Yakk
2020-08-12, 08:43 PM
This is a way to build encounters that matches the DMG encounter building system but uses different math. It also starts from a different perspective.
This is a revision based on more math efforts to match the DMG better than previous attempts.
Following these rules, you start with a high level Chapter, populate it with Scenes, and those Scenes with encounters. While I use literary terms, what ties a Chapter and Scene together is less a fixed plot than it is consequences of abandoning/ignoring part of it and going off and taking a rest. Maybe the rest of the Scene hunts you down, or maybe they go off and get help, or the hostages die, or something.
So:
Chapter
A Chapter are events plotted to occur between long rests. A Chapter consists of 1 or more Scenes. Along with the Scenes, there should be Stakes. If your players "back out" of the Scenes of a Chapter long enough to take a long rest, something should happen in the world. If they defeat all of the Scenes in a Chapter, something else should happen. Both should be planned, and they should both lead to interesting stories. Optionally, you can have partial victory Stakes as well.
A Chapter consists of 1 to 5 Scenes (typically 3) consisting of an average of 12 Scene Points (8 to 24 depending on how hard you want it to be). You will get to know your group.
Scene
A Scene are events plotted to occur between short rests. A Scene consists of 1 or more Encounters. Much like Chapters, there should be Stakes. If your players "back out" of the Encounters of a Scene long enough to take a short rest, something should happen in the world. If they defeat all of the Encounters in a Scene, something else should happen. Both should be planned, but for Scenes, you can make it a bit softer; it might be that you can back out early and catch up later. You can tie your Stakes up to the Chapter above. If your Chapter has a 3 hour timer, you could glob all of the encounters together and let players pick where the Scenes begin and end. But to start, group your encounters into Scenes and have Stakes for each one.
A Scene consists of 3 to 6 (or more) Scene Building Points worth of Encounters.
Encounter
An Encounter are events plotted to occur on second or minute intervals. One typical kind of encounter is a combat encounter, but you can have others. All Encounters should have Stakes -- for Combat Encounters, the lazy stakes are "if you lose, you die"; but "we don't fight and run away" is another possible outcome. So you should be clear why the PCs might care about this encounter, and have Stakes for winning/losing the Encounter in mind.
Combat encounters can be categorized as Easy, Medium, Hard or Deadly. They are worth 1, 2, 3 and 4 Scene Building Points each. (There are also above-deadly encounters, but this post doesn't cover them; they are worth more than 4).
Determining how hard an encounter is is a bit of simple math.
First, start with the players. Add up their levels. Then, add 1 for each PC level 5 and above, and another 1 for each PC level 11 and above. Finally, if any PCs are level 11 or higher, add (PC level - 10) to the total.
This generates a Encounter Building Budget. To find out where Easy/Medium/Hard and Deadly are, divide it by 5 for Easy, 4 for Medium, 3 for Hard and multiply it by 0.4 for Deadly.
On the monster side, you do something similar with CR. For monsters of CR 1 or less, use:
CR 1/8: 0.25 points
CR 1/4: 0.5 points
CR 1/2: 0.75 points
CR 1: 1.25 points
For monsters of CR 2 through 20, use the same system as players: CR plus 1 if 5 or higher, plus another 1 if 11 or higher, plus (CR-10) if 11 or higher.
For monsters above CR 20, add an additional 6*(CR-20).
Now simply add up monster Encounter Building Points. Compare to the group threshold. Do not do encounter size multiplication; that has already been factored in.
---
Sample encounter building.
A group of 4 level 7 PCs. Their budget is 32.
Easy: 5.3
Medium: 8
Hard: 10.7
Deadly: 12.8
You want a Medium encounter of an Ogre with Orcs. The Ogre is worth 2, the orcs are each worth 0.75.
8 - 2 is 6. 6/.75 is 8. So one Ogre with 8 Orcs
---
The party levels up to level 11. Their budget is now (14*4)=56.
Easy: 9.3
Medium: 14
Hard: 18.7
Deadly: 22.4
They are up against a Champion, 2 Ogres and some Orcs. We want this to be a bit of a climax, so we make it deadly.
Champion is CR 9, so 10 points. Orcs are 0.75 each. Ogres are 2 each.
9+4=13, 22.4-13 is 9.4, which is 13 orcs.
So we need at least 13 Orcs to make this at all heart-pounding.
This is an example of where the DMG system breaks down; about half of the threat of this fight comes from the Ogre and Orcs, half from the Champion. Using the full XP scaling on the champion is wrong here, as is not scaling the champion at all.
CR/Level
Encounter Points
1/8
0.25
1/4
0.5
1/2
0.75
1
1.25*
2
2
3
3
4
4
5
6
6
7
7
8
8
9
9
10
10
11
11
14
12
16
13
18
14
20
15
22
16
24
17
26
18
28
19
30
20
32
21
40
22
48
23
56
24
64
25
72
26
80
27
88
28
96
29
104
30
112
* You can use 1 for PCs, level 1 PC are fragile.
Underlying math:
The first bit to get is that monster XP is about (DPR)*(HP)*(1 + 0.1*(AC+ATK-13))/5.
This means that if you take two monsters and "smoosh" them together, adding up DPR and HP but leaving ATK/AC alone, you end up with 4x the XP. Just adding up the 2 monsters gets you 2x the XP.
That, roughly, is where the encounter size multiplier comes from. 2 monsters are worth 3x the XP of 1, not 2. The 3 is smaller than 4 partly because after you kill 1 monster, enemy damage output is halved; if you half-kill a big monster, it is just as painful.
As it happens, if you raise the number of monsters to the power 0.48 you get values that approximate the DMG encounter size multipliers.
And if you take monster XP and raise it to the power 0.67, you get a value that when added up linearly, emulates the DMG encounter size multipliers. This is because 0.67 =~ 1/(1.48).
XP( N Orcs ) = N * N^.48 * XP(Orc)= N^1.48 * XP(Orc)
If we take the ^0.67 of each side we get:
XP( N Orcs )^0.67 = N * XP(Orc)^0.67
we then define EBP(x) = XP(x)^0.67, and we can add up encounter building points linearly.
Once you can do this, rejiggering and building encounters is so much less painful than the DMG states.
Next, we go to Scene Points. EBP aren't linear in (adjusted) XP. The DMG expects us to add up XP to work out the Scene (encounters between rests) budget.
XP for easy is 1/2 medium, hard is 3/2 medium and deadly is 2x medium.
If we raise these to the 0.67 power we get
EBP for easy is 63% medium, hard is 131% medium, and deadly is 159% medium.
0.4, 1/3, 1/4, 1/6 are in the ratio 160%, 133%, 100% and 67%. So using those ratios of EBP give us about the same ratios as the (adjusted) XP would.
And 1/4 gives us a monster of CR equal to the average of the 4 players levels, which is a medium encounter.
By adding up scene points, you get 1 deadly, or 4 easy, or 2 medium encounters per scene; at 3 scenes/day, this is 6 medium 3 deadly or 12 easy encounters/day. This corresponds reasonably well to the DMGs daily XP budget. There is some variance here, but it occurs slowly enough that you'll get a feel for how hard a day has to be.
Bonus: Sandbox Scenes
Suppose you go with Gritty rests. Under that system, a Scene is a day, and a Chapter requires a week's rest.
For a given Chapter, you pay attention to what tier it is in, and you include failure modes that are not "PCs all die" and "adventure is over". Your players should expect to fail and retreat at the start of a tier.
You budget Encounters for a party of 4 mid-level characters in a tier.
T0: 4 level 1s for 4 (0.7/1/1.3/1.6)
T1: 4 level 3s for 12 (2/3/4/5).
T2: 4 level 7s for 32 (6/8/11/13)
T3: 4 level 14s for 80 (14/20/27/32)
T4: 4 level 20s for 128 (22/32/43/52)
(either skip T0 -- aka level 1 -- or have some trivial intro stuff for it).
Then populate an area with T1 scenes.
A wolf pack encounter could be an easy followed by a hard encounter. So 2 then 4. CR 1/4 is 0.5, so 4 wolves at first, harrassing the party. Then a pair of dire wolves (2.5) plus 3 wolves as a second wave. That is a 4 point scene.
A gnome that asks you to carry his gnomish positioning system to a nearby peak. At the peak there are mated griffons (CR 2, so 4 EBP; hard). Along the way harpies attack. We'll use medium budget, but give them a positional advantage (near a ravine the PCs can fall down) for 3 harpies (EBP 3) but bump it by 1 because of the ravine. So this scene is 6 scene points, or an above average scene.
A group of PCs starting a tier will find even the "easy" content challenging. So when building these tiered sandboxes, (a) include some lower-tier intro stuff, and (b) have the easier stuff be more common ealier.
The goal here is that, while you aren't building for the PC party, you do want to know how badass a group of 20 orcs is (15, so is deadly at T2 and easy at T3), especially in comparison to the other threats in the area.
Finally, note that CR 30 monsters are 112 EBP, and that is off the scale, and many people find CR 30s not strong enough. Players with optimization can easily double the power output of other PCs, and larger parties are really strong in 5e.
However, this does give you the idea that a CR 30 monster is roughly as tough as 3 CR 20 monsters put together.
Why am I doing this:
I'm working on a sandbox-ish campaign, and wanted to be able to sketch things at the chapter/scene level and fill in the gaps super fast later.
So I can know that this particular ruined temple is a T3 scene, above average challenge, and worry about it later. As I get closer, it is a T3 scene with a dragonborn oracle in it (CR 8 with half-dragon, so 9 EBP) and a champion (CR 9 with half-dragon, so 10 EBP).
There are veteran guards (half-dragon template applies to veteran, so CR 3 or 3 EBP each) and Guard Drakes (CR 2, so 2 EBP each).
I want the oracle/champion to be deadly (32 points -- Orcale (9), Champion (10), 3 Veterans (9) and 2 Guard Drakes (4)).
The exterior guards can be medium -- 20 points. So 4 Veterans and 4 Guard Drakes. When attacked, the Orcale starts to gather belongings and flee (with a Veteran and Drake), which takes about a minute. Once that is arranged, the Champion blows a horn, any remaining exterior forces withdraw and the interior forces join up to form a single unit and counter attack if possible.
Add some maps for where the battle could take place. I already have motivations and non-violent ways to approach it (well, not immediately violent) -- they can trade for what they want instead of fighting for it. Also need details of the Orcale's means of fleeing.
The stakes are that the Orcale knows something or has something the PCs might want, which is connected to the rest of the plot (and unimportant here).
This is a revision based on more math efforts to match the DMG better than previous attempts.
Following these rules, you start with a high level Chapter, populate it with Scenes, and those Scenes with encounters. While I use literary terms, what ties a Chapter and Scene together is less a fixed plot than it is consequences of abandoning/ignoring part of it and going off and taking a rest. Maybe the rest of the Scene hunts you down, or maybe they go off and get help, or the hostages die, or something.
So:
Chapter
A Chapter are events plotted to occur between long rests. A Chapter consists of 1 or more Scenes. Along with the Scenes, there should be Stakes. If your players "back out" of the Scenes of a Chapter long enough to take a long rest, something should happen in the world. If they defeat all of the Scenes in a Chapter, something else should happen. Both should be planned, and they should both lead to interesting stories. Optionally, you can have partial victory Stakes as well.
A Chapter consists of 1 to 5 Scenes (typically 3) consisting of an average of 12 Scene Points (8 to 24 depending on how hard you want it to be). You will get to know your group.
Scene
A Scene are events plotted to occur between short rests. A Scene consists of 1 or more Encounters. Much like Chapters, there should be Stakes. If your players "back out" of the Encounters of a Scene long enough to take a short rest, something should happen in the world. If they defeat all of the Encounters in a Scene, something else should happen. Both should be planned, but for Scenes, you can make it a bit softer; it might be that you can back out early and catch up later. You can tie your Stakes up to the Chapter above. If your Chapter has a 3 hour timer, you could glob all of the encounters together and let players pick where the Scenes begin and end. But to start, group your encounters into Scenes and have Stakes for each one.
A Scene consists of 3 to 6 (or more) Scene Building Points worth of Encounters.
Encounter
An Encounter are events plotted to occur on second or minute intervals. One typical kind of encounter is a combat encounter, but you can have others. All Encounters should have Stakes -- for Combat Encounters, the lazy stakes are "if you lose, you die"; but "we don't fight and run away" is another possible outcome. So you should be clear why the PCs might care about this encounter, and have Stakes for winning/losing the Encounter in mind.
Combat encounters can be categorized as Easy, Medium, Hard or Deadly. They are worth 1, 2, 3 and 4 Scene Building Points each. (There are also above-deadly encounters, but this post doesn't cover them; they are worth more than 4).
Determining how hard an encounter is is a bit of simple math.
First, start with the players. Add up their levels. Then, add 1 for each PC level 5 and above, and another 1 for each PC level 11 and above. Finally, if any PCs are level 11 or higher, add (PC level - 10) to the total.
This generates a Encounter Building Budget. To find out where Easy/Medium/Hard and Deadly are, divide it by 5 for Easy, 4 for Medium, 3 for Hard and multiply it by 0.4 for Deadly.
On the monster side, you do something similar with CR. For monsters of CR 1 or less, use:
CR 1/8: 0.25 points
CR 1/4: 0.5 points
CR 1/2: 0.75 points
CR 1: 1.25 points
For monsters of CR 2 through 20, use the same system as players: CR plus 1 if 5 or higher, plus another 1 if 11 or higher, plus (CR-10) if 11 or higher.
For monsters above CR 20, add an additional 6*(CR-20).
Now simply add up monster Encounter Building Points. Compare to the group threshold. Do not do encounter size multiplication; that has already been factored in.
---
Sample encounter building.
A group of 4 level 7 PCs. Their budget is 32.
Easy: 5.3
Medium: 8
Hard: 10.7
Deadly: 12.8
You want a Medium encounter of an Ogre with Orcs. The Ogre is worth 2, the orcs are each worth 0.75.
8 - 2 is 6. 6/.75 is 8. So one Ogre with 8 Orcs
---
The party levels up to level 11. Their budget is now (14*4)=56.
Easy: 9.3
Medium: 14
Hard: 18.7
Deadly: 22.4
They are up against a Champion, 2 Ogres and some Orcs. We want this to be a bit of a climax, so we make it deadly.
Champion is CR 9, so 10 points. Orcs are 0.75 each. Ogres are 2 each.
9+4=13, 22.4-13 is 9.4, which is 13 orcs.
So we need at least 13 Orcs to make this at all heart-pounding.
This is an example of where the DMG system breaks down; about half of the threat of this fight comes from the Ogre and Orcs, half from the Champion. Using the full XP scaling on the champion is wrong here, as is not scaling the champion at all.
CR/Level
Encounter Points
1/8
0.25
1/4
0.5
1/2
0.75
1
1.25*
2
2
3
3
4
4
5
6
6
7
7
8
8
9
9
10
10
11
11
14
12
16
13
18
14
20
15
22
16
24
17
26
18
28
19
30
20
32
21
40
22
48
23
56
24
64
25
72
26
80
27
88
28
96
29
104
30
112
* You can use 1 for PCs, level 1 PC are fragile.
Underlying math:
The first bit to get is that monster XP is about (DPR)*(HP)*(1 + 0.1*(AC+ATK-13))/5.
This means that if you take two monsters and "smoosh" them together, adding up DPR and HP but leaving ATK/AC alone, you end up with 4x the XP. Just adding up the 2 monsters gets you 2x the XP.
That, roughly, is where the encounter size multiplier comes from. 2 monsters are worth 3x the XP of 1, not 2. The 3 is smaller than 4 partly because after you kill 1 monster, enemy damage output is halved; if you half-kill a big monster, it is just as painful.
As it happens, if you raise the number of monsters to the power 0.48 you get values that approximate the DMG encounter size multipliers.
And if you take monster XP and raise it to the power 0.67, you get a value that when added up linearly, emulates the DMG encounter size multipliers. This is because 0.67 =~ 1/(1.48).
XP( N Orcs ) = N * N^.48 * XP(Orc)= N^1.48 * XP(Orc)
If we take the ^0.67 of each side we get:
XP( N Orcs )^0.67 = N * XP(Orc)^0.67
we then define EBP(x) = XP(x)^0.67, and we can add up encounter building points linearly.
Once you can do this, rejiggering and building encounters is so much less painful than the DMG states.
Next, we go to Scene Points. EBP aren't linear in (adjusted) XP. The DMG expects us to add up XP to work out the Scene (encounters between rests) budget.
XP for easy is 1/2 medium, hard is 3/2 medium and deadly is 2x medium.
If we raise these to the 0.67 power we get
EBP for easy is 63% medium, hard is 131% medium, and deadly is 159% medium.
0.4, 1/3, 1/4, 1/6 are in the ratio 160%, 133%, 100% and 67%. So using those ratios of EBP give us about the same ratios as the (adjusted) XP would.
And 1/4 gives us a monster of CR equal to the average of the 4 players levels, which is a medium encounter.
By adding up scene points, you get 1 deadly, or 4 easy, or 2 medium encounters per scene; at 3 scenes/day, this is 6 medium 3 deadly or 12 easy encounters/day. This corresponds reasonably well to the DMGs daily XP budget. There is some variance here, but it occurs slowly enough that you'll get a feel for how hard a day has to be.
Bonus: Sandbox Scenes
Suppose you go with Gritty rests. Under that system, a Scene is a day, and a Chapter requires a week's rest.
For a given Chapter, you pay attention to what tier it is in, and you include failure modes that are not "PCs all die" and "adventure is over". Your players should expect to fail and retreat at the start of a tier.
You budget Encounters for a party of 4 mid-level characters in a tier.
T0: 4 level 1s for 4 (0.7/1/1.3/1.6)
T1: 4 level 3s for 12 (2/3/4/5).
T2: 4 level 7s for 32 (6/8/11/13)
T3: 4 level 14s for 80 (14/20/27/32)
T4: 4 level 20s for 128 (22/32/43/52)
(either skip T0 -- aka level 1 -- or have some trivial intro stuff for it).
Then populate an area with T1 scenes.
A wolf pack encounter could be an easy followed by a hard encounter. So 2 then 4. CR 1/4 is 0.5, so 4 wolves at first, harrassing the party. Then a pair of dire wolves (2.5) plus 3 wolves as a second wave. That is a 4 point scene.
A gnome that asks you to carry his gnomish positioning system to a nearby peak. At the peak there are mated griffons (CR 2, so 4 EBP; hard). Along the way harpies attack. We'll use medium budget, but give them a positional advantage (near a ravine the PCs can fall down) for 3 harpies (EBP 3) but bump it by 1 because of the ravine. So this scene is 6 scene points, or an above average scene.
A group of PCs starting a tier will find even the "easy" content challenging. So when building these tiered sandboxes, (a) include some lower-tier intro stuff, and (b) have the easier stuff be more common ealier.
The goal here is that, while you aren't building for the PC party, you do want to know how badass a group of 20 orcs is (15, so is deadly at T2 and easy at T3), especially in comparison to the other threats in the area.
Finally, note that CR 30 monsters are 112 EBP, and that is off the scale, and many people find CR 30s not strong enough. Players with optimization can easily double the power output of other PCs, and larger parties are really strong in 5e.
However, this does give you the idea that a CR 30 monster is roughly as tough as 3 CR 20 monsters put together.
Why am I doing this:
I'm working on a sandbox-ish campaign, and wanted to be able to sketch things at the chapter/scene level and fill in the gaps super fast later.
So I can know that this particular ruined temple is a T3 scene, above average challenge, and worry about it later. As I get closer, it is a T3 scene with a dragonborn oracle in it (CR 8 with half-dragon, so 9 EBP) and a champion (CR 9 with half-dragon, so 10 EBP).
There are veteran guards (half-dragon template applies to veteran, so CR 3 or 3 EBP each) and Guard Drakes (CR 2, so 2 EBP each).
I want the oracle/champion to be deadly (32 points -- Orcale (9), Champion (10), 3 Veterans (9) and 2 Guard Drakes (4)).
The exterior guards can be medium -- 20 points. So 4 Veterans and 4 Guard Drakes. When attacked, the Orcale starts to gather belongings and flee (with a Veteran and Drake), which takes about a minute. Once that is arranged, the Champion blows a horn, any remaining exterior forces withdraw and the interior forces join up to form a single unit and counter attack if possible.
Add some maps for where the battle could take place. I already have motivations and non-violent ways to approach it (well, not immediately violent) -- they can trade for what they want instead of fighting for it. Also need details of the Orcale's means of fleeing.
The stakes are that the Orcale knows something or has something the PCs might want, which is connected to the rest of the plot (and unimportant here).