D&D 5E Weirdness: The more monsters, the less the XP.

[Tony Vargas]

All I know is, detailed encounter guides are needless extra work for the DM, and the play experience is better if the DM just eyeballs it, and places monsters according to what makes sense, and not what he thinks would be an "Easy" , "moderate" or "hard" encounter for the party.

5e encounter guidelines do feel that way, to me, but I ran 1e for a long time, and got used to encounter-design as more art than science. It's easy for me to make or adjust a 5e encounter on the fly. OTOH, when guidelines are fast/easy/consistent enough, the 'needless' extra work can be pretty trivial, and even a little helpful. For DM with less than 35 years of experience, though, they might feel a little more 'necessary,' and the extra work isn't needless - and just how much, how onerous, and how worthwhile that extra work is, can become a real issue.

As far as the one style & play experience you prefer, sure, it doesn't require encounter guidelines. It's also not the only way to play the game.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

All I know is, detailed encounter guides are needless extra work for the DM, and the play experience is better if the DM just eyeballs it, and places monsters according to what makes sense, and not what he thinks would be an "Easy" , "moderate" or "hard" encounter for the party.

The key problem here is the Easy/Moderate/Hard/Deadly guidelines are such bad predictors as to be essentially useless. Tony is right that some people might find value in encounter guidelines; but the current guidelines are too simplistic to add value.

I spent today working on my combat simulator web app for quickly running trial combats. It's barely even started, nowhere even close to done, but part of the motivation is to give DMs tools for really predicting the difficulty of an encounter. (E.g. "when those displacer beasts randomly target PCs instead of charging for the closest target, your typical 7th level party will expand an average of 8 spell points and lose 44 HP if the displacer beasts surround them at the start of combat. Six of these combats in a row will bring the party close to zero resources; eight of them in a row will usually kill them".)

 

[s786526]

what

 

[Quickleaf]

Encounters with either 1 strong enemy or many weaker enemies have more points of "design failure" than encounters with some enemies that are neither strong nor weak. In other words, that the latter (some enemies that are neither strong nor weak) is more likely to play "as expected" than the swing-ier 1 strong enemy encounter or the many weaker enemies encounter.

I think that's what the encounter multiplier for adjusted XP is reflecting.