Recent content by tomedunn

I've enjoyed many of the other channels people have posted over the years, but lately I've been enjoying The Bard's College. It's a small channel with only a handful of videos, but I've found the content to be a good source of inspiration for creating adventures. It also helps that videos tend...

It's not that more actions make you dangerous, it's that monsters in groups live longer than a single monster alone. There are benefits to having more actions, but those are smaller orders effects to what's driving the difficulty change when grouping monsters. This is why referring to this...

Increasing the number of dice rolled (specifically attack rolls and saving throws) will make the results more consistent, not less. You might be more likely to roll a critical hit or a high damage roll, but those make up a smaller portion of the overall result than a single critical hit or high...

As an addendum to that point, my analysis of XP thresholds for PCs shows that martial classes, which typically don't have strong AoE capabilities, tend to have higher XP values for the purposes of encounter balancing. So for a martial heavy party, even if the encounter multiplier is...

The multipliers in the DMG are an approximation that sacrifices accuracy for simplicity. The encounter multiplier should scale smoothly with the number of creatures, as I show in my analysis of the math behind the encounter multiplier. Most likely, while the encounter multiplier for 7...

I do something similar to this within the existing 5e encounter building rules. If I have a strong or weak PC I'll multiply thier XP thresholds by a fixed percent and use that when determining the groups difficulty thresholds. It's worked really well for me, but it does need to be recalculated...

Encounters with a group of mooks and one lieutenant can easily come out looking tougher than they actually are for the reason I mentioned. For example, an encounter with 1 x CR 5 (1,800 XP) and 4 x CR 1 (200 XP) against a party of four level 5 PCs will have an XP total of 2,600 XP and an...

In my experience helping DMs balance encounters, there are two main reasons for why this happens (maybe one might apply to your case). Either the DM applied the encounter XP multiplier incorrectly, by including all monsters when determining it, and thus vastly overestimated the adjusted XP for...

One of the major problems that online encounter calculators run into is that they assume every monsters contributes to the encounter's XP multiplier. If you are only ever using monsters of similar CR then this shouldn't pose much of a problem, but if you try to build an encounter with say a CR 9...

When I took a stab encounter math, I used a matrix approach that worked really well. The basic idea is you start off with the full matrix, each character's individual XP along with all of the cross term XP (the damage each would deal in the time it takes the PCs to defeat each other monster)...

This is very similar to the encounter building system used in Pathfinder 2e, even to the point where monster point values are doubling every two levels. I ran an analysis of the PF2 encounter building rules and showed their baseline monster stats do double in combat power roughly every two...