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As an addendum to that point, my analysis of XP thresholds for PCs shows that martial classes, which typically don't have strong AoE capabilities, tend to have higher XP values for the purposes of encounter balancing. So for a martial heavy party, even if the encounter multiplier is...

The multipliers in the DMG are an approximation that sacrifices accuracy for simplicity. The encounter multiplier should scale smoothly with the number of creatures, as I show in my analysis of the math behind the encounter multiplier. Most likely, while the encounter multiplier for 7...

I do something similar to this within the existing 5e encounter building rules. If I have a strong or weak PC I'll multiply thier XP thresholds by a fixed percent and use that when determining the groups difficulty thresholds. It's worked really well for me, but it does need to be recalculated...

Encounters with a group of mooks and one lieutenant can easily come out looking tougher than they actually are for the reason I mentioned. For example, an encounter with 1 x CR 5 (1,800 XP) and 4 x CR 1 (200 XP) against a party of four level 5 PCs will have an XP total of 2,600 XP and an...

In my experience helping DMs balance encounters, there are two main reasons for why this happens (maybe one might apply to your case). Either the DM applied the encounter XP multiplier incorrectly, by including all monsters when determining it, and thus vastly overestimated the adjusted XP for...

One of the major problems that online encounter calculators run into is that they assume every monsters contributes to the encounter's XP multiplier. If you are only ever using monsters of similar CR then this shouldn't pose much of a problem, but if you try to build an encounter with say a CR 9...

When I took a stab encounter math, I used a matrix approach that worked really well. The basic idea is you start off with the full matrix, each character's individual XP along with all of the cross term XP (the damage each would deal in the time it takes the PCs to defeat each other monster)...

This is very similar to the encounter building system used in Pathfinder 2e, even to the point where monster point values are doubling every two levels. I ran an analysis of the PF2 encounter building rules and showed their baseline monster stats do double in combat power roughly every two...

The AI checker used in that video, by the designer's own admission, is bad at detecting this kind of art. From thier most recent blog update. Meaning, art that uses automated tool, such as brush tools used by some professional digital artists, will have a high false positive rate. I would also...

For the first plot, the y-axis is measured in damage done on a hit, or damage reduced by Deflect Attacks. And for the second plot the y-axis shows the sample size (i.e., the number of monsters attacks in the dataset) used to determine the average monster hit damage in the first plot at each CR.

Took a bit longer than I had hoped, but here are the requested plots. After revisiting the notebook I used to generate that plot, I realized I had excluded legendary monsters from the dataset. Both of these plots have legendary monsters included, which pulls down the average damage for higher...

I have the data for both of those, but I probably won't have the time to do so for a few hours.

I ran the numbers using official 5e monsters from my database and the average damage reduction from Deflect Attack is very similar to the average attack damage for CR appropriate monsters. This means a monk will get to redirect a monster's attack roughly 50% of the time on average (more often...