D&D 5E Fixing Challenge Rating

[DEFCON 1]

All the best if you are able to actually work something out! It's a hard road, but seems like it would be very helpful for some if you can hammer something good into shape. But I'm always afraid that one of the hardest things anyone is going to run into as they try to mock up a system for rating challenges is that there are just so many ways to get around them that are not based on PC and monster statblocks, but rather DM adjudication. If all encounters were purely based on math you'd be able to build genuine expectations... but when things like charms, illusions, summons and the like can power down, power up or even completely remove encounters from a DM's expectations for a day... trying to actually suss out what things are "worth" in calculations can seem a nightmare.

Like for instance, at the top of a supposedly difficult fight, a player might cast a single charm effect spell that affects the boss monster immediately in the encounter... and through that charm spell and how the players and DM then roleplay out the party's and boss's reaction-- that might result in the boss telling all of his minions to stand down, and the fight is averted. And thus an encounter that was created under the expectation that it would reduce party resources a certain amount (and thus be taken into account in the CR calculations in the number of encounters for the day)... that avoided fight has now blown those calculations up after a single spell. And as a result the DM might now possibly find subsequent encounters easier for the PCs than they expected them to be because the PCs didn't lose nearly the amount of resources they were "supposed" to. And can the CR system that is designed be able to take those changes in calculations into account?

This has always been my own personal bugaboo about trying to use challenge rating systems, let alone create them. With so many PC at the table with so many abilities that interact with one another against so many monsters with so many abilities that can end or extend fights beyond expectation... I always feel like even thinking there should be a system to rely on is a road I don't want to go down. Better to just get into the mindset and experience of "winging it" each and every time and thus avoiding the disappointment of thinking a system is in place to use and then discovering it doesn't actually work.

But I will also freely admit that my mindset is colored by my own beliefs in improvisation when it comes to RPGs, as well as being completely okay with "fudging" things to fix possible gaps in encounters when things go weird. So I certainly appreciate folks wanting to actually have systems to rely on and use that mean they don't have to improvise or "fudge" around encounters that get gummed up through PC action. And if you can make a system that can get you at least halfway there, then more power to you! I'm always curious to see how things are able to evolve in that sphere.

 

[James Gasik]

I think it's ok if a Challenge Rating system only takes into account a typical party in a normal encounter. There's always going to be ad hoc complications- are the enemies resistant to the players weapons? Vulnerable to the player's spells? Does the terrain benefit one side or the other? Is this the "perfect group" for the encounter, or do the enemies have amazing synergies? Could the fight be averted? Can it be won quickly, or drag out for ten turns? What happens if someone dies mid-encounter? Et. al.

Rather than trying to tackle the dizzying amount of probabilities, I think it's easier to have a baseline, and from there, something like Quickleaf's flowchart from page 1 of the thread or similar guidelines to the DM will fill in the grey areas.

The biggest mistake I see DM's make is not knowing their group. For the most part, what the characters are good at, and what the players have them do doesn't change much from adventure to adventure- only a few classes can alter their capabilities daily, after all.

As my first DM taught me, it's ok if the players manage to overcome a challenge easily, due to lucky rolls or occasionally having a "silver bullet" for the encounter- there's always more encounters. Let them have their win and apply the lessons learned next time!

Because undertuning an encounter is more preferable than overtuning it. One way downshifts a tougher fight to an easier one, not a big deal. The other way can lead to a long, grueling battle that sucks up way too many resources and dead characters, which can totally suck all the momentum out of the adventure (or even the campaign!).

And on the off chance that your goal is to make your players taste death at every turn, well, you don't really need an encounter building tool- two Legendary monsters with a dozen minions should do the trick!

 

[Pedantic]

Like for instance, at the top of a supposedly difficult fight, a player might cast a single charm effect spell that affects the boss monster immediately in the encounter... and through that charm spell and how the players and DM then roleplay out the party's and boss's reaction-- that might result in the boss telling all of his minions to stand down, and the fight is averted. And thus an encounter that was created under the expectation that it would reduce party resources a certain amount (and thus be taken into account in the CR calculations in the number of encounters for the day)... that avoided fight has now blown those calculations up after a single spell. And as a result the DM might now possibly find subsequent encounters easier for the PCs than they expected them to be because the PCs didn't lose nearly the amount of resources they were "supposed" to. And can the CR system that is designed be able to take those changes in calculations into account?

This has always been my own personal bugaboo about trying to use challenge rating systems, let alone create them. With so many PC at the table with so many abilities that interact with one another against so many monsters with so many abilities that can end or extend fights beyond expectation... I always feel like even thinking there should be a system to rely on is a road I don't want to go down. Better to just get into the mindset and experience of "winging it" each and every time and thus avoiding the disappointment of thinking a system is in place to use and then discovering it doesn't actually work.

But I will also freely admit that my mindset is colored by my own beliefs in improvisation when it comes to RPGs, as well as being completely okay with "fudging" things to fix possible gaps in encounters when things go weird. So I certainly appreciate folks wanting to actually have systems to rely on and use that mean they don't have to improvise or "fudge" around encounters that get gummed up through PC action. And if you can make a system that can get you at least halfway there, then more power to you! I'm always curious to see how things are able to evolve in that sphere.

Ideally, I'd think the CR system should be able to provide a pretty standard "if they fight this, they will likely leave in this condition" outcome. The best case scenario is that you can then modify the PC input side (say, having some adjustment to the point totals, in the point based model being discussed) to account for the party in different resource states.

I don't think CR needs to account for every possible PC plan or encounter outcome, but that tool would have value even for you in the style suggested above. Your later encounters will have a PC party at a higher resource level than expected, and you'd be able to dynamically adjust for the new expected outcome and have some guidance in how to adjust later encounters if you wanted to preserve resource expenditure/challenge at some specific level.

 

[Shardstone]

I really think numerical CR is the problem. I use a system like this:

First, I look at the tiers of play. Every monster I design is meant to fit a specific threat level in each tier: Low Threat, High Threat, Overwhelming Threat. Low Threat are basically minions and mooks, High Threat aren't bosses but are the upper range of that Tier, and Overwhelming Threat are Legendary foes in that tier. You can throw a lot of Low Threats at a party, small groups of High Threats, or an Overwhelming Threat with 1 or 2 High Threats or a gaggle of Low Threats.

When your level approaches the top of your tier, how you view threat changes. Low Threats are now much lower, High Threats become Low, and some Overwhelming Threats become High Threat. When you go up a Tier, virtually everything officially goes down by 1 tier, so all T1 Overwhelming Threats are now T2 High Threats. As you get to the top of T2, T1 Overwhelming Threats may even be reduced down to T2 Low Threats.

I don't worry too much about exact numbers of monsters the party can handle, as these Threat Levels are based off the party having maximum resources. This can make a group of Low Threats into a group of High Threats if players are low on resources, prompting better strategy. Likewise, due to magical items, boons, feats, and non-PHB content, as well as the ins and outs of your party, a specific encounter that is High Threat might be rendered Low Threat.

The idea here is to provide narrative impact and non-exact monster building. I think a little bit of variability in monster building is necessary and, if a Medusa for example is a T1 Overwhelming Threat, I can think of ways to portray that to the party while also knowing that circumstances could change (ie, the party all have mirrored shields and a potion giving them an extra reaction for a minute to raise it against the medusa, making this a High or even Low Threat encounter).


I really think getting lost in the math is easy to do as a game designer, but almost always ends up forgetting the game's feel. Knowing, for example, that an encounter will use 10% of my party's resources isn't very helpful. If my party is two Fighters, a Rogue, and a Barbarian at 2nd level, the only real resource I'm tracking is the Barbarian's Rage. What does 10% of the resources mean for the rest? HP? HD? Ability uses? Consumables? It feels like trying to quantify too many things without actually telling me what to expect when this encounter goes down.

 

[Stalker0]

All the best if you are able to actually work something out! It's a hard road, but seems like it would be very helpful for some if you can hammer something good into shape. But I'm always afraid that one of the hardest things anyone is going to run into as they try to mock up a system for rating challenges is that there are just so many ways to get around them that are not based on PC and monster statblocks, but rather DM adjudication. If all encounters were purely based on math you'd be able to build genuine expectations... but when things like charms, illusions, summons and the like can power down, power up or even completely remove encounters from a DM's expectations for a day... trying to actually suss out what things are "worth" in calculations can seem a nightmare.

Like for instance, at the top of a supposedly difficult fight, a player might cast a single charm effect spell that affects the boss monster immediately in the encounter... and through that charm spell and how the players and DM then roleplay out the party's and boss's reaction-- that might result in the boss telling all of his minions to stand down, and the fight is averted. And thus an encounter that was created under the expectation that it would reduce party resources a certain amount (and thus be taken into account in the CR calculations in the number of encounters for the day)... that avoided fight has now blown those calculations up after a single spell. And as a result the DM might now possibly find subsequent encounters easier for the PCs than they expected them to be because the PCs didn't lose nearly the amount of resources they were "supposed" to. And can the CR system that is designed be able to take those changes in calculations into account?

While some consideration to those kind of "shotgun" type spells is useful, I don't think its essential.

Part of the job isn't just for a DM to map out challenges, its for the players to FEEL that challenge. If the players are facing encounters that are reasonable difficult for them, then they recognize that the big charm they just put out was a "BIG DEAL". They aren't going to feel bad that the encounter was now easy, they will celebrate that they got away from a difficult fight with a clutch moment.

The problem right now is relatively competent parties are just not challenged by the numbers the system says they should be challenged by...and I don't mean with clutch spells and creative play....I mean just the two sides slugging it out. So the triumph is diminished because the result was never really in question.


Now that said, how would a consideration for the shotgun type spell look? You could have a few modifiers at the end of your table. For example, maybe a modifier for "Weak Will Power".

So you have an entry in the table that says:

Weak Will Power: This encounter has wisdom saves lower than X, and is facing a party that has strong use of wisdom based saving throws: x.75 to CP (etc etc).

that is in no way perfect but at least gives it some consideration.

 

[el-remmen]

I never felt like I needed any kind of encounter building guidelines (using published adventures and other DMs as models plus decades of trial and error have awarded me that privlege) and still never use them but I have to say one thing that has kept me from even trying in 5E is the very idea of an "XP Budget." I don't want to "budget" anything in my real life, let alone to prep for D&D. For me an effective encounter building system would need to be as simple as compare the CRs of the monsters you want to include to the level of the PCs in your party and done. If i have to do anymore, I check out and just rely on eyeballing like I always have pretty successfully.

This is why I like @SlyFlourish's Lazy DM Benchmark - because it is close enough and easy to use. For me, "close enough and easy to use" is the ideal goal for such a system.

Also starting with the numbers and not with the monsters when building an encounter seems backwards to me, but to each their own - I know my way of seeing things doesn't work for everyone.

 

[Mepher]

This thread is timely for me because I am just returning to 5E after some years away. The main reason I left was the encounter building. I felt even in most published adventures the players easily outpaced the monsters making most encounters very easy. For my own homebrew materials I tried various encounter building guidelines such as in the published books or on DNDBeyond but found most encounters very rapidly went from very easy (using only infinite resources like cantrips) to deadly. There wasn't a whole lot of in between. I am sure with more time spent I could have come up with better encounters but as someone that has played since the mid 80s it was easier to just return to AD&D which I knew and loved. Sitting with a group of 50 year olds that have played together for 30+ years, the players have all said they miss the options that 5E provides to them so we are giving it another go. I will be watching closely and I look forward to what Mike comes up with.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Encounter balance is a tool that says, "This is what should happen when X meets Y." Yet, that runs concept to the entire point of a good TTRPG. We play to find out. If the math tells us what will happen, what is the point of playing?

Yeah, "we play to find out" feels especially resonant. I suspect that there may not be a good answer for the general case of "what should happen when any given monster meets the party?" Depends on the monster. Depends on the party. Depends on the tactical choices made by each. Depends on the DM's framing and the context it occurs in. We play to find out.

There's something very appealingly Toolbox about "Here is the challenge. Could be easy, could be hard, that decision is on you and how you use the tools at your disposal." And then letting you assemble your legos however you want to in order to accomplish your goal. It's kind of a shame your character's toolbox in 5e is pretty inflexible day-to-day. If all you have is hammers...

IMO, a good encounter building tool should work something like sheet music. It shows you the notes to play.

To extend and maybe break the metaphor...

An encounter is a verse. A D&D session is a song. A campaign is maybe an album. The notes that you play in the verse aren't independent of the sound of the song, right? There's a context. They need to go together well, and their value is dependent on what's around them, what instruments your band can play (and how well!). If you're trying for a jazz sound, the rules are different than if you're trying for a pop punk sound. These aren't interchangeable.

So, like, I can't swap out a CR 12 monster for another CR 12 monster and expect that it won't affect the encounter and the session and the campaign overall. They aren't mechanically equivalent, despite that identical CR number.

If we manage to make better DMing tools, ones that helped DMs skill up, then I think we have a powerful tool to grow the TTRPG community.

Keeping the analogy ball going as long as it's useful: musicians do this by performing. There's an audience. It's not a win/loss condition, it's a condition where people like you (or not). And there's a lot of ambiguity - am I doing this right? Was the night off? Was the venue right? But iteration and practice is what, for the most part, makes good working musicians. Not everyone's gonna be John Lennon, but with enough practice, you can be Pretty Good at the Guitar.

Bringing the analogy back home to roost, I think we could understand that great DMs are built by iteration - by performing D&D in front of a lot of people, multiple times.

So, then, the powerful tool to grow the TTRPG community is to bring new DM's into new groups and public spaces and lean into the performance of D&D. We build skills like improvisation. We build our knowledge of various fantasy tropes and works (a little Appendix N homework). We include advice in the DMG for how to not freeze up, how to be a good host, how to attract players, how to help the party build characters with hooks and drama and backstory, how to present a setting without lore-dumps, etc. A lot more advice cribbed from screenwriting and acting and improv than we have now!

And we still have the home games, just as we have the local band of 5 dads who jam together at the local pub on Monday nights. They're happy doing their thing. And we also have D&D celebrities, who, through luck and charisma, are able to get followings.

And in that context, what is CR? It's best use case is guard rails - to give DMs a pool of monsters for the session that wouldn't end in a sudden TPK or a one-round stomp-fest. And for that, something less precise than current CR might be better. Maybe something tier-based, that accepts that you aren't going to easily quantify the resource drain of every individual orc, but that lets you know, hey: this is the antagonist menu for you in these levels. An orc? That's a 1-4-tier antagonist. An orc general and his warband of 1,000 orcs? Now we're talking maybe 10-15. An ancient white dragon is clearly 17-20. A single mind flayer might be 5-10, though a mind flayer armada feels more 17-20.

That also lets you calibrate non-monster threats. A desert trek is probably a 1-4 antagonist, but a sandstorm might be 5-10, and the Black Flats, a continuous expanse of solid obsidian that turns the sun into an oven and is filled with literal demons might be 10-15. And the Nine Hells itself has gotta be 17-20 (at least at the lower layers). Dinner with the king is 1-4, dinner with the emperor is 5-10, dinner with an Archon is 11-17, etc. This helps us set DCs and imagines that the PC's will use special abilities (charms or magic items or enchantment spells or something) to navigate these increasingly supernatural challenges. This maybe even helps us when the Fighter in heavy armor is wondering how she's going to contribute to the political intrigue theme of this session (if we're having dinner with the emperor, then we've got a 7th-level fighter feature of Great Renown where their combat reputation proceeds them and allows them to be seen as an expert consultant when it comes to imperial security).

The encounter design is fuzzier. Is this Easy or Medium or Hard or Deadly? Well, maybe any of those things. The CR is only going to tell you what genre it's going to be. It's the "you're going to be OK" sign. It's the list of interesting antagonists for your story (given PC abilities at that level). Maybe it's no more precise than that.

 

[Shardstone]

I really feel that CR as it is also strips a lot of magic from monsters. Trying to so rigidly design them IMO makes the designs off feel uninspired, and makes the danger of something feel a lot more transparent. Since the point of bounded accuracy is to make it so that you can challenge higher level players with lower CR monsters, I feel like the current implementation makes it so those lower CR monsters really just don't feel like a true threat -- more an annoyance as you're trying to deal with the cool real danger in the fight.

 

[clearstream]

Hey everyone! Like a lot of DMs, I've struggled to get CR to work reliably in my games. Unlike a lot of DMs, I can honestly claim that it's my fault.

5e drafts heavily off of 3e's core mechanics, so it made sense to recruit its encounter building tool. Rodney Thompson and Peter Lee both pushed to do something else, but we already had a small budget, a tiny team, and lots of work. I locked us into CR because it fit with our timeline and was a tool that our existing DM base already understood. Looking back, I think I made the right call as a producer, but it wasn't a great call from a design point of view.

Over the past two weeks I've been tinkering with an alternate approach to encounter building, one inspired by games like Warhammer 40k. It assigns a point value to characters and creatures. A balanced encounter has equal points on both sides. If the characters' point value is below the monsters, it's a tough fight. If the reverse is true, it's an easy fight.

EDIT: System tested and found wanting. Replacement up:

https://github.com/mikemearls/5e_point_encounters/blob/main/challenge_points.md

Here's the old version for memory's sake:
------------------------------------------------
I've put the bones of the system up on GitHub:

GitHub - mikemearls/5e_point_encounters: A system for balancing encounters in 5e using point values

A system for balancing encounters in 5e using point values - mikemearls/5e_point_encounters

github.com

The math is still early, so expect changes as I spin up some code to run a deeper analysis of the monsters and characters in the 5e SRD. Hit me up here with any questions or comments.

To my reading, the system attempts to fix CP-per-character, and vary monster-point-cost by character level.

That doesn't take full advantage of your premise. Rather, fix monster-point cost, and vary CP-per-character by level.

The pictured future-MM then prints a point-cost for each monster (just like a WH codex). In the DMG would be a table of character CPs-per-level-per-difficulty-band. CRs would no longer be needed.

That would be easy to use. (With apologies if this critique is based on grasping your design incorrectly.)

Encounter balance is a tool that says, "This is what should happen when X meets Y." Yet, that runs concept to the entire point of a good TTRPG. We play to find out. If the math tells us what will happen, what is the point of playing?

I'd say that systems like the Elo aim to make observed results match a predicted attrition or win ratio. So WH points are intended to make observed battles match a 50/50 win ratio for each force of equal points. That doesn't breach play to find out... if anything, it amplifies it. I can't really play to find out when I am guaranteed a win (or loss.)