D&D 5E Monster Creation in D&D Next

SkidAce said:

Not everybody builds their NPC villains the way you described. And its odd you say that you wish to cling to 4e, because the majority of those stat blocks were "devastating" in combat abilities only.

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So are 4e PC's. It's balanced that way. In 4e, your "I can let you breathe under water" and your "I can float the treasure on a disk" powers don't take away from your "I can blow you to pieces" powers.

I think WotC has to be very careful with how they word this whole XP budget concept, as already shown.

Personally, I'd love to see something like:

By default, the PCs are balanced under the assumption that they'll have to face at least (Level * PCs * N) XP per day. If they face much less than that, it can be easier than intended and it also favors characters based on daily powers, such as wizards, and much more than that might be very difficult, requiring the party to expend consumable magic items, and favoring characters based around at-will powers, such as fighters.

PCs gain XP per day, rather than XP per encounter. The XP they gain is the total XP for all encounters faced, times a modifier based on how that XP compares to their expected daily XP. PCs who face greater challenges and press on to victory are rewarded for their efforts, while those who face an insignificant challenge only learn nothing from it.

Total XP overcome compared to Expected XP (Level * PCs * N)
0-20%: No XP
-50%: Half XP
-100%: Full XP
-150%: +10% XP
-200%: +20% XP
Higher: +30% XP

Ex: If the PCs are expected to be able to handle 1000 XP in a day, and they run into 1600 XP on a big day, they'd get 1920 XP (ie, +20%).

Poof, solves the whole 'I go find a kobold to kill so I level' problem and the '5-minute workday' problem _and_ gives incentive, even if just a minor one, for longevity abilities over burst abilities, which the game never really has.

But... it'd then need even more clarification that the DM can override that for when they place encounters far apart, and/or maybe allow PCs the option to continue on without the 'extended rest' even if there's travel time required.

At which point, I fall back to where I've been before, of wondering why we can't tie extended rests away from solar cycle (sun went up and down, whee more spells for me!) to something on the DM side. Like make spells recharge when the PCs level (with guidance for making that every N XP, or whatever, instead) or when the DM decides otherwise (Ex: 'You've defeated the Lich King! You're still shy of leveling, but you do recover all of your abilities during the celebrations that follow.')

Anyhow, rambling. Hopefully WotC is putting a lot of thought into this concept, maybe also with some suggestions for what makes an easy vs hard fight, XP total-wise.

These days there a lot of groups that choose not to use XP. Whatever system rewards "pushing on", I don't think it should be tied to XP.

Plus many other groups simply don't want to perform math calculations on a daily basis based on the number of combats in a day.

Finally, it somehow doesn't feel right, that group A who plays the same number of encounters as group B, but does it in one day instead of two, should level faster.

Don't get me wrong, I think there should be incentive for pushing on. Just not with XP.

I do not use xp at all for levelling, I do use it for building reasonable challenges. Nothing more than that.

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Zaukrie said:

I do not use xp at all for levelling, I do use it for building reasonable challenges. Nothing more than that.

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That's what I do as well in one campaign. I really just use XP values as a measurement help to figure out how tough encounters will be. I decide when the player characters level independent of that. (In my case, I primarily let them level faster than normal, since that group is an online game where we only get 2 and a half hour of play for 4 weeks and then have 2 months devoted to other campaigns.)

Markn said:

Finally, it somehow doesn't feel right, that group A who plays the same number of encounters as group B, but does it in one day instead of two, should level faster.

Don't get me wrong, I think there should be incentive for pushing on. Just not with XP.

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I played in a 3.5 campaign, level 1-20, using the Savage Tide AP with lots of extra scenarios tacked on. We, the players, petioned the DM to cut all XP in half to make the campaign last longer, just because we enjoyed it so much...

Something I learned from MMOs where they had "double XP events" - it just made beloved characters last shorter, giving you less time to enjoy them.

keterys said:

At which point, I fall back to where I've been before, of wondering why we can't tie extended rests away from solar cycle (sun went up and down, whee more spells for me!) to something on the DM side. Like make spells recharge when the PCs level (with guidance for making that every N XP, or whatever, instead) or when the DM decides otherwise (Ex: 'You've defeated the Lich King! You're still shy of leveling, but you do recover all of your abilities during the celebrations that follow.')

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Part of it is because logically where this kind of thinking carries us, when we look at the mechanics and handling time, is a place a lot of people don't want to go. (Kind of like how making Armor as AC only makes sense if you work it through, only in reverse.)

To wit, consider having two forms of resting. We'll call the natural form "resting" and the more magical form "recharging" for sake of example. Then you might have something like this:

Short Rest - lets you bandage some wounds, drink potions and cast spells freely, etc. All it really means that if you aren't pressed right this minute, and have got some charges left in the wand of cure light wounds, you can cast 'em if you've got 'em.

Short Recharge - takes about the same amount of time as a short rest and can thus overlap it (i.e. individual party members can do one or the other). You regain some hit points and/or some "encounter" abilities. In Next, you can use a hit die.

Long Rest - get back hit points equal to your level, plus Con Mod. Regain a limited number of Vancian spells. Begin the long process of shrugging off long-term effects, such as 3E ability damage healing. You can do this once per day.

Long Recharge - Boom! Get back all your hit points and spells, or very close anyway. Regain ability damage and other long-term effects in a major way, if not fully. Overlaps with Long Rest the same way the short variants overlap with each other.

Now, to bring that back to what you were proposing, charge XP for the recharge effect, and base the cost on the level of the character getting the recharge. I'd start with something around 3% to 5% of what is needed for a level, but have this gradually increase over the course of an adventure, perhaps modified by events. You might even include a "coward" penalty if the party novas against very weak opponents and then rests.

It works out about the same as adjusting the final XP based on expected play, but is more organic in that the players are getting immediate feedback. Plus, they can very clearly set their own tolerances. That is, if one group hates to lose any XP, they can work hard not to do so. Whereas another group might consider throwing in a rest or two every adventure part of the price of doing "efficient" business.

Of course, as I've said elsewhere, this would work even better if tied to a robust and fluid action point currency or something similar. If you can use action points for extra actions, but also use them to "recharge" abilities, it becomes a very serious trade between rapid, less effective options versus more measured, more effective options.

TwoSix said:

Or you just use it to track how much the PCs have been challenged. If they typically can face 1000 XP of monsters a day, and have already faced 900 XP, maybe the 750 XP of dragon might be too much.

Up to you, of course. It's a living, breathing world, kill them if you want.

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I want them to die, but I don't want to actually be the guy who kills them. I want to be surprised by them dying. I don't want the rules to allow the players to blame me when they (their PCs) die.

I want the game to be designed so that it provides the PCs with the resources to deal with (at least find a way to survive) wildly unbalanced encounters, rather than implying that part of my job as DM is to provide perfectly balanced encounters.

I don't think it's good enough to provide me with tools to balance encounters. I want more than that from the game. I want to not have to do it at all.

Battles should be fun no matter the relative strength of the opposition. It should be fun to womp on underlevelled grunts and fun to eke out a victory or merely survival against overlevelled enemies, either by dipping into a precious stash of nonrenewable magic items, or by tricking them or running away.

I think this is a reasonable desire and an interesting and challenging design specification.

Libramarian said:

I want them to die, but I don't want to actually be the guy who kills them. I want to be surprised by them dying. I don't want the rules to allow the players to blame me when they (their PCs) die.

I want the game to be designed so that it provides the PCs with the resources to deal with (at least find a way to survive) wildly unbalanced encounters, rather than implying that part of my job as DM is to provide perfectly balanced encounters.

I don't think it's good enough to provide me with tools to balance encounters. I want more than that from the game. I want to not have to do it at all.

Battles should be fun no matter the relative strength of the opposition. It should be fun to womp on underlevelled grunts and fun to eke out a victory or merely survival against overlevelled enemies, either by dipping into a precious stash of nonrenewable magic items, or by tricking them or running away.

I think this is a reasonable desire and an interesting and challenging design specification.

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This is a reasonable desire, but it doesn't have very much to do with the xp budget. The xp budget is a method of estimating what type of battles the PCs can win. If you want to set up encounters that your PCs are supposed to beat, you can use it for that. If you want to put monsters in the world and let the PCs face whatever they run into, it lets you estimate whether or not they are likely to win.

What you are asking for is the ability to have a fun encounter -- even if the PCs can't really win it. That's a reasonable desire (I share it!), but the tools to get that are rules or techniques to help players estimate the difficulty of battles and mechanisms to let PCs avoid, evade or retreat from battles without generating a TPK.

I note, incidentally, that 4e-style monster scaling makes it harder for the PCs to figure out what's a difficult battle. If a manticore varies from levels 6-14, it's hard to know how difficult a fight with three of them will be by looking at them. On the other hand, the "bloodied" rule is very helpful in this regard, as it the information "we haven't even bloodied two of them yet!" is very valuable to knowing when you're in over your head. More spells and class abilities designed to let characters evade or retreat would go a long way to helping this kind of gaming.

-KS

KidSnide said:

This is a reasonable desire, but it doesn't have very much to do with the xp budget. The xp budget is a method of estimating what type of battles the PCs can win. If you want to set up encounters that your PCs are supposed to beat, you can use it for that. If you want to put monsters in the world and let the PCs face whatever they run into, it lets you estimate whether or not they are likely to win.

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I don't want tools to estimate whether they're likely to win. It's inconveniencing to me to have to explain to the players that I'm not using them.

Mike Mearls knows that this puts the DM and players into conflict. He's said on his blog, talking about CR in 3e:They're putting these rules into the game again. Now the players will have the authority to call out the DM for breaking the rules if they throw either an illegal encounter or an illegal "adventuring day" at them.

He also says:So he knows that I plan to houserule XP budgeting out of the game and he's watching out for it. This cat and mouse game gets deeper and deeper. (I hate that blog post).

I want all design resources possible to go towards making encounters fun no matter the balance, rather than towards this XP budgeting thing. It's just a more robust and more inclusive and less passive aggressive way of making encounters fun.