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

[Quickleaf]

My question is, how exactly are defining "deadly"? The DMG defines deadly as "could be lethal to one or more players." Every time this subject comes up, the encounters described strike me as being pretty deadly by that definition. Reading through the thread, it seems like you're defining it as "a decent chance of a TPK." Would that be accurate?

I lean more toward the "or more" part of the definition (because the Hard definition already includes the possibility of a character dying). "Possibility of TPK" would correspond with how I think of a deadly encounter, though just how much of a possibility would depend on how deadly it is exactly...or turns out to be.

In addition, "deadly" to me implies that:

(a) Most of the players are sweating it during the fight with a real sense of "will I make it out of this alive?" or at least "will my friend in the thick of things make it out of this alive?" (Note that "alive" can be substituted with "not captured" or whatever)

(b) The cleric with spare the dying is going to be under so much duress that being able to reach a dying character in time to cast spare the dying will not be a foregone conclusion.

(c) Use of exceptional resources or very clever thinking is required to prevail.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

CR is not granular enough, because you take the average of defensive and offensive CR. Monster roles as in 4e would help building an encounter. If you had OCR and DCR and XP multipliers if you use an artillary monster at range or a skirmisher in an ambush, you had a much better tool for gauging your difficulty.

 

[Tia Nadiezja]

One thing I think is interesting is the question of expectations: What is "hard" or "deadly" for a given group? With some groups I played with back in my AD&D days, an encounter wasn't "hard" unless they were scrounging for wealth to pay for a resurrection spell for someone afterward, while in my current set of campaigns (where half the players never played pre-WotC D&D and the investment is primarily in the characters and story rather than the game mechanics while still seeking a fun challenge) an encounter is "hard" if anyone worries their character will drop to 0 and "deadly" on the first death save failed.

Those are really, really huge differences.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Well, I had my first session of "official" (as opposed to playtest) 5e tonight. And...well, from my experience there, the difference between Hard and Deadly is very difficult to see. Our DM had us starting at first level...and holy crap was the fight a meat-grinder. Nobody had to roll death saves, but a single additional attack landed on anybody would've done it. Slightly better monster luck, or slightly worse player luck, could've killed PCs of people who had never even played D&D before. Working backward from our stated XP reward (200 XP divided among 5 characters) and number of foes (four Zombies), the "expected" difficulty is only slightly greater than Hard (400 XP after multiplier; 375 XP is a "Hard" encounter for five first-level chars).

We've already blown a third of our spells, and one of my Inspiration Dice, and we're looking at probably not being able to take another fight like this even with a short rest (certainly not if anybody rolls a 1 for their Hit Dice...) Is this normal? Is this going to change at all? I truly fear that I'm going to have my very first "official" 5e character die before I even get a chance to really play him, and to be honest at that point I'm not sure I'd want to come back.

 

[Fabio Andrea Rossi]

My 2 cents: since 2e days I have a magic and very not numerical rule which nearly always works.

Once I prepare an encounter which I think it's deadly, either by gut feeling or by CR setting rules, I always throw in a couple further level appropriate enemies.

On paper, pcs should die,in the reality they need to try really hard,with many dropping to the ground, fighting at their best and generally being very satisfied to win the Fight.

I do this only after the first levels,say from level 6 once pcs have acces to more resources than they typically use in "deadly" encounters.

 

[Rhenny]

My 2 cents: since 2e days I have a magic and very not numerical rule which nearly always works.

Once I prepare an encounter which I think it's deadly, either by gut feeling or by CR setting rules, I always throw in a couple further level appropriate enemies.

On paper, pcs should die,in the reality they need to try really hard,with many dropping to the ground, fighting at their best and generally being very satisfied to win the Fight.

I do this only after the first levels,say from level 6 once pcs have acces to more resources than they typically use in "deadly" encounters.

I do something similar. If I really want to challenge the PCs or "try" to get them down (for dramatic effect not sadism, lol) I keep reinforcements in my back pocket. If the PCs are cleaning up and not taking as much damage as I had anticipated, the reinforcements enter the battle, preferably from a different direction. This adds beef to the encounter and forces the party to fight on 2 or 3 fronts, which is always more deadly.

Also, never underestimate the power of focused fire, and once in a while an attack on a PC that is already unconscious works wonders to scare the hell out of the players. None of these tactics have to be used all of the time, but if used once in a while they make all fights seem deadly even when they are easy.

 

[shoak1]

In every edition thus far, I was able to establish a formula at how to create challenging encounters for my group, just drag and drop so to speak. I've not been able to create any sort of guideline/formula in 5e. It's a mess encounter creation-wise.

I applaud the use of the scientific method to help nail down a formula, but in this case I think there are too many variables. I don't mean party/DM relative skill values, those will average out in a wash and then you can adjust afterwards for your table's relative skill. I mean the MM CR problems. It's as if they were assigned by someone who never actually played the game. I suspect they were assigned in a rush at the last minute rather than extensively playtested.

I'm really frustrated at how the game designers could get most of a game so right and then screw up such a fundamental aspect of the game. Now time that I could have spent adding story, chrome, and depth to my campaign is more often than not spent on adjusting monster stats to create balanced encounters.

 

[intermedial]

I've had much more success recently in designing both encounters and monsters by throwing out the CR system entirely and focusing my encounter work on three metrics:

• The sum total of the party's hit points versus the average Damage Per Round of the enemy combatants
• The average Damage Per Round of the entire party versus the sum total of the enemy combatant's hit points
• A combat length of three rounds
• Choosing a target difficulty

There are two steps

1) Ensure that the sum total of the enemy combatant's hit points are sufficient to survive the DPR of your party for three arounds. I feel that combats longer than three rounds risk getting boring, but if you like your fights to be drag-out slog, adjust accordingly.

2) Determine the DPR your monsters will need, decide on what percentage of the party's total hit points you want to bump off, assuming a four person party.

• 25%. At this level, the only time a party member would drop is with a serious tactical miscalculation resulting in one party member taking the brunt of entirety of the damage. This would be an easy/ medium encounter.
• 50%. At 50% hit point reduction, there is a sharper chance that a player will drop or die. Even in an ideal scenario, most party member can expect to be reduced to half hit points, with maybe one or two being unscathed if the others take most of the damage. This is usually sufficient to cause the party to "sweat" but only a grave error or bad rolls is going to swing this the other way. This is appropriate for a medium to hard encounter.
• 75%. At 75% hit point damage inflicted, the party members still standing are gravely wounded, and they are doing so only barely or because two or more have dropped. Be aware that any situation in which more than one party member drops in a four person party can quickly escalate to a TPK. This is a very hard or deadly encounter.

NOTE: If you're using multiple creatures, check the DPR of your party against their individual hit points to check for how many the party can kill each round. The result is that your monsters have a higher DPR in round one, average in round two, and low in round three due to casualties.

Thus, If we had, for example, a party of four characters with a total hit point pool of 100 (about what you could expect for third of fourth level characters, or six second level characters) and an average DPR of 40/ round total, for a hard encounter to select 120 hit points of monsters, who have a sum total DPR of about 15. Under your example, choosing two or three Carrion Crawlers would be right on target for a medium/ hard encounter, which seems appropriate based on your description.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

CR is not granular enough, because you take the average of defensive and offensive CR. Monster roles as in 4e would help building an encounter. If you had OCR and DCR and XP multipliers if you use an artillary monster at range or a skirmisher in an ambush, you had a much better tool for gauging your difficulty.

If you're going granular, why not go full-bore and use actual simulation tools? You'll get even more granular results. Just as the easiest way to figure out how often Lore Bards can Counterspell Meteorswarm (d20-at-advantage +d12 Peerless Skill +8 for Jack of All Trades) is not to use a mathematical formula but instead to just do the rolls a thousand times (it's a 77% success rate BTW), the easiest way to figure out how difficult a given combat will be against N PCs with capability X is to actually simulate that combat a few thousand times with some simplifying assumptions.

On the other hand, if you try to break things down into a bunch of complicated statistics that you have to manually apply to each other, you wind up with the worst of both worlds.

It shouldn't be too hard to whip up a little tool that lets you set up HP and single vs. AoE attacks (AC- or save-based) on two sides of a combat and then predicts how many HP each will have lost at the end of the combat in the form of a probability distribution (NOT just a mean). Then all you need is a good metric for assigning labels, e.g. "if the PCs end the combat at zero HP more than 1% of the time, it's Deadly; if they usually end it at 90% of HP, it's Easy; if they end at 80%, it's Medium; otherwise it's Hard."

This is kind of like intermedial's approach except without the simplifying assumptions like a three-round combat, which IMO are too simplistic.

 

[Miladoon]

I've had much more success recently in designing both encounters and monsters by throwing out the CR system entirely and focusing my encounter work on three metrics:

• The sum total of the party's hit points versus the average Damage Per Round of the enemy combatants
• The average Damage Per Round of the entire party versus the sum total of the enemy combatant's hit points
• A combat length of three rounds
• Choosing a target difficulty

There are two steps

1) Ensure that the sum total of the enemy combatant's hit points are sufficient to survive the DPR of your party for three arounds. I feel that combats longer than three rounds risk getting boring, but if you like your fights to be drag-out slog, adjust accordingly.

2) Determine the DPR your monsters will need, decide on what percentage of the party's total hit points you want to bump off, assuming a four person party.

• 25%. At this level, the only time a party member would drop is with a serious tactical miscalculation resulting in one party member taking the brunt of entirety of the damage. This would be an easy/ medium encounter.
• 50%. At 50% hit point reduction, there is a sharper chance that a player will drop or die. Even in an ideal scenario, most party member can expect to be reduced to half hit points, with maybe one or two being unscathed if the others take most of the damage. This is usually sufficient to cause the party to "sweat" but only a grave error or bad rolls is going to swing this the other way. This is appropriate for a medium to hard encounter.
• 75%. At 75% hit point damage inflicted, the party members still standing are gravely wounded, and they are doing so only barely or because two or more have dropped. Be aware that any situation in which more than one party member drops in a four person party can quickly escalate to a TPK. This is a very hard or deadly encounter.

NOTE: If you're using multiple creatures, check the DPR of your party against their individual hit points to check for how many the party can kill each round. The result is that your monsters have a higher DPR in round one, average in round two, and low in round three due to casualties.

Thus, If we had, for example, a party of four characters with a total hit point pool of 100 (about what you could expect for third of fourth level characters, or six second level characters) and an average DPR of 40/ round total, for a hard encounter to select 120 hit points of monsters, who have a sum total DPR of about 15. Under your example, choosing two or three Carrion Crawlers would be right on target for a medium/ hard encounter, which seems appropriate based on your description.

This, but.

At my table, longer battles equal deadlier battles. With D&Ds swingy dice, I have designed easy CR encounters that almost TPK because they went 5-6 rounds and deadly encounters that lasted 2 rounds with one PC taking minimal damage. It was just a matter of luck. I use the CR to get a rough idea and to calculate XP awarded.

EDIT: Wanted to add. A lot of the outcomes depend on initiative order. I think monsters that go first and hit first will change the level of difficulty enough.