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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mearls" data-source="post: 9573419" data-attributes="member: 697">Going back to the level 12 encounter, let's pit a party of 4 12th level characters against 4 critters of equal XP value.In 5.5 that's very easy. We have 4700 xp per character. That's roughly 4 CR 9 creatures.In 5e, it's trickier. We have to halve the monsters effective XP to stay within the guidelines, so that leaves us looking for monsters worth 1500 xp each. Ugh! That's roughly 4 CR 5 creatures.In both cases we're overshooting the mark, but let's see what that gives:5.5 Creatures: 155 hp each, 600 total. 65 DPR each, or 260 in the aggregate5e Creatures via DMG: 138 hp each, 552 total. 35 DPR each, or 140 in the aggregateIt's wild how much higher the damage is (in a good way), but the hit points are about the same.A 12th level champion fighter has 3 attacks base, 6 with action surge. Let's also assume they are wielding a two handed, d12 weapon with the reroll damage fighting style and 20 Str, +2 weapon.Damage per attack, assuming a champion, is about 15 per attack. Given the list AC, they probably hit 95% of the time. (Listed AC is 16, fighter is attacking with +11 attack bonus and effectively advantage on every roll). The fighters also have about 136 HP each.It takes about 12 attacks to drop a CR 9 creature in 5.5, so the fighters can slay one per round. Without using any daily abilities, the fight takes about 4 rounds. It goes faster if there are battle masters in the group or if they use action surge.That's all great, but there's a huge downside if you are worried about backward compatibility. You need to rebuild all of your old encounters to use the new guidelines. If we just used the same stat blocks in a 5e adventure versus a 5.5 one, thus 4 creatures at CR 5, we get this in 5.5:5e:138 hp each, 552 total. 35 DPR each, or 140 in the aggregate5.5:99 hp each, 396 HP total. 37 DPR each, or 148 in the aggregate.A fight designed to be deadly in a 5e adventure is trivial in 5.5So a fight you directly convert is far easier for the party. You can't use the same stat blocks when you convert. You need to rebuild the encounter with the new XP budget.I wonder if the double solved. Rather than work outward from the DMG encounter guidelines, they rewrote those while also recalibrating the monster stats, but didn't cross-reference the design. I'm not sure it is noticeable at low levels, but at high levels you're throwing out your 5e content and starting from scratch.</blockquote>

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