D&D (2024) Adjusting Difficulty

[Sword of Spirit]

That would seem an odd way of doing it, since the main issue preventing even Legendary creatures from being good solo challenges is that if they deal enough damage to put up a satisfying fight they have too few hit points to last through it, while if they have enough hp to last through such a fight they are likely to hit so hard they oneshot PCs if not risk a TPK.

I mean, one of the effective ways some groups have dealt with this is to double monster hp without changing anything else. Mythic monsters (while extremely rare) basically do this also.

So I'm not sure why they would change things in a direction that makes the problem worse rather than better.

(Personally, I can't use the actual mechanical solutions because I need PC-NPC parity to increase rather than decrease or I'm not interested oin running or playing the game, but I do recognize the mechanical issues and am working on alternate fixes.)

Now, maybe they just mean monsters will be tougher overall for their CR.

 

[GMMichael]

This seems like a recipe for IRL problems. I would definitely intervene. We discussing “sharing” and “stealing from the party” at session 0.

I like to set those expectations up with familiar concepts. So session zero provides relationships and watchmen provide the head bashing.

So I'm not sure why they would change things in a direction that makes the problem worse rather than better.

See my theory on WotC breaking it so players can pay WotC to fix it.

 

[tomedunn]

A +1 weapon is an uncommon magic item, as is a +1 shield (I know armor is higher, but just go with me), and +2 would be rare. So 2 rare items would increase a PC's level by 1.

We can then assign a numerical value to magic items based on their rarity:

Common: 0.5
Uncommon: 1
Rare: 2
Very Rare: 3
Legendary: 4

Add up the player's magic items. Single use items, like potions and scrolls, count as 1/4th. For every 4 points a PC has, increase their effective level by 1 when determining encounter difficulty.

This approach should work reasonably well at higher levels, where the gap in power between levels is more consistent, but at lower levels it runs the risk of significantly overestimating how much stronger a party is for certain types of magic items.

I did a similar analysis where I looked at how magic items impacted PC XP thresholds. This gets around the low level issue of adjusting the party's level, and allows scaling above level 20, but at the cost of some extra math that some might not be comfortable with.

The general results are summarized in the table below, which shows the average percent increase to a PC's XP thresholds for different types of magic item bonuses. In case it wasn't clear, the first row is for items that increase your attack bonus or save DC, and the second is for items that increase your armor class or saving throw bonuses.

The values for each type of offensive magic item bonus assume all of your damage benefits from them. So a monk will benefit less from a +1 weapon than what's listed because a good portion of their damage comes from unarmed strikes.

Similarly, the values for magic items that boost a character's armor class or saving throw bonuses assumes all of the damage they take is affected. If we assume half the damage a character takes comes from attacks and half from saves then a character with +1 AC from a magic item will only get half the listed benefit, or around 3.8%.

From my research into this topic, it's clear that the 2014 encounter building rules don't account for the PCs having any magic items in determining their XP thresholds. Its possible the 2024 rules also do this, in which case the above table should still apply, but I haven't had a chance to verify this by calculate XP budgets for the updated classes.

 

[Xeviat]

This approach should work reasonably well at higher levels, where the gap in power between levels is more consistent, but at lower levels it runs the risk of significantly overestimating how much stronger a party is for certain types of magic items.

I did a similar analysis where I looked at how magic items impacted PC XP thresholds. This gets around the low level issue of adjusting the party's level, and allows scaling above level 20, but at the cost of some extra math that some might not be comfortable with.

The general results are summarized in the table below, which shows the average percent increase to a PC's XP thresholds for different types of magic item bonuses. In case it wasn't clear, the first row is for items that increase your attack bonus or save DC, and the second is for items that increase your armor class or saving throw bonuses.

View attachment 385741

The values for each type of offensive magic item bonus assume all of your damage benefits from them. So a monk will benefit less from a +1 weapon than what's listed because a good portion of their damage comes from unarmed strikes.

Similarly, the values for magic items that boost a character's armor class or saving throw bonuses assumes all of the damage they take is affected. If we assume half the damage a character takes comes from attacks and half from saves then a character with +1 AC from a magic item will only get half the listed benefit, or around 3.8%.

From my research into this topic, it's clear that the 2014 encounter building rules don't account for the PCs having any magic items in determining their XP thresholds. Its possible the 2024 rules also do this, in which case the above table should still apply, but I haven't had a chance to verify this by calculate XP budgets for the updated classes.

That's the beauty of it at lower levels. It takes 2 rare items to get to the +2 attack/+2 AC that adjusts the PC's effective level by +1 (4 points). Low level characters generally don't have enough magic items for it to be an issue. If they do, though, you have an idea of when to push them a little harder.

 

[tomedunn]

That's the beauty of it at lower levels. It takes 2 rare items to get to the +2 attack/+2 AC that adjusts the PC's effective level by +1 (4 points). Low level characters generally don't have enough magic items for it to be an issue. If they do, though, you have an idea of when to push them a little harder.

I was more referring to the fact that a 1 level adjustment at low levels can increase a character's XP budget by 50-100%, which is likely substantially more than the actual boost they get from their magic items, depending on the specific items they have.

But as you point out, and I agree, it's unlikely a PC will have enough magic items to warrant such an adjustment at low levels. So this is more of a corner case to be concerned with, and not a significant flaw in the overall approach you're suggesting.

To build off your proposal, though, you could add a bit of extra granularity to this approach by looking at the point total for the party as a whole, rather than on a individual PC basis. That way, a party with 4 points across 4 PCs can be adjusted for, rather than having to wait for a single one to accumulate 4 or more points on their own.

This approach gets a little messy if you have a group where one PC has 8 points and another has none (do you give the one PC a +2 to their level or do you give two PCs each a +1), but, either way you resolve it, I think the benefits might be worth it.

 

[Xeviat]

I was more referring to the fact that a 1 level adjustment at low levels can increase a character's XP budget by 50-100%, which is likely substantially more than the actual boost they get from their magic items, depending on the specific items they have.

But as you point out, and I agree, it's unlikely a PC will have enough magic items to warrant such an adjustment at low levels. So this is more of a corner case to be concerned with, and not a significant flaw in the overall approach you're suggesting.

To build off your proposal, though, you could add a bit of extra granularity to this approach by looking at the point total for the party as a whole, rather than on a individual PC basis. That way, a party with 4 points across 4 PCs can be adjusted for, rather than having to wait for a single one to accumulate 4 or more points on their own.

This approach gets a little messy if you have a group where one PC has 8 points and another has none (do you give the one PC a +2 to their level or do you give two PCs each a +1), but, either way you resolve it, I think the benefits might be worth it.

I used it to make sure the PCs were getting a fair distribution of magic items. I was running a 3E adventure converted to 5E, but I didn't want to cut all the gear because I like magic items.

But you are right about the XP adjustment.