roughly 4-5 hours long (give or take for holidays, people being sick etc), going for over 2 years.

[CantigThimble]

Oh come on Max. You're ignoring the clear intent of the rule. If encounter difficulty multiplication is relative to the strengths of the monsters as compared to each other (without reference to the PCs) then you're going to get absurd results.

The obvious and clear intent of the rule is that multiple weaker monsters (low CR relative to the strength of the party, not relative to the strength of other monsters), are not counted towards overall encounter XP difficulty multiplication.

If 6 weak monsters dont get multiplied by 3 or more to determine the threat they pose to a party of adventurers, then neither do 5 weak monsters, encountered with a slightly stronger one.

I'll grant you the guideline is worded poorly.

By 'worded poorly' do you mean 'very clearly says something that is not what you want it to say'? Saying that the designers intended 'average level of the players in the party' but wrote 'average CR of the monsters in the group' is about as reasonable as saying that the designers intended all the 4-elements powers to cost 1 less ki but just made a typo. Just because the rule would be much better if it were written that way doesn't mean that's what the designers 'obviously and clearly meant' by it.

At the very least you owe an apology to Max for your insults and to all the other people you've accused of bad GMing for not following the written guidelines. The guidelines are plain-as-day WRONG if you want to reasonably challenge your players.

[Gastronomie]

It's another one of those threads where everyone is making good points but it's becoming unnecessarily tense because of unnecessarily rude remarks.

As for my opinion based on experience, monsters with low CR compared to the rest of the monsters or PCs should not be integrated into the challenge calculation of the encounter, unless its abilities are really special or the higher-CR monsters' abilities are influenced by the mooks. They rarely make a difference.

[Malifice]

By 'worded poorly' do you mean 'very clearly says something that is not what you want it to say'?

No, when I said it is worded poorly, I meant 'it's worded poorly.' I choose my words carefully, and mean what I say.

The rule is designed to balance monsters in an encounter against the PCs, not to balance monsters against other monsters in the same encounter, while actually working in reverse and making weaker encounters actually have a higher encounter budget.

The clear intent of the rule is to ensure that multiple trash monsters of low CR dont attract a huge XP multiplier that over inflates their adjusted XP value.

Unless your argument is that [5 x CR 1's and 1 x CR 2] shouldnt be multiplied, but [6 x CR 1's] should be?

An argument that is (of course) absurd, and leads to an absurd result.

As a lawyer, we apply the following rule when interpreting the law:


[I]n construing statutes, and all written instruments, the grammatical and ordinary sense of the words is to be adhered to, unless that would lead to some absurdity or inconsistency with the rest of the instrument, in which case the grammatical and ordinary sense of the words may be modified, so as to avoid that absurdity or inconsistency, but not farther.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rule_(law)
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rule_(law))

Plus this one:


The mischief rule[1] is one of three rules of statutory interpretation traditionally applied by English courts.[2] The other two are the "plain meaning rule" (also known as the "literal rule") and the "golden rule".

The main aim of the rule is to determine the "mischief and defect" that the statute in question has set out to remedy, and what ruling would effectively implement this remedy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mischief_rule
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mischief_rule)

Clearly the intent of the rule is to ensure that low CR trash monsters dont throw out your encounter budget. Equally clearly applying the rule in a literal way creates an absurd result. FOor an example of this absurdity:


7 x CR 2 monsters = 9,450 XP (3150 x 3 for numbers)
6 x CR 2 monsters AND 1 CR 10 Monster = 8,600 XP (no multiple for the lower CR monsters, due to the presence of a single CR 10!).


Removing a CR 2, and replacing it with a CR 10 makes the encounter less difficult when looking at the adjusted XP value, If I am to accept your interpretation of the Rule, and take it literally and without context.

That is an absurd result, and one that is also contrary to the obvious intent of the rule itself.

Agree?

Finally, please also note that (in any event) in the encounters where I actually reduced the XP value of 'small CR trash monsters' those encounters all included at least 1 additional monster of higher CR than those trash monsters in any event (which hilariously reduces the difficulty of the encounter!), so they were all legal.

That was by accident of course (as I reckon the rule itself is worded poorly and leads to absurdities) and not by design.

[Malifice]

It's another one of those threads where everyone is making good points but it's becoming unnecessarily tense because of unnecessarily rude remarks.

As for my opinion based on experience, monsters with low CR compared to the rest of the monsters or PCs should not be integrated into the challenge calculation of the encounter, unless its abilities are really special or the higher-CR monsters' abilities are influenced by the mooks. They rarely make a difference.

The way the rule is currently written is:

"When making this calculation [Evaluating Encounter Difficulty], don't count any monsters whose challenge rating is significantly below the average challenge rating of the other monsters in the group unless you think the weak monsters significantly contribute to the difficulty of the encounter."

In other words, the only time you dont count weak monsters when evaluating encounter difficulty, is when the encounter also contains a strong monster.

And when you assess a monsters strength in this calculation you do so by comparing it to the CR of other monsters, and not to the PCs!

It's literally absurd when read literally. It leads to the following outcomes:

[7 x CR 2 monsters] gives a encounter budget of 9,450 XP (3150 x 3 for numbers)

[6 x CR 2 monsters + 1 x CR 10 Monster] gives an encounter budget of 8,600 XP

Removing a CR 2 and replacing it with a CR 10 means we no longer multiply for the presence of the multiple lower CR monsters... because they are not anywhere near the same level of threat as the CR 10 that I replaced one of those CR 2's with!

Its absurd. Clearly the rule is worded poorly, and needs to be given its proper intent.

[Willie the Duck]

The rule is designed to balance monsters in an encounter against the PCs, not to balance monsters against other monsters in the same encounter, while actually working in reverse and making weaker encounters actually have a higher encounter budget.

The clear intent of the rule is to ensure that multiple trash monsters of low CR dont attract a huge XP multiplier that over inflates their adjusted XP value.

A rule like that would not be out of place, but that is not what I got out of this one. To me, the clear intent (there obviously is not a universal clear intent, since even in this small group there is multiple disagreements), is that adding a speed bump monster to a fight does not change the fight dynamic in a meaningful way, and thus should not contribute to the reward. It is addressing that concern, which is a valid one. The presence or absence of different rules which addresses multiple monsters of CR significantly below the PC party is a completely separate matter, which should be addressed separately.

The absence of the rule you want does not make this other rule clearly actually mean what you wanted in the first place.

[MaxWilson]

Oh come on Max. You're ignoring the clear intent of the rule. If encounter difficulty multiplication is relative to the strengths of the monsters as compared to each other (without reference to the PCs) then you're going to get absurd results.

The obvious and clear intent of the rule is that multiple weaker monsters (low CR relative to the strength of the party, not relative to the strength of other monsters), are not counted towards overall encounter XP difficulty multiplication.

Wrong. The clear and obvious intent of the rule is to implement Lanchester's Square Law in a D&D setting, and acknowledge that 2N monsters have more than twice the combat power of N monsters. (Against purely directed attacks they have 4N as much power, meaning that power scales as N^2, but because indirect attacks like artillery exist it's common for militaries to model combat power as scaling as N^1.5, and 5E follows suit--notice that multipliers are roughly the N^1.5 power of the number of enemies involved.)

So, you're misreading the rules and you misunderstand what they're trying to accomplish in the first place. It has nothing to do with the power differential between PCs and monsters--bounded accuracy and the XP-per-CR table take care of that part.

Next time, think before you insult.

[Malifice]

the clear intent is that adding a speed bump monster to a fight does not change the fight dynamic in a meaningful way, and thus should not contribute to the reward.

Yes, but the rule does not do this.

I create an encounter with 1 x CR 10 and 6 x CR 2s. It has an adjusted value of 8,600 xp.

I think 'wow, that's too high' so I remove the CR 10, and replace it with another CR 2 monster, and the encounter difficulty increases to 9,450 XP.

I've removed a CR 10, replaced it with a CR 2, and the encounter difficulty just increased.

Even more weirdly, when assessing if a monster 'poses a credible threat' I dont compare those weak monsters to the actual PCs under the rule as written, I compare the CR of the weak monsters, to the CR of the Stronger one in the encounter. Thats the metric the rule tells me to use (are the weak monsters significantly weaker than the stronger one).

So because 'X' number of CR 'Y' monster all have the same CR, I have to multiply by the number of those monsters to determine encounter difficulty, regardless of the CR discrepancy between them and the level of the PCs. However if I add a single different monster with 'significantly higher' CR, I no longer multiply for the presence of the low CR monsters.

Meaning [7 x CR 2 monsters] compute as a 'Deadly' encounter for 7th level PCs, whereas [6 x CR 2 monsters and 1 x CR 8 Monster] is only a 'Hard' fight!

Surely the metric we use is: 'Do these [weak monsters] significantly contribute to the fight?' and if the answer is 'No' you dont multiply the overall XP total to determine encounter difficulty based on the presence of those monsters (although you still add the XP into the total as normal).

Its the only way to interpret that rule, and have it make any sense.

[MaxWilson]

It's literally absurd when read literally. It leads to the following outcomes:

[7 x CR 2 monsters] gives a encounter budget of 9,450 XP (3150 x 3 for numbers)

[6 x CR 2 monsters + 1 x CR 10 Monster] gives an encounter budget of 8,600 XP

Your math is wrong, and your interpretation of the rules are wrong.

7 x CR 2 Intellect Devourers gives an adjusted XP of 7,875, which is 3,150 (450 * 7) x 2.5 (for 7 monsters). Not 9450.

6 x CR 2 Intellect Devourers + 1 x CR 10 Young Red Dragon gives an adjusted XP of 21,500, which is 8600 (450 * 6 + 5900) x 2.5 (for 7 monsters, ). Not 8600.

That isn't an absurd result. A bunch of Intellect Devourers do become a lot harder to deal with when you add a Young Red Dragon to the mix. Now you have to fend off brain-suckers at the same time you avoid clumping up for the dragon to roast with his breath weapon, and if anyone gets perma-stunned by a brain sucker the dragon will tear a strip off you before anyone can run over and cast Greater Restoration.

[Malifice]

Wrong. The clear and obvious intent of the rule is to implement Lanchester's Square Law in a D&D setting, and acknowledge that 2N monsters have more than twice the combat power of N monsters.

Lol!

Max, the rule doesnt do that. The normal rule (multiply for multiple monsters) does that. This rule creates an exception to that rule, that only applies when you have a powerful monster with a group of weaker ones.

If I ran the weaker monsters on their own (without the stronger monster) the encounter difficulty is actually higher thanks to this rule, because I now have to multiply for their presence (where I dont have tomultiply if I have at least 1 stronger monster).

See my post above for what the rule actually does. Seriously, read it.

[KorvinStarmast]

My main group gets pretty close to 1/week. More (on average) than 3 weeks/month, at least during the school year. And we're all adults. When we have breaks, they tend to be longer ones (due to vacations, etc). My first group met once per week, minus one week per month for the usual RL things happen. And then it went dormant due to RL.
My current (Tier 3) group meets once per two weeks, with now and again no game when people can't show up. Slow and steady. And not optimized, though a decent smattering of magical items. (The +1 half plate is very nice ...)
Oh come on Max. You're ignoring the clear intent of the rule. If encounter difficulty multiplication is relative to the strengths of the monsters as compared to each other (without reference to the PCs) then you're going to get absurd results. The issue with mobs and hordes is they get a lot of attack rolls, which means more crits, which leads to other outcomes. What is not specified is the delta between the low CR and the party level, IMO not between the low CR and the high CR. The whole point of adding some lower CR minions in a roughly "party level appropriate" encounter is to soak up resources and to mitigate the 4 on 1 or 5 on 1 action economy deal for the higher level CR monster. The break point is left unstated.

For sure mate. And I will multiply for multiple monsters if those monsters pose a reasonable threat to the PCs. Most CR 3 monsters pose plenty of threat, particularly in groups. (Put a half dozen hell hounds in a pack, with fire breathing and pack tactics. If they get group initiative, they can cut loose with quite a bit of damage rather quickly. FWIW, we had an interesting encounter a while back where a level 11 ranger ran into a pack of giant toads... it was no cake walk.


Its a question of judgement here, not a formulaic rote mathematical process. You need to eyeball the monsters, the CR and the strength of your party (level, magic items, composition etc). True, you also need to know your party: beer and pretzels game, or a table full of optimizers, or somewhere in between?

20th, plus several Epic boons. Around half a million XP. They ran through Age of Worms, converted to 5E. Roughly 3 sessions a month, each session roughly 4-5 hours long (give or take for holidays, people being sick etc), going for over 2 years. Keeping a group and a game together for that long is an achievement in itself.
The rule is designed to balance monsters in an encounter against the PCs, not to balance monsters against other monsters in the same encounter, while actually working in reverse and making weaker encounters actually have a higher encounter budget. I'll just say again that quantity has a quality all its own, but I think we mostly agree on having to eyeball that when taking the specifics of a given kind of monster, and its special abilities into account.

The clear intent of the rule is to ensure that multiple trash monsters of low CR dont attract a huge XP multiplier that over inflates their adjusted XP value. In a 6-8 encounter day, the grind has a quality all its own. Only been in one game that came close to that (it was me who was pushing the hardest on the other players to make better use of our short rests since I was trying to recharge my ability to turn undead in a zombie heavy campaign ... )

The way the rule is currently written is:

"When making this calculation [Evaluating Encounter Difficulty], don't count any monsters whose challenge rating is significantly below the average challenge rating of the other monsters in the group unless you think the weak monsters significantly contribute to the difficulty of the encounter." "significantly" is a moving target ... but as you've had to put this into place as a DM, I doubt you find that to be newsworthy. :smallcool:

[Malifice]

The issue with mobs and hordes is they get a lot of attack rolls, which means more crits, which leads to other outcomes.

And I understand that, which is WHY the general rule (multiplication of XP totals for encounter difficulty for multiple monsters) exists.

However I am talking about the separate rule that excludes weak monsters from this multiplication. Its an exception to the general rule that requires you multiply.

This exception states that you do not multiply when you have:

1) A number of weaker monsters, and
2) Those monsters are significantly weaker than the strongest monster in the encounter.

So a bunch of CR 2 monsters with a CR 10, and we do not multiply for the CR 2 monsters (they are significantly weaker than the CR 10).

A bunch of CR 2 monsters on their own, and we have to multiply for multiple monsters.

Accordingly the second encounter (just the CR 2 monsters) computes out harder than the encounter with the CR 10 and the CR 2's!

[Malifice]

Your math is wrong.

OK, try again with a 6 x CR 2s and 1 x CR 8.

Note how the [6 x CR 2's and 1 x CR 8] computes out as a harder encounter than [7 x CR 2's].

6,600 XP.

The 7 x CR 2's on thier own would be 7,875 XP!

Removing the CR 8 and replacing it with a CR 2 increases the difficulty of the encounter!


and your interpretation of the rules are wrong.

No it isnt Max. Your interpretation is.

There is no way you are going to convince me that the intent of the rule, is for encounters to get harder on account of adding a higher CR monster, or that a bunch of mooks on their own are supposed to be a more difficult encounter than the mooks with a high CR monster riding along with them.

[Malifice]

Before you attack me peeps, pause for a second and look at the actual rule, and the actual maths.

Im right on this.

[MaxWilson]

By 'worded poorly' do you mean 'very clearly says something that is not what you want it to say'? Saying that the designers intended 'average level of the players in the party' but wrote 'average CR of the monsters in the group' is about as reasonable as saying that the designers intended all the 4-elements powers to cost 1 less ki but just made a typo. Just because the rule would be much better if it were written that way doesn't mean that's what the designers 'obviously and clearly meant' by it.

At the very least you owe an apology to Max for your insults and to all the other people you've accused of bad GMing for not following the written guidelines. The guidelines are plain-as-day WRONG if you want to reasonably challenge your players.

The really ironic part is that if you stick to hordes of low-CR monsters, like goblins, the guidelines work out pretty well, since goblins are pretty cheap (50 XP, 200 XP after max multipliers) for their combat power. For a party of 4 9th level PCs, 40 goblins (8000 XP/Hard) is actually pretty tough if they avoid Fireball formation and make good use of Nimble Escape + Stealth expertise. They are significantly harder than 2 Githyanki Knights (11,700 XP/Deadly) would be, though of course a smart party can still flatten either one and keep on going. And yet it's the goblins which Malifice thinks ought to be cheaper. Malifice's rules would require 160 goblins before it cost 8000 XP (since there would be no XP multiplier against a 9th level party), and trying to argue that 160 goblins are weaker in total combat power than 2 Githyanki Knights is truly absurd.

[Malifice]

The really ironic part is that if you stick to hordes of low-CR monsters, like goblins, the guidelines work out pretty well

No they dont work out well. Clearly there is a huge problem with the guidelines.

50 Goblins are (10,000) adjusted XP.

49 Goblins + 1 x CR 11 monster is (9,650) adjusted XP.

Yes that's the maths. Removing a CR 1/4 Goblin and adding a CR 11 monster in its place, makes the encounter easier. You cant argue that CR 1/4 monsters are not significantly weaker than a CR 11 monster can you, so they dont get multiplied thanks to the presence of the CR 11.

Removing a Goblin, and adding a Behir makes the encounter easier?

You think that's intentional?

[MaxWilson]

Lol!

Max, the rule doesnt do that. The normal rule (multiply for multiple monsters) does that. This rule creates an exception to that rule, that only applies when you have a powerful monster with a group of weaker ones.

If I ran the weaker monsters on their own (without the stronger monster) the encounter difficulty is actually higher thanks to this rule, because I now have to multiply for their presence (where I dont have tomultiply if I have at least 1 stronger monster).

See my post above for what the rule actually does. Seriously, read it.


And I understand that, which is WHY the general rule (multiplication of XP totals for encounter difficulty for multiple monsters) exists.

However I am talking about the separate rule that excludes weak monsters from this multiplication. Its an exception to the general rule that requires you multiply.

This exception states that you do not multiply when you have:

1) A number of weaker monsters, and
2) Those monsters are significantly weaker than the strongest monster in the encounter.

So a bunch of CR 2 monsters with a CR 10, and we do not multiply for the CR 2 monsters (they are significantly weaker than the CR 10).

A bunch of CR 2 monsters on their own, and we have to multiply for multiple monsters.

Accordingly the second encounter (just the CR 2 monsters) computes out harder than the encounter with the CR 10 and the CR 2's!


Before you attack me peeps, pause for a second and look at the actual rule, and the actual maths.

Im right on this.

Oh, the irony. You accuse people who actually understand the rules of not having read them; you misquote the rules (hint: you don't compare anything to the CR of "the strongest monster in the encounter", you compare it to the average CR of the group as a whole, to exclude outliers); and then you play the victim by asking others not to attack you.

How exhausting.

[MaxWilson]

No they dont work out well. Clearly there is a huge problem with the guide lines.

50 Goblins are (10,000) adjusted XP.

49 Goblins + 1 x CR 11 monster is (9,650) adjusted XP.

Yes that's the maths. Removing a CR 1/4 Goblin and adding a CR 11 monster in its place, makes the encounter easier.

*sigh* No, that's not the rule.

The average CR of 49 goblins + 1 CR 11 Algorith is 0.71. You're supposed to compare the CR of a goblin (0.5) to the average (0.71) and decide if the goblins contribute significantly to the difficulty of the encounter. If so, they count, and your multiplier is 4x, yielding 38,600 XP, not 9650 XP.

If you think the goblins don't contribute significantly to the difficulty of the encounter, you're just wrong.

Edit: for reference, here it is again:


This is actually the correct way to do it. Dungeon Master Guide, page 82: "When making this calculation [Evaluating Encounter Difficulty], don't count any monsters whose challenge rating is significantly below the average challenge rating of the other monsters in the group unless you think the weak monsters significantly contribute to the difficulty of the encounter."

[Malifice]

you don't compare anything to the CR of "the strongest monster in the encounter", you compare it to the average CR of the group as a whole

If that's the case (and I have to average the CR's of all the monsters in the group to determine if a monster is 'too weak to count as a force multiplier') that creates a whole new bunch of problems Max.

You're aware of that right?

[MaxWilson]

If that's the case (and I have to average the CR's of all the monsters in the group to determine if a monster is 'too weak to count as a force multiplier') that creates a whole new bunch of problems Max.

You're aware of that right?

I'm aware of the flaws in the procedure; it tends to discourage DMs from using heterogenous groups of monsters, which is one respect in which the Xanathar's method is superior. But Xanathar's doesn't play nicely with adventuring day budgets. I've done some work on trying to improve on the DMG method by direct application of Lanchester's Laws to give XP predictions which match the DMG for homogenous groups and give a smoother interpolation for heterogenous groups, but I don't have anything yet that I'm really happy with.

So yes, I'm more aware than you are of the flaws, having thought about them more deeply.

Edit: The closest I've got to a good formula is sum([for each monster, XP/100 ^ (2/3)]) ^ 1.5 * 100. For 2 beholders, that gives 28,284 XP (compare: 30,000 using DMG method). For 1 beholder and 25 hobgoblins, that gives 31,754 XP (compare: 50,000 using DMG method). For 1 Githyanki Knight and 4 Githyanki Warriors, it gives 13,362 XP (compare: 13,400 using DMG method). I'm pretty happy with all of these results compared to the DMG method, but I need to do some deep thinking about corner cases first, especially for creatures of very high and low CRs.

[Malifice]

*sigh* No, that's not the rule.

The average CR of 49 goblins + 1 CR 11 Algorith is 0.71. You're supposed to compare the CR of a goblin (0.5) to the average (0.71) and decide if the goblins contribute significantly to the difficulty of the encounter. If so, they count, and your multiplier is 4x, yielding 38,600 XP, not 9650 XP.

If you think the goblins don't contribute significantly to the difficulty of the encounter, you're just wrong.

Actually the average CR of the monsters in the encounter is (49 x 1/4) + (11/49) or something like that.

And applying that rule (we add together the CR of all monsters in a group and discount only the ones with a CR significantly lower than this 'median' CR) I'm really struggling to see when we would ever discount a monster from force multiplication.

If I follow your interpretation, Im struggling to see when this rule would ever kick in, and why such a ridiculously complicated rule even exists.

[KorvinStarmast]

Mal, Max, Willie:

Take 6 Saber Toothed Cats of CR 2. 450 XP. (2700 for six)
Their owner/leader is a Frost Giant CR 8. 3900 XP.
(They emerge from the Frost Giant's lair; party has tracked them to this location. Why this combo? She's some kind of hermit/shaman/druid Frost giant, with a ring, wand, or staff that gives her something like animal friendship/animal control. They all behave like a "pack" where she's the alpha ... more or less. Allies of long standing. They fight together.)

There a number of ways to parse this for encounter / day/ XP budget encounter calculation.
1. (Six cats) + (the Giant) = (2 x 6 x 450) + 3900 = 5400 + 3900 = 9,300.
2. (Six cats + the Giant) = 2 x (6 x 450 + 3900) = 13, 200
3. Six Cats(no mod) + the Giant = 6 x 450 + 3900 = 6,600

Against a level 5 party, which do you choose as the appropriate scale for calculating the XP budget?
Against a level 7 party, which do you choose as the appropriate scale for calculating the XP budget?
Against a level 9 party, which do you choose as the appropriate scale for calculating the XP budget?

At what point is "significant" introduced in dealing with the lower CR pack?

Note that the XP budget for the day for a four person party is 14,000 for 5th level (4), 20,000 at level 7, 30,000 at level 9.

For a given encounter, the threshold for deadly is 4400 (5), 6,800 (7) and 9,600 (9).

Depending on class make up, the level 5 party (without a few suitable magic items) will have a pretty hard time with this encounter (and will need to use terrain to their advantage).

[Willie the Duck]

Yes, but the rule does not do this.

How could it not? It says right in the block of text we've all quoted to do exactly that. If you have a group of (let's say) 8 x CR 7 monsters, if you throw a (egain, ex.) CR 2 monster into the mix, the rules say not to add that monster into the xp calculation. How is that not "adding a speed bump monster to a fight does not change the fight dynamic in a meaningful way, and thus should not contribute to the reward?"

In your examples, you keep adding a monster of much higher CR into your after part of a before-after scenario, which is not the same scenario. This (IMO) feeds my point that, in the absence of the rule you want, you are declaring this other rule to be a poorly worded (but clear intent) attempt at the rule you want. Something I strongly doubt anyone agrees you've successfully argued.


Its the only way to interpret that rule, and have it make any sense.


Im right on this.

I know you haven't taken my advice before, but seriously. If one fails to succeed to convince one's audience with substantive argument, declaring oneself right (or one's position the only one that is in some way acceptable) is a guaranteed failure point. Take a break. Re-read the material. Test your argument on someone outside this forum. Then come back. This is a clear analogue to the example I gave of my HS debate team mate who thought he had a perfectly convincing argument, "my audience just doesn't realize it."


Before you attack me peeps, pause for a second and look at the actual rule, and the actual maths.

And a self-declared victimhood status certainly will not help.

[MaxWilson]

Actually the average CR of the monsters in the encounter is (49 x 1/4) + (11/49) or something like that.

You are correct, goblins are CR 1/4, not 1/2. ((49 * 0.25) + 11)/50 = 0.46, not 0.71. I goofed on that. Have a cookie.


And applying that rule (we add together the CR of all monsters in a group and discount only the ones with a CR significantly lower than this 'median' CR) I'm really struggling to see when we would ever discount a monster from force multiplication.

In the encounter you gave previously, "1 Death Tyrant + 6 zombies", the zombies are pretty much irrelevant and it's reasonable to discount them. They're just flavor.

Whenever the monsters are not just flavor, you count them.


If I follow your interpretation, Im struggling to see when this rule would ever kick in, and why such a ridiculously complicated rule even exists.

It prevents corner cases from becoming an issue, like "1 Ancient Red Dragon + 2 kobolds is as hard as 2 Ancient Red Dragons." It's just an acknowledgement to the DM that he can say, "No, that's silly, ignore the kobolds."

But it discourages DMs from doing heterogenous encounters, like 1 Lich + 6 Githyanki Warriors, because it artificially inflates the cost of the Lich by too much. By DMG standards, 1 Lich + 6 Githyanki is either 93,000 XP (if you count the Githyankis as significant) or 37,200 XP (if you don't), and neither one strikes me as quite right, or as faithful to the basic insights from Lanchester's Laws. The DMG rules are an oversimplification, and if I instead apply Lanchester's Laws directly I get (330^(2/3) + 6*(7^(2/3)))^(3/2)*100 = 58,202 XP, or about twice as hard as the Lich by itself, which does seem right to me.

[Malifice]

Lets presume I have an encounter with 8 x CR 1/2's and 1 x CR 8.

A Frost giant and 8 Gnolls.

Going by MaxWilsons interpretation of the rules, (8 X 1/2) + (1 X 8) = 12. 12/9 = Roughly CR 1.3 or something. So (going by your interpretation) we dont discount the CR 1/2's because they are not significantly lower in CR than this median of 1.3 (meaning they count towards multiplication).

Meaning an encounter with 8 x CR 1/2's and 1 x CR 8 is worth an adjusted 11,750 XP.

The Giant on his own (sans Gnolls) is worth 3,900 XP.

Are you saying this is supposed to be the rule Max? That 8 Gnolls are expected to add around 8,000 XP to the overall difficulty of the encounter?

Because I'll bet you 20 bucks (in your local currency) that this isn't the case.

[Malifice]

How could it not? It says right in the block of text we've all quoted to do exactly that. If you have a group of (let's say) 8 x CR 7 monsters, if you throw a (egain, ex.) CR 2 monster into the mix, the rules say not to add that monster into the xp calculation.

Thats not what the rule says. Read it again please.

[Malifice]

In the encounter you gave previously, "1 Death Tyrant + 6 zombies", the zombies are pretty much irrelevant and it's reasonable to discount them.

That's not the rule Max.

The rule (as you have explained it to me is) we first need to determine the median CR for all the creatures in the encounter.

We then need to compare the CR of our monsters to this median CR to determine encounter difficulty.

Note how we are not comparing it to the Party's level for some reason. Instead we are comparing it to the median CR of all the monsters in the encounter.

[(CR 11) + (CR 6 x 1/4)/7] = an encounter median of around about CR 2. Are the Zombies significantly lower in CR that CR 2?

It's a judgement call but I dont consider CR 1/4 to be significantly lower than CR 2.

[MaxWilson]

Lets presume I have an encounter with 8 x CR 1/2's and 1 x CR 8.

A Frost giant and 8 Gnolls.

Going by MaxWilsons interpretation of the rules, (8 X 1/2) + (1 X 8) = 12. 12/9 = Roughly CR 1.3 or something. So (going by your interpretation) we dont discount the CR 1/2's because they are not significantly lower in CR than this median of 1.3 (meaning they count towards multiplication).

Meaning an encounter with 8 x CR 1/2's and 1 x CR 8 is worth an adjusted 11,750 XP.

The Giant on his own (sans Gnolls) is worth 3,900 XP.

Are you saying this is supposed to be the rule Max? That 8 Gnolls are expected to add around 8,000 XP to the overall difficulty of the encounter?

Because I'll bet you 20 bucks (in your local currency) that this isn't the case.

I feel like this is identical to the lich + githyanki scenario I just talked about: the DMG rules give you the option of either discounting the low-CR guys from the multiplier entirely (which gives you a value that is unrealistically low) or counting them at fully (which gives you a value that is unrealistically high), which means this is a case where the DMG rules fall down, and is exactly why I want a better formula.

@Malifice, I will say that you are, for once, doing the math correctly. The question for the DM is "is 0.5 significantly lower than 1.3, and if it is, do the gnolls contribute significantly to the difficulty of the encounter?" Let's say for the sake of argument that the gnolls will be played intelligently (they are freakishly high-Int gnolls with hobgoblin martial training, and they will Help the giant's attacks, will position themselves to threaten opportunity attacks and keep PCs from being able to engage the giant effectively, will use their bows to harrass spellcasters, etc.). Then yes, I would agree that the rule says you are "supposed" to use 11,750 XP as the adjusted value. And I've also said that the rule is unsatisfactory in this case.

I don't gamble (real-life religious convictions) so I can't take you up on your bet.

[KorvinStarmast]

I feel like this is identical to the lich + githyanki scenario
For Mal, Max, and Willie: please take a look at this mixed CR encounter (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=23281393&postcount=90)and tell me which way you'd parse the XP budget. I am trying to illustrate a point about monster CR and party level, and I think that's a good example to use.


When making this calculation, don’t count any monsters whose challenge rating is significantly below the average challenge rating of the other monsters in the group unless you think the weak monsters significantly contribute to the difficulty of the encounter.


If there’s no match, use the closest threshold that is lower than the adjusted XP value.

[MaxWilson]

That's not the rule Max.

The rule (as you have explained it to me is) we first need to determine the median CR for all the creatures in the encounter.

We then need to compare the CR of our monsters to this median CR to determine encounter difficulty.

Note how we are not comparing it to the Party's level for some reason. Instead we are comparing it to the median CR of all the monsters in the encounter.

[(CR 11) + (CR 6 x 1/4)/7] = an encounter median of around about CR 2. Are the Zombies significantly lower in CR that CR 2?

It's a judgement call but I dont consider CR 1/4 to be significantly lower than CR 2.

Eh? It's literally 12.5% of CR 2. That seems significantly lower to me, and the tactical profile of the zombies (slow-moving bags of HP who are unlikely to do so much as even position themselves to prevent PCs from closing with the Death Tyrant) doesn't suggest significant added difficulty, and that adds up to "I, Max, wouldn't count the zombies when computing the XP multiplier under DMG rules."

It's up to you, of course, but it's very strange for you to claim "that's not the rule" and then back it up by "it's a judgment call but I don't consider CR 1/4 to be significantly lower than CR 2." What you seem to mean is "that's not how I would apply the rule," but since your application leads to absurdities it seems like a bad application.

[MaxWilson]

For Mal, Max, and Willie: please take a look at this mixed CR encounter (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=23281393&postcount=90)and tell me which way you'd parse the XP budget. I am trying to illustrate a point about monster CR and party level, and I think that's a good example to use.

Sure. 300 HP of Saber-Toothed Tigers/cats seems like a significant boost to a 138-HP Frost Giant to me; since they are a significant increase in difficulty I don't even have to bother deciding what the average CR is, I'll just count them.

Therefore I can just sum up all the XP and multiply by 2.5, exactly per https://kobold.club/fight/#/encounter-builder. ((6 x 450) + 3900) x 2.5 (for 7 creatures) = 16,500 XP.

Note that this is roughly this is roughly halfway between the difficulty of 2 Frost Giants (11,700 XP) and 3 Frost Giants (23,400 XP). Six cats and one Frost Giant have more HP than three Frost Giants but have less AC and typically do less damage (competitive with pure giant DPR only against low-Strength targets whom they can Pounce on reliably) so it seems reasonable to count the cats as somewhat weaker, though in practice it could go either way.

[KorvinStarmast]

Sure. 300 HP of Saber-Toothed Tigers/cats seems like a significant boost to a 138-HP Frost Giant to me; since they are a significant increase in difficulty I don't even have to bother deciding what the average CR is, I'll just count them.

Therefore I can just sum up all the XP and multiply by 2.5, exactly per https://kobold.club/fight/#/encounter-builder. ((6 x 450) + 3900) x 2.5 (for 7 creatures) = 16,500 XP.

And per page 56 of basic rules: 7–10 × 2.5

[MaxWilson]

And per page 56 of basic rules: 7–10 × 2.5


...yes, that's why I used 2.5. Are you agreeing with me or correcting me, and if the latter what's the correction because I'm not seeing it?

[Malifice]

Encounter:

(6 x CR 3s), and (1 x CR 20). Lets say a Pit Fiend and 6 Bearded Devils.

38/7= Median CR of around 5 and a bit.

So we clearly dont discount the CR 20, or the CR 3 Bearded devils (CR 3 is not really that much lower than CR 5).

Final encounter difficulty: 73,000 XP

Making it a Deadly encounter for 5 x 20th level PCS.

Removing the 6 x CR 3's make it an Easy encounter, at 25,000 XP.

Are 20th level PCs' really going to be bothered by the addition of 6 x CR 3 monsters [Bearded devils] enough to push an otherwise 'Easy' encounter all the way up to 'Deadly'?

Those Bearded devils dont last a round at that level.

[KorvinStarmast]

...yes, that's why I used 2.5. Are you agreeing with me or correcting me, and if the latter what's the correction because I'm not seeing it? Agreeing, and it's just that I like to source things from the rules rather than a third party site. (Nice little tool there, to be sure). I have found a variety of "linked places" on the net -- in particular Dnd wiki and even some of the parts of DnD beyond (home brew in particular) -- to have misleading info.

Thanks for your take on that. :smallsmile:

[Malifice]

@KorvinStarmast:


Take 6 Saber Toothed Cats of CR 2. 450 XP. (2700 for six)
Their owner/leader is a Frost Giant CR 8. 3900 XP.

According to Max, we first need to determine the median CR of this group of monsters.

[8 + (6x2)] = 20/7 = A shade under CR 3.

Seeing as the 'low CR monsters in the group' (the Sabre tooth cats - CR 2) are not 'significantly lower' than this median figure (CR 2.9) then they factor for multiplication purposes, and we count them.

So he would argue the encounter is (7 monsters = 2.5 multiplier to base 6,600 XP) 16,500 XP for difficulty purposes.

Correct me if I'm wrong Max.

(Note how at no stage, have I even referred to the strength of the PCs to determine 'mook' strength - only the monsters themselves).


Against a level 5 party, which do you choose as the appropriate scale for calculating the XP budget?
Against a level 7 party, which do you choose as the appropriate scale for calculating the XP budget?
Against a level 9 party, which do you choose as the appropriate scale for calculating the XP budget?

Deadly, Deadly and Deadly.

Even for a party of 5 x 9th level PCs.

Personally, I would calculate it very differently.

[KorvinStarmast]

Personally, I would calculate it very differently.
Different than the three cases that I provided? (providing the correction that for case 2 I should have used 2.5, rather than 2.0. Between 6 and 7 was a break point. Had I used 5 sabre tooth, that would have kept it all in the same category when we add the giant). I guess that what I am trying to illustrate is that how big a spread between CR's and party level has a factor, that is allegedly accounted for by the rising daily XP budget.

I'll put that here for illustrative purposes in a moment.
-----------------------
In order to avoid the break point issue between six and seven (thanks Max and Mal for pointing that out)

Take 5 Saber Toothed Cats of CR 2. 450 XP. (2250 for five)
Their is a Frost Giant CR 8. 3900 XP.

There a number of ways to parse this for encounter / day/ XP budget encounter calculation.
1. (Five Cats) + (the Giant) = 2 x (5 x 450) + 3900 = 4500 + 3900 = 8400
2. (Five Cats + the Giant) = 2 x (2250 + 3900) = 12,300
3. Five Cats(no mod) + the Giant = 2250 + 3900 = 6150
4. {Five Cats(no mod) + the Giant} x 1.5 (two monster clumps) = 9225

For a party at level 5, level 7, or level 9, does one calculate it differently? I ask because the discussion has headed toward "at what point is 'significant' introduced in dealing with the lower CR pack?"

Note that the XP budget for the adventuring day for a four person party is 14,000 for 5th level (4), 20,000 at level 7, 30,000 at level 9.

For a given encounter, the threshold for deadly is 4,400 (5), 6,800 (7) and 9,600 (9).

(They emerge from the Frost Giant's lair; party has tracked them to this location. Why this combo? She's some kind of hermit/shaman/druid Frost giant, with a ring, wand, or staff that gives her something like animal friendship/animal control. They all behave like a "pack" where she's the alpha ... more or less. Allies of long standing. They fight together.)

[UrielAwakened]

Is it just me or is literally everyone misusing the term "median."

[Malifice]

Under my method, I eyeball the CR of the monsters as against the threat they pose to the PCs (using CR as a rough guide).

CR 2's vs Level 5's = no discount, as CR is about the same as Level. It's a Deadly fight (and it would be Deadly regardless of multiplication).

CR 2's vs Level 7's = partial discount. Id be inclined to use my judgement and treat them as a second monster (multiplying the base XP of the encounter by 1.5 for '2' monsters). This gives me a final value of 9,900 s(so still very much a Deadly fight for 5 x level 7's). I would back off with the Cats (only using 2 of them for example).

CR 2's vs Level 9+ I would be reluctant to provide a discount for this level and above, but I probably still have them at around the 'pool XP and counts as a single monster' level at level 9, so around the 9,900 XP range for 6,600 x 1.5.

That makes this fight (1 X Frost Giant and 6 x Sabre tooth cats) a 'Hard' fight for 5 x 9th level PCs.

Which based on anecdotal evidence, is about right. I would expect 5 x 9th level PCs to win this fight in 4-5 rounds but chew through some resources to get it done.

[MaxWilson]

Agreeing, and it's just that I like to source things from the rules rather than a third party site. (Nice little tool there, to be sure). I have found a variety of "linked places" on the net -- in particular Dnd wiki and even some of the parts of DnD beyond (home brew in particular) -- to have misleading info.

Thanks for your take on that. :smallsmile:

Oh, gotcha. I understand now, thanks for clarifying. (And I agree about the dangers of third-party sites. Kobold.com had a fairly severe bug early on, around late 2014, which made it give the wrong answers for difficulty, although to be fair it was only because 5E had changed the rules for computing difficulty and the Kobold.com creators hadn't yet realized it. They fixed the bug shortly after I reported it though, IIRC within less than a week or so.)

[MaxWilson]

Is it just me or is literally everyone misusing the term "median."

Malifice is the only person in this thread who has to my knowledge used the term "median." You're correct that he used it incorrectly, but he's the only one AFAIK.

[Malifice]

Different than the three cases that I provided?

In my example, I should have made case 1 multiply by 2.5, rather than 2.0, yeah, that was a break point. Had I used 5 sabre tooth, that would have kept it all in the same category.

See above.

I have always applied the CR of the 'mook' monsters to the average Party level to determine if a multiplier should apply.

A bunch of half a dozen low CR monsters, shouldn't double or nearly triple the Difficulty of an encounter with a single CR 8 for a party of 9th level+ PCs.

One fireball and spirit guardians and they're largely gone, with only 2 x 3rd level slots expended out of the parties repertoire. Maybe the Barbarian or Fighter also needs to waste a round mopping up any survivors.

[Malifice]

Malifice is the only person in this thread who has to my knowledge used the term "median." You're correct that he used it incorrectly, but he's the only one AFAIK.

Well, 'average' CR of all monsters then.

I stand corrected.

[MaxWilson]

See above.

I have always applied the CR of the 'mook' monsters to the average Party level to determine if a multiplier should apply.

A bunch of half a dozen CR 1 or 2 monsters, shouldnt nearly triple the Difficulty of an encounter with a single CR 8 for a party of 9th level+ PCs.

One fireball and spirit guardians and they're largely gone, with only 2 x 3rd level slots expended out of the parties repertoire. Maybe the Barbarian or Fighter also needs to waste a round mopping up any survivors.

You poor child. Sabre-Toothed Tigers have 52 HP and +2 to Dex saves. It takes two and a half DC 15 Fireballs on average to kill one, or 11 rounds of Spirit Guardians. If you're hitting all six Sabre Toothed Tigers with one Fireball, that means they're focusing fire on someone, and if that someone is not a beefy fighter, that someone is probably prone and taking roughly 12d6+6d10+60 worth of pounce attacks (+6, at advantage for prone target) from the cats, plus potentially 6d12+12 (+9, at advantage for prone target) from the Frost Giant.

If you think the cats don't add significantly to the difficulty of the encounter, you're wrong.

[MaxWilson]

Well, 'average' CR of all monsters then.

I stand corrected.

No biggie. Under the circumstances the two numbers are likely to be close to each other anyway, and the "unless you think the weak monsters significantly contribute to the difficulty of the encounter" clause is the important clause anyway, which is why I didn't bother to correct your usage earlier. I doubt the DMG writers would care whether you use average (mean) or median or just eyeball it.

[Doug Lampert]

I'm aware of the flaws in the procedure; it tends to discourage DMs from using heterogenous groups of monsters, which is one respect in which the Xanathar's method is superior. But Xanathar's doesn't play nicely with adventuring day budgets. I've done some work on trying to improve on the DMG method by direct application of Lanchester's Laws to give XP predictions which match the DMG for homogenous groups and give a smoother interpolation for heterogenous groups, but I don't have anything yet that I'm really happy with.

So yes, I'm more aware than you are of the flaws, having thought about them more deeply.

Edit: The closest I've got to a good formula is sum([for each monster, XP/100 ^ (2/3)]) ^ 1.5 * 100. For 2 beholders, that gives 28,284 XP (compare: 30,000 using DMG method). For 1 beholder and 25 hobgoblins, that gives 31,754 XP (compare: 50,000 using DMG method). For 1 Githyanki Knight and 4 Githyanki Warriors, it gives 13,362 XP (compare: 13,400 using DMG method). I'm pretty happy with all of these results compared to the DMG method, but I need to do some deep thinking about corner cases first, especially for creatures of very high and low CRs.

Try putting the monsters in order from toughest to weakest. 1st monster counts full, 2nd-3rd monsters count double, 4th-6th monsters count triple, 7th+ monsters count quadruple.

You can play with the break points if you like, but the base method is simple, gives an escalation based on numbers, means one ancient red dragon + 1 kobold is clearly the difficulty of the red dragon plus a tiny amount.

[Malifice]

Sabre-Toothed Tigers have 52 HP and +2 to Dex saves. It takes two and a half DC 15 Fireballs on average to kill one, or 11 rounds of Spirit Guardians. If you're hitting all six Sabre Toothed Tigers with one Fireball, that means they're focusing fire on someone, and if that someone is not a beefy fighter, that someone is probably prone and taking roughly 12d6+6d10+60 worth of pounce attacks (+6, at advantage for prone target) from the cats, plus potentially 6d12+12 (+9, at advantage for prone target) from the Frost Giant.

Lol. Stat up 5 x 9th level PCs and run them though the fight. I assure you the Cats are all dead inside of 3 rounds, and probably 2 (if close together).

Fireball + Spirit Guardians + Fighter/ Barbarian w GWM kills 3 in round 1.


If you think the cats don't add significantly to the difficulty of the encounter, you're wrong.

I think they do add to the difficulty for 9th level PCs, hence why I was treating them as a single monster and adding their XP to the total, and multiplying by 1.5 (for 'two' monsters).

[MaxWilson]

Try putting the monsters in order from toughest to weakest. 1st monster counts full, 2nd-4th monsters count double, 5th-9th monsters count triple, 10th+ monsters count quadruple.

You can play with the break points if you like, but the base method is simple, gives an escalation based on numbers, means one ancient red dragon + 1 kobold is clearly the difficulty of the red dragon plus a tiny amount.

That seems, to me at least, both more complicated than sum([for each monster, XP/100 ^ (2/3)]) ^ 1.5 * 100 and also more likely to have weird breakpoints. I suppose it does have the advantage of being easier to compute in your head, but since I don't compute encounter difficulties at the table anyway that's kind of a moot point for me.

Computing encounter difficulties and adventuring day budgets is, for me, either a post-adventure activity as I analyze the adventure relative to DMG guidelines as a way of evaluating the DMG guidelines, or a preparation activity while I'm drawing up random tables of potential encounters, e.g. "here are some monsters you could meet on level 5 of the dungeon". So using a calculator to calculate encounter difficulties is not a problem, as long as the formula gives more reliable numbers than the DMG.

[UrielAwakened]

No biggie. Under the circumstances the two numbers are likely to be close to each other anyway, and the "unless you think the weak monsters significantly contribute to the difficulty of the encounter" clause is the important clause anyway, which is why I didn't bother to correct your usage earlier. I doubt the DMG writers would care whether you use average (mean) or median or just eyeball it.

I mean no.

If you have one CR 8 and a bunch of CR 1s, the median is 1. The mean is higher.

I don't know if the rule is "If it's below median don't count it" or "if it's below mean don't count it" or if there's even a rule at all because the CR system is a joke and I stopped using it so this whole conversation seriously confused me. But if it was a rule and the rule was median, in many cases nothing would be below it.


Try putting the monsters in order from toughest to weakest. 1st monster counts full, 2nd-3rd monsters count double, 4th-6th monsters count triple, 7th+ monsters count quadruple.

This feels like the best solution presented so far, and the one that most accurately accounts for every possible encounter set-up.

[MaxWilson]

Lol. Stat up 5 x 9th level PCs and run them though the fight. I assure you the Cats are all dead inside of 3 rounds, and probably 2 (if close together).

Fireball + Spirit Guardians + Fighter/ Barbarian w GWM kills 3 in round 1.

Of course the cats all die quickly. 5E is very easy by default. I've said it before in this thread: IME, you have to go up to Deadly x3-4 before it becomes anywhere close to a fair fight, even if the PCs just charge in there swinging instead of using their heads.

But cats add significantly to the difficulty of the encounter, because Frost Giant + no cats dies even more quickly.

Frost Giant + Cats forces more than twice the resource expenditure of Frost Giant alone. (More HP of damage taken by PCs, more spell slots spent, more action surges spent.) It will be somewhere around the same resource expenditure as 2-3 Frost Giants, just as the DMG formula predicts.

DMG formulas can give weird results sometimes but this is a case where it's reasonably accurate.

[KorvinStarmast]

Sabre-Toothed Tigers have 52 HP and +2 to Dex saves. It takes two and a half DC 15 Fireballs on average to kill one, or 11 rounds of Spirit Guardians.
FWIW, I make the assumption, perhaps a bad one, that a caster will have an 18 casting stat at level 5, 7 and 9, but maybe a 16 is a better/more conservative assumption for 5 & 7, and an 18 at 9. Not everyone min maxes their stats, and some folks like feats.

DC 14 for the Dex save. As I see this fight, the key to avoiding the swarm problem is to use crowd control spell early to divide/slow the initial rush of big cats to avoid the problem that you point out: the proning / extra attacks that entails.

[Malifice]

Of course the cats all die quickly.

Two seconds ago you were arguing they 'meaningfully contribute to the difficulty of the encounter'.

Which is it?

[MaxWilson]

I mean no.

If you have one CR 8 and a bunch of CR 1s, the median is 1. The mean is higher.

I don't know if the rule is "If it's below median don't count it" or "if it's below mean don't count it" or if there's even a rule at all because the CR system is a joke and I stopped using it so this whole conversation seriously confused me. But if it was a rule and the rule was median, in many cases nothing would be below it.

You're right. I was thinking of the cases that had been presented so far, like 1 Githyanki Knight + 4 Githyanki Warriors and 1 Frost Giant + 6 Saber-Tooth Cats, but those are all cases where the lower-CR creatures are significant. In cases like 1 Ancient Red + 3 Kobolds where they are insignificant, mean vs. median will be far apart, and those are precisely the cases you're trying to detect.

But you can also eyeball those cases just fine without even computing the mean at all. Just ask yourself if the lower-CR creatures are tactically significant. 1 Ancient Red Dragon + 3 Kobolds? Well, they can Help attacks (but the dragon doesn't really need it) and they can maybe threaten to break concentration, but they die quickly. Not significant.

[KorvinStarmast]

Two seconds ago you were arguing they 'meaningfully contribute to the difficulty of the encounter'.

Which is it? Can't it be both? :smallcool:

[MaxWilson]

Two seconds ago you were arguing they 'meaningfully contribute to the difficulty of the encounter'.

Which is it?

Both. The encounter is not likely to kill you, but what difficulty there is comes at least as much from the cats as the giant.

I'm just going to go ahead and quote the whole post you snipped:




Lol. Stat up 5 x 9th level PCs and run them though the fight. I assure you the Cats are all dead inside of 3 rounds, and probably 2 (if close together).

Fireball + Spirit Guardians + Fighter/ Barbarian w GWM kills 3 in round 1.

Of course the cats all die quickly. 5E is very easy by default. I've said it before in this thread: IME, you have to go up to Deadly x3-4 before it becomes anywhere close to a fair fight, even if the PCs just charge in there swinging instead of using their heads.

But cats add significantly to the difficulty of the encounter, because Frost Giant + no cats dies even more quickly.

Frost Giant + Cats forces more than twice the resource expenditure of Frost Giant alone. (More HP of damage taken by PCs, more spell slots spent, more action surges spent.) It will be somewhere around the same resource expenditure as 2-3 Frost Giants, just as the DMG formula predicts.

DMG formulas can give weird results sometimes but this is a case where it's reasonably accurate.

[CantigThimble]

That was by accident of course (as I reckon the rule itself is worded poorly and leads to absurdities) and not by design.

Your ENTIRE argument hinges on the idea that Wizards of the Coast could not have possibly just designed something badly. (The entire history of Magic the Gathering rules changes proves my point there) You are interpreting the rules of a game as if they were legally binding and insisting that that interpretation reflects the intent of the designers.

Game designers are NOT legislators. We are under ZERO obligation to follow what they write, which is good, because sometimes they F up, and when they do we can just completely ignore what they wrote and do something better. The entire point of all the rules regarding interpretation of the law is that we CAN'T just ignore laws and do what we think works better, but here that's totally an option.

[Malifice]

FWIW, I make the assumption, perhaps a bad one, that a caster will have an 18 casting stat at level 5, 7 and 9, but maybe a 16 is a better/more conservative assumption for 5 & 7, and an 18 at 9. Not everyone min maxes their stats, and some folks like feats.

DC 14 for the Dex save. As I see this fight, the key to avoiding the swarm problem is to use crowd control spell early to divide/slow the initial rush of big cats to avoid the problem that you point out: the proning / extra attacks that entails.

Pretty much this.

At 9th level, half a dozen CR 2 Sabre tooth Cats are not a meaningful challenge to a party of 5 x 9th level PCs.

They do bump the encounter up from Easy (a Frost giant on its own) to Hard (my method of calculation). Which is a significant increase.

Under Max's method, they bump the Frost giant encounter up from Easy to Deadly.

They add a layer of complexity, and it's possible (they roll well on initiative and bum rush a single PC ans spam crits) things could go bad, but they dont otherwise meanfully add anything to the encounter.

[Malifice]

Your ENTIRE argument hinges on the idea that Wizards of the Coast could not have possibly just designed something badly.

Actually quite the opposite. I think the wording is bad, not the design.

They definately design crap stuff. Im not arguing with you.

[MaxWilson]

Pretty much this.

At 9th level, half a dozen CR 2 Sabre tooth Cats are not a meaningful challenge to a party of 5 x 9th level PCs.

They do bump the encounter up from Easy (a Frost giant on its own) to Hard (my method of calculation). Which is a significant increase.

Under Max's method, they bump the Frost giant encounter up from Easy to Deadly.

They add a layer of complexity, and it's possible (they roll well on initiative and bum rush a single PC ans spam crits) things could go bad, but they dont otherwise meanfully add anything to the encounter.

The exact same thing is true of multiple Frost Giants. Three Frost Giants will be 23,400 XP/Deadly for 4-5 9th level PCs under either of our methods. But IME you need to go much higher before a threat becomes genuinely deadly in the sense of generating dramatic tension and a real possibility that the PCs might lose (therefore a reason for them to invest serious effort before engaging).

[Malifice]

Both. The encounter is not likely to kill you, but what difficulty there is comes at least as much from the cats as the giant.

Yes, and if you have a look at how I calculated difficulty, the (6 x CR 2 Cats) add about as much XP into the overall encounter difficulty 'pool' as does the Giant (plus a multiplier of 1.5).

6 x 2's = 2,700 XP
1 x 8 = 3,900 XP

Multiplied by 1.5 for [cats + giant = '2' monsters] = 9,900 XP.

Giant on own = 3,900 XP [Easy for 5 x 9th level PCs]
Giant + Cats = 9,900 XP [Hard for 5 x 9th level PC's]

Your method would have this encounter up from a difficulty of 3,900 XP to 16,600 XP [Deadly for those PCs], which is a bit more than the cats 'only contributing a roughly equal amount of the danger' in the encounter isnt it?

So the math I use tends to agree with the outcome and actual perceived difficulty, rather than does your math (which would have this encounter as valued at 16,600 xp a 'Deadly' fight for 5 x 9th level PCs, and even Deadly for 5 x 10th level PCs).

[Unoriginal]

6 Bearded Devils are enough to keep, say, 3 lvl 20 PCs occupied for one round. Which is enough to make one lvl 20 PC take the full brunt of the Pit Fiend's assault, which is potentially lethal or dangerous enough it'll be lethal during the second round.

So yeah, adding 6 CR 3 monsters to a CR 20 one is enough to make the encounter go from Easy to Deadly, according to what the DMG call Deadly.

Remember: strictly speaking, Deadly means that ONE full-ressource PC might die from it. That you need to do more than Deadly to threaten more than one PC isn't surprising.


--------------

Also, to come back to OP: isn't just the issue that they were lvl 13 when the PCs are expected to finish SKT at lvl 10?

[CantigThimble]

Actually quite the opposite. I think the wording is bad, not the design.

They definately design crap stuff. Im not arguing with you.

I have difficulty with your claim that the 'wording is bad'. The wording in that section is not at all ambiguous or confusing, it's just that if you follow what was written it's a bad guideline.

I suppose you could say that is shows that the 'designer's intent' was to make sure the that the multiplier system wasn't used in nonsensical ways. But I think the rule just reflects that they had no clue how to do that and ended up picking something that doesn't actually work. Not that they DID know how to make it work and just accidentally worded it badly.

Which leads us back to point 1, the encounter design system in 5e is badly designed and doesn't lead to reasonable challenges for adventuring parties if followed.

[Malifice]

The exact same thing is true of multiple Frost Giants. Three Frost Giants will be 23,400 XP/Deadly for 4-5 9th level PCs under either of our methods.

And I would have 3 x Frost giants being a genuine threat to a party of 3 x 9th level PCs.

They win initiative and throw rocks, and its 3 x 4d10+6 damage attacks or 6 x 3d12+6 damage attacks (enough to kill a 9th level PC in one round) and not hard to accomplish with a +9 to hit.

Things could go quite badly for the PCs in such a fight, and they wouldnt want to hit it too badly drained of resources (HP, HD, slots, rages etc).

[Malifice]

I have difficulty with your claim that the 'wording is bad'. The wording in that section is not at all ambiguous or confusing, it's just that if you follow what was written it's a bad guideline.

I think if you take the logical interpretation and compare the CR of weak monsters to the Level of the Party to determine the threat of those monsters to that party (instead of comparing them to the average CR of other monsters in the encounter for some reason) it works out a lot better, and more closely mirrors what the Devs were likely getting at here.

Some-one should probably tweet them and ask.

[Malifice]

6 Bearded Devils are enough to keep, say, 3 lvl 20 PCs occupied for one round. Which is enough to make one lvl 20 PC take the full brunt of the Pit Fiend's assault, which is potentially lethal or dangerous enough it'll be lethal during the second round.

Have you DM'd 20th level parties?

I assure you those Devils die horribly (or are otherwise nullified) on round one. A lowly 5th level spell imprisons them behind a wall of force.

[MaxWilson]

I have difficulty with your claim that the 'wording is bad'. The wording in that section is not at all ambiguous or confusing, it's just that if you follow what was written it's a bad guideline.

I suppose you could say that is shows that the 'designer's intent' was to make sure the that the multiplier system wasn't used in nonsensical ways. But I think the rule just reflects that they had no clue how to do that and ended up picking something that doesn't actually work. Not that they DID know how to make it work and just accidentally worded it badly.

Which leads us back to point 1, the encounter design system in 5e is badly designed and doesn't lead to reasonable challenges for adventuring parties if followed.

I don't agree that it's badly designed. I think it does a reasonably good job at what it's apparently designed to do: provide a bunch of opportunities for casual players to play casually, roll lots of attacks and stuff, and still win.

You can see this is a design goal from the DMG descriptions of each difficulty level. If there's a chance that one or more PCs could die, it's "Deadly". If there's a chance that the party could actually lose (and perhaps all die), that's obviously fairly deep into "one PC could die" territory, and deep into Deadly.

Therefore, DMs who want to run combats with dramatic tension as to the outcome should not feel shy about reaching deep into Deadly territory, because 5E is extremely easy by design and you're not trying to run an easy game. There is no problem with upping the difficulty. QED.

[MaxWilson]

And I would have 3 x Frost giants being a genuine threat to a party of 3 x 9th level PCs.

They win initiative and throw rocks, and its 3 x 4d10+6 damage attacks or 6 x 3d12+6 damage attacks (enough to kill a 9th level PC in one round) and not hard to accomplish with a +9 to hit.

Things could go quite badly for the PCs in such a fight, and they wouldnt want to hit it too badly drained of resources (HP, HD, slots, rages etc).

You poor child. You had to move the goalposts to make your point (5 9th level PCs previously, suddenly it's 3 9th level PCs in your latest post because you clearly realized that the giants are not a deadly threat to 5 PCs despite their Deadly rating) and you're still underestimating the PCs.

[Malifice]

You poor child.

Im 43 so Im probably older than you.

Hopefully.

[CantigThimble]

I think if you take the logical interpretation and compare the CR of weak monsters to the Level of the Party to determine the threat of those monsters to that party (instead of comparing them to the average CR of other monsters in the encounter for some reason) it works out a lot better, and more closely mirrors what the Devs were likely getting at here.

Some-one should probably tweet them and ask.

That's not a logical interpretation of the rule in the book, it's just a totally different rule that probably accomplishes what the devs were trying to accomplish more effectively.

What's the point of insisting that your rule is the clear logical interpreation instead of just saying: "The devs made a crap rule, I made a better one, I'm using my rule instead of theirs."

I mean, the wording in the book isn't ambiguous or unclear, it's just a bad rule.

[Malifice]

You poor child. You had to move the goalposts to make your point (5 9th level PCs previously, suddenly it's 3 9th level PCs in your latest post because you clearly realized that the giants are not a deadly threat to 5 PCs) and you're still underestimating the PCs.

That was a typo. 5 x 9th level PCs.

If they're down on resources (on account of dealing with the other half a dozen encounters that day) a fight with 3 Frost giants could end in a TPK.

Bad luck (giants go first, close to melee and roll a Crit or two on a single PC) could see things turn south very quickly as well.

[Unoriginal]

Have you DM'd 20th level parties?

I assure you those Devils die horribly (or are otherwise nullified) on round one. A lowly 5th level spell imprisons them behind a wall of force.

So you're saying that it takes 1 PC to neutralize all of them, always, and then the Pit Fiend get whaled on by the remaining PC actions?

[Malifice]

That's not a logical interpretation of the rule in the book, it's just a totally different rule that probably accomplishes what the devs were trying to accomplish more effectively.

Which is what I think they were trying to say (and how the rule is interpreted in circles I play in).

I honestly think its worded badly. Which was my original point.

[Malifice]

So you're saying that it takes 1 PC to neutralize all of them, always, and then the Pit Fiend get whaled on by the remaining PC actions?

Im saying that 5 x 20th level PCs have a ridiculous arsenal at their disposal. There is no way on earth that adding half a dozen CR 3 Bearded devils to a fight with a Pit Fiend pushes it from Easy to Deadly.

It adds a layer of complexity to the fight. A speed bump and that's about it.

Heck they could safely ignore the bearded devils for a round or two while they curbstomp the Pit fiend, and then mop them up afterwards in a round or two.

[PhoenixPhyre]

A few disconnected thoughts.

1) I find the idea that there is some "holy RAW" about encounter design or that the categories (easy, medium, etc) to be a bit...odd. And certainly useless to me. The math is a first-pass filter. Nothing more. And that's even how it's presented.

Take, for example, a party of 4 dumb (INT 8) barbarians. Let's put them at, say, level 8 (midway through T2). If you hand them an encounter that's basically melee brutes (dealing mostly physical damage, lower mobility) like an ettin and two elephants (all CR 4, hard encounter, 6600 aXP), they will mostly have (unless the dice are against them) a reasonably hard, but doable time. Small probability of dropping people permanently.

Now put them against a mind flayer (CR 7) and an intellect devourer (CR 2), for a theoretically medium (5025 aXP, counting everybody). This will either go really well for the party (dropping enemies without a problem) or horrifically wrong (if the enemies get a mind blast off and start devouring brains).

Encounter math is a starting point, nothing more. Party composition, party options, terrain, circumstances (surprise, etc), tactics, other goals, etc have a larger influence than plain CR and numbers.

2) It also makes sense to think of the encounter math (and CR, for that matter) as providing floor/ceilings. Specifically, encounter math is designed for no-feat, mundane gear, non-multiclassed parties. Against those common cases (and if you handle the concerns from point #1), it gives assurance that this particular fight (in context of a full adventuring day) should require at most a given level of resources, on average. It may be easier than that, but rarely harder all else being equal.

CR (specifically offensive CR here) is calibrated so that it tells you the likelyhood of reducing the weakest party members from full health to zero in a single turn. Specifically, the Max Damage column of the table for CR N is the health of a Level N wizard with +2 CON (until CR > 20). The other items show clear expected values that go roughly by tier (with levels 4 and 8 as outliers due to ASI).

3) Since it's calibrated around the case of zero +X ATK/AC items (not no magic items, but not assuming the presence of those particular bonuses), adding +X items shifts the curve. Basically, it bumps up a person by a significant amount (almost an entire tier at lower level) in terms of incoming hit probability and outgoing hit probability (depending on the item). So if everyone has +2 items going into T3, things are going to look different than if they only have +1 or +0 items.

4) One suggestion for reconciling the issue above (with average CR vs average Party Level)--what if you took the mention of "monsters significantly below the average of the CRs of other creatures" as a group thing, instead of an individual thing?

So 6 saber cats + 1 frost giant would be considered as two groups (for averaging) purposes:

1 frost giant
6 saber cats.

Starting at 6 saber cats and adding a frost giant means that the average CR for the consideration is 2 (the average of the 6xCR 2 creatures). CR 8 > CR 2, so everything counts.

Going the other way starting with 1 giant and adding 6 cats as a group says:

Average CR = 8 (giant). CR 2 << CR 8, so just add the XP straight, don't multiply by the modifier for 7 creatures.

Again, I don't think there's any rule here, merely guidelines that may work better in one way for some groups than for others. Do what works, use guidelines as a starting point and not a binding prescription.

[CantigThimble]

Which is what I think they were trying to say (and how the rule is interpreted in circles I play in).

I honestly think its worded badly. Which was my original point.

This is like saying that the revised ranger is the clear interpreation of the PHB ranger but the devs worded it badly. It's not a matter of them trying to say something and not quite getting it across, its a matter of them, deliberately, clearly, and with no mistakes, saying something totally different that turned out poorly.

[Exocist]

Lol. Stat up 5 x 9th level PCs and run them though the fight. I assure you the Cats are all dead inside of 3 rounds, and probably 2 (if close together).

Fireball + Spirit Guardians + Fighter/ Barbarian w GWM kills 3 in round 1.

Because I am amused - Fighter, Rogue, Sorcerer, Cleric & Paladin

Fighter (Cavalier) 9, Variant Human.
STR: 20
DEX: 12
CON: 14
INT: 8
WIS: 14
CHA: 10
HP: 76
Feats: Polearm Master, Great Weapon Master
Fighting Style: Defense
AC: 19 (Full Plate, +1 Defense)

Rogue (Arcane Trickster) 9, Shadar-Kai
STR: 8
DEX: 18
CON: 14
INT: 14
WIS: 12
CHA: 10
Feats: Sentinel, Elven Accuracy
AC: 16 (Studded Leather)
HP: 66
Spells:
Cantrips: Booming Blade, Minor Illusion, Mage Hand
1st: Find Familiar, Silent Image, Disguise Self
2nd: Mirror Image, Invisibility, Web

Sorcerer (Shadow), Yuan-Ti (I'm not good at sorcerer spell list)
STR: 8
DEX: 14
CON: 14
INT: 11
WIS: 12
CHA: 18
Feats: War Caster
AC: 15 (Mage Armour)
HP: 56
Metamagic: Quicken Spell, Twinned Sepll
Spells:
Cantrips: Fire Bolt, Frostbite, Prestidigitation, Minor Illusion, Message
1st: Absorb Elements, Shield, Mage Armour
2nd: Suggestion, Levitate
3rd: Haste, Counterspell
4th: Banishment, Watery Sphere
5th: Animate Objects

Cleric (Death), Variant Human (also not good at Cleric spells)
STR: 8
DEX: 14
CON: 15
INT: 10
WIS: 18
CHA: 12
Feats: War Caster, Resilient (Constitution)
AC: 19 (Half-Plate + Shield)
HP: 66
Spells:
Cantrips: Toll the Dead, Thaumaturgy, Guidance, Sacred Flame, Light
1st: Bless, Healing Word
2nd: Augury, Hold Person, Spiritual Weapon
3rd: Animate Dead, Dispel Magic, Revivify, Spirit Guardians
4th: Banishment, Death Ward
5th: Contagion (is this still OP?), Holy Weapon

Paladin (Vengeance), Fallen Aasimir
STR: 16
DEX: 10
CON: 13
INT: 8
WIS: 12
CHA: 16
Feats: Polearm Master, Great Weapon Master
Fighting Style: Defense
AC: 19 (Full Plate + Defense)
HP: 67
Smites Spells:
1st: Hunter's Mark, Bless
2nd: Hold Person, Find Steed, Misty Step
3rd: Haste, Revivify

[jas61292]

Having read this thread, I think the whole issue here is people trying to force a rule to comment on a situation it is not designed to comment on. The way it is written had absolutely nothing to do with a large number of weak enemies along side something strong (unless we are talking something so different in CR that it is ridiculous, like an ancient dragon and his pack of normal wolves). Rather, it is all about the exact opposite scenario: a single (or small number) of weak enemies along side multiple strong enemies.

It's there to tell you that, when planning an encounter with a handful of high CR NPCs, not to bother to count the evil knight's plain old horse when deciding what to multiply by. Or when fighting a pack of winter wolves, you don't need to bother including to few goblins that are riding on a few of them.

Small numbers of weak enemies can be safely ignored. This rule is not saying anything about situations when the weak enemies are the bulk of the threat.

[Willie the Duck]

Thank you! I agree. I that's not the point I put forth, it is at least what I thought I was saying.

[Unoriginal]

Worth noting the module encounters aren't designed with a "we must have X encounters of difficulty Y" mindset.

The calculate things so that the different fights are as difficult as they're meant to be, but how difficult they're meant to be depend on where in the plot they are.

The CR 15 Jaralaxl would probably be a bit of ajoke against end-of-SKT PCs, but good lord would it end badly if Dragon Heist PCs tried to fight him.

[Malifice]

Because I am amused - Fighter, Rogue, Sorcerer, Cleric & Paladin

Fighter (Cavalier) 9, Variant Human.
STR: 20
DEX: 12
CON: 14
INT: 8
WIS: 14
CHA: 10
HP: 76
Feats: Polearm Master, Great Weapon Master
Fighting Style: Defense
AC: 19 (Full Plate, +1 Defense)

Rogue (Arcane Trickster) 9, Shadar-Kai
STR: 8
DEX: 18
CON: 14
INT: 14
WIS: 12
CHA: 10
Feats: Sentinel, Elven Accuracy
AC: 16 (Studded Leather)
HP: 66
Spells:
Cantrips: Booming Blade, Minor Illusion, Mage Hand
1st: Find Familiar, Silent Image, Disguise Self
2nd: Mirror Image, Invisibility, Web

Sorcerer (Shadow), Yuan-Ti (I'm not good at sorcerer spell list)
STR: 8
DEX: 14
CON: 14
INT: 11
WIS: 12
CHA: 18
Feats: War Caster
AC: 15 (Mage Armour)
HP: 56
Metamagic: Quicken Spell, Twinned Sepll
Spells:
Cantrips: Fire Bolt, Frostbite, Prestidigitation, Minor Illusion, Message
1st: Absorb Elements, Shield, Mage Armour
2nd: Suggestion, Levitate
3rd: Haste, Counterspell
4th: Banishment, Watery Sphere
5th: Animate Objects

Cleric (Death), Variant Human (also not good at Cleric spells)
STR: 8
DEX: 14
CON: 15
INT: 10
WIS: 18
CHA: 12
Feats: War Caster, Resilient (Constitution)
AC: 19 (Half-Plate + Shield)
HP: 66
Spells:
Cantrips: Toll the Dead, Thaumaturgy, Guidance, Sacred Flame, Light
1st: Bless, Healing Word
2nd: Augury, Hold Person, Spiritual Weapon
3rd: Animate Dead, Dispel Magic, Revivify, Spirit Guardians
4th: Banishment, Death Ward
5th: Contagion (is this still OP?), Holy Weapon

Paladin (Vengeance), Fallen Aasimir
STR: 16
DEX: 10
CON: 13
INT: 8
WIS: 12
CHA: 16
Feats: Polearm Master, Great Weapon Master
Fighting Style: Defense
AC: 19 (Full Plate + Defense)
HP: 67
Smites Spells:
1st: Hunter's Mark, Bless
2nd: Hold Person, Find Steed, Misty Step
3rd: Haste, Revivify

Barring spirit guardians, not a single AoE in a party of 5 x 9th level PCs?

The Sorcerer summons his Shadow hound and Banishes the Giant DC 15 Charisma save at +4 with disadvantage or he goes away). Alternatively he could twin Banish two cats (placing the Shadow hound adjacent to both to grant both of them disadvantage on the save). The Cleric then repeats this if the Sorcerer fails.

Odds are the Giant is gone round one (unless it makes all 3 saves) or a few of the Cats are gone in round 1, and just the two casters have acted.

If the Sorc drops the Giant, the Cleric instead casts either Bless (ensuring more hits on the 9 GWM attacks coming in round 1 from the Fighter and Paladin) or Spirit Guardians (to keep the Cats at bay). Maybe he just banishes a cat or two himself with a 4th or 5th level slot.

Then the Action Surging Cavalier and Paladin both with PAM and GWM start crunching the Cats. We're looking at around 9 attacks between the two (including reaction attacks/ bonus actions from PAM/ GWM) each dealing around 1d10+15 (plus a few low level smites). The rogue spams his mage hand for advantage, and deals 6d6 damage to a wounded one finishing it off.

I would expect those three to kill at least 2 Cats per round with PAM and GWM plus the Rogues sneak attack. Maybe more if the Paladin wants to blow a smite or two.

Shield spells, the Cavaliers Ward ability, Spirit guardians and so forth protect the Sorcerer (or whomever is concentrating on Banishment). The Cats arent smart enough to know who to target to break concentration in any event.

I dont know what the Familiar and the Paladins Celestial Horse are doing. Not much for the former (maybe using he Help action). But between those two and the Shadow Hound, plus the PCs, the Cats now have 8 targets to pick from.

If you have a jerk DM and the monsters win initiative, and all attack the one PC, things might be a little different.

Hopefully it's not the Cleric, as any other PC goes down, and he simply Revivifies them.

I would expect the party to win this encounter in around 3-4 rounds (with the last round spent largely mopping up and in no real danger), expending some resources, and losing some HP, but not being seriously threatened unless things go really bad.

Which is about right for a 'Hard' encounter.

[MaxWilson]

That was a typo. 5 x 9th level PCs.

If they're down on resources (on account of dealing with the other half a dozen encounters that day) a fight with 3 Frost giants could end in a TPK.

Bad luck (giants go first, close to melee and roll a Crit or two on a single PC) could see things turn south very quickly as well.

5E difficulty ratings assume the PCs are at full health. Ref: https://twitter.com/jeremyecrawford/status/935995896637964290?lang=en


We actually balance the game assuming player characters are at full health. We have to do that, since an encounter could happen at any point. An extra powerful healing spell doesn't unbalance the game. But it can disrupt what feels right to a group. That's what concerns us. #DnD

Anyway, 3 Frost Giants (23,400 XP) are officially more difficult (both under DMG rules and under Malifice's rules) than 1 Frost Giant, 4 CR 2 Iron Shadows, and 9 CR 1 Quicklings. But the latter will be tougher in actual play, although still not a deadly threat for 5 9th level PCs playing smart.

5E is very easy by default. (AFAICT this includes published adventures, though I only buy them and browse them, I don't run them. Also, some of the early adventures like Rise of Tiamat were harder than DMG guidelines recommend, perhaps about the "right" difficulty for posing a challenge, at least against melee-centric PC groups.)

But you can raise the difficulty very easily by just adding more monsters.

[MaxWilson]

Barring spirit guardians, not a single AoE in a party of 5 x 9th level PCs?

I see Web, Watery Sphere, and Spirit Guardians.

[Doug Lampert]

That seems, to me at least, both more complicated than sum([for each monster, XP/100 ^ (2/3)]) ^ 1.5 * 100 and also more likely to have weird breakpoints. I suppose it does have the advantage of being easier to compute in your head, but since I don't compute encounter difficulties at the table anyway that's kind of a moot point for me.

Computing encounter difficulties and adventuring day budgets is, for me, either a post-adventure activity as I analyze the adventure relative to DMG guidelines as a way of evaluating the DMG guidelines, or a preparation activity while I'm drawing up random tables of potential encounters, e.g. "here are some monsters you could meet on level 5 of the dungeon". So using a calculator to calculate encounter difficulties is not a problem, as long as the formula gives more reliable numbers than the DMG.

Eh, how is a simple sum with multiplication "more complicated" than your formula that involves two fractional exponents and a summation? You can in fact eyeball my formula and get it right for 4 or 5 monsters, yours, not so much. Add another kobold with mine, and you find the multiplier for monster X and multiply by that and add. Decide yours is wrong, and adding a kobold involves going back to prior to the 3/2 term, and redoing the math.

And the alleged weird breakpoints are ALWAYS on the XP value of the weakest monsters, and never more than one times that value. Try generating a weird breakpoint that actually matters.

And the difference is less than 10% for any constant monster strength up to 11 monsters. You are making this too complicated.

[MaxWilson]

Eh, how is a simple sum with multiplication "more complicated" than your formula that involves two fractional exponents and a summation?

Well, for one thing your simple sum needs some tweaking to match DMG values. You said it yourself--you have to choose the breakpoints. Under DMG rules 16 hobgoblins are worth 6400 XP. Under my rules 16 hobgoblins are worth 6400 XP. Under your rules, as originally posted and with your original breakpoints, 16 hobgoblins are worth 100 + 2 * 200 + 3 * 300 + 10 * 400 = 5400 XP, if I am understanding you correctly.

The process of choosing those breakpoints is something I'd rather avoid, since it's both finicky and unnecessary.


You can in fact eyeball my formula and get it right for 4 or 5 monsters, yours, not so much. Add another kobold with mine, and you find the multiplier for monster X and multiply by that and add. Decide yours is wrong, and adding a kobold involves going back to prior to the 3/2 term, and redoing the math.

And the alleged weird breakpoints are ALWAYS on the XP value of the weakest monsters, and never more than one times that value. Try generating a weird breakpoint that actually matters.

And the difference is less than 10% for any constant monster strength up to 11 monsters. You are making this too complicated.

I feel like I already explained this, but to reiterate: computing encounter difficulty is not something I would ever do at the table, only after (if I'm curious what the official DMG difficulty would have been) or way before (when designing encounter tables). So having to plug a formula into a calculator (or Chrome's search bar) is not a big deal to me, especially if it's a simple formula.

Compare 16^1.5*100 = 6400 with 100 + 2 * 200 + 3 * 300 + 10 * 400 = 5400, and you'll see why I think your method is more complicated and less elegant.

Same goes for more complicated encounters, like 4 Frost Giants and 5 Githyanki. (4*39^(2/3)+5*7^(2/3))^1.5*100 = 51,558 XP, easy. If I try to apply your method I have to go through in my head and order them and then assort them into bins and evaluate the bins with their separate multipliers... let's see, 3900 + 2 * 2 * 3900 + 3 * 3900 + 2 * 3 * 700 + 3 * 4 * 700 = 43,800... not only is your method a lot more work but it's a lot less obvious that I'm actually computing things correctly. If I accidentally had 6 Githyanki in there instead of 5 it wouldn't be as obvious with your method as it would with mine. Can you look at 3900 + 2 * 2 * 3900 + 3 * 3900 + 2 * 3 * 700 + 3 * 4 * 700 and tell immediately how many of those creatures are CR 3 and how many are CR 8? But I can look at (4*39^(2/3)+5*7^(2/3))^1.5*100 and immediately see that there are 4 CR 8s and 5 CR 3s.

For reference, DMG adjusted XP for 4 Frost Giants and 5 Githyanki is 47,750, so both formulas are pretty close to DMG values, ~10% high in my case and ~10% low in yours.

But as I said before, I am not completely satisfied with my current formula and won't be until I check some more corner cases including creatures with very high and very low CRs.

[CantigThimble]

Honestly, the breakpoint for when something no longer contributes meaningfully to difficulty has nothing to do with CR or XP or anything. It has to do with whether or not the party has AOE that can one shot it. If the magic users can kill most of the little monsters without spending more than an action then they don't contribute to encounter difficulty. If they can't, then bounded accuracy means that even low CR monsters will be a significant source of damage.

Lets take the example of an 8th level party fighting either 78 goblins or a single githyanki knight (3900 xp either way). If the party has spirit guardians or a couple fireballs then the goblins aren't going to be much of a threat and you can reasonably treat them as one monster for the purposes of determining XP budget. They're going to be about as much of a threat as the knight. If the party is mostly martial or doesn't have large AOE (or positioning prevents them from taking out most of the goblins in the first two rounds with the AOE they do have) then the goblins are very likely going to TPK the party by weight of numbers.

[MaxWilson]

Honestly, the breakpoint for when something no longer contributes meaningfully to difficulty has nothing to do with CR or XP or anything. It has to do with whether or not the party has AOE that can one shot it. If the magic users can kill most of the little monsters without spending more than an action then they don't contribute to encounter difficulty. If they can't, then bounded accuracy means that even low CR monsters will be a significant source of damage.

Lets take the example of an 8th level party fighting either 78 goblins or a single githyanki knight (3900 xp either way). If the party has spirit guardians or a couple fireballs then the goblins aren't going to be much of a threat and you can reasonably treat them as one monster for the purposes of determining XP budget. They're going to be about as much of a threat as the knight. If the party is mostly martial or doesn't have large AOE (or positioning prevents them from taking out most of the goblins in the first two rounds with the AOE they do have) then the goblins are very likely going to TPK the party by weight of numbers.

This would be true if 5E goblins didn't have missile weapons and Nimble Escape. But because they do, one Fireball or Spirit Guardians isn't going to cut it. In fact there's a pretty decent chance the party is going to TPK even if everyone in the party is a full spellcaster with Fireball access. It mostly depends on how high the spellcasters' ACs are: Fighter 1/Wizard 7 with heavy plate armor + Shield spell will be fine, but a bog-standard Evoker 8 or Lore Bard would be in trouble.

But do note that 78 goblins is worth 15,600 adjusted XP (Deadly x2) by DMG rules, not 3900 XP, so a possible TPK is not completely unexpected.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Honestly, the breakpoint for when something no longer contributes meaningfully to difficulty has nothing to do with CR or XP or anything. It has to do with whether or not the party has AOE that can one shot it. If the magic users can kill most of the little monsters without spending more than an action then they don't contribute to encounter difficulty. If they can't, then bounded accuracy means that even low CR monsters will be a significant source of damage.

Lets take the example of an 8th level party fighting either 78 goblins or a single githyanki knight (3900 xp either way). If the party has spirit guardians or a couple fireballs then the goblins aren't going to be much of a threat and you can reasonably treat them as one monster for the purposes of determining XP budget. They're going to be about as much of a threat as the knight. If the party is mostly martial or doesn't have large AOE (or positioning prevents them from taking out most of the goblins in the first two rounds with the AOE they do have) then the goblins are very likely going to TPK the party by weight of numbers.

This is true. It's also not incredibly amenable to "hard numbers" or "formula" approaches.

Fact is, a DM's job will always require judgement calls. And this is one of them. Encounter "math" has always been about principles, not numbers (although numbers may be a component).

1. Action economy matters. If either side has more effectual actions, that side has an advantage that increases non-linearly with the difference. This is where the numbers come in.
1a. Ineffectual actions don't count. What's ineffectual? That depends. They might be unable to hit (although this is rarer than in previous editions). They might be unable to reach (the party is flying and they only have melee attacks). They may not be able to survive the opening volley. They might not be able to make a defensive save (had this happen--pro tip: items that increase save DCs are dangerous) and so get locked-down with no recourse. Etc.
1b. This can be done with either more bodies or with more actions per body (bonus actions, legendary actions, etc).

2. Attack types matter. If the enemies target the weak saves of the party with debilitating effects, it's a much harder encounter than if they target the good defenses. If everyone has magic weapons, non-magic BPS resist is meaningless and should be removed from the effective health calculation.

Etc. To truly "balance" an encounter, you need to know the party it will face and the methods they will employ. Since that's rarely possible, it's more important to know how it will be against a reference party and have a variety. And if you don't want to TPK, to err on the easier side or be willing to fudge things. If you do want to TPK (or are at least ok with it), go right ahead.

[Unoriginal]

If it takes you longer than 20 min to adjust an encounter, you might as well not include it.

[CantigThimble]

This would be true if 5E goblins didn't have missile weapons and Nimble Escape. But because they do, one Fireball or Spirit Guardians isn't going to cut it. In fact there's a pretty decent chance the party is going to TPK even if everyone in the party is a full spellcaster with Fireball access. It mostly depends on how high the spellcasters' ACs are: Fighter 1/Wizard 7 with heavy plate armor + Shield spell will be fine, but a bog-standard Evoker 8 or Lore Bard would be in trouble.

But do note that 78 goblins is worth 15,600 adjusted XP (Deadly x2) by DMG rules, not 3900 XP, so a possible TPK is not completely unexpected.

I was using Malifice's rule of treating monsters with CR more than 5 below party level as a single monster, and thus no multiplier would be necessary to demonstrate how it doesn't function as intended in this scenario.

And you are right that I'm probably overestimating the power of the AOE, but I will say that it comes down to positioning and terrain. If there's room to spread out and maneuver then the goblins will certainly win. If the goblins are forced to bunch up then the AOE will destroy them.

[MaxWilson]

I was using Malifice's rule of treating monsters with CR more than 5 below party level as a single monster, and thus no multiplier would be necessary to demonstrate how it doesn't function as intended in this scenario.

Oh, okay then. I agree, Malifice's rule leads to an incorrect difficulty calculation, relative to the single Githyanki Knight.


And you are right that I'm probably overestimating the power of the AOE, but I will say that it comes down to positioning and terrain. If there's room to spread out and maneuver then the goblins will certainly win. If the goblins are forced to bunch up then the AOE will destroy them.

Yes, although since goblins are rarely forced to bunch up (thanks to missile weapons and Nimble Escape), it might be better to choose something with only melee attacks, like wolves. Aside: the fact that conjured animals have no missile weapons is one of the Achilles heels of Shepherd Druids and Conjure Animals, and it makes them relatively weak against AoEs compared to skeleton archers and humanoid troops.

If the enemy has lots of AoEs (e.g. Magma Mephits), a smart druid switches from using his troops to swarm the enemy to using them to screen the enemy, buy time and distance, and threaten opportunity attacks, while ranged PCs do the bulk of the killing.

[Exocist]

Barring spirit guardians, not a single AoE in a party of 5 x 9th level PCs?


I see Web, Watery Sphere, and Spirit Guardians.

I was thinking of giving the Sorcerer Hypnotic Pattern. Like I said, I'm not good at Sorcerer/Cleric spells - what would you have taken?


Barring spirit guardians, not a single AoE in a party of 5 x 9th level PCs?

The Sorcerer summons his Shadow hound and Banishes the Giant DC 15 Charisma save at +4 with disadvantage or he goes away). Alternatively he could twin Banish two cats (placing the Shadow hound adjacent to both to grant both of them disadvantage on the save). The Cleric then repeats this if the Sorcerer fails.

Odds are the Giant is gone round one (unless it makes all 3 saves) or a few of the Cats are gone in round 1, and just the two casters have acted.

If the Sorc drops the Giant, the Cleric instead casts either Bless (ensuring more hits on the 9 GWM attacks coming in round 1 from the Fighter and Paladin) or Spirit Guardians (to keep the Cats at bay). Maybe he just banishes a cat or two himself with a 4th or 5th level slot.

Then the Action Surging Cavalier and Paladin both with PAM and GWM start crunching the Cats. We're looking at around 9 attacks between the two (including reaction attacks/ bonus actions from PAM/ GWM) each dealing around 1d10+15 (plus a few low level smites). The rogue spams his mage hand for advantage, and deals 6d6 damage to a wounded one finishing it off.

I would expect those three to kill at least 2 Cats per round with PAM and GWM plus the Rogues sneak attack. Maybe more if the Paladin wants to blow a smite or two.

Shield spells, the Cavaliers Ward ability, Spirit guardians and so forth protect the Sorcerer (or whomever is concentrating on Banishment). The Cats arent smart enough to know who to target to break concentration in any event.

I dont know what the Familiar and the Paladins Celestial Horse are doing. Not much for the former (maybe using he Help action). But between those two and the Shadow Hound, plus the PCs, the Cats now have 8 targets to pick from.

If you have a jerk DM and the monsters win initiative, and all attack the one PC, things might be a little different.

Hopefully it's not the Cleric, as any other PC goes down, and he simply Revivifies them.

I would expect the party to win this encounter in around 3-4 rounds (with the last round spent largely mopping up and in no real danger), expending some resources, and losing some HP, but not being seriously threatened unless things go really bad.

Which is about right for a 'Hard' encounter.


Checking the resource usage. Let's count up their slots:

Rogue - 4/2
Sorcerer - 4/3/3/3/1 & 9 SP
Cleric - 4/3/3/3/1
Paladin - 4/3/2

1st round
The Sorcerer has a pretty good chance of landing Banishment with disadvantage, so I'll count that as 4th slot & 3 SP.
Cleric is down a 1st (inconsequential), 3rd (mostly inconsequential) or 4th/5th (maybe a bit more consequential) level slot.
Paladin might be down a couple of 1st level spells
Maybe the Sorcerer is then down a 1st level slot from casting Shield
Paladin also has Revivify, but it's a bit more costly for him to do so.
Familiar was there to Help the Arcane Trickster so he can get Double Advantage Sneak Attacks every round.

The rest are too difficult for me to judge, considering it's likely contingent on what happened in round 1.

So we're down to
Rogue - 4/2
Sorcerer - 3/3/3/2/1 & 6 SP
Cleric - 4(3)/3/3(2)/3(2)/1(0)
Paladin - 2/3/2

+ Whatever else they spent in the following rounds. Of these, the cleric and sorcerer look like they might have used a good amount of resources for 1 encounter (4th and 3 SP, potentially a 4th/5th from the cleric) - they couldn't keep that up in the 5-7 following encounters. Maybe that's about right for a Hard encounter, but then again, no guidelines are really given on how much resource a Hard encounter is supposed to consume (Maybe 1/6th to 1/5th of the Party's total resource would be my guess, given we're supposed to have 6-8 medium-hard encounters per day, so 5-6 Hard encounters would be about equivalent.)

[PhoenixPhyre]

For Hard encounters (taking the average between medium and deadly boundaries), it's basically 4.5/adventuring day across the level range.

That also fits with an alternating 2/1/1 and 2/2/1 cadence (the slashes are short rests, but you can do it in any order), which fits a lot of the rest of the implicit assumptions of the DMG as far as I can tell.

[Exocist]

For Hard encounters (taking the average between medium and deadly boundaries), it's basically 4.5/adventuring day across the level range.

That also fits with an alternating 2/1/1 and 2/2/1 cadence (the slashes are short rests, but you can do it in any order), which fits a lot of the rest of the implicit assumptions of the DMG as far as I can tell.

Ok, I'll plug in 2/9ths and work spells off Spell Points.

Paladin
Hit Points: 67 + 33.5 (Hit Dice), total 100.5. The Monsters must burn through 22.3333 of the Paladin's HP.
Spell Points: 27. The monsters must burn through 6 of the Paladin's PS.

Sorcerer
Hit Points: 56 + 28 (Hit Dice) totalling 84. The Monsters must burn through 18.66667 of the Sorcerer's HP.
Spell Points: 57 + 9 Sorcery Points, totalling 66. The monsters must burn through 14.6667 of the Sorcerer's SP.

Rogue
Hit Points: 66 + 33 (Hit Dice), total 99. The monsters must burn through 22 of the Rogue's HP.
Spell Points: 14. The monsters must burn through 3.111 spell points.

Cleric
Hit Points: 66 + 33 (Hit Dice), total 99. The Monsters have to burn through 22 of the Cleric's HP.
Spell Points: 57. The monsters must burn through 12.6667 spell points.

Fighter
Hit Points: 76 + 38 (Hit Dice), total 114. The Monsters have to burn through 25.3333 of the Fighter's HP, as well as 2/3rds of an Action Surge, 2/3rds of an Indomitable and 2/9ths of his Unwavering Mark + Warding Maneuver uses.

Again, no combat has been run (I'm not in a position to run one) so we don't know what will happen. If two people could actually run this combat (one controlling the party, one controlling the monsters) and report the results, we could see if it falls in line with these assumptions.

[MaxWilson]

Again, no combat has been run (I'm not in a position to run one) so we don't know what will happen. If two people could actually run this combat (one controlling the party, one controlling the monsters) and report the results, we could see if it falls in line with these assumptions.

What hypothesis would you be testing by doing so? Are you trying to see if the DMG overvalues the cats relative to higher-CR creatures like more giants? If so you'd need to compare equal DMG XP values of Giant + cats vs. pure giants. I think three frost giants is about equal in XP to one giant and nine cats.

To control for luck you'd probably want to run each fight twice, to give some idea of the variance.

If no one else has done this by tomorrow I'll run it. I'll use the characters exactly as Exocist has written them, without changing any spells; and I'll have the monsters fight to the death (no morale checks) and choose targets strategically of and only if at least one giant is alive, otherwise just choose the easiest target each round. I'll use standard pouncing tactics because they're cats, and I'll keep a log.

[Exocist]

What hypothesis would you be testing by doing so? Are you trying to see if the DMG overvalues the cats relative to higher-CR creatures like more giants? If so you'd need to compare equal DMG XP values of Giant + cats vs. pure giants. I think three frost giants is about equal in XP to one giant and nine cats.

To control for luck you'd probably want to run each fight twice, to give some idea of the variance.

If no one else has done this by tomorrow I'll run it. I'll use the characters exactly as Exocist has written them, without changing any spells; and I'll have the monsters fight to the death (no morale checks) and choose targets strategically of and only if at least one giant is alive, otherwise just choose the easiest target each round. I'll use standard pouncing tactics because they're cats, and I'll keep a log.

Well, for one, the "difficulty" of 1 Giant + 9 Cats vs 3 Giants (I think the 3 Giants will be easier for this party due to double Banishments).

Second, if either encounter matches up to the DMG guidelines of "Difficulty" - i.e., this "Hard" encounter should consume ~2/9ths of the party's daily resources.

[furby076]

Last note: no one calls it D&D Next anymore. Just no one.

hm, yes we do. what nobody calls it anymore is AD&D...unless they play 2nd ed still. they are special and we leave them, and 0D&D players alone

[MaxWilson]

hm, yes we do. what nobody calls it anymore is AD&D...unless they play 2nd ed still. they are special and we leave them, and 0D&D players alone

As an RPG, I prefer AD&D over 5E in many respects, especially the DM-side support (e.g. MM entries) and non-combat aspects.

5E makes a more interesting CRPG (or Combat As Sport RPG) than AD&D does though, due to a more complicated action economy.

They're good at different things.

[MaxWilson]

Well, for one, the "difficulty" of 1 Giant + 9 Cats vs 3 Giants (I think the 3 Giants will be easier for this party due to double Banishments).

Second, if either encounter matches up to the DMG guidelines of "Difficulty" - i.e., this "Hard" encounter should consume ~2/9ths of the party's daily resources.

I'm not sure that the latter is actually the definition of "Hard" (who says the PCs are expected to finish a day completely empty?) but I'll collect the data, if no one else has done it first, tomorrow.

[Malifice]

I was using Malifice's rule of treating monsters with CR more than 5 below party level as a single monster, and thus no multiplier would be necessary to demonstrate how it doesn't function as intended in this scenario.

Hang on. You're using an ecounter with 78 goblins as evidence to falsify the rule?

That seem like a standard encounter to you?

[Malifice]

Of these, the cleric and sorcerer look like they might have used a good amount of resources for 1 encounter (4th and 3 SP, potentially a 4th/5th from the cleric) - they couldn't keep that up in the 5-7 following encounters. Maybe that's about right for a Hard encounter, but then again, no guidelines are really given on how much resource a Hard encounter is supposed to consume (Maybe 1/6th to 1/5th of the Party's total resource would be my guess, given we're supposed to have 6-8 medium-hard encounters per day, so 5-6 Hard encounters would be about equivalent.)

That sounds about right for a Hard encounter. They can probably deal with around 4-5 such 'Hard' encounters before needing a long rest (presuming the a few short rests to replenish HP via HD usage, and other Short rest resources, which this party are reasonably short on).

The fights are hard enough that they cant just blunder through them, and need to think a bit (and be careful with resource epxenditure, using those resources at the right time and against the right targets) but not overwhelming in nature.

If I was using that encounter for that group, I would design the next encounter as a 'Medium' encounter to ease it off a bit, before allowing time for a Short rest either before hand, or directly after the fight with the Giants and the Cats.

[Malifice]

Another thing occured to me last night.

Im pretty sure that the DMG passage we are referring to starts with the premise of using CR approproate monsters (CR roughly equal to the level of the party, give or take).

It then introduces the passage that we're talking about (when using low CR monsters, do not multiply for their presence [when determining encounter difficulty] if their CR is significantly lower than the average CR of the other monsters in the group).

Is it not a fair reading of that passage (taking into account the prior context of an expectiation that the other monsters are high CR monsters) that there is an expected corelation between the 'strong' monster (or monsters) and the level of the party?

As in, the passage read as a whole and taking into account the preceeding paragraphs and context is kind of saying 'When you have a Strong CR monster (Drow Priestess for example) and a bunch of lower CR ones (half a dozen Drow warriors for example) you dont multiply the overall XP budget on account of the presence weaker monsters.'

That is how I have always interpreted that passage (read in the context of the whole section) to mean.

[CantigThimble]

Hang on. You're using an ecounter with 78 goblins as evidence to falsify the rule?

That seem like a standard encounter to you?

Shrug. I've seen plenty of encounters involving large numbers of mooks. So you tell me, when is your rule supposed to apply? 1-6 monsters only? Point is, numbers have a significant impact on encounter difficulty unless those numbers can be reduced immediately by AOE. Any number of enemies that will die to spike growth or spirit guardians before dealing damage have almost zero impace on the difficulty of the encounter. Enemies that will soak large amounts of AOE or multiple rounds of fighter attacks while dealing damage definitely deserve to contribute to multipliers. Take something like a group of 5-10 yuan-ti archers. They're only CR3 but they can pump a large amount of damage out and are very difficult to AOE down. Even a level 8 DPS focused fighter will take 2-3 turns to to take one down.

A single CR8 monster is much less dangerous than 5 CR 3 monsters due to action economy and bounded accuracy. The multiplier helps to account for that better. (if not perfectly) The cutoff for number of mooks no longer significantly contributing to encounter difficulty isn't CR, it's the point at which the mooks die to a single AOE.

[CantigThimble]

Another thing occured to me last night.

Im pretty sure that the DMG passage we are referring to starts with the premise of using CR approproate monsters (CR roughly equal to the level of the party, give or take).

It then introduces the passage that we're talking about (when using low CR monsters, do not multiply for their presence [when determining encounter difficulty] if their CR is significantly lower than the average CR of the other monsters in the group).

Is it not a fair reading of that passage (taking into account the prior context of an expectiation that the other monsters are high CR monsters) that there is an expected corelation between the 'strong' monster (or monsters) and the level of the party?

As in, the passage read as a whole and taking into account the preceeding paragraphs and context is kind of saying 'When you have a Strong CR monster (Drow Priestess for example) and a bunch of lower CR ones (half a dozen Drow warriors for example) you dont multiply the overall XP budget on account of the presence weaker monsters.'

That is how I have always interpreted that passage (read in the context of the whole section) to mean.

Why does it matter so much what the passage is supposed to mean or could be interpreted to mean? Isn't it infinitely more important to figure out what actually produces an enjoyable game and do that, no matter what the book says?

[Malifice]

Shrug. I've seen plenty of encounters involving large numbers of mooks.

Mate, a combat encounter featuring 78 goblins is an outlier.


So you tell me, when is your rule supposed to apply? 1-6 monsters only?

In a standard DnD combat encounter, designed to be fought by 5 PCs with difficulty determined accordingly.

You know; the kind of thing you see happen in 99 percent of combat encounters. A single solo legendary Boss. Maybe a 'heavy' type and some mooks. A Boss monster and some mooks. 2-3 monsters of a CR 1-2 lower than the party level. That kind of thing.


Point is, numbers have a significant impact on encounter difficulty unless those numbers can be reduced immediately by AOE.


And I agree with that point. I only dont factor in multiplication for multiple low CR mook creatures (with or without a Boss).

[KorvinStarmast]

For Hard encounters (taking the average between medium and deadly boundaries), it's basically 4.5/adventuring day across the level range.

That also fits with an alternating 2/1/1 and 2/2/1 cadence (the slashes are short rests, but you can do it in any order), which fits a lot of the rest of the implicit assumptions of the DMG as far as I can tell. *Golf Clap* that's a nice succinct model for building an adventure day. It looks very similar to what one of our DMs does.


If no one else has done this by tomorrow I'll run it. I'll use the characters exactly as Exocist has written them, without changing any spells; and I'll have the monsters fight to the death (no morale checks) and choose targets strategically of and only if at least one giant is alive, otherwise just choose the easiest target each round. I'll use standard pouncing tactics because they're cats, and I'll keep a log. Please do, I'd like to see the results.

Hang on. You're using an ecounter with 78 goblins as evidence to falsify the rule? That seem like a standard encounter to you? This is a good point. D&D 5e isn't very good at handling large groups during combat. (FWIW, one of the grandest battles I was ever in was in OD&D; our party was in a dungeon/cavern complex, battling it out with 81 goblins and their goblin king/leaders. Use of terrain and choke points was instrumental to our eventual victory. But the battle itself took the whole session). It was combat as war to be sure.
Take something like a group of 5-10 yuan-ti archers. They're only CR3 but they can pump a large amount of damage out and are very difficult to AOE down. Even a level 8 DPS focused fighter will take 2-3 turns to take one down. the "bag of HP" design model at work again ...

A single CR8 monster is much less dangerous than 5 CR 3 monsters due to action economy and bounded accuracy.
The above fighter needs an ally who can either divide the battlefield, obscure their aim, or in some other way crowd control that gang of archers. That's why D&D parties are the basic design model. Complementary abilities ...

[MaxWilson]

Another thing occured to me last night.

Im pretty sure that the DMG passage we are referring to starts with the premise of using CR approproate monsters (CR roughly equal to the level of the party, give or take).

Nope. The only thing it says about CR is to exercise caution when using monsters whose CR is higher than the party's level.

I'm pretty sure your notion of what a "CR appropriate monster is" is different from the 5E designers', because Xanathar's encounter tables for level 17-20 parties include such things as "1d4 [CR 11] Efreets," "1d10 [CR 8] Frost Giants with 2d4 [CR 2] Polar Bears," "1d3 [CR 7] Grick Alphas", "2d4 [CR 5] Trolls," "2d4 [CR 5] werebears," etc. The idea that "quantity has a quality of its own" is baked pretty deep into 5E's structure--bounded accuracy exists to ensure that monsters never go obsolete, and that you can use low-CR monsters against a high-level party and still challenge them. You just need to use more of them, and the DMG formulas are intended to account for that fact, although as I and others have said multiple times on this thread, the DMG is calibrated to be extremely easy and you should raise the difficulty by a lot (at least to the Deadly - Deadly x3-4 range) if you want a challenge.


Shrug. I've seen plenty of encounters involving large numbers of mooks.


Mate, a combat encounter featuring 78 goblins is an outlier.


So you tell me, when is your rule supposed to apply? 1-6 monsters only?


In a standard DnD combat encounter, designed to be fought by 5 PCs with difficulty determined accordingly.

You know; the kind of thing you see happen in 99 percent of combat encounters. A single solo legendary Boss. Maybe a 'heavy' type and some mooks. A Boss monster and some mooks. 2-3 monsters of a CR 1-2 lower than the party level. That kind of thing.


Point is, numbers have a significant impact on encounter difficulty unless those numbers can be reduced immediately by AOE. Any number of enemies that will die to spike growth or spirit guardians before dealing damage have almost zero impace on the difficulty of the encounter. Enemies that will soak large amounts of AOE or multiple rounds of fighter attacks while dealing damage definitely deserve to contribute to multipliers. Take something like a group of 5-10 yuan-ti archers. They're only CR3 but they can pump a large amount of damage out and are very difficult to AOE down. Even a level 8 DPS focused fighter will take 2-3 turns to to take one down.

A single CR8 monster is much less dangerous than 5 CR 3 monsters due to action economy and bounded accuracy. The multiplier helps to account for that better. (if not perfectly) The cutoff for number of mooks no longer significantly contributing to encounter difficulty isn't CR, it's the point at which the mooks die to a single AOE.


And I agree with that point. I only dont factor in multiplication for multiple low CR mook creatures (with or without a Boss).

What I'm hearing is that not only do you not use large quantities of mooks, but you also have no clue how strong they are. By your rules, 78 goblins is barely an Easy encounter for a party of five 9th level PCs, yet they are far more likely to TPK that party than 2 Frost Giants ("Hard" and costing nearly 3x the adjusted XP of the goblins, by your rules)... and you have no idea how true this is because you never run combats like that, apparently.

I do though*, and clearly CantigThimble does as well. We know what we're talking about.

* That doesn't necessarily mean the PCs always fight them head-on. Sometimes they sneak around them or bribe them or engage them with Fabian tactics. And sometimes they do engage head-on and lots of dice get rolled and people die.

[MaxWilson]

This is a good point. D&D 5e isn't very good at handling large groups during combat.

This is true only of modern D&D editions, and only if you use modern procedures like cyclic initiative (as opposed to e.g. DMG side initiative) and forget to use THAC0-equivalents and forget to buy enough dice. There's nothing about big combats that is intrinsically hard to run in the D&D ruleset. When 78 goblins shoot 50 arrows at the AC 15 party wizard and 7 arrows at everyone else, at disadvantage for long range, you just roll 50 dice, ask the wizard if he is Shielding (obviously yes, so his AC goes to 20), then count up how many dice are 16+ and reroll them, looking for another 16+. That gives you the number of hits, which you multiply by five to get total damage dealt. (Count 20s separately to see if they become crits on a reroll, but with disadvantage that will almost never happen.)

Then roll the other 28 dice for everyone else. The thing that makes it complicated here isn't the number of goblins, it's the number of PCs. If all 78 goblins were shooting at the wizard you'd already be done at this point, having rolled more dice.

[leogobsin]

This is true only of modern D&D editions, and only if you use modern procedures like cyclic initiative (as opposed to e.g. DMG side initiative) and forget to use THAC0-equivalents and forget to buy enough dice. There's nothing about big combats that is intrinsically hard to run in the D&D ruleset. When 78 goblins shoot 50 arrows at the AC 15 party wizard and 7 arrows at everyone else, at disadvantage for long range, you just roll 50 dice, ask the wizard if he is Shielding (obviously yes, so his AC goes to 20), then count up how many dice are 16+ and reroll them, looking for another 16+. That gives you the number of hits, which you multiply by five to get total damage dealt. (Count 20s separately to see if they become crits on a reroll, but with disadvantage that will almost never happen.)

Then roll the other 28 dice for everyone else. The thing that makes it complicated here isn't the number of goblins, it's the number of PCs. If all 78 goblins were shooting at the wizard you'd already be done at this point, having rolled more dice.

What Korvin said wasn't that running large groups was hard, it's that D&D isn't good at running large groups, and I'd agree with that: not because large groups are hard or complicated to do, but because they're slow. Rolling 50 dice and looking at all the results could easily take several minutes, and the whole while your players are sitting there twiddling their thumbs.

[UrielAwakened]

You just roll 50 dice...Then roll the other 28 dice for everyone else...

Lmfao.

No. I do not want to sit there are roll 78 dice. No thank you.

You need a system like Dungeon World where you roll once and once only. And then add like +1 damage for each goblin beyond the first.

In fact here's a better system for groups of 20 or more enemies:

Take the maximum result and subtract the PC's armor from it. That's how many hits you expect for every 20 or so enemies.

So divide number of enemies by 20 and multiply it by that armor number from before + 1 (to account for a crit dealing double damage). That's how many hits you get. Roll damage.

Fast and easy and nobody wants to kill themselves by the time the session's over from watching a lunatic silently roll hundreds of d20s to himself.

[PhoenixPhyre]

*Golf Clap* that's a nice succinct model for building an adventure day. It looks very similar to what one of our DMs does.


I tend to believe that cadence is the most important thing in balancing the adventuring day. Leaving clear opportunities for short rests but not usually letting them get by with a single encounter between rests. The threshold for Hard is actually (for most levels) the same as 1 easy + 1 medium.

So these all work (E = Easy, M = Medium, H = Hard, D = Deadly, / = short rest):

MM/MM/MM (for encounters on the hard side of Medium)
HH/HH/H (or any permutation, for encounters on the easy side of Hard)
H/HH/H (or any permutation, for encounters on the hard side of Hard)
D/D/D (for encounters on the easy side of deadly)
D/H/D (for harder deadly encounters)
EME/HH/EMM (for a very long day)

or basically any other cadence where at least there are 2 non-deadly or 1 deadly fights between one pair of resting opportunities. And you can vary this between days just fine.

For gritty resting, you can have the same fights just split up over multiple in-game days, mixed in with days where you don't have any fights. So you might have

HH/X/X/H/X/HH (Xs mean no fight, SR are 8 hours) and then a long rest.

Gives flexibility at the cost of time. On the other hand, you can do the heroic rest where your "adventuring day" is only a few hours but you burn through lots of fights per in-game day.

[Tehnar]

Lmfao.

No. I do not want to sit there are roll 78 dice. No thank you.

You need a system like Dungeon World where you roll once and once only. And then add like +1 damage for each goblin beyond the first.

In fact here's a better system:

Take the maximum result and subtract the PC's armor from it. That's how many hits you expect for every 20 or so enemies. But since we're figuring crits and crits do double damage, instead divide the number of enemies by 10. Easier math too.

So divide number of enemies by 10 and multiply it by that armor number from before. That's how many hits you get. Roll damage.

Fast and easy and nobody wants to kill themselves by the time the session's over from watching a lunatic silently roll hundreds of d20s to himself.


If you have plenty of dice, it is actually quicker that way. You roll them in batches and just count the number of dice that meet the target number.
Wargames have been doing that for ages.

Or you know, just use a dice roller app. Or you can even just average it at that amount.

[UrielAwakened]

I play digitally and even I don't want to deal with counting that many d20s.

Nor should any system ever require you to.

It's really bad design.


Or you can even just average it at that amount.

Literally what my calculation accomplishes.

[PhoenixPhyre]

If you have plenty of dice, it is actually quicker that way. You roll them in batches and just count the number of dice that meet the target number.
Wargames have been doing that for ages.

Or you know, just use a dice roller app. Or you can even just average it at that amount.

With 78 goblins I'd probably chunk them into groups and roll once per group and apply N x <average damage>. Of course, with 78 goblins it's rare that they'd all be able to attack at once, so usually you're rolling a subset of the dice.

My sweet spot is something like 1.5x or 2x as many monsters as PCs. So 4 PCs, 6-8 monsters. Fewer for "big bad" fights or ones with more complex opponents or terrain.

[MaxWilson]

What Korvin said wasn't that running large groups was hard, it's that D&D isn't good at running large groups, and I'd agree with that: not because large groups are hard or complicated to do, but because they're slow. Rolling 50 dice and looking at all the results could easily take several minutes, and the whole while your players are sitting there twiddling their thumbs.

It doesn't take several minutes. And sometimes I have the players do the rolling anyway, which they do with bated breath. Checking to see if you're about to die is not a "twiddle your thumbs" moment.

[CantigThimble]

Mate, a combat encounter featuring 78 goblins is an outlier.

In a standard DnD combat encounter, designed to be fought by 5 PCs with difficulty determined accordingly.

You know; the kind of thing you see happen in 99 percent of combat encounters. A single solo legendary Boss. Maybe a 'heavy' type and some mooks. A Boss monster and some mooks. 2-3 monsters of a CR 1-2 lower than the party level. That kind of thing.

You say 'standard', but I've been in campaigns where fighting less than 10-15 enemies was out of the ordinary and the party had established tactics for dealing with 100+ if it came down to it. We've played very different games.


The above fighter needs an ally who can either divide the battlefield, obscure their aim, or in some other way crowd control that gang of archers. That's why D&D parties are the basic design model. Complementary abilities ...

Well, part of the reason I chose Yuan-Ti was specifically because magic resistance makes them a pain to crowd control. Obscurement like fog cloud can certainly be powerful in some scenarios, but is dependent on positioning and terrain to benefit your party more than the enemy. (And I fully expect the DM to have the Yuan-Ti understand that) Yuan-Ti archers are just tough bastards and their damage output is quite impressive. They may be CR3 but I would think twice about engaging a large group of them at any level.

[UrielAwakened]

It doesn't take several minutes. And sometimes I have the players do the rolling anyway, which they do with bated breath. Checking to see if you're about to die is not a "twiddle your thumbs" moment.

Sounds really really awful.

[Tanarii]

You say 'standard', but I've been in campaigns where fighting less than 10-15 enemies was out of the ordinary and the party had established tactics for dealing with 100+ if it came down to it. We've played very different games.Given that the DMG multipliers stop at 15+, with the previous category being 11-14, it's reasonable to assume that the designers didn't assume players in general would have significantly more than 15 on a regular basis. Otherwise they would have included multipliers for 20+ or whatever.

It's also reasonable to assume that encounters of significantly lower CR than the party enemies with huge multipliers to bring them up to an Medium encounter (or more) probably break the intended rought guidelines of the Encounter difficulty encounters. IMO they hold fairly well for the 'expected' ranges of 2-14 creatures, approximately equal to each other CR creatures, that add up to a Easy to Deadly fight. And so do the Adventuring Day guidelines if they contain encounters made up of those with two short rests, so 3 Deadly to 12 Easy encounters.

Once you start getting outside that range, either in terms of multiple times Deadly difficulty, highly varying CRs of enemies within one fight, or solos or huge numbers of enemies, they rapidly start to become not particularly useful.

[Willie the Duck]

I play digitally and even I don't want to deal with counting that many d20s.
Nor should any system ever require you to.
It's really bad design.
Literally what my calculation accomplishes.

D&D 5e already has (optional) language in it indicating that they consider averaging rather than rolling every roll (to simplify complex combats) to be a reasonable decision (but leaves the decision in the hand of the DM). It's for damage rolls instead of to-hit rolls, but they clearly have the concept in mind.

The decision to average instead of roll every roll probably depends on how much of a burden rolling many d20s is to the individual (especially given how common access to digital random number generation is at this point). Actually rolling allows for rare but spectacular outlier situations to show up unpredictably. I wouldn't call assuming that no one would want that to be an act of bad design.

[CantigThimble]

Given that the DMG multipliers stop at 15+, with the previous category being 11-14, it's reasonable to assume that the designers didn't assume players in general would have significantly more than 15 on a regular basis. Otherwise they would have included multipliers for 20+ or whatever.

It's also reasonable to assume that encounters of significantly lower CR than the party enemies with huge multipliers to bring them up to an Medium encounter (or more) probably break the intended rought guidelines of the Encounter difficulty encounters. IMO they hold fairly well for the 'expected' ranges of 2-14 creatures, approximately equal to each other CR creatures, that add up to a Easy to Deadly fight. And so do the Adventuring Day guidelines if they contain encounters made up of those with two short rests, so 3 Deadly to 12 Easy encounters.

Once you start getting outside that range, either in terms of multiple times Deadly difficulty, highly varying CRs of enemies within one fight, or solos or huge numbers of enemies, they rapidly start to become not particularly useful.

Well, at 15-20+ I don't think standard multipliers would even function. Positioning and terrain will determine to what degree the larger group can leverage their numbers and that decides how deadly the encounter will be.

[CantigThimble]

I play digitally and even I don't want to deal with counting that many d20s.

Nor should any system ever require you to.

It's really bad design.

My experience may be shaped significantly by the fact that my group contains a decent number of Warhammer players. Rolling 30 attacks, counting successes and rolling damage is a normal Tuesday. (And hey, we don't even need to roll armor saves here!)

[UrielAwakened]

D&D 5e already has (optional) language in it indicating that they consider averaging rather than rolling every roll (to simplify complex combats) to be a reasonable decision (but leaves the decision in the hand of the DM). It's for damage rolls instead of to-hit rolls, but they clearly have the concept in mind.

The decision to average instead of roll every roll probably depends on how much of a burden rolling many d20s is to the individual (especially given how common access to digital random number generation is at this point). Actually rolling allows for rare but spectacular outlier situations to show up unpredictably. I wouldn't call assuming that no one would want that to be an act of bad design.

You can't average to-hit roles until you get to some extreme numbers because to-hit is where all the risk exists.

If everyone is running around with passive to-hits and passive saves then every combat outcome is pre-determined already.

[Willie the Duck]

You can't average to-hit roles until you get to some extreme numbers because to-hit is where all the risk exists.

If everyone is running around with passive to-hits and passive saves then every combat outcome is pre-determined already.

Okay, I am really confused upon which side of the dive roll vs. burden divide you want to be. With your first post, my take-away was that 5e has bad design because the default assumption is that if 78 goblins fire arrows at you, there should be rolled 78d20. Here you seem to be arguing against not rolling the to-hits and instead taking an assumed average. Am I missing something? Could you verbally sketch out the design space where you think something isn't bad design? Thanks!

[Unoriginal]

Okay, I am really confused upon which side of the dive roll vs. burden divide you want to be. With your first post, my take-away was that 5e has bad design because the default assumption is that if 78 goblins fire arrows at you, there should be rolled 78d20. Here you seem to be arguing against not rolling the to-hits and instead taking an assumed average. Am I missing something? Could you verbally sketch out the design space where you think something isn't bad design? Thanks!

For some people, 5e is bad no matter how it address this concern, because it's 5e, Willie the Duck.

[UrielAwakened]

You can't take an assumed average of each die roll but you can do a collective average is my point. What it sounded like was being argued was something more like a passive attack roll, which would never work.

I already showed how to quickly do the average on the last page.

(Max roll - Target's AC + 1) * (Number of attackers/20) * average damage.

First number is number of hits you'd expect plus crit damage, second number is how many times on average that pattern repeats, third number is damage.

Easy.

I guess technically you should have a minimum of 1 coming out of that first value but that's probably intuitive.

[MaxWilson]

normal Tuesday.

I see what you did there. :)

[Willie the Duck]

You can't take an assumed average of each die roll but you can do a collective average is my point. What it sounded like was being argued was something more like a passive attack roll, which would never work.

I already showed how to quickly do the average on the last page.

(Max roll - Target's AC + 1) * (Number of attackers/20) * average damage.

First number is number of hits you'd expect plus crit damage, second number is how many times on average that pattern repeats, third number is damage.

Easy.

I guess technically you should have a minimum of 1 coming out of that first value but that's probably intuitive.

Well, I don't see where the passive attack roll was suggested, but that seems to be the minor part of the discussion. I guess I'd say that, while what you have put forth is hardly sophisticated math, it's outside of the scope of a game that markets itself to most all ages. Maybe (maybe) it would be nice if something like this was included in a sidebar somewhere, but honestly it seems outside of what most games would do. Original Traveller is still known as having too complex calculations, when really all it as is that one algebraic equation for accelerating and decelerating travel (not even taking orbital effects into account), and GURPS 3e: Vehicles is still known as being entirely too much math, when the most complicated thing it asks for is a cube-root.

[MaxWilson]

Well, I don't see where the passive attack roll was suggested, but that seems to be the minor part of the discussion. I guess I'd say that, while what you have put forth is hardly sophisticated math, it's outside of the scope of a game that markets itself to most all ages. Maybe (maybe) it would be nice if something like this was included in a sidebar somewhere, but honestly it seems outside of what most games would do. Original Traveller is still known as having too complex calculations, when really all it as is that one algebraic equation for accelerating and decelerating travel (not even taking orbital effects into account), and GURPS 3e: Vehicles is still known as being entirely too much math, when the most complicated thing it asks for is a cube-root.

The DMG does have basically this in a sidebar, though I've never used it and I have no idea who would or when. Eliminating randomness is fine for analysis (including decision-making), but not so much fun for execution. I guess it might be appropriate to do this if you were trying to model interactions between large numbers of unimportant combatants (like "all of my elven allies who are fighting all of the evil orcs") without rolling dice, but I've also never known players to get upset if you simply handwave interactions between unimportant combatants ("when you guys get back out of the tower I'll roll a d20 and multiply the result by 10%, max 100%, and that's how many of your elven allies died; and I'll do the same thing for the hobgoblins"). It's tough to imagine a situation where the players want the fidelity of non-guesstimated results but also don't want the fidelity of actual randomness.

BTW, I'm currently prepping for the simulated fight. My major concern right now is recording and showing things in a way such that people will be able to easily understand who moved where during the fight and what the terrain was. It's easy to show on a whiteboard at the table but hard to show in an Internet discussion, and I don't want to resort to ASCII diagrams.

[mephnick]

Or maybe just don't do mass combat because D&D isn't designed for it and has only ever been thrown in every edition eventually because idiots whine it's not there because they don't understand what D&D is.

[CantigThimble]

I see what you did there. :)

I think you may be assuming more wit than I possess. What did I do there?

[MaxWilson]

I think you may be assuming more wit than I possess. What did I do there?

Oh, I thought it was a joke about casual slaughter and ironically casting yourselves as villains (due to killing so many people). See https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ButForMeItWasTuesday for the trope namer, which refers to a villain who kills so frequently he cannot even remember the act of villainy which destroyed the heroine's life.

Chun-Li: My father saved his village at the cost of his own life. You had him shot as you ran away. A hero at a thousand paces.
M. Bison: I'm sorry. I don't remember any of it.
Chun-Li: [stunned expression] You don't remember?!
Bison: For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday.

Given the enormous number of attack rolls you were citing in that post, it seemed like a clever reference to this trope.

[War_lord]

D&D 5th edition assumes a very specific playstyle, if you don't want to or cannot work within those assumptions, you're going to have a bad time. Be that complaining it's too easy because you want it to do combat-as-war nova fights or because you want it to scale up to mass combat when it's not meant to do that.

[MadBear]

Kinda hard to hear the interesting arguments with all the pompous, smug, & insulting comments directed at people. To help this comment blend in, I'll add some of my own. One of you used the wrong math term at some point. gotcha. One of you had terrible grammar. gotcha. One of you disagree's with my point, so you're like a child. gotcha.

There. now my comment will blend in with this post perfectly.

[Exocist]

Kinda hard to hear the interesting arguments with all the pompous, smug, & insulting comments directed at people. To help this comment blend in, I'll add some of my own. One of you used the wrong math term at some point. gotcha. One of you had terrible grammar. gotcha. One of you disagree's with my point, so you're like a child. gotcha.

There. now my comment will blend in with this post perfectly.

U suck
You r bad and shud feel bad
No u
No u times 10

[MaxWilson]

BTW, sorry for the delay on the results of the Frost Giant/Cats fights. It's still on my radar, but I'm really busy with a work emergency. Should be done by tonight, but then again that's what I told myself yesterday too, and the day before that.