D&D 5E Fixing Challenge Rating

[Pedantic]

This seems very similar in function/direction to Trekiros' battle simulator. It might be worth looking at for a comparison point.

 

[Shardstone]

I think it would be easier to balance by Tier, and then have a secondary category for "Normal Monster" and "Legendary Monster" per Tier. Really, I feel everything in T1 should be similar, T2, etc, with of course highs and lows and tricks and stuff like that. That way level 4 characters (and even level 3) can start fighting some T2 enemies, and you don't have to worry about exact CR calculations for every encounter.

Maybe have a tertiary category for the players; Upper Tier and Lower Tier. Lower Tier (first 2-3 levels in a Tier) have a different idea of "deadly" then Upper Tier (upper 1-2 levels in a Tier).

I feel this would be more intuitive then having to count points or do maths.

 

[John Lloyd1]

In theory (assuming this all works) your point budget would be based on the number of characters who show up. So, in building encounters one way to attack would be:

Assume a minimum number of players show up, let's say 4.
Then, figure out what to add per player beyond that.

So for a moderate encounter, you get one point per character. You could:
Start with one creature with a CR equal to the party. That's 4 points.
Each creature with CR equal to the party's level - 4 is one point, so you could plan on adding one of those per extra player.

For a deadly encounter, you'd have three points per party.
You could pick one 12 point creature, with CR equal to level + 3.
Then, for each extra player, add a creature with CR equal to party level - 1.

Hopefully, that sounds easy to plan for. Shifting things downward is trickier. At least, for how it's built right now.

Aah. That makes sense. I was thinking you meant total party level instead of average party level for some reason.

That would work assuming the APL doesn't change that much.

I really should stop using the mean to calculate the APL and use the median. That would be much easier to calculate in my head.

 

[dudebobmac]

I will soon! Doing this in part to re-activate my programming skills, but as I post stuff I definitely hope people review the work and find ways to improve it. A point scheme like this is a useful community resource. Having it locked up in one person or company's hands wouldn't help.

Totally agree, leaving it open source is definitely the way to go which GitHub is of course great for. I'm assuming all of your code will be going into the GitHub repo you posted at the top of this thread? I'll make sure to keep an eye out for anything I can help with

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Hey everyone! Like a lot of DMs, I've struggled to get CR to work reliably in my games. Unlike a lot of DMs, I can honestly claim that it's my fault.

5e drafts heavily off of 3e's core mechanics, so it made sense to recruit its encounter building tool. Rodney Thompson and Peter Lee both pushed to do something else, but we already had a small budget, a tiny team, and lots of work. I locked us into CR because it fit with our timeline and was a tool that our existing DM base already understood. Looking back, I think I made the right call as a producer, but it wasn't a great call from a design point of view.

Over the past two weeks I've been tinkering with an alternate approach to encounter building, one inspired by games like Warhammer 40k. It assigns a point value to characters and creatures. A balanced encounter has equal points on both sides. If the characters' point value is below the monsters, it's a tough fight. If the reverse is true, it's an easy fight.

I've put the bones of the system up on GitHub:

GitHub - mikemearls/5e_point_encounters: A system for balancing encounters in 5e using point values

A system for balancing encounters in 5e using point values - mikemearls/5e_point_encounters

github.com

The math is still early, so expect changes as I spin up some code to run a deeper analysis of the monsters and characters in the 5e SRD. Hit me up here with any questions or comments.

So, gosh, wasn't there this game once that had a point system like that? And called itself D&D? I thought I remembered there was a designer, was his name Mort Marles or something like that who worked on that game? lol.

Honestly, I haven't read the rest of the thread, but having written a few wargames that used point systems my observation would be that it CAN work, IF the one doing the pointing and the one doing the point buying are pretty much in agreement and are doing it with a genuine eye to getting a result that is not surprising. So, yes, it could work well enough when the GM is reading off point values from the MM and not trying to pull anything, which I assume is the normal case.

It should be a decent use of points, the question is whether or not it is actually doable. There are a ton of variables in play that will determine whether an encounter is 'hard' or 'easy'. Again, some of that can be navigated by assuming good faith, but there WILL be surprises.

 

[Zardnaar]

So, gosh, wasn't there this game once that had a point system like that? And called itself D&D? I thought I remembered there was a designer, was his name Mort Marles or something like that who worked on that game? lol.

Honestly, I haven't read the rest of the thread, but having written a few wargames that used point systems my observation would be that it CAN work, IF the one doing the pointing and the one doing the point buying are pretty much in agreement and are doing it with a genuine eye to getting a result that is not surprising. So, yes, it could work well enough when the GM is reading off point values from the MM and not trying to pull anything, which I assume is the normal case.

It should be a decent use of points, the question is whether or not it is actually doable. There are a ton of variables in play that will determine whether an encounter is 'hard' or 'easy'. Again, some of that can be navigated by assuming good faith, but there WILL be surprises.

4E had a reasonably good encounter system. Pity about the rest of the game.

 

[SlyFlourish]

What if the real secret is that some folks want a solid gauge of how tough an encounter is before they put it in front of players, and if you don't, maybe this discussion isn't really relevant to you?

I argue they aren’t going to get it. Most of the 5e or even d20 variants have too many variables to ever be sure how a battle is going to turn out. In my experience, 4e came closest and it was also off above level 11 or so.

The best I’ve been able to come up with is a loose gauge that’s relatively easy to calculate. I don’t think there’s any more accurate formula because there’s too many other variables to account for.

That said, I’m really interested to see what Mike M. comes up with and I’m so happy to see the value of the work we did in Forge of Foes being used in all new ways.

 

[SlyFlourish]

By the way, just so people don’t have to look it up, the Lazy Encounter Benchmark is as follows:

An encounter may be deadly if the sum total of monster CRs is greater than one quarter the sum of total character levels, or half the sum of character levels if the characters are 5th level or above.

For powerful characters above 10th level, an encounter may be deadly if the sum of monster CRs is greater than three quarters of the sum of character levels, or equal to the sum of character levels if the characters are 17th level or above.

A single monster may prove too challenging if it’s CR is greater than the average character level or 1.5. x the average character level if the characters are 5th level or above.

 

[Umbran]

I argue they aren’t going to get it.

You seem to have missed the point of my post, which was about avoiding threadcrapping.

 

[Stalker0]

I do think the linear progression of points based on number of players is too inaccurate. instead i would use a table, 3 players = x points, 4 players = y, etc…and those values are tailored to provide the best balance.

Also perhaps a factor to include the ratio of monsters to players…for as we all know a single solo monster versus 6 players is often very underwhelming compared to its challenge rating. At certain thresholds the action economy drives the challenge much more than the strength of a single monster