D&D 5E DMG's definition of "Deadly" is much less deadly than mine: Data Aggregation?

I just ran a party of six 2nd level PCs thru a fight with three carrion crawlers. No magic items.

PCs had one minor fight before this one that day (with troglodytes in sunlight). They had to blow a lot of spell and class feature resources. One PC was paralyzed (and got better). One PC dropped (and was healed up).

In short, they stomped the crawlers.

According to the DMG this was a "deadly" fight. In play it was more like "hard."

So... from your experience with 5e what does it take to have an ACTUALLY DEADLY fight?

I'm gathering data for myself (and anyone who wants to add theirs) on a Google Spreadsheet. You need to be logged into GoogleDocs to enter data, but once you are all you need is this link:

Google Spreadsheet for Data Collection: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AAIBDemfxoX8DTxAg2q7AzkZVZxwwONvhsxQ2eHTxXY/edit?usp=sharing

[SBLOCK=How do you expect this to be used, Quickleaf?]
Simple answer: I expect this to be used as a tool to help inform my encounter creation (whether prepped or impromptu) as a 5e DM moreso than the DMG encounter difficulty guidelines. Potentially it could be helpful for others too, hence why I'm sharing.[/SBLOCK]

[SBLOCK=Is "actual difficulty in play" the DM's retroactive expectation of the probabilities, or is it outcome?]
I'd say it's more a retrospective of how everything panned out. Often this is from the DM's perspective, but just as often it can come from talking with your players about it after the game.

"ACTUAL" encounter difficulty is purely based on perception. It trusts DMs and players to use their good judgment, camaraderie, and communication skills to arrive at an accurate assessment of how a given fight went.

And, for the record, there are going to be some fights which so entirely break the mold that they're not useful for data collection purposes. And that's totally cool. Run those weird wild organic fights. For my part, I'll be restricting recording to more "standard fights" that I feel confident in my/our difficulty assessment of.[/SBLOCK]

[SBLOCK=Aren't you a tyrant DM who wants to slaughter your PCs with Deadly encounters, Quickleaf?]
Sure, aren't we all?

Seriously, I don't ask because I'm some tyrant who wants to slaughter PCs. I ask because sometimes their foolhardy actions call for a truly DEADLY encounter, while sometimes the narrative/foreshadowing calls for a truly DEADLY encounter. To not follow thru on that "promise" is IMHO to do a disservice to the players by invalidating their choices just as much as if I'd foreshadowed an amazing dragon's hoard and there only be a sizable pouch/chest of gold at the end.[/SBLOCK]

[SBLOCK=But Quickleaf, it dependsss...]
No guano, Sherlock.

And some encounters are pitched fights, some aren't fights at all, and sometimes the halfling just goes bat guano crazy.

The existence of variables, outside-the-box scenarios, and the "art" of encounter design doesn't invalidate the utility of a metric for general difficulty estimating.[/SBLOCK]

About 20% above the "deadly" number.

Also, you didn't note how the dice luck went for that encounter. Did the players pop a number of good rolls? Did the crawlers strike out when at bat more than average? Dice luck can be very swingy, as can party composition.

Cleric cast bless and that tipped things in the PCs favor. But otherwise dice rolls were mostly balanced.

Thanks for the +20% estimate [MENTION=158]Henry[/MENTION].

Is the +20% across the board for all encounter difficulties, or just deadly ones?

Depends on the party balance and how many folks. What is a stomp for one, may be durn near a TPK for others.

Also, remember, the CR is based on a party of 4 PCs if I read correctly. So 6 PCs would be a bit easier than deadly.

And, no. You are no tyrant. The days of Gygax and no save death modules may be over, but if your PCs don't have some fear why play? A game with no chance of failure would be a mastabatory power fantasy at best, boring at worst. You are no Tyrant. The Tyrant DM does not just kill his party, but imposes 50 tons of senseless deals with only ego. HIS carrion crawlers would be vampiric and have INT 30 and gods. Said DM is eventually without a game more than he is in one or permanently relegated to player for everyone's sanity.

Green1 said:

Depends on the party balance and how many folks. What is a stomp for one, may be durn near a TPK for others.

Also, remember, the CR is based on a party of 4 PCs if I read correctly. So 6 PCs would be a bit easier than deadly.

Click to expand...

Yes, yes, I know that. The DMG has guidelines for adjusting the approximate encounter difficulty based on party size, which I followed.

For your review, I've included a screenshot of the encounter from Kobold Fight Club.

What I'm saying is my experience (not limited to my carrion crawler example, but epitomized by it) is that "Deadly" according to the DMG doesn't feel deadly in play. Tense, taxing, hard? Yes. Possibly deadly if the PCs were already wounded and resource-depleted? Yes. Scary deadly even at full resources/hp? Absolutely No.

So I'm curious about others who've noticed this trend and what their approach is to deal with it?

I think it all depends on how you play the monsters. It I use tactics I can make a "hard" encounter deadly

I think it depends partly on how minmaxed your group is. But for my group, which i would say is fairly minmaxed, I use double deadly XP for a proper hard fight.

Yep, I've been DMing for a long time, and I'm conversant with monster tactics.

I know people love to play the "it depends" card when it comes questions about encounter difficulties, but I would love to hear more anecdotes like Henry's from experienced DMs who've hard-earned them thru actual play.

No offense to the theorists among us, but I'm interested in actual examples that can help me establish a more accurate encounter difficulty estimation than I'm getting from the DMG.

Psikerlord# said:

I think it depends partly on how minmaxed your group is. But for my group, which i would say is fairly minmaxed, I use double deadly XP for a proper hard fight.

Click to expand...

Party size and level?

You're far from alone.

There are plenty of us whose players can regularly win fights that are not only DMG-deadly, but double-deadly and triple-deadly too.

Note: this doesn't make one player better than another. It just means things are working as they should, meaning that if you focus on something, you become good at that something. And just as some players focus on role-playing, some players focus on combat optimization. If all players consistently only make choices calculated to yield more combat power (more damage output, more HP/AC/Save defenses and so on) this has a real effect on that party, compared to a party merely taking the default or "average" choices.

There's nothing weird or strange about one party doing TWICE the damage of another party or even more... EACH combat round, EVERY combat round. This is not a bug in the system, it just shows how wonderfully diverse characters you can roll up!

---

Then it's a matter of play style too. Whether the DM likes attrition based combats (having 8 encounters a day) or focuses on the fights that are really challenging has a huge effect on how much the PCs dare to hold back.

Some groups play sandboxes or hexcrawls. Here the PCs have a huge say in when to stop for the day. This equals a HUGE boost in combat potential, compared to games where the DM (or her adventure) sets limits on where and when resting is possible.

So again, whether your group find Deadly encounters deadly or merely like a warm-up pass at the gym, isn't about "playing it right". It's just... different.

Not to speak about the players themselves. Some players just phone it in, treating their game as just a relaxing night hanging out with your friends. Other players spend all their waking hours obsessing over every single +1 bonus there is.

Other players are simply young. Or inexperienced. Or both.

---

That said, I must confess I believe WotC has consistently made a decision to cater to the lowest denominator. (Which is probably a smart business decision; making us feel smart of we can plow through Deadly encounters like nothing... )