D&D Next Q&A

Ratskinner · Aug 3, 2012

XP/Encounter budgeting

Y'know, I really don't care which they use, so long as its explained well, and transparent as to what happens if you mess with it. I'm fine with Encounter budgeting....but I'd like it to be more flexible than 4e. That is, a wider range of "interesting". When I was running 4e, I felt like it was way to easy to turn a fight into a cakewalk or disaster (by 4e standards, anyway) by mis-budgetting or coloring outside the lines. Its something I really miss from AD&D, a sloppiness that lets encounters vary significantly. (I would accuse 3e of the same problem, but the CR system was so bad that it had no hope of being so.)

Minigiant · Aug 3, 2012

Chris_Nightwing said:
Right, but if you haven't fought all day, wouldn't you be at your peak condition? Wouldn't you be better in a single fight than a fight after four others?

Yup. But the 100XP evil noble has to deal with 1000XP of PC offense

Chris_Nightwing said:
Right, I have a proposal that avoids encounter powers or changing the rest cycle. As DM, you can decide whether any given day is an adventuring day or a downtime day.

Adventuring days are typical, you start the day with full resources and decide how best to use them yourself. Downtime days are different, and any typical daily resources are reduced in scope. This could be fine-tuned according to what the DM has planned, but it might be easier to say something like 1 spell per spell level, 1 hit die, 1 use of any other daily ability. A single encounter on a downtime day would hopefully be targetting towards these resources.

Where did your other abilities go? You had to prepare some boring bookkeeping spells, or train with your sword, or you're just not fully ready to combat the hoards that day. You could even rule that there be no more than X adventuring days in a row before you must take a downtime day - thus preventing novas with frequent rests.

That is EXACTLY (almost) how my homebrewed game works. I made a topic about it. Somewhere.

Basically a fighter has rolled HD in town and Max HP on the field. The wizard gets bonus spells on the field and none in town.

Dark Mistress · Aug 3, 2012

The two of you using a bicycle to have your discussion. Well learning to ride a bike is a bad example. A better example would be learning how to create a web page. Which can be done a few ways.
1) Go to school and be taught.
2) Have someone teach you personally.
3) Learn on your own by trial and error.

First one takes money and someone that knows how to already do it, second one is free likely but still takes someone that knows how, the final one is free and doesn't take anyone that knows how to do it. Yeah I know there is no schools for GMing, but it is a lot closer than the learning to ride a bike metaphor.

Mustrum_Ridcully · Aug 3, 2012

Well, 3E already tried the daily XP budget with the statement that 4 EL=PL encounters would be doable in one day.

Unfortunately, in truth the CR system was all over the place - monsters were sometimes more powerful and sometimes less powerful than their CR implied, and they did not account for their magic item creation rules in determining how much a EL = PL encounter would really cost the party.

There were probably a lot of factors it failed to consider. But I think one factor that this system doesn't seem to consider is that n monsters in a row area easier to manage then n monsters at once, for n > 1. Maybe that's even intentional, they are trying to promote "smart play" where players force the enemies to split up. Except.. It's not really necessary - this tactic works in 4E as well - if you have an encounter with 8 monsters, and you manage to split them up, the encounter will be easier than when the enemies all engage at once. Even if you have no chance of recovering encounter or daily powers, just due to the way action economy works.

FireLance · Aug 4, 2012

Mustrum_Ridcully said:
Well, 3E already tried the daily XP budget with the statement that 4 EL=PL encounters would be doable in one day.

Unfortunately, in truth the CR system was all over the place - monsters were sometimes more powerful and sometimes less powerful than their CR implied, and they did not account for their magic item creation rules in determining how much a EL = PL encounter would really cost the party.

The problem with CR was that it was too process-based. Add a template or class levels, increase the CR by a fixed amount. This is a quick, but not always accurate, way of determining the challenge of a monster.

The 4e system of keeping the key monster statistics (attack bonus, damage, defenses) within a narrow band determined by level is better for ensuring that challenge correlates quite highly with level, but has the downside of reducing monster variability.

The ideal system is probably to create monsters organically (as per 3e) and then use some table (like 4e) to determine what level its key statistics are (e.g. attacks like a 6th-level monster, deals damage like a 5th-level monster, has the defenses of a 7th-level monster) and then use DM judgement or apply a formula to come up with some overall measure of challenge, but this means more work for the DM.

Pros and cons, eh? It's like: monster variability, balance and ease of DMing - pick two.

Crazy Jerome · Aug 4, 2012

Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but I somewhat took the spirit of "adventure day" budgeting to mean something like this:

The DM makes an adventure. Whether he starts off with 1,000 XP and parses it out into the idea, or starts with the idea and ends up with 1,000 XP, it doesn't matter once it hits the table.

Assuming this is a one day adventure, per budget, then the DM will use some other guidelines to determine how to split those XP up. He could do this in several ways:

Use a guideline that basically turns them into encounter budgeting (e.g. two 200 XP encounters and two 300 XP encounters).
Just stick them where he wants, then eyeball that and/or check that previous guideline for some idea of whether that will be something the party can handle it or not.
Start the monsters in some reasonably split up manner, but have them react to the party, and let the chips fall where they may.

That last one is to me the more interesting one. It basically says, "If the party succeeds in this adventure, they get 1,000 XP. Doesn't matter how the monsters are arranged for XP purposes." That is, if the party is able to divide and conquer, they'll get that 1,000 XP easier. If they don't at all, they'll have to get really lucky or clever some other way to get even that (or survive). Most parties will be somewhere in the middle, and this will average out to about 1,000 XP.

So being clever or stupid doesn't get you more or less XP. It means the XP you get is with less or more risk. This could cause, in some groups, really nitpicky boring play, or fatally reckless play. OTOH, when played in the proper spirit, it should allow a group to pick the amount of risk versus excitement they want.

Mercule · Aug 4, 2012

thecasualoblivion said:
My big issue with the adventuring day is being able to shorten it for plot/story reasons and not have balance fall apart. As far as I'm concerned, "balanced as long as you have X experience points worth of challenges between rests" isn't really balance at all.

Agreed. I never (and I mean never) considered the length of the adventuring day prior to 3e. I don't know exactly why, but it wasn't a factor.

Whatever 3e broke needs to be fixed in 5e. Personally, I think adding back things like having haste age the recipient may be the answer. But, a lot of folks get anxious when spells have drawbacks like that.

DerekSTheRed · Aug 4, 2012

I like what I'm hearing on this, but that's probably because it fits my DMing style. I learned to DM mostly through 3E and this seems pretty close to the CR system I'm used to. I stopped DMing 3E and SWSE because I got tired of stating monsters as PCs just so they could die in less than a minute. I'm happy that I don't have to do that but still have the option to do that for a BBEG and/or recurring character.

The N monsters in N encounters versus N monsters in 1 encounter issue is interesting but not something I see as likely to be a factor. Most monsters are smart enough to retreat or call for help if they are out numbered. I suppose a DM could impose an XP penalty if the fight was too easy or an XP bonus if the fight was too hard. However, I don't like punishing the PCs for coming up with good tactics like divide and conquer. I would rather encourage the PCs to use smart tactics and reward them with easier XP.

Li Shenron · Aug 4, 2012

DerekSTheRed said:
I stopped DMing 3E and SWSE because I got tired of stating monsters as PCs just so they could die in less than a minute.

You could have just stopped stating monsters as PCs

GX.Sigma · Aug 4, 2012

I like the XP budget system, even though I really have no idea how it could be used to create a balanced adventure. I guess for something like the Caves of Chaos, you'd put one day's worth of XP in each cave (even though that's clearly not what they did); or for a little dungeon, one day's worth of XP on each level. But what about something like the Temple of Elemental Evil, or any big dungeon... or wilderness adventure?

D&D Next Q&A

Ratskinner

Adventurer

Minigiant

Legend

Dark Mistress

First Post

Mustrum_Ridcully

Hero

FireLance

Legend

Crazy Jerome

First Post

Mercule

Adventurer

DerekSTheRed

Explorer

Li Shenron

Legend

GX.Sigma

Adventurer

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