D&D 5E Serious gamers and new CR formula

[MostlyDm]

I'll mention in passing that there isn't really a "6-8 expectation" unless you're restricting encounters to Easy combats. Maybe 6-8 was typical before they flipped difficulties thresholds from ceilings to floors in Basic Rules 0.2, but nowadays 5-6 Medium Combats is about all you can expect to get before you hit your daily difficulty budget limit (which is still a ceiling).

E.g. at 11th level, to choose one at random, each PC would get 11,500 XP of difficulty, where Easy is 800-1599, Medium is 1600-2399, Hard is 2400-3599, and Deadly is 3600+. Three Hard encounters is all you get, or six bare-Mediums. Getting eight requires you to dip into Easies and keep the rest Medium.

I was about to say this.

It seems like people are over-emphasizing the 6-8 guideline.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Thanks.

The elephant in the room, however, is: am I the only DM whose players would be bored out of their skulls by several medium encounters in a row?

What D&D calls "medium" we call "laughably easy".

I know there's a dedicated thread on this; I just wanted it to be said that my kind of game is more like double the difficulty but half the experience.

That was my point, Cap'N Zapp: if you use non-"laughably easy" encounters, there is no 6-8 per day expectation in the DMG. It's more like 2-3.

"6-8 encounters expected per day" is a false meme. 5E isn't designed that way.

(And yes, that means that xp awards must be divided by four. You're welcome.)

I at one point considered doing this for wandering monsters... and then I realized that it's unnecessary, because low-CR monsters already give lots of difficulty for little experience. As mentioned previously, eight to a dozen or so Giant Rats make a perfect nuisance encounter for resting adventurers: they eat up your resources, concentration, and time and they give you nothing worthwhile whatsoever out of the experience (300 XP for a dozen, 75 per PC). Yet if you don't leave someone on guard (shield donned, etc.) instead of resting, the rats can mess you up pretty good, so you can't just ignore the threat... unless your party is built to be immune to nuisances (e.g. spends a spell slot on quick-casting Leomund's Tiny Hut), in which case you get what you paid for. Although the rats could still accumulate during your rest and just hit you afterwards, since they know you're in the area.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

If the party is trying to take a long rest is it fair to say they have probably burned up most or at least more than 50% of their resources? At this point getting hit with a random encounter or two is dangerous. If the party squanders all their resources in one big fight they are left vulnerable when resting. Your random encounters needn't be killer at this point to carry real danger.

That's only true for bursty PCs. There are other PCs who have lots of consistency and not much reliance on "resources." Consider a Mobile Sharpshooter fighter--his main resource is "arrows, lots of them." He can kill random encounters all day even if he's got no action surges left, no spell slots left, no Indomitable left, and only 40% of his HP left. In fact he can probably do okay even if he's got no arrows left.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I was about to say this.

It seems like people are over-emphasizing the 6-8 guideline.

As I alluded to earlier, I think the "6-8 guideline" is an editing mistake. Using the original Basic 0.1 rules you'd get 6-8 Medium and Hard encounters per day, but those encounters are now Easy and Medium respectively. When they revised the rules for encounter difficulty, I don't think they rewrote that bit of text to match the new numbers. They should have either revised the text to specify "Easy or Medium" or they should have changed the numbers to "three to five" to reflect the new math. The way it is today, the text doesn't match the XP budget table.

 

[Minigiant]

The key is resources.

Spell slots. HP. HD. Rages. Channel Divinity. Ki. Surges.

If your PCs say the game is too easy and have 50% of their resources at the end of the day constantly, you probably aren't giving them enough XP per day.

If your PCs say the game is too easy and have 10% of their resources at the end of the day constantly, you probably are allowing them to nova too often or easily AND aren't giving them enough XP per day.

Of course, the basic assumption is average PCs of any race/class combo with no feats nor required combat magic items.

Powergamed, Monty Hauled, and/or Experienced Played PCs will need more challenge.

Joke, Noob, Well Rounded Campaign, and Low Combat Campaign PCs will need less.

 

[OB1]

The PCs are travelling through the Underdark. It will take them 20 days to reach their destination.

Do you throw many random encounters/events at them every day of their journey to ensure that the wilderness isn't safe? This will be beyond boring. I am a big fan of random encounters in adventures, but 100 of them between destinations is too many.

That also creates the problem where no regular characters in the setting would travel anywhere.

Well, to be fair, traveling anywhere outside of well maintained roads under a King's protection would be incredibly dangerous in a medieval setting and regular characters probably wouldn't attempt it without having hired guards of their own to protect them.

I do agree that 100 encounters would be far too much, but you don't have to have 6-8 every day. It's perfectly okay for some days to have none, others to have just 1 or 2 easy encounters, and some days to have more.
I actually take the DMG guidlines for not giving XP for trivially easy encounters one step further. If an adventuring day has less than half the recommended Daily XP available, players receive no XP for the encounters they handle that day. The idea being that the challenges they faced just weren't enough to push them to their limits to apply skills in new ways that would lead them towards getting better.

 

[CapnZapp]

Okay so in summary the best explanation I've seen so far is "the DMG text is a mistake".

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking too.

Fat chance we'll see that errataed, though...

 

[pemerton]

Not to make a dig at you or to single out your post, but I think it is telling that the (to me) obvious solution is not in there...

Travel 20 days but get only, say, 3 long rests.

<snip>

Voila - now the game gets its needs and wants. Not just the world and the story, but the game too.

<snip>

It is a shame that probably half of you reading this is foaming at the mouth by now, for me suggesting the unthinkable: to remove the sacred cow of "long rest each night no questions asked"

There has been a lot of discussion on various ways to do this in 4e. I think many of those ways would work for 5e too. I don't see that it should create very much foaming at the mouth.

 

[CapnZapp]

There has been a lot of discussion on various ways to do this in 4e. I think many of those ways would work for 5e too. I don't see that it should create very much foaming at the mouth.

Isn't it a defining trait of 5th edition that the rulebooks are completely clean of anything that would make the old guard foam at the mouth...

Remember: Until this stuff is in the actual game, in the dead tree PHBs and DMGs, it's just hot air on a forum.

You and I can fix this thing, but my point is that WotC is getting away with being silent and not even having to acknowledge there is a problem, let alone discussing it and providing tools to solve it.

(I am pleased this point is finally getting traction - it was hard work making many of you even seeing it. Thank you for reading!)

 

[Zalabim]

But Capn, the DMG does address variant rules on what qualifies for a Short/Long Rest, both speeding up (for "1 hour rests in a dungeon is impossible") and slowing down (for "6 encounters in a day outside a dungeon is impossible.")