D&D 5E How are you all finding the encounter building rules working out at higher levels?

[Elric]

Although I haven't run anything that high yet, that strikes me as vastly overestimating the value of 2 CR 1/4 creatures...has anyone had any experience running high level encounters that can bear testimony to how the encounter rules work in a practical way? If they don't work well, as written, what hacks, if any, did you use?-E

The original encounter design guidelines are flawed and overstate encounter difficulty when you have monsters at different CRs, as you've noticed. The update to the DM Basic Guide from November looks much the same except that it recommends ignoring the encounter XP multiplier if the monsters have CRs that are very different. A better system would not need this step because it would already sensibly account for monsters at different CRs.

I recommend Gobelure's thread on how to modify the encounter design guidelines to fix this problem, so that you don't need an "encounter XP multiplier." http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?367697-Encounter-difficulty-how-to-fix-it The key is that in Gobelure's new tables PC and monster power scales more slowly with CR/levels, so that you don't need the "fudge factor" of a multiplier.

Here's how I described the issue in that thread:

It seems to me that PC and monster power doesn't scale as fast in general as the XP numbers alone would imply (e.g., a CR 5 Hill Giant worth 1,800 XP is not as deadly as 4 CR 2 Ogres worth 450 XP each). So large numbers of lower CR monsters would be too strong relative to what the XP total suggests.

The encounter XP multiplier (basic DM guide, p. 57) helps to address that design flaw. However, the XP multiplier is itself flawed (as an encounter with an Adult Red Dragon and 3 Kobolds demonstrates).

My take is that some monsters are particularly dangerous in groups (e.g., with their own kind, like Intellect Devourers, or with any melee combatant, like Hobgoblins). Those should have been handled with special guidelines in their stat blocks (CR varies based on group composition), and XP should have simply scaled more slowly as CR increased (with the corresponding decrease in the XP budget encounter guidelines), thus obviating the need for a multiplier.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

The key is that in Gobelure's new tables PC and monster power scales more slowly with CR/levels, so that you don't need the "fudge factor" of a multiplier.

I think you're misstating the logic behind multipliers. Fundamentally they exist because of the artillery equation: two hobgoblins will inflict three times as much damage as a single hobgoblin before dying, and the multiplier reflects this. Multipliers break down in the presence of heterogenous CRs, but that's an implementation flaw, not their reason for existing.

IMO it's best to mostly just ignore encounter guidelines, because they straitjacket the play experience and give bad estimates anyway. I drew a little map today of three vampire spawn and twenty zombies scattered around a building and one vampire inside--then realized that I have no idea how you'd compute the XP for it, because it all depends how many encounters you divide it into. I'd just call it one encounter since they're all within one or two moves of each other (the building is 150' long, it's actually my apartment building), which makes it worth about 90K XP IIRC kobold.com's figures. But as a player I'd attempt to divide and conquer the small groups, making it worth only about 20K total. Which is it? I don't have to care! But I think someone designing by DMG guidelines would have co-located all the monsters automatically, out of habit, instead of putting five zombies around a corpse here and two around the corner and a vampire in a tree, etc., in order to avoid the question.

 

[Quartz]

I'm not familiar with the original adventure, but are the PCs expected to fight the demi-lich or talk to it? If the former, do they have the ability to find out about it before encountering it?

 

[Pickles III]

Poorly

 

[Eric V]

I'm not familiar with the original adventure, but are the PCs expected to fight the demi-lich or talk to it? If the former, do they have the ability to find out about it before encountering it?

It's an Al-Qadim module, so parley is almost always an option. The original mod called for a floating undead head with the capacities of an 18th level spellcaster, so demilich (especially as described in the 5e MM) seemed to make more sense.

As for discovery, they could scout ahead, or if they don't kill the Great Ghul they encounter before, they could interrogate it to discover more information.

 

[Elric]

I think you're misstating the logic behind multipliers. Fundamentally they exist because of the artillery equation: two hobgoblins will inflict three times as much damage as a single hobgoblin before dying, and the multiplier reflects this. Multipliers break down in the presence of heterogenous CRs, but that's an implementation flaw, not their reason for existing.

If this were true, then Gobelure's system would be unable to replicate the results of the regular encounter system when applied to creatures of the same CR, since it does not use an encounter XP multiplier. But this is not true, and one way to see this is that Gobelure's system does (pretty closely) replicate the results of the regular encounter system (with the multiplier) when applied to creatures of the same CR. His post lays out the math underlying why this is true: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?367697-Encounter-difficulty-how-to-fix-it

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

What I say below is not intended as any kind of slight to Gobelure (or Elric), because Gobelure's key insight ("monster CR in 5E scales roughly as a 3/2 power of HP/DPR, and so does assumed player capability") is quite valuable. But the implications of that insight aren't what Elric is claiming they are.

If this were true, then Gobelure's system would be unable to replicate the results of the regular encounter system when applied to creatures of the same CR, since it does not use an encounter XP multiplier. But this is not true, and one way to see this is that Gobelure's system does (pretty closely) replicate the results of the regular encounter system (with the multiplier) when applied to creatures of the same CR. His post lays out the math underlying why this is true: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?367697-Encounter-difficulty-how-to-fix-it

TLDR: It is unable to do so, and more importantly it diverges not just from the DMG system but from actual expected damage as number of monsters increases.

Gobelure's math isn't saying what you think it's saying, and it is in fact unable to replicate the results of the DMG system when it comes to scaling. (It's not even designed to do so! Gobelure's focus is on solving the "three rats and a lich" problem, not the "three liches" problem.) It does not scale with the artillery equation. Illustrative example:

1 brown bear vs. 4 2nd level PCs: Easy (200 XP/800) under DMG system, Easy (2 TMEL/6 TPEL) under the EL system.
2 brown bears vs 4 2nd level PCs: Hard (600 XP/800) under DMG system, Medium (4 TMEL/6TPEL) under the EL system.
3 brown bears vs 4 2nd level PCs: Very Deadly (1200 XP/800) under the DMG system, barely Deadly (6 TMEL/6 TPEL) under the EL system.

You'll see this divergence any time a multiplier boundary is crossed. E.g. EL and DMG both agree that two demiliches at a time is Hard for 5 20th level characters, but EL says only one Demilich is Medium and DMG says it's Hard.

So when you say it "replicate the results of the regular encounter system (with the multiplier) when applied to creatures of the same CR", you're misunderstanding what problem Gobelure's system is trying to solve as well as the results it gets. It works pretty well, better than the DMG system, for creatures of different CRs, but for creatures of the same CR the DMG system is IMO more accurate. Although neither system is very good at predicting actual results because they're both based on CR, which is a poor summary statistic of deadliness even before you toss it into simplistic equations. E.g. it values ranged and melee capabilities the exact same, doesn't account for mobility at all, treats abilities like regeneration as simple static HP inflation even for creatures with the smarts to use those capabilities tactically.

More importantly, not only does Gobelure's system diverge from the DMG system, it diverges even more from expected reality than the DMG system does. Take all those brown bears against, for simplicity, a party of four identical Str 18 2nd level Fighters with AC 18 (chain and shield) and battleaxes (+6/d8+4) who don't spend any Action Surges during the fight.

Accounting for crits, a fighter's expected DPR against the bear's AC 11 is 7.03, so it should take 5 fighter-rounds to kill a bear. The bear's expected DPR against a fighter is 3.63 for the bite plus 4.75 for the claws, so 8.38.

1 bear: The bear will inflict 8.38 on the first round, and then maybe (25%) inflict 8.38 on the second round depending on initiative, so 8.38 * 0.25 = 2.09 is the expected damage. About 10.5 damage will be inflicted on the fighters.
2 bears: Two bears will inflict 16.76 damage on the first round, then 1.25 bears will inflict 10.47 damage on the second round, then 0.5 bears will inflict 4.19 damage on the third round. Total damage inflicted is about 31.5, three times as much as the 1 bear fight. This is the reality which XP multipliers try to reflect.
3 bears: Three bears inflict 8.38 * (3 + 2.25 + 1.5 + 0.75) = 62.85 damage on the fighters over the course of four rounds. Three bears is twice as deadly as two, and six times deadlier than one bear. The DMG system gets this basically correct (it breaks down a bit due to rounding at larger numbers of bears) by saying it's six times as much XP value but the EL system thinks deadliness scales linearly in the number of bears, so it's off by a factor of two when it says it's only twice as much EL.

Gobelure's system does what it is designed to do over a narrow range, but any time you scale number of monsters up significantly it will break. This would be more obvious if the DMG system weren't also scaled over a very narrow range, but any time you scale up from one monster to two or three the results will diverge from the DMG system because of that lack of multipliers, and it will diverge even more from the actual combat results.

 

[Wolf118]

I drew a little map today of three vampire spawn and twenty zombies scattered around a building and one vampire inside--then realized that I have no idea how you'd compute the XP for it, because it all depends how many encounters you divide it into. I'd just call it one encounter since they're all within one or two moves of each other (the building is 150' long, it's actually my apartment building), which makes it worth about 90K XP IIRC kobold.com's figures. But as a player I'd attempt to divide and conquer the small groups, making it worth only about 20K total. Which is it? I don't have to care! But I think someone designing by DMG guidelines would have co-located all the monsters automatically, out of habit, instead of putting five zombies around a corpse here and two around the corner and a vampire in a tree, etc., in order to avoid the question.

So what did you end up doing to calculate encounter XP? My thought would be to wait until AFTER the combat was over and see how the PCs attacked the building. Was it one massive fight? Successive waves? Were they smart and broke it up into smaller encounters? Of course, the total XP is the total XP; Adjusted XP is not what the party gets anyway.

Now this doesn't help with encounter planning as much, but you could estimate ahead of time how you think the PCs would break up the encounters, and then use that in planning future encounters. Building block approach to your party's specific capabilities.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

So what did you end up doing to calculate encounter XP? My thought would be to wait until AFTER the combat was over and see how the PCs attacked the building. Was it one massive fight? Successive waves? Were they smart and broke it up into smaller encounters? Of course, the total XP is the total XP; Adjusted XP is not what the party gets anyway.

Now this doesn't help with encounter planning as much, but you could estimate ahead of time how you think the PCs would break up the encounters, and then use that in planning future encounters. Building block approach to your party's specific capabilities.

This bold part exactly--I ran not-quite-that-but-a-very-similar encounter last night (i.e. zombies and vampire spawns around a building, minus the vampire because a master vampire doesn't fit with the story where the PCs are right now). And I didn't compute the encounter XP at all until just now, because you asked.

The players got 6400 XP out of it (divided among a 7th level PC, 8th level PC, 8th level NPC, 4th level NPC, and 2nd level NPC), but as I compute the numbers now it was technically 25,600 XP, or 3.87 times the Deadly threshold. In fact, that one encounter (fourth one of the day) was 1.32 times what the DMG says their daily encounter budget should be, all in one fight.

These PCs are not particularly optimized; they don't have a ton of magic items (a Wand of Web is all) but they do have some bio-modifications from a xixchil device (the cleric got trollish regeneration at the cost of -2 Int and -2 Cha, green skin, and a bad temper; on the other hand he only has 13 Wis, so clearly he's still not overpowered for a cleric).

They were already low on resources and the fight was quite tough for them, but the players enjoyed it all the more for that fact. They killed the zombies relatively quickly with the cleric's Turn Undead (he took some hits while waiting for them all to group up around him), while the longbow-wielding, chain mail-wearing vampire hobgoblins sniped him (with Martial Advantage for being hobgoblins) from the windows of the house.

The paladin dragged one of the vampires out into the sunlight (no regen + disadvantage to break free of grapple + auto 20 damage per round), while the vampires tried at various times to grapple/bite the cleric and the paladin and drag them up onto the ceiling using Spider Climb (so they'd fall for damage if they escaped) and the ranger NPC sniped the vampires using Sharpshooter + Colossus Slayer from a safe distance.

The cleric went down twice but came back up (prone) thanks to regen, but he lost about 30 semi-permanent HP due to life drain (can get them back on a long rest by spending 100 XP per HP) so he lost some net XP there and has a definite reason not to charge into a house with several vampires in it next time, despite feeling invincible with his trollish regeneration.

It was a complicated, interesting, fun fight for everyone involved[1] despite or maybe because of being officially way, way too deadly.

That is why I feel totally comfortable ignoring DMG encounter balance guidelines.

[1] I'm really glad I offloaded action declaration tracking and HP tracking during that fight to one of the players though. That decreased my stress level enormously and let me focus more on playing the monsters, increasing my fun.

 

[Elric]

What I say below is not intended as any kind of slight to Gobelure (or Elric), because Gobelure's key insight ("monster CR in 5E scales roughly as a 3/2 power of HP/DPR, and so does assumed player capability") is quite valuable. But the implications of that insight aren't what Elric is claiming they are.

I think it was noticed in Gobelure's thread that his system seems to indicate that encounters are a bit easier than the official encounter guidelines. And certainly it's possible that the numbers need some tweaking. Since the definition of an Easy encounter isn't constant across levels in the official system, and there is rounding involved, it's won't mimic the official system precisely. But there's no reason in principle why system like Gobelure's, but with tweaked numbers, couldn't deliver results that are comparable to the official system for even-PL groups.