D&D 5E Encounter Building: Revised XP Threshold by Character Level Table

MostlyDm said:

It's a fascinating idea, as usual.

A few minor thoughts. Your current metric assumes as an outcome "50% of at least one survivor." If that's the outcome assumption you stick with, you should put that in huge bold letters. I suspect that this outcome is significantly more extreme, and assumes a much harder base game, than most people will be expecting. Remember, the supposed definition of DMG "Deadly" is that there's a chance of some player death. I'm not specifically complaining or anything, just observing that your play assumptions may diverge significantly from the people that want to use your tool.

Which kind of segues into my next comment. I think you'll need to very explicitly communicate exactly what assumptions your simulations make about party tactics. For example, you say "four 15th level Champions played straightforwardly" ... but what does that mean, exactly? Does it mean that they engage in a mix of melee and ranged and make regular attacks? Does it assume they grapple, shove, and gang-smash enemies? Do they use Dodge?

My first assumption for the word "straightforwardly" would be that they make nothing but regular attack rolls, but you often describe other tactical approaches with such an offhanded/casual tone that I sometimes wonder if you assume nearly every table is using similar tactics. So, again, something that probably needs to be more fully spelled out.

Just in case there's any confusion, none of this is meant as a slight. I have massive respect and admiration for you, and I think this is an awesome endeavor you are pursuing. I wish you nothing but success.

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To be clear, I'm not strongly committed to the "50% chance of at least one survivor" metric. I'm actually very interested in suggestions for what metrics would be more valuable than that. When you're creating an adventure, and you're planning to pitch it to N adventurers of level M, what metric are you using internally to evaluate afterwards whether or not you made it the right difficulty? What does an "adventure for 4-5 characters of levels 10-12" mean to you?

Does it mean that characters within that level range should be close to zero HP/spell points/action surges/superiority dice/etc. by the end of the adventure? Does it mean that they should have a 99% chance of all surviving? Something else?

Don't worry, I will be very, very up-front about party tactics. "Played straightforwardly" in this case means, if you go and look at the Champions in question, you'll see that their AI is basically, "If an enemy is in range, attack the nearest enemy. Otherwise, Dash towards the nearest enemy." If you wanted to tweak the AI to e.g. "attack the lowest-HP enemy" instead of "nearest enemy" I would want you to be able to do so, and then re-run your metric in against those Champions. The whole point of machine learning is that figuring the question you want to ask, and the form you want the answer in, is at least 50% of the work--then you let the computer and the programmer do the other 50%.

You raise the idea of more-complicated tactics, and that is also something I'm chewing on: monsters can have more-sophisticated tactics, but then, so can PCs. Pieter Spronck has done some interesting work with adaptive game AI, where you first devise/evolve the cleverest set of rules for the monster AI (he used Neverwinter Nights for his platform actually), and then you dumb it down to start, and unlock more sophisticated rules when the game needs to become more difficult. This is different from the usual approach to AI, which is to cheat more and more--in D&D terms it's the difference between turning 6 goblins fighting simply into 6 goblins using sophisticated hit-and-run tactics including strategic feints designed to defeat PCs in detail (same power, more sophisticated AI), or turning 6 goblins into 6 Drow Elite Warriors (more power). But if you don't have some constant metric like the Champion metric, then how can you communicate the intended difficulty to anyone? To put it in different terms, is it useful to say that "Team XYZ of PCs only has three 11th level PCs, but they're able to tackle adventures balanced for six 15th level Champions!"?

If you're familiar with linear algebra, the idea of tweaking the baseline (smarter Champions) may remind you a little bit of choosing a new coordinate axis. Nobody really cares about the details of which coordinate axes you choose, and you can always transform one into another, but you at least need to choose one set to start off with, and it's good if that set is really simple, e.g. the x, y, z normal vectors. Same deal with Champions, or maybe "one of each class where wizard just blasts and cleric just heals" or something. You want your baseline to be something that makes it easy for people to comprehend how their group differs from that baseline. A baseline with sophisticated tactics would be very bad unless those sophisticated tactics were also ubiquitous in real life gameplay. (That's a good argument for including a Fireball-chucking wizard in the baseline BTW, since I think most groups would be taken aback if you didn't Fireball an orc horde or a stirge swarm.)

Thanks for the input! I'd like to continue picking your brains on this subject if I may, so don't be shy about sharing your thoughts. (We might want to split off onto a separate thread at some point of course if it seems off-topic for this one.)

MostlyDm said:

Fair enough! Perhaps I should have read your posts on the matter more closely.

So is the consensus that, for novice DMs running games for novice players, "Deadly" encounters are still woefully non-threatening and never/rarely result in character deaths?

On first blush I just find myself feeling skeptical. How is this data gathered, exactly? I imagine most self-reporting, polling, conventions etc. all have the same fundamental selection bias: Most people who are so interested in D&D that they follow this stuff are probably not the DMs the DMG should really be aimed at.

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I have one group of players who isn't very tactical at all, although they are wildly creative (e.g. solo monk using Stunning Fist + Bag of Devouring to kill a huge CR 12 Chain Wyrm that the monk in question probably could not have survived otherwise; they also like manipulating falling damage). Despite that, they have often survived Deadly x3 to x6 fights using straightforward tactics: "hit it until it stops moving; Dodge if the enemy is focusing fire on you". (They've survived other fights in the Deadly x10-20 neighborhood but there was some DM collusion there, and roleplaying considerations too, e.g. providing NPC backup, preventing all of the enemy troops from hitting the players en masse, and morale failures making some troops run away.)

I have some ways to risk TPKs without risking the campaign's fun (in some campaigns, players have a karmic "undo button" they can use to rewind from disaster) so I've been able to calibrate more closely than I think many DMs do what constitutes an actual TPK in the works and what only looks like one but isn't. Surprisingly often, it may look and feel like the players are 80% of the way to TPK but it's actually only 50%, because that's when they start pulling out the one-shot magic items the DM has forgotten about, or the one big expensive power they were saving, or getting really creative.

Despite all that, I'm not prepared to say that the DMG guidelines are wrong. The reason, simply, is that the DMG guidelines are also incredibly vague. "Deadly" means there's a chance one or more PCs could die. If one or more PCs don't die, does that mean it wasn't Deadly? I don't think so. I think it just means that death was on the line somehow, or at least that the players felt death was on the line. (I think that also implies that any combat that isn't deadly is implicitly either "boring" or has some kind of non-deadly-for-the-PCs stakes tied up in it, e.g. social prestige, or saving the lives of civilians before the monsters can kill them, a la X-COM Terror missions.)

(And before [MENTION=6788736]Flamestrike[/MENTION] jumps in here to talk about the length of the adventuring day, I'll point out that some of those Deadly x3 or x4 fights have occurred after multiple other Deadly x1 fights on the same day, with or without a short rest in between, and that sometimes the Deadly x3-4 fight alone consumes more than 100% of the whole day's adventuring budget. And yet the PCs have a pretty fair shot at winning even if they don't do anything sophisticated. So no, this has nothing to do with needing "6-8 Medium combats per adventuring day".)

But (1) that's still just anecdotal evidence, and (2) as I said, I'm not at all sure whether what I'm seeing contradicts the DMG or not, because I'm not sure what the DMG is predicting.

It's exactly the desire to eliminate ambiguity and anecdotal evidence that drives my interest in a machine-learned difficulty metric for 5E.

Hemlock said:

I have one group of players who isn't very tactical at all, although they are wildly creative (e.g. solo monk using Stunning Fist + Bag of Devouring to kill a huge CR 12 Chain Wyrm that the monk in question probably could not have survived otherwise; they also like manipulating falling damage). Despite that, they have often survived Deadly x3 to x6 fights using straightforward tactics: "hit it until it stops moving; Dodge if the enemy is focusing fire on you". (They've survived other fights in the Deadly x10-20 neighborhood but there was some DM collusion there, and roleplaying considerations too, e.g. providing NPC backup, preventing all of the enemy troops from hitting the players en masse, and morale failures making some troops run away.)

I have some ways to risk TPKs without risking the campaign's fun (in some campaigns, players have a karmic "undo button" they can use to rewind from disaster) so I've been able to calibrate more closely than I think many DMs do what constitutes an actual TPK in the works and what only looks like one but isn't. Surprisingly often, it may look and feel like the players are 80% of the way to TPK but it's actually only 50%, because that's when they start pulling out the one-shot magic items the DM has forgotten about, or the one big expensive power they were saving, or getting really creative.

Despite all that, I'm not prepared to say that the DMG guidelines are wrong. The reason, simply, is that the DMG guidelines are also incredibly vague. "Deadly" means there's a chance one or more PCs could die. If one or more PCs don't die, does that mean it wasn't Deadly? I don't think so. I think it just means that death was on the line somehow, or at least that the players felt death was on the line. (I think that also implies that any combat that isn't deadly is implicitly either "boring" or has some kind of non-deadly-for-the-PCs stakes tied up in it, e.g. social prestige, or saving the lives of civilians before the monsters can kill them, a la X-COM Terror missions.)

(And before [MENTION=6788736]Flamestrike[/MENTION] jumps in here to talk about the length of the adventuring day, I'll point out that some of those Deadly x3 or x4 fights have occurred after multiple other Deadly x1 fights on the same day, with or without a short rest in between, and that sometimes the Deadly x3-4 fight alone consumes more than 100% of the whole day's adventuring budget. And yet the PCs have a pretty fair shot at winning even if they don't do anything sophisticated. So no, this has nothing to do with needing "6-8 Medium combats per adventuring day".)

But (1) that's still just anecdotal evidence, and (2) as I said, I'm not at all sure whether what I'm seeing contradicts the DMG or not, because I'm not sure what the DMG is predicting.

It's exactly the desire to eliminate ambiguity and anecdotal evidence that drives my interest in a machine-learned difficulty metric for 5E.

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Hemlock, thank you for the input. That is a lot to chew on over the last 2 posts. Unfortunately I need to get some work done so I will probably have to wait until tonight (in 12-16 hours) before I can respond. Thank you!

dave2008 said:

Yes, that makes sense - I find myself in a similar situation currently. That is what I mean by play style. From my perspective that is when discuss in the guidelines about using easy vs. medium vs. hard vs. deadly encounters. The casual gamers may want to stick to easy and medium, while the competitive gamers might use mostly hard and deadly encounters.

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It's not just competitiveness that drives this difference. It also depends on the degree to which they tend to identify with PCs and therefore to worry about death. When you have a chance to draw from a Deck of Many Things or to push a big red button marked, "If You Press This You Will Die," are you thinking more of your desires as a player to find out what will happen, or of your character's desires to break the family curse/live a long and comfortable life/free the village/whatever? One of these leads to much more casual risk-taking than the other, and probably also to less stress.

(A separate dimension is the degree to which they believe the DM and/or whatever Powers rule the game world would actually permit bad things to happen to them. Atheists/foxholes, Marx/religion/opiate, etc.)

Hemlock said:

To be clear, I'm not strongly committed to the "50% chance of at least one survivor" metric. I'm actually very interested in suggestions for what metrics would be more valuable than that. When you're creating an adventure, and you're planning to pitch it to N adventurers of level M, what metric are you using internally to evaluate afterwards whether or not you made it the right difficulty? What does an "adventure for 4-5 characters of levels 10-12" mean to you?

Does it mean that characters within that level range should be close to zero HP/spell points/action surges/superiority dice/etc. by the end of the adventure? Does it mean that they should have a 99% chance of all surviving? Something else?

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Yeah, this is an important question to answer. I suspect if you ask 5 DMs this question, though, you will get 6 answers. Certainly, if you ask me 5 times, I might give you a different answer each time.

I hope you don't mind a few long-winded examples:

Example A
For the most part, I actually tend towards option #2 in the dichotomy I proposed upthread. My favorite method with new players is to warm the party up with a freebie encounter, or sometimes freebie plot arc, where I calibrate everything to the party and yet also illustrate that the world is much more dangerous than that.

A year ago I began running a game for my wife and one of her coworkers, first time playing 5e for both of them, and that’s how I did it for them. First adventure was a heist to steal a magic ring from a powerful-ish wizard (juiced up Mage, CR 7 or 8 ish). He had some low level apprentices and zombie minions, some glyphs of warding, but nothing overwhelming for a level 1 trio (2 PCs plus a DM cleric to keep them alive).

Their goal was to gather intel to make sure he was definitely not going to be present when they hit the place. They were extremely thorough in their recon, and it worked. They also discovered some stuff is beyond their abilities, when they tried to explore his inner sanctum and found a Helmed Horror at the top of the stairs in tight quarters. They hightailed it out, and the Horror had instructions not to care about the apprentices or the sundry items in the apprentice labs. If they’d pushed the Horror, they would have died, either to it or to the pair of spell glyphs it knew to trigger if it was being overwhelmed (it was of course immune to both glyphs.) They figured out that this was not the best course of action, and they basically got away clean. Mostly clean.

That adventure was largely designed for lowbie characters to cut their teeth.

Other than that.... It’s just a world full of stuff. Some stuff is easy, like a raiding tribe of 40 kobolds and a troll that live in the swampy southern edge of the city. Some stuff is harder, like the friendly town that’s actually a cult to Far-Realm influenced demons. Some stuff is really hard, like the black dragon and his minions in the swamp, or the shadow copper dragon in the foothills (hates the black dragon, who trapped him in the plane of shadow centuries ago), or the Lich that rules the main city the campaign takes place in.

For this game... I think a champions metric could be useful just as a baseline for my own edification, but it’s not necessary. As it stands, stuff exists, and they go where they want, and hopefully they don’t run afoul of something that will squash them. With the champions metric, I could, for example, flag various locations in my notes with “Champions 4.8” and “Champions 4.13” and stuff. I might then use those flags to be a little more blatant with telegraphing… but maybe not. I enjoy keeping things fairly organic, and telegraph things that make sense. I’m not too worried about killing them. It’s a tough world.

Since the metric here would just be for my own edification, it wouldn’t make a huge difference whether the numbers assumed 50% chance of 1 survivor or 75% of 3 out of 4 survivors or anything in between. As long as I knew what it meant, it would be meaningful for informational purposes. I wouldn’t be using it for it’s primary purpose of calibrating encounters, though.

Example B
When I ran a game for my oldest nephew's birthday party, the game was specifically requested as an "old school" dungeon crawl that would likely result in multiple TPKs.

I made about 25 pregen characters that ranged from 1st to 5th level (with the lower level characters having more optimized stats, feats, and gear; and the high level characters having in many cases terrible important stats, e.g. a sickly albino level 5 rogue with 5 CON or an old out-of-retirement level 5 fighter with 10 or 11 in STR/DEX/CON. Level 3 characters tended to be more "Average".) The plan was for them to pick a group, run through the dungeon, and keep picking new pregens as they got picked off.

I designed the first couple of encounters to be survivable, to warm them up, but the dungeon overall is probably not. Dozens of goblins and hobgoblins in entrenched positions. Giant spiders in a great ambush spot. Rust monsters to jack up their gear. A shortcut passage guarded by a spellcasting Wraith, four specters, and a dozen zombies in tight quarters. Lots of traps everywhere. Stone Golem as immovable obstacle. One chamber will have a couple of beholders that have been chained up and reduced to 4 random eyestalks apiece. The “endpoint” includes an Aboleth, Chuuls, and cultists.

Unfortunately, the game was delayed, so they really only went through a handful of "warm-up" encounters, with the nastiest being a Giant Constrictor Snake ambushing a lone guy in waist-deep water, and the party being set upon by dozens of stirges. They also played smarter than I expected, in that they thought to buy cheap hirelings on their very first excursion. So far they've lost just the hirelings, but when we called a halt they were about to be ambushed in a dead-end by a pack of 12 ghouls that they sort of knew were on their tail and didn't do much about. I'm currently suspecting a TPK when we meet up again, but who knows.

Even if they succeed in the dungeon crawl, the guy who hired them is actually a Mind Flayer Arcanist with Githyanki bodyguards and dozens of slaves. He might kill them when they return to him for their reward.

So this is a case where I specifically calibrated the dungeon to exceed the general capabilities of the party. A metric that assumes a 50% chance of having a single survivor sounds kind of awesome, actually… makes it more fun if one guy limps back to the camp to tell tales of what happened to the other adventurers about to make an attempt.

Example C
I’m now putting together a game for my youngest nephew and some of his friends. He is not too interested in TPKs and completely de-leveled dangerous worlds. He wants a bit more of a defined story, with some reasonably appropriate challenges. None of the players are very experienced with D&D.

So I’m going to be handling things more delicately. I’ll be throwing small groups of weak monsters at them, using bad tactics, and slowly scaling up as I see how they handle stuff.

This is a game where your tool sounds like it would be massively useful. I’d probably be most helped if the metric was closer to the DMG “Deadly” version, aka “a chance someone will die.”

Personally, it’s been a while since I ran a game with kid gloves. So the idea of having a useful tool actually sounds kind of nice.

I do think this seems to reinforce my previous assumption that casual/easy/beer & pretzels games are the primary use case for these kinds of tools.

Hemlock said:

Don't worry, I will be very, very up-front about party tactics. "Played straightforwardly" in this case means, if you go and look at the Champions in question, you'll see that their AI is basically, "If an enemy is in range, attack the nearest enemy. Otherwise, Dash towards the nearest enemy." If you wanted to tweak the AI to e.g. "attack the lowest-HP enemy" instead of "nearest enemy" I would want you to be able to do so, and then re-run your metric in against those Champions. The whole point of machine learning is that figuring the question you want to ask, and the form you want the answer in, is at least 50% of the work--then you let the computer and the programmer do the other 50%.

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Perfect.

Hemlock said:

You raise the idea of more-complicated tactics, and that is also something I'm chewing on: monsters can have more-sophisticated tactics, but then, so can PCs. Pieter Spronck has done some interesting work with adaptive game AI, where you first devise/evolve the cleverest set of rules for the monster AI (he used Neverwinter Nights for his platform actually), and then you dumb it down to start, and unlock more sophisticated rules when the game needs to become more difficult. This is different from the usual approach to AI, which is to cheat more and more--in D&D terms it's the difference between turning 6 goblins fighting simply into 6 goblins using sophisticated hit-and-run tactics including strategic feints designed to defeat PCs in detail (same power, more sophisticated AI), or turning 6 goblins into 6 Drow Elite Warriors (more power). But if you don't have some constant metric like the Champion metric, then how can you communicate the intended difficulty to anyone? To put it in different terms, is it useful to say that "Team XYZ of PCs only has three 11th level PCs, but they're able to tackle adventures balanced for six 15th level Champions!"?

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Yeah, I do think something like the Champion metric has a lot of value to your goal. It’s easy to envision four champions essentially just auto-attacking, and what kind of power that is, and how to do better than that. It’s a good floor.

Hemlock said:

If you're familiar with linear algebra, the idea of tweaking the baseline (smarter Champions) may remind you a little bit of choosing a new coordinate axis. Nobody really cares about the details of which coordinate axes you choose, and you can always transform one into another, but you at least need to choose one set to start off with, and it's good if that set is really simple, e.g. the x, y, z normal vectors. Same deal with Champions, or maybe "one of each class where wizard just blasts and cleric just heals" or something. You want your baseline to be something that makes it easy for people to comprehend how their group differs from that baseline. A baseline with sophisticated tactics would be very bad unless those sophisticated tactics were also ubiquitous in real life gameplay. (That's a good argument for including a Fireball-chucking wizard in the baseline BTW, since I think most groups would be taken aback if you didn't Fireball an orc horde or a stirge swarm.)

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I can see that a balanced party might be a better floor, if you can program it effectively and have it run just as straightforwardly.

But I don’t think using Champions as a floor is a bad idea, per se. Still useful for informational purposes.

Hemlock said:

Thanks for the input! I'd like to continue picking your brains on this subject if I may, so don't be shy about sharing your thoughts. (We might want to split off onto a separate thread at some point of course if it seems off-topic for this one.)

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Sure!

If Dave dislikes this long post cluttering his thread he can say so, happy to move elsewhere.

MostlyDm said:

If Dave dislikes this long post cluttering his thread he can say so, happy to move elsewhere.

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No, please continue - I'm enjoying it from a distance

Hemlock said:

I have one group of players who isn't very tactical at all, although they are wildly creative (e.g. solo monk using Stunning Fist + Bag of Devouring to kill a huge CR 12 Chain Wyrm that the monk in question probably could not have survived otherwise; they also like manipulating falling damage). Despite that, they have often survived Deadly x3 to x6 fights using straightforward tactics: "hit it until it stops moving; Dodge if the enemy is focusing fire on you". (They've survived other fights in the Deadly x10-20 neighborhood but there was some DM collusion there, and roleplaying considerations too, e.g. providing NPC backup, preventing all of the enemy troops from hitting the players en masse, and morale failures making some troops run away.)

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Hemlock said:

I have some ways to risk TPKs without risking the campaign's fun (in some campaigns, players have a karmic "undo button" they can use to rewind from disaster) so I've been able to calibrate more closely than I think many DMs do what constitutes an actual TPK in the works and what only looks like one but isn't. Surprisingly often, it may look and feel like the players are 80% of the way to TPK but it's actually only 50%, because that's when they start pulling out the one-shot magic items the DM has forgotten about, or the one big expensive power they were saving, or getting really creative.

Despite all that, I'm not prepared to say that the DMG guidelines are wrong. The reason, simply, is that the DMG guidelines are also incredibly vague. "Deadly" means there's a chance one or more PCs could die. If one or more PCs don't die, does that mean it wasn't Deadly? I don't think so. I think it just means that death was on the line somehow, or at least that the players felt death was on the line. (I think that also implies that any combat that isn't deadly is implicitly either "boring" or has some kind of non-deadly-for-the-PCs stakes tied up in it, e.g. social prestige, or saving the lives of civilians before the monsters can kill them, a la X-COM Terror missions.)

(And before @Flamestrike jumps in here to talk about the length of the adventuring day, I'll point out that some of those Deadly x3 or x4 fights have occurred after multiple other Deadly x1 fights on the same day, with or without a short rest in between, and that sometimes the Deadly x3-4 fight alone consumes more than 100% of the whole day's adventuring budget. And yet the PCs have a pretty fair shot at winning even if they don't do anything sophisticated. So no, this has nothing to do with needing "6-8 Medium combats per adventuring day".)

But (1) that's still just anecdotal evidence, and (2) as I said, I'm not at all sure whether what I'm seeing contradicts the DMG or not, because I'm not sure what the DMG is predicting.

It's exactly the desire to eliminate ambiguity and anecdotal evidence that drives my interest in a machine-learned difficulty metric for 5E.

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It's anecdotal, but interesting.

I haven’t really paid much attention to XP budgets so far in my time running 5e. But, considering it now, I think my experiences probably match up.

I think even my low-level intro adventure in my Example A above exceeded the supposed adventuring budget by a lot. Going by memory, it was something like 5 zombies, lots of crawling claws, a thug and up to 5 more thugs (when the crawling claws attached to crippled prisoners in the experimentation labs, the prisoner was taken over and became a hostile thug)... and then halfway through the battle followed up with 6 skeletons in formation and 5 Acolytes and a Priest (with Wizard spells instead of cleric).

From SRD XP values that’s something like 1,800 XP total, not counting force multipliers. I think they had just hit level 2 due to XP from their time doing recon. I’m away from book, but I think 1800+force multipliers is a bit above the Deadly threshold for Level 2.

I think you’re absolutely right that “chance someone could die” is kind of the minimum requirement for a fight to be interesting. I think eliminating that ambiguity is a laudable goal.

dave2008 said:

Yes, that makes sense - I find myself in a similar situation currently. That is what I mean by play style. From my perspective that is when discuss in the guidelines about using easy vs. medium vs. hard vs. deadly encounters. The casual gamers may want to stick to easy and medium, while the competitive gamers might use mostly hard and deadly encounters.

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Interesting thought. Good idea, in principle, but… let me tell you a weird, seemingly unrelated story.

A former friend of mine played Diablo 3 intensely when it first released. He was among the first crop of people to beat it on the hardest difficulty, and played seriously on hardcore mode with a popular twitch streamer for a while.

He complained at one point that Blizzard kept nerfing the difficulty of the game due to player complaints. Time and again, they reduced the difficulty… even on the hardest setting. To the point that he essentially lost interest in the game and stopped playing.

His complaint was not that they made the game easier, per se. It was that they reduced the difficulty even of the hardest setting. He had no problem, for example, if they reduced the difficulty of Normal to cater to players that did not want the hardest experience.

But people didn’t want to play on Normal. They wanted to play on Hellfire or whatever it’s called. They wanted to feel like they had beaten the game on the hardest difficulty. It’s a psychological thing. So Blizzard made the hardest level easier, and they beat it, and they were happy.

Personally, I’m kinda with my friend here. And with you. But be aware, there will likely be people who like the idea that they are running “Deadly” encounters… but perhaps don’t like the reality of a truly deadly encounter.

To bring it closer to D&D, consider the player (or DM) that wants a game to be difficult and epic and have monsters scary… but also want to play in a game where players get artifact level items, bonus feats, generous concentration rules, etc. This actually reminds me of a rant I went on when talking to a friend yesterday about Story and Railroading in D&D, but that’s even more of a tangent so I will leave that for another day.

Basically, I’m just thinking… If you (or Hemlock) calibrate things more accurately, it’s possible you will have as many detractors as you do proponents, after people TPK their parties because they don’t want to think of themselves as casual or novice players.

Just a random thought, really. Not meant to deter you.

MostlyDm said:

Basically, I’m just thinking… If you (or Hemlock) calibrate things more accurately, it’s possible you will have as many detractors as you do proponents, after people TPK their parties because they don’t want to think of themselves as casual or novice players.

Just a random thought, really. Not meant to deter you.

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Yeah, that's true. It doesn't bother me to have detractors, but it is one of the reasons I want to be very explicit about what my predictions mean, and it's also one of the reasons I like the idea of a low-ball metric like "N Champions played unimaginatively." It's more fun to feel like you're vastly exceeding expectations than barely playing up to par.

MostlyDm said:

Basically, I’m just thinking… If you (or Hemlock) calibrate things more accurately, it’s possible you will have as many detractors as you do proponents, after people TPK their parties because they don’t want to think of themselves as casual or novice players.

Just a random thought, really. Not meant to deter you.

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Yes, there will always be disagreement - and that is ok. There are things in D&D and RPGs in general you simply can't control for and that is a good thing I think.