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

[Tony Vargas]

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.

Less experience from fighting many weaker monsters than taking on fewer more powerful ones, yes. That's not hard to rationalize: you learn more fighting 6 different monsters, each of which is much more powerful than you as an individual, over the course of the day, than you do fighting 18 of the same monsters, each of which is individually less capable than you.

But, it's mainly an artifact of Bounded Accuracy: being outnumbered just really sucks in 5e.

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.

Agreed.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Something I noticed... at some point... is that total XP budget per adventuring day is also based on the adjusted values. They say that you should get from level 1 to level 2 after a single adventuring day, by following the guidelines, but this is only true if every encounter is a solo one.

I mean, it makes sense from a math standpoint, but it's a pain to multiply all of the values used, both during each encounter and over the course of a day, separate from the actual amount of XP earned. I would almost prefer if they never included those guidelines in the first place, since they're such a distraction and a source of uncertainty.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Something I noticed... at some point... is that total XP budget per adventuring day is also based on the adjusted values. They say that you should get from level 1 to level 2 after a single adventuring day, by following the guidelines, but this is only true if every encounter is a solo one.

I mean, it makes sense from a math standpoint, but it's a pain to multiply all of the values used, both during each encounter and over the course of a day, separate from the actual amount of XP earned. I would almost prefer if they never included those guidelines in the first place, since they're such a distraction and a source of uncertainty.

Feel free to ignore them. The AD&D approach (just eyeball it) to adventure/encounter construction still works, and then you never have to deal with multipliers at all.

As for planned levelling... if you want your PCs to level up to 2 after the first session, include a few orcs and goblins (500 or 600 XP worth), and then some traps (200 XP poison needle trap), and award some XP if they find the treasure and escape with it to safety (1000 XP). Voila! AD&D adventure.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Feel free to ignore them. The AD&D approach (just eyeball it) to adventure/encounter construction still works, and then you never have to deal with multipliers at all.

That's more or less what I settled on. I was trying to give this edition a fair shake by following all of the guidelines at least once, but there's not much point in putting so much effort into managing the encounters when I don't have any real way to enforce resting limits.

 

[Elric]

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?

Yes, this does not make sense. Players advance in level more quickly when they have what are supposedly equivalently hard combats against fewer foes as opposed to more foes.

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" in the first place.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. A later post in Gobelure's thread details how to account for the XP issue: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...fix-it/page3&p=6405378&viewfull=1#post6405378

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.

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, so "thresholds of difficulty" may need a bit of tweaking.

 

[Pickles III]

This is just one of the myriad of things that makes me wonder why WotC even bothers with challenge ratings, encounter building tables and the like. It seems like so many players take them as gospel, follow them to the letter, then get annoyed when they don't work right for their particular group. That group of 20 Bandits against 4 melee PCs makes the battle difficult enough that the XP that they get out of it (due to XP multipliers for large groups) doesn't seem nearly enough... whereas the same 20 Bandit group against 4 PCs that can drop a pair of AoE spells in the middle of them at the top of the battle seems like a cakewalk.

If WotC had just left "encounter building" and "challenge ratings" out of it and just told DMs "figure out what your group can handle and create fights to challenge them"... DMs would build towards their specific party and not just using arbitrary numbers and wonder why they don't work right. It's how DMs always had to do it way back when and we got pretty good at just eyeballing things based on monster stats and XP gained... and it's a skill that too many DMs these days have never really learned how to do.

Because there are brand new DMs who have no idea how to build encounters? How do you figure it out without lurching between boring walkovers & TPKs. (In my 1e days when we retired one particular high level campaign we then started a new campaign every couple of weeks as the DM could not get a handle on balancing first level encounters again and wiped us out repeatedly.)

In a woolly rules system this is amongst the woolliest & I wish they had gone to greater lengths to emphasise this. It's more art than science & party composition & conditions will effect it etc etc.

They also made a real pigs ear of the encounter building rules & the "CR system", when 4e managed to do this very well so maybe they do not really understand the implications of what they are doing.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Because there are brand new DMs who have no idea how to build encounters? How do you figure it out without lurching between boring walkovers & TPKs.

New DMs learn by doing. Whether that's trying to make the math right using Challenge Ratings and XP encounter building tables... or just by looking at the stat blocks of monsters and thinking about what their party will do to them versus what the monsters can do back. Then you build the fights and see them play out.

The only difference is... when a battle goes all pear-shaped and they created the encounter themself, they go back and think about what happened and what went wrong and what needs to change for next time. But rather when they made it using all the so-called "builders", they come here on EN World afterward ranting about how they suck. Since they have someone to "blame" for the fight's failure, they're more likely to not look inward to figure out what they can do to fix things next time.

WotC gave all of us the tools to blame them rather than ourselves when we made a mistake on encounter creation. Which I don't think is very helpful to people learning in the long run.

 

[Knight_Marshal]

No matter what game system we play, our group has done away with rewarding xp. After the right amount of time, IE.. when the GM wants us to, we level up. In our AL group (different players) we are playing it as casual instead of entirely by the rules and I am pretty sure the GM is doing the same thing.

 

[jayoungr]

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?

Are you awarding XP for anything that isn't combat?

 

[Shadowdweller00]

Are you awarding XP for anything that isn't combat?

Most definitely. In actual play, I use a combination approach. I calculate xp - from monsters, for overcoming challenges, for completing goals. But also milestones if I feel that the former yields an undesireable result (given in the form of story awards). It's just that - in terms of actual table time - the large scale encounters like the bandits are likely to take longer (barring the effective use of AoE spells like Fireball). Sometimes significantly longer. But earn potentially less than a third of the xp gain from a powerful, solo foe - or so it would appear.