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Encounter Building: Revised XP Threshold by Character Level Table
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<blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6987227" data-attributes="member: 6787650"><p>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?</p><p></p><p>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?</p><p></p><p>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 <em>those</em> 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%.</p><p></p><p>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 <em>Neverwinter Nights</em> 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 <em>communicate</em> 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!"?</p><p></p><p>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 <em>choose</em> 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 <em>didn't</em> Fireball an orc horde or a stirge swarm.)</p><p></p><p>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.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="FormerlyHemlock, post: 6987227, member: 6787650"] 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 [I]those[/I] 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 [I]Neverwinter Nights[/I] 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 [I]communicate[/I] 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 [I]choose[/I] 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 [I]didn't[/I] 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.) [/QUOTE]
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