Encounter difficulty / XP tresholds

[Waazraath]

Question: should I bother to use the XP treshold table? I haven't done so in the past, and things worked out fine (I'm experienced enough as a player and as a DM in earlier editions to guess what a party can handle, and what will be walk overs and challenging encouters). But I'm starting a new campaign, and wonder if I wouldn't benefit from it, nevertheless (it isn't in the book for nothing I suppose).

The reason I was (or: am) highly sceptical, is that the DMG says the guidelines assume a party 'of three to five adventurers.' And that seems bollocks to me. An encounter that is nice and challenging for 3 players can be a walkover for 5, and the nice and challenging encounter for 5 players can turn out to be a TPK for a party of 3. Especially those (parties of 3) are in my experience very vulnerable if due to a few unlucky rolls 1 goes down earlier (and gods forbid its the healer).

Am I missing something?

[Man_Over_Game]

Question: should I bother to use the XP treshold table? I haven't done so in the past, and things worked out fine (I'm experienced enough as a player and as a DM in earlier editions to guess what a party can handle, and what will be walk overs and challenging encouters). But I'm starting a new campaign, and wonder if I wouldn't benefit from it, nevertheless (it isn't in the book for nothing I suppose).

The reason I was (or: am) highly sceptical, is that the DMG says the guidelines assume a party 'of three to five adventurers.' And that seems bollocks to me. An encounter that is nice and challenging for 3 players can be a walkover for 5, and the nice and challenging encounter for 5 players can turn out to be a TPK for a party of 3. Especially those (parties of 3) are in my experience very vulnerable if due to a few unlucky rolls 1 goes down earlier (and gods forbid its the healer).

Am I missing something?

The game is balanced around having multiple, easier fights than it is to have singular, difficult ones. The intent is that you take on 2-3 fights, take a Short Rest, take on a few more fights, take another breather, and finish off your last few fights.

However, most DMs prefer to have fewer fights than that, and end up putting in 2 fights when the game expects around 6, which causes things to feel really easy.

So determine how difficult you plan your games to be, how many fights you have per day, and compare that to the standard of "6". That is, if you want fewer than 6 fights in a day, then bump up the difficulty and increase the experience threshold (up to 150%).

With that in mind, the default would have the fight be relatively easy for a group of 5, and slightly challenging for a group of 3. Then just provide plenty of options for players to face more and more encounters, so that the 5-man group is eventually challenged due to attrition, and that the 3-man group needs to make the decision to turn back and rest.

In a way, 5e balances the game through sheer numbers.

[Waazraath]

The game is balanced around having multiple, easier fights than it is to have singular, difficult ones. The intent is that you take on 2-3 fights, take a Short Rest, take on a few more fights, take another breather, and finish off your last few fights.

However, most DMs prefer to have fewer fights than that, and end up putting in 2 fights when the game expects around 6, which causes things to feel really easy.

So determine how difficult you plan your games to be, how many fights you have per day, and compare that to the standard of "6". That is, if you want fewer than 6 fights in a day, then bump up the difficulty and increase the experience threshold (up to 150%).

Maybe I wasn't clear, I wasn't asking about the number of fights for balancing. I am aware of the assumptions behind the system, and contrary to a lot of folk (at least, I see enough topics about it), I never found it hard to 'police the adventuring day'.

I was wondering about the system of 'XP treashold' and 'encounter difficulty' in itself. It seems so fundamentally flawed, by being aimed at 'parties between 3 and 5' that I assume I'm better off by just doing a rough estimation myself, ignoring all numbers and tables.

[Man_Over_Game]

Maybe I wasn't clear, I wasn't asking about the number of fights for balancing. I am aware of the assumptions behind the system, and contrary to a lot of folk (at least, I see enough topics about it), I never found it hard to 'police the adventuring day'.

I was wondering about the system of 'XP treashold' and 'encounter difficulty' in itself. It seems so fundamentally flawed, by being aimed at 'parties between 3 and 5' that I assume I'm better off by just doing a rough estimation myself, ignoring all numbers and tables.

Ah, you might have responded before the final edit:

With that in mind, the default would have the fight be relatively easy for a group of 5, and slightly challenging for a group of 3. Then just provide plenty of options for players to face more and more encounters, so that the 5-man group is eventually challenged due to attrition, and that the 3-man group needs to make the decision to turn back and rest.

In a way, 5e balances the game through sheer numbers.

The fact is, you might have 2 people missing from your party of 5. Or you might be an AL DM and you don't really know how many players you plan on having.

So you balance everything for the smaller number (3), and just add more encounters as necessary. The Party of 3 will quickly meet their match (and either retreat or die), and the party of 5 will do the same (but just takes a little longer). Since experience is divided up, both teams will level up just as fast (assuming the 5th level team mows through more encounters).

5e does this by making everything fundamentally easy, so that there's room for you to throw in more encounters. It assumes that 3 encounters that are a bit too easy individually (and forcing you to stop by fight 4), is a much better solution than 1 encounter that's too difficult (and you get no progress for by fleeing or dying).


Similarly, a soup recipe calls for 3 tablespoons of salt, but you have more people to serve. So rather than dumping in a bunch of salt right off the bat and risk the experience, you start with the conservative recommendation and add more as needed. The recipe still serves 3-5 people, but bases most of the measurements off of the assumption of serving 3 and adding more as necessary.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Another useful source of balance guidelines is in Xanathar's. It uses an enemies-per-pc approach rather than straight xp or adjusted xp.

[Zuras]

Have you looked at Kobold Fight Club?

The tool does the calculations for you, and I find it helpful for scaling. XP values are helpful but it is also important to take the modifiers for numbers of adversaries into account.

At any rate, the XP thresholds seem to work well for me in big dungeons like DMM. It’s not a strict guideline, but it is very helpful to gauge out beforehand when to include the boss fight without it being a cakewalk or risking the players (correctly) deciding to pack it in because their resources are too low. Think of it as a pre-session pacing tool more than a prescription for how many fights you should be running.

[Waazraath]

Ah, you might have responded before the final edit:


The fact is, you might have 2 people missing from your party of 5. Or you might be an AL DM and you don't really know how many players you plan on having.

So you balance everything for the smaller number (3), and just add more encounters as necessary. The Party of 3 will quickly meet their match (and either retreat or die), and the party of 5 will do the same (but just takes a little longer). Since experience is divided up, both teams will level up just as fast (assuming the 5th level team mows through more encounters).

5e does this by making everything fundamentally easy, so that there's room for you to throw in more encounters. It assumes that 3 encounters that are a bit too easy individually (and forcing you to stop by fight 4), is a much better solution than 1 encounter that's too difficult (and you get no progress for by fleeing or dying).


Similarly, a soup recipe calls for 3 tablespoons of salt, but you have more people to serve. So rather than dumping in a bunch of salt right off the bat and risk the experience, you start with the conservative recommendation and add more as needed. The recipe still serves 3-5 people, but bases most of the measurements off of the assumption of serving 3 and adding more as necessary.

Ah, missed your edit. This explains things indeed, especially the bolded part. Makes sense. This isn't my situation though: we play with a DM and 3 players (everybody), or we don't play. So in that sense, the rather wide bandwidth the DMG works with is unneccesary for me (and that might have something to do with my feeling that it is so broad an estimate that I might just guess it without bothering myself with addtional calculations.

@Zuras & @ PhoenixPyre: I'll check out Xanathar's & Kobold fight club.

[Tanarii]

The reason I was (or: am) highly sceptical, is that the DMG says the guidelines assume a party 'of three to five adventurers.' And that seems bollocks to me. An encounter that is nice and challenging for 3 players can be a walkover for 5, and the nice and challenging encounter for 5 players can turn out to be a TPK for a party of 3. Especially those (parties of 3) are in my experience very vulnerable if due to a few unlucky rolls 1 goes down earlier (and gods forbid its the healer).

Am I missing something?
Yes. The threshold system takes into account the difficulty based on the number of players, because it's per character. The adjustments for 2 players and 6+ players are additional modifications based on action economy, similar to the multiplier for number of monsters.

Example:
Level 4 character, medium threshold is 250 XP.

Total XP for a medium encounter for a party of N characters, all level 4:
2: 500 adjusted XP, multiplier for enemies one higher on the table, ie 3-6 creatures are x2.5 adjustment.
3: 750 adjusted XP
4: 1000 adjusted XP
5: 1250 adjusted XP
6: 1500 adjusted XP, multiplier for enemies on lower on the table, ie 3-6 creatures are a X1.5 adjustment

Edit: if you build an encounter / adventuring day on budget, you'd need to know how many characters in advance. If you're just using it to get an idea of how difficult the encounter would be and how far you can expect the characters to push to, then you build them on whatever budget you like then estimate difficulty based on current number of players.

I do the latter. I build based on a number of players of a level I choose for the 'zone', with no idea what level and number of charcaters will face it. Any given session, the players choose what to do based on if they think they can handle a 'zone' / adventuring site, and how far they are willing to push in it. Sometimes they pick wrong and they have to retreat early on, take losses, or even TPK. The DMG tables are useful because they let me foreshadow.