Party size and pets

[EggKookoo]

I don't really adhere to the encounter-building rules in the DMG and XGtE. I mostly eyeball it. But I was reviewing those rules just as a kind of mental exercise and it occurred to me to wonder how much I should consider combat pets as members of the party. I mean for determining party size.

In my current campaign, I have a Battle Smith with his steel defender, and a chainlock with Investment of the Chain Master and a pseudo-dragon. Both of these pets get attacks alongside their PC master. While the pseudo-dragon doesn't have a lot of HP, it has decent mobility and overall survivability. Would you consider these to be two extra party members when determining how hard the fight will be?

[loki_ragnarock]

No.

Those are class features, not characters.

[Gtdead]

Only if you feel that the players aren't challenged, although this doesn't have to do with pets per se. I wouldn't alter my encounter building philosophy due to class features. A rule of thumb is to maintain an action economy ratio that favors the monsters. This wouldn't affect the daily budget, I'd just create more swarmy encounters or use monsters than summon things or at the very least gain offensive advantage easier.

[EggKookoo]

No.

Those are class features, not characters.

I understand that. But there's a definite impact on action economy. A 4-PC party with two combat pets that get their own turns does function like a 6-PC party in many respects.


A rule of thumb is to maintain an action economy ratio that favors the monsters. This wouldn't affect the daily budget, I'd just create more swarmy encounters or use monsters than summon things or at the very least gain offensive advantage easier.

Right, so 5 monsters vs. 4 PCs compared to 5 monsters vs. 4 PC and 2 combat pets. You'd recommend bumping the number of monsters to >6 (assuming no real change to the overall encounter CR)?

[Gtdead]

Right, so 5 monsters vs. 4 PCs compared to 5 monsters vs. 4 PC and 2 combat pets. You'd recommend bumping the number of monsters to >6 (assuming no real change to the overall encounter CR)?

Yes, always assuming that the pet actions are significant enough to warrant such a change. Generally speaking I've found that swarms tend to be more deadly on the same xp budget and cause greater resource expenditure. Of course it depends on the party makeup, but whenever I want to up the difficulty, I rearrange the xp budget to allow for fewer but deadlier and more swarmy encounters.

The way scaling works, as per monster creation rules, 2 monsters will always have more aggregate stats than 1 monster of 1 CR higher. The difference gets more pronounced the higher the CR, which is why the adjusted XP is so aggressive when multiple enemies are involved.

[stoutstien]

I don't really adhere to the encounter-building rules in the DMG and XGtE. I mostly eyeball it. But I was reviewing those rules just as a kind of mental exercise and it occurred to me to wonder how much I should consider combat pets as members of the party. I mean for determining party size.

In my current campaign, I have a Battle Smith with his steel defender, and a chainlock with Investment of the Chain Master and a pseudo-dragon. Both of these pets get attacks alongside their PC master. While the pseudo-dragon doesn't have a lot of HP, it has decent mobility and overall survivability. Would you consider these to be two extra party members when determining how hard the fight will be?

Short answer. No.

Slightly longer answer, while permanent pets do have some action economy leverage that is part of the overall PC option. Some reason it's considered bad form to just add HP because someone took GWM/SS.

Saying that nothing wrong with parties facing off against challenges suited for their abilities but usually they seek them out.

[EggKookoo]

Yes, always assuming that the pet actions are significant enough to warrant such a change. Generally speaking I've found that swarms tend to be more deadly on the same xp budget and cause greater resource expenditure. Of course it depends on the party makeup, but whenever I want to up the difficulty, I rearrange the xp budget to allow for fewer but deadlier and more swarmy encounters.

Yeah, it's hard to pin down. The dice obscure a lot. But it does feel like those pets are tipping things a bit.

What you say also jives with my experience. Combat in D&D seems to have two main difficulty metrics (metrices?). There's risk -- how quickly and likely is it that a PC will be brought to (near) death. And there's hardness -- how many resources is this fight going to eat up. CR doesn't cover both. Action economy factors in just as much.

Hardness is easier to balance in my experience. Easier to predict, anyway. Risk is, well, riskier.


The way scaling works, as per monster creation rules, 2 monsters will always have more aggregate stats than 1 monster of 1 CR higher. The difference gets more pronounced the higher the CR, which is why the adjusted XP is so aggressive when multiple enemies are involved.

Which makes sense. Otherwise each CR would be twice the functional value of the number below it, and of course that's not how it works at all.

[da newt]

IMO - pets/mounts do make a difference, but not as much as a PC so I sort of count them as 1/2 or just round up. Of course the CR / encounter design guidelines are sort of general / rule of thumb anyway and Player competency and PC optimization have such a wide variability etc, it's all best to treat it loosely and adjust as necessary for your game.

[Kurt Kurageous]

Don't worry about it. Add HP equal to the pet's HP to the monsters.

[EggKookoo]

I'm thinking more about action economy. Not that a pet increases the CR for a given difficulty of encounter directly. But rather is one additional turn for the party's benefit during the round, and one additional potential target for the enemy to focus on.


IMO - pets/mounts do make a difference, but not as much as a PC so I sort of count them as 1/2 or just round up. Of course the CR / encounter design guidelines are sort of general / rule of thumb anyway and Player competency and PC optimization have such a wide variability etc, it's all best to treat it loosely and adjust as necessary for your game.

I've been thinking about this, too. Maybe each pet contributes some fraction of a "party member." Again, not for strict CR so much as determining how many party members there for for adjusted CR.

Really, I'm just trying to understand the intended mechanic/rules so I can better understand how I deviate from them when I just go with my gut.

[Kurt Kurageous]

Really, I'm just trying to understand the intended mechanic/rules so I can better understand how I deviate from them when I just go with my gut.

That way leads to madness.

Your gut is easier to understand and is based on many many mistakes and successes you have had in the past. Trying to understand the actual intent (which you will not know unless you have access to meetings minutes and the priorities and decisions made when creating the system) or the assumptions. You could read years of sage advice and other unclear mumblings of the semi sane and the howling mob and it may not lead to an answer.

You don't need to know the thoughts behind the training wheels. You already know how to balance. More importantly, you already know how to entertain your players. There is no algorithm for that.

[stoutstien]

That way leads to madness.

Your gut is easier to understand and is based on many many mistakes and successes you have had in the past. Trying to understand the actual intent (which you will not know unless you have access to meetings minutes and the priorities and decisions made when creating the system) or the assumptions. You could read years of sage advice and other unclear mumblings of the semi sane and the howling mob and it may not lead to an answer.

You don't need to know the thoughts behind the training wheels. You already know how to balance. More importantly, you already know how to entertain your players. There is no algorithm for that.

Our guts and memories are also notoriously unreliable. Of course trying to base anything off CR isn't much better but it's not a fine tuned system as much as a rough estimate. One of the big problem is it doesn't really have a defined baseline to start from. I spent some time trying to reverse engineer it and I personally suspect that is based on a party of four assuming just player handbook material and no feats or multi-classing.

Unless you regularly play with a variety of different fall into the belief that things like permanent pets are having a disproportionate impact but without seeing the opportunity cost for having that option it's just guess work. When you fall in the habit of fine-tuning your campaigns for a certain party makeup you get really good at doing just that. That in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing for most DMs because they usually only run one table and the priorities is maintaining a positive gaming experience for everybody.

Alternatively if somebody's looking to actually get a grasp of encounter design as more of a philosophy or concept then they have to set that aside or at least temper it with questions and patience. So we're working with the question of if class options with permanent pets should be considered with adjusting CR then be prepared to sit down and actually compare it to the alternative to see if there's any distinguishable differences.

[Kurt Kurageous]

Our guts and memories are also notoriously unreliable.

I cannot agree with gut being unreliable. I can agree with imprecise. CEOs make decisions as often with their gut as they do with massive amounts of distilled data. It comes down to values, the things you think are important when all else is equal.

A DM who has gamed and made mistakes for a while (multiple campaigns, player groups, whatever) has a reliable gut for creating the game they have run, and thus can reach for the one they want to run. When do you pull out into traffic? Your judgement is based on experience and the lessons learned from that experience. That's your gut.

Memory is unreliable. No argument from me.

[Gtdead]

I think it's more of a rationalism vs empiricism argument at this point. I personally agree that gut feelings are important and mostly reliable, and I consider them the result of knowledge applied subconsciously, but I need to understand the underlining mechanisms before I start using this experience as an argument, to myself or to others, and I don't believe that learning through trial and error is possible without a very specific framework for the recalibrations.

[EggKookoo]

I think it's an efficiency (and perhaps confidence) thing. If I work entirely through intuition, I could be very close to the intended mechanic without realizing it. If it turns out the intended mechanic works, I'd rather just hook into that from a cognitive standpoint so I can free up my "gut" for other things. Like the saying goes, learn the rules before you break them.

The problem with D&D is that it's hard for a DM to learn the encounter rules before applying them. Most of us see them in action in some form, or work with a simplified or pre-planned approach (using published content, for example) long before we crack open the DMG to the encounter-building stuff. By the time we do (or the time I did, anyway), I already had a sense of what works. Reading those instructions feels like trying to reconstruct the raw ingredients from a cooked pot of stew. I can see that's a potato, and I know it tastes good, but I never really saw how it got there in the first place. I can *poof* make something stew-like happen, but I wonder if I could make better stew if I learned the recipe or some cooking theory.

For me it's also getting compounded because a couple of my players want to try their hand at DMing. So they ask questions, and I really don't know how I make the stew. I've just made tons of it over the years and I know what tastes good, or good enough. I relish the thought of having another DM at the table who I can discuss DMing theory with.

Anyway, in a more practical vein, I do find that the pets have an impact on what I expect the combat to go like. But I also suspect the D&D devs themselves probably didn't really put a lot of thought into that impact, aside from perhaps initially trying to limit it.