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

[Uller]

[MENTION=413]Uller[/MENTION]
That style of play seems at odds with the "Adventuring Day Encounter Budget."

It is. And I'm not sure what the answer is but I think if I were running a game that was more wilderness/town oriented with no more than one or two encounters per day or even spread out over many days I'd definitely use much longer time frames for short and long rests (maybe one day and one week and require comfortable conditions such as a town to get a long rest) and make the recovery of HP, HD, spells etc more granular (like 25% of HD recovered per 2 days of rest)...otherwise you have to have these uber encounters all the time and once you start getting above 6th level or so it gets a little ridiculous.

In the example I gave above the "Hard" encounter included an 11th level caster and an Earth elemental plus a survivor of one of the previous battles that the caster polymorphed into a giant ape. Had the party been fully rested, this would have been a push over encounter for them.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Additional datum: I was running some test combats today in a constrained space (cage match style, whole combat in an area less than 120' across, auto-lose if you go outside those bounds) and noticed that encounters are significantly harder under those conditions--it's harder to use good tactics when you are artificially space-constrained. I speculate that those who habitually play on battlemats/grid instead of TotM may consciously or unconsciously constrain their own movement, and if so they'll probably find combats harder than I've estimated in this thread, especially if the DM likes to make creatures overrun/evade PCs (optional DMG rule) and go for the back line.

(I get the impression that Combat as Sport players often feel like it's not kosher to leave whatever area the DM has drawn as the "combat map.")

 

[Quickleaf]

It is. And I'm not sure what the answer is but I think if I were running a game that was more wilderness/town oriented with no more than one or two encounters per day or even spread out over many days I'd definitely use much longer time frames for short and long rests (maybe one day and one week and require comfortable conditions such as a town to get a long rest) and make the recovery of HP, HD, spells etc more granular (like 25% of HD recovered per 2 days of rest)...otherwise you have to have these uber encounters all the time and once you start getting above 6th level or so it gets a little ridiculous.

In the example I gave above the "Hard" encounter included an 11th level caster and an Earth elemental plus a survivor of one of the previous battles that the caster polymorphed into a giant ape. Had the party been fully rested, this would have been a push over encounter for them.

I think the challenge for me is that I'm running a game which transitions from wilderness/town oriented play into hardcore Underdark play. Night Below, if you're familiar with it.

So switching the definition of short/long rests doesn't work because there is going to be a point where the PCs are doing a lot of dungeon-crawling. A good deal of this dungeon-crawling will involve scenarios like you describe with gnarly lairs to tackle. While some of it will be random encounter based with a much less busy adventuring day.

In other words, we're playing a very "versatile" game.

 

[Quickleaf]

Additional datum: I was running some test combats today in a constrained space (cage match style, whole combat in an area less than 120' across, auto-lose if you go outside those bounds) and noticed that encounters are significantly harder under those conditions--it's harder to use good tactics when you are artificially space-constrained. I speculate that those who habitually play on battlemats/grid instead of TotM may consciously or unconsciously constrain their own movement, and if so they'll probably find combats harder than I've estimated in this thread, especially if the DM likes to make creatures overrun/evade PCs (optional DMG rule) and go for the back line.

(I get the impression that Combat as Sport players often feel like it's not kosher to leave whatever area the DM has drawn as the "combat map.")

Interesting. Well, I'm running my game via Roll20, and combat is almost entirely based on maps/tokens so far because that's a big draw for a lot of the players. Even though I'm a pretty "organic" DM, I'm sure there is some combat-as-sport happening among the players, especially since some I played with in 4e and others have MMORPG experience.

And yet this is the same group that has been doing very well against the monsters I've thrown at them.

To be fair, I've knocked a couple PCs out over the course of the various monsters I've thrown at them. And they've used very good tactics, play well as a team, and are pretty creative with their spells and strategies.

Once they start facing more intelligent monsters, I suspect the difficulty will increase greatly. So far they've mostly been fighting stupid or mindless creatures.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Interesting. Well, I'm running my game via Roll20, and combat is almost entirely based on maps/tokens so far because that's a big draw for a lot of the players. Even though I'm a pretty "organic" DM, I'm sure there is some combat-as-sport happening among the players, especially since some I played with in 4e and others have MMORPG experience.

And yet this is the same group that has been doing very well against the monsters I've thrown at them.

To be fair, I've knocked a couple PCs out over the course of the various monsters I've thrown at them. And they've used very good tactics, play well as a team, and are pretty creative with their spells and strategies.

Once they start facing more intelligent monsters, I suspect the difficulty will increase greatly. So far they've mostly been fighting stupid or mindless creatures.

This is key. The thing that makes space-constrained combat (a little) harder is when monsters ignore the front-liners and eat an opportunity attack to tear into the back line. If your front line is AC 21 (plus Shield) and your back line is AC 16, and a pair of Chuuls who are low on HP overrun the front line and Dash over to the back line, then the back line guy can't just Dodge the way the front-liner can and assume he'll be safe: rolling a 10 at disadvantage is far easier than rolling a 15 at disadvantage. Instead, the back-line guy has to expend at least a first level spell like Expeditious Retreat to get away, unless he already has Longstrider precast or is Mobile. Then the Chuuls can potentially Dash over again to pin the back-liner against the side of the arena, and if they get lucky they may even hit him a couple of times and maybe even paralyze him. In the test combats so far, the party still performs very well, but combats which would be trivially easy (near-zero resource expenditure) in an open-ended space become a little dicey in a cage match if you try to get cheap with them, and you wind up expending some spells and HP to keep the difficulty down.

By open-ended space I mean "any area that you can freely exit." A cramped labyrinth is open-ended, and so is Australian scrub, even though sight lines in either may only be 40' or so. The ability to disengage from melee (forward or backward) is key, although forward is riskier if there might be more monsters ahead.

Another side note: the scariest CR 4 encounter I've rolled today on kobold.com is 8 draft horses. 40' movement, 19 HP, +6 to hit for 9 points of damage each... if 8 draft horses are for some reason driven into a murderous rage, they can do some serious damage without eating up much of your XP budget.

 

[Balthazar Balzacazar]

Once they start facing more intelligent monsters, I suspect the difficulty will increase greatly. So far they've mostly been fighting stupid or mindless creatures.

Very true! Does anyone remember the editorial in the old Dragon magazine about "Tucker's Kobolds"? A good summary of how even lowly kobolds could use guerilla tactics to menace high-level parties. It was in the 2e era, if I recall right.

 

[Steven Winter]

Any thoughts on whether the DMG monster guidelines give monsters that are closer to CR?

I have a sneaking suspicion they might go far the other way, but it's hard to really judge them when you've got a group of six optimisers taking down your monsters!

One of the things I really miss from 4E is the Standard/Elite/Solo divisions of monsters. There's a distinct difference between designing a monster for a 5th level party that they'll be facing alone compared to one that appears as a horde...

I agree on all counts. The DMG's CR guidelines do seem to produce tougher monsters (or lower final CRs), but I haven't applied that system to enough monsters from the MM to generate a statistically significant amount of data. (If someone has and posted it online, I'd love to see it; it would save me tons of time.) If you create a basic, no-frills monster that's nothing but AC, HPs, and damage, the "Monster Statistics by Challenge Rating" table (DMG pg. 274) definitely spits out monsters with far higher HPs and DPR than what's seen in the MM.

My initial suspicion -- and again, I don't yet have hard data to back this up, it's just a suspicion that could turn out to be wrong -- is that the DMG's hit point multipliers for resistances and immunities are too generous. Even when a creature is immune to two or three types of damage, PCs have an easy time working around it, so an advantage that supposedly increases a monster's effective HP by 150% or 200% turns out to be no real advantage at all. What's more, I don't understand why there's no corresponding adjustment when a monster has a vulnerability. I've harped on this before; vulnerability to fire is why the mummy lord weighs in nowhere near CR 15, but that crippling vulnerability seems to have carried no weight at all in the CR computation.

It's crucial to understand that the R&D staff didn't create a monster-balancing system and then design monsters to fit it. That's the 4E approach, and we all remember the rivers of abuse that were poured on 4E's by-the-numbers monsters. Instead, they designed interesting, dynamic monsters and established their CRs through exhaustive playtesting. Only then did they try to create a backward-looking mathematical system that could duplicate those results. So it's no surprise to find flaws in the system. Statistically, some members of the population inevitably are going to fall outside the standard deviation of whatever formula your regression analysis spits out, and they'll look like errors even though they're not. All of which is sort of a different problem from where this thread started out, but it's closely related.

Steve

 

[Quickleaf]

I agree on all counts. The DMG's CR guidelines do seem to produce tougher monsters (or lower final CRs), but I haven't applied that system to enough monsters from the MM to generate a statistically significant amount of data. (If someone has and posted it online, I'd love to see it; it would save me tons of time.) If you create a basic, no-frills monster that's nothing but AC, HPs, and damage, the "Monster Statistics by Challenge Rating" table (DMG pg. 274) definitely spits out monsters with far higher HPs and DPR than what's seen in the MM.

I do remember checking the Hobgoblin (CR 1/2) against the DMG guidelines when a lot of people were commenting on how dangerous they were against low-level PCs. And assuming that a hobgoblin gets Martial Advantage for 2 out of 3 rounds (DPR ~11), then it checks out.

Hobgoblin CR 1/2 = (Defense CR 1/4 + Offense CR 1) / 2

Is this the sort of data that would be helpful? Just cross-referencing MM monsters against the DMG CR guidelines (when possible)?

My initial suspicion -- and again, I don't yet have hard data to back this up, it's just a suspicion that could turn out to be wrong -- is that the DMG's hit point multipliers for resistances and immunities are too generous. Even when a creature is immune to two or three types of damage, PCs have an easy time working around it, so an advantage that supposedly increases a monster's effective HP by 150% or 200% turns out to be no real advantage at all. What's more, I don't understand why there's no corresponding adjustment when a monster has a vulnerability. I've harped on this before; vulnerability to fire is why the mummy lord weighs in nowhere near CR 15, but that crippling vulnerability seems to have carried no weight at all in the CR computation.

Good insight.

It's crucial to understand that the R&D staff didn't create a monster-balancing system and then design monsters to fit it. That's the 4E approach, and we all remember the rivers of abuse that were poured on 4E's by-the-numbers monsters. Instead, they designed interesting, dynamic monsters and established their CRs through exhaustive playtesting. Only then did they try to create a backward-looking mathematical system that could duplicate those results. So it's no surprise to find flaws in the system. Statistically, some members of the population inevitably are going to fall outside the standard deviation of whatever formula your regression analysis spits out, and they'll look like errors even though they're not. All of which is sort of a different problem from where this thread started out, but it's closely related.

To be fair, the criticism of 4e's monster's wasn't directed at the mathematical system they were built upon, rather it was directed on reducing monsters' writeups to combat functions rather than the more organic "monster as a whole" approach of 5e. In 5th edition, traits like "Divine Awareness" and "False Appearance" and "Speak with Frogs and Toads" make a difference. So do the more organic monster descriptions which include a bit more ecology/culture than their 4e counterparts (at least the 4e MM, the 4e MV actually went into some depth with monster ecology/culture). And the lair actions/regional effects of legendary monsters help reinforce that monsters aren't just there to kill or be killed.

 

[Steven Winter]

Is this the sort of data that would be helpful? Just cross-referencing MM monsters against the DMG CR guidelines (when possible)?

Exactly. At least, it would be useful to a statistics geek like me.

Steve

 

[Quickleaf]

Exactly. At least, it would be useful to a statistics geek like me.

Steve

Would you want it to be limited to monsters that are easily quantifiable using DMG calculations?

For example, take the aboleth... CR 10 according to MM, but my calculations show it to be CR 9. Pretty close. Obviously, there is some element of their enslave ability (shutting down an incoming PC's attacks for a round or two) that has been factored into the MM's CR rating for the aboleth. Or maybe they've included the whole "you can only breathe water" disease as an element of the CR reflecting how an aboleth fight can affect the adventuring day, not just the encounter with the aboleth itself?

Aboleth (CR 10)
defense CR 7 = 6 (hp 135 +20 =155) + 1 (ac 17)
offense CR 11 = 10 (DPR 65) + 1 (attack +9)
DPR = 65
enslave + psychic drain + tailx2 = 10 +30
multiattack + psychic drain + tailx2 = 36 + 10 + 30
multiattack + tailx3 = 36 + 45

final CR: (7 + 11) / 2 = 9