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

[Shadowdweller00]

Something I've been thinking about in 5e: I've been DMing pretty much since the outset of 5e. During the process of encounter design, groups of monsters get an effective "XP multiplier" that counts toward encounter difficulty and XP budget; but does not contribute to the actual XP earned by the PCs. The ultimate significance of this is that larger encounter groups are worth decreasing total amounts of XP. And, given a trend of more or less balanced encounters during a play session, the PCs are likely to earn LESS experience the MORE monsters they fight.

I've got mixed feelings about this. It conveniently enables DMs to speed or slow experience gain as suits their preference. But I have also occasionally had frustrated players who were unimpressed at the XP gain at the end of a session in which they vanquished many foes. Does this not strike anyone else as being a little bizarre?

 

[Shadowdweller00]

An illustration of what I mean:

A party of four 5th level PCs has a medium encounter threshold of 2000xp. So medium encounters for the party could be:
1 troll - worth 1,800 xp
2 hellhounds - worth 1,400 xp
5 giant spiders - worth 1,000 xp
8 giant wasps - worth 800 xp
20 bandits - worth 500 xp

 

[Iosue]

I once asked Mearls about using encounter XP in lieu of adjusted XP. He said it would be okay, but the danger is that parties are incentivized to hoard XP by attacking large, but weaker, groups.

Looking at your example, it strikes me that, while all are medium encounters, they fall on a bell curve of difficulty. The group can gang up on the lone troll, so that's not really going to be that hard. Likewise, the 20 bandits.* The other three encounters strike me as being slightly more difficult.

*The bandits encounter will vary wildly by how it plays out, though. If the party can Thermopylae the bandits, it's cake. At 5 bandits per 1 PC, it's tougher, but not incredibly so. If the bandits can focus fire on individual characters, though, the party's in trouble.

 

[werecorpse]

Yes it's odd.

Although I look at it the other way round. I think that it's crazy that a single troll is worth so much.

IMO It's part of the simplicity drive. The way things have been done always in standard d&d rules is to give a monster an XP value. In 5e numbers are a bigger factor so to make a scaled fight they have to make sure you don't use 10 giant spiders hence the DMG method of calculating an encounter value.

A better way to do it might have been to say that a medium encounter for four 5th level PC's has an XP value -say 1000xp (or whatever you deem appropriate) and that such an encounter is built by the DMG mechanic resulting in it being a single cr4, 3 cr3, 5 cr 2 etc.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

The Troll is only not really worth that much xp, because as soon as you are the same level as the trolls CR it suddenly becomes easier. If the group would be level 4 instead, The troll and the bandid group may be equally dangerous. No fireball and only a single attack makes dealing with especiallx big numbers and solo creatures harder. So maybe adifferent formula should be used to calculate difficulty and xp.

 

[delericho]

Does this not strike anyone else as being a little bizarre?

Yeah, it's odd. I can understand the logic behind it (I think) but it's still odd.

I think my inclination would be to give encounter XP for some groups of 3 or fewer monsters and adjusted XP for larger groups - if the group is large, that means the individual creatures are (probably) little threat individually. Such creatures probably don't gain much for large numbers, so the encounter challenge isn't as hard as the encounter XP would suggest. Conversely, a small group means you've (again probably) got a monster that is a decent challenge by itself, and that is therefore more challenging for having backup - and so the encounter is worth a greater reward.

But note that I haven't tested any of that. My actual rule for granting XP is "you gain a level every 3 sessions".

 

[delericho]

The Troll is only not really worth that much xp, because as soon as you are the same level as the trolls CR it suddenly becomes easier.

There's quite a lot of monsters like that - some work best alone as a Deadly encounter, some work best as foot-soldiers in big groups. And, of course, some can be used in multiple roles.

This is actually something WotC spotted years ago - I remember it being discussed in a "Design & Development" article in the 3e era. Since then, I've been eagerly looking forward to the "Monster Manual" that includes guidelines on how best to use the monsters therein... and, oddly, have been consistently disappointed.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Personally, I think there should be a .75 modifier on single monster encounters.

 

[Sage Genesis]

5e's encounter CR/xp rules are built on the premise that you fight a single monster in the default situation. The consequence is that groups are exceptional with slightly different xp calculations and don't quite work out right, as the OP and others have noted. That's because the action economy is weird if 4-against-1 is considered default and a more even spread is considered special.

Say what you like about 4e, but the encounter construction budgets just plain worked. (Although admittedly solo monsters took a bit of designer familiarity to properly nail down in the end.)

Unfortunately I don't really know how one could fix the issue properly. Changing the system to include a more group-default encounter budget has all sorts of domino effects - legendary monsters, inflated value of AoE attacks, the hp and hit dice budgets would become too low, etc. Maybe someone more invested in this than I could put such a system on the DMGuild shop or something.

 

[Ovinomancer]

5e's encounter CR/xp rules are built on the premise that you fight a single monster in the default situation. The consequence is that groups are exceptional with slightly different xp calculations and don't quite work out right, as the OP and others have noted. That's because the action economy is weird if 4-against-1 is considered default and a more even spread is considered special.

Say what you like about 4e, but the encounter construction budgets just plain worked. (Although admittedly solo monsters took a bit of designer familiarity to properly nail down in the end.)

Unfortunately I don't really know how one could fix the issue properly. Changing the system to include a more group-default encounter budget has all sorts of domino effects - legendary monsters, inflated value of AoE attacks, the hp and hit dice budgets would become too low, etc. Maybe someone more invested in this than I could put such a system on the DMGuild shop or something.

I'm not sure where you get that. Given most of the published encounters are not with singlets, but with multiple entities, you've got a high burden to show that the single monster assumption exists.