D&D 5E A benchmark for Encounter Deadliness

[clearstream]

Love it! However, can you clarify two things:

1. do you mean total character levels and total monster CRs?
2. What do you mean by CR for XP threshold

For 2. you look at the XP that the table (DMG 82) suggests should be awarded for the encounter and then find the monster CR that would award that XP (DMG 275). So for a level 1 character, the table suggests 100 XP and a CR 1/2 monster would give that XP. That is the CR for XP threshold.

That method is used to translate the XP Threshold table on page 82 into a CR Threshold table. The rule of thumb very roughly describes the pattern that table follows. Which through blurry vision is about as Mike Shea has it.

What is not factored in is the encounter size multipliers, which are suggested on the second table on page 82. Again, very roughly, I think you can treat from 2-6 monsters as plausibly the same (they're not, but again this is through blurry vision). One might want to create modifying rules of thumb for single creature encounters and those with more than six.

 

[dave2008]

Part 1
Part 2
Example 1
Example 2

Thanks! I've skimmed that before. I think Angry has a lot of good ideas, but I have a hard time reading his work - his style grates on me.

 

[clearstream]

I'd say that confusing "deadly encounter" meaning "high attrition/difficulty" and it meaning "X% chance of character death may cause problems.
First encounter of the day and your players aren't expecting many more? Your "deadly" encounter is unlikely to have anyone die.
10th encounter of the day? Your deadly encounter is going to have a much higher chance of actual character death.

You know, now that you draw my attention to it, I think my rule of thumb is less informative than it could be, through seeming overly precise. In possibly more informative terms, I'm suggesting that for a typical party of four it would take participation in two deadly encounters to see have the chance of character death be about a coin-flip. That is across the whole party, so no one character is 50/50 to die! Attritional encounters - easy to hard - are then an order of magnitude less risky. Players might go through twenty such encounters and experience no worse than that coin-flip chance of death in two lethal (i.e. deadly).

What this draws attention to - my general point - is that it is not enough to say some kind of encounter is potentially deadly. What does "deadly" mean? Given the worst possible die rolls and no DM intercession, all encounters are potentially deadly. I think that one thing deadly must not mean is 100% certainty of a character death! Except in the most intentionally brutal, meat-grinder campaigns. Additionally, deadliness interacts with the availability of revival magic. And encounter is only really lethal if the death turns out to be permanent.

And what of the suggestion to test such encounters. What does "test" mean for "deadly". Must I see a character die? What if I always see all characters die!? Probably too deadly (in most cases), right? With concerns like that in mind I felt a DM might benefit from a rule of thumb - a way to know what she means by deadly. I settled on about a coin-flip of seeing a death, for every two such encounters. This is a low but palpable chance of death per character, and feels in the range of real world examples like Dunnigan's estimate of 2% casualty rates in the front line of conflicts (I take it that not every part of the front line amounts to a deadly encounter, so where the fighting is fiercest the toll must be higher).

 

[clearstream]

The funny thing is that all of the fancy XP math is very close to adding up CR, but not quite.

Most of the difference is in sub-level-5 CR, and that groups of monsters are a bit weaker than they would be from naive CR adding. (Two CR 5s are more like a CR 9 then a 10, 3 are more like a CR 13, etc)

The plan he put up also puts a higher threshold for "deadly" than the DMG deadly is. Which is legit, but should be made clear.

A medium encounter is CR matching average player levels with 4 PCs. A deadly encounter has 2x the XP of that, but that is only 1.4x the CR as CR -> XP is roughly quadratic. Mike's deadly is 2x CR of that.

It is possible that this was done intentionally. It is also possible Mike made a math error. I cannot tell, because how Mike worked out this rule of thumb is not told to us. Was it trial and error? Did he do math? Did he mix the two, and give us a guideline that is out of whack?

You can see his workings hinted at in his earlier discussions, for e.g. the older guidelines that he made available. He says of those that they concord with the 5e math, which I find them to after reversing them out.

 

[NotAYakk]

I like the Idea of splitting the encounter. Actually that is what allows for 6-8 fights per day. Also sometimes it is your responsibility as a DM to split the encounter in two halves. Sometimes it is the party who might initiate the split.
Even if the sample encounter is split into two parts by luring half of them away and kill them making terrible noise, the remaining orcs will usually arrive to late to enter the fight in the same encounter. Now you will have two encounters back to back and so you will have a natural 2 encounter before short rest sequence.

Ya, I am working on making budgets be "scene" based. A scene is a clump of foes and every ally that can come to their help, or who would react in a way the players don't want if they take a short rest.

It then becomes up to the players to cut my scene into smaller bits.

Similarly, break the world into tiers. Scenes in a tier can have a range of difficulties. Tiers correspond to roughly a 2x increase in player power, and easy T2 corresponds to hard T1.

Now the world isn't customized for PCs, but PCs in the right tier aren't going to be roflstomped. As they reach the top end, encounters get easier, but the climax of a tier is going to be a deadly fight.

I find that building stuff on tiers, and not customized to player level exactly, nor to exact party, makes me feel more honest about world building.

Still gotta make sure it works tho.

 

[NotAYakk]

You can see his workings hinted at in his earlier discussions, for e.g. the older guidelines that he made available. He says of those that they concord with the 5e math, which I find them to after reversing them out.

That makes me worry; I did the math, and "deadly" is at (sum of levels)/2.

Take a group of 4 level 9s. Their medium budget is 5k, hard about 7.5k and deadly about 10k.

His rule of thumb puts it at CR 18 sum, which is 20,000 xp.

Basically I think he missed a (roughly) square root factor between XP based balancing and CR based balancing. I have done the same, which is why I suspected this error before checking.

Now, sqrt(2) is about 1.4 which is about 1.5.

So instead of /2 do /3. 9*4/3 is 12. CR 12 is 8400 XP, closer to 10k. Well, this actually gives closer to a hard diffuculty than deadly.

Add up player levels. Add 1 to player level if 5 or above. Then divide by 3. That gives 13 for your party of 4 level 9s.

Noe, before you point out that he admitted that it doesn't work for solo monsters, take two CR 9s. Base XP is 10k, but 3x multiplier for encounter size brings it to 20k, double dradly. And Mike's guildlines say it is at the edge of deadly.

B]Fixed Rule[/b]
Add up PC levels. Add 1 for each PC level 5+. Divide by 3.

Compare to the sum of CRs of monsters. If monsters are at or above this, it is a deadly+ enounter.

OTOH, maybe Mike wanted to double deadly as "really deadly" at level 5+.

(At level 1-4 this is a bit off; more work needed. I do not think Mike's values work here either? We have a single CR 1 monster being deadly by his math?!)

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

I think this would be a concern, were the game played that way. I've found and heard reported that for most groups, number of encounters is low enough that you can - as a rough rule of thumb - treat each independently. Bearing in mind we are talking rules of thumb here, not strictly-applicable-in-every-case values.

At which point, the actual party makeup becomes much more dominant in skewing the level of what a specific party can handle.
Only having 3-4 encounters/day is a massive boost to the power of spellcasters, and make a party consisting of more of them capable of handling deadlier challenges.

 

[clearstream]

At which point, the actual party makeup becomes much more dominant in skewing the level of what a specific party can handle.
Only having 3-4 encounters/day is a massive boost to the power of spellcasters, and make a party consisting of more of them capable of handling deadlier challenges.

Agreed. I use a 3-day long rest, 1-day short rest, 1 hour breather structure, so that I can deal with 5MWD through plausibly advancing the plot, and so that strategic magic like revival spells is much sparser. I have it that between a rest of each type an equal amount of time must pass before you can benefit again from that type.

This puts my table fairly close to 2-3 short rests per long, and 1-2 encounters per short. However, because I stop short of forcing pacing mechanically (I tried rest points gained per encounter, for e.g. and for us it played out fairly horribly) players can and probably should choose not to just suicide into the next encounter if they know or have guessed it will be lethal. They won't always know, but in a campaign using foreshadowing and ongoing NPC aims and motivations, they can sometimes guess.

My best case encounter building system would be to have more dials for Kobold Fight Club, with an automated quick-fight mode to test with! Shy of that, I find - and much for the kinds of reasons you have outlined mutatis mutandis - that the precise XP values and multipliers and so on in the DMG are not better than a very rough rule of thumb. That's why I feel very open to simplification to the degree Mike Shea proposes.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

Agreed. I use a 3-day long rest, 1-day short rest, 1 hour breather structure, so that I can deal with 5MWD through plausibly advancing the plot, and so that strategic magic like revival spells is much sparser. I have it that between a rest of each type an equal amount of time must pass before you can benefit again from that type.

This puts my table fairly close to 2-3 short rests per long, and 1-2 encounters per short. However, because I stop short of forcing pacing mechanically (I tried rest points gained per encounter, for e.g. and for us it played out fairly horribly) players can and probably should choose not to just suicide into the next encounter if they know or have guessed it will be lethal. They won't always know, but in a campaign using foreshadowing and ongoing NPC aims and motivations, they can sometimes guess.

The balance is based on the average. If some days have less encounters, and some have more (or the players believe that they will have more enough to conserve resources for them), its all good.

My best case encounter building system would be to have more dials for Kobold Fight Club, with an automated quick-fight mode to test with! Shy of that, I find - and much for the kinds of reasons you have outlined mutatis mutandis - that the precise XP values and multipliers and so on in the DMG are not better than a very rough rule of thumb. That's why I feel very open to simplification to the degree Mike Shea proposes.

A "fudge factor" based on permanent aspects of the group like degree of experience and optimisation shouldn't be hard to incorporate.
However, do you think that there would (or should) be a way of representing the reduction in what a party can handle caused by previous encounters?

 

[clearstream]

That makes me worry; I did the math, and "deadly" is at (sum of levels)/2.

Take a group of 4 level 9s. Their medium budget is 5k, hard about 7.5k and deadly about 10k.

His rule of thumb puts it at CR 18 sum, which is 20,000 xp.

I agree that the actual value for your example should be ~1.5 instead of 2. My take, however, is that Shea's rule 2. is doing its job if it successfully predicts that an encounter will be deadly - given we are also complying with his rule 1. So if we put a demi-lich against four 9th level PCs because we think it makes sense in our campaign, his rule 2. successfully predicts that the encounter will be deadly.

A more likely encounter - also deadly - would be three or four CR 6 creatures. Which is also about right for XP award, although both the single and the multiple monster encounters will fall within the XP/day expectation.

His rule ignores the encounter multipliers table and I think points out a kind of flaw with it. It should have made 1x the value at 3-6 monsters - the standard encounter - and offset from there. I think the values it uses are somehow connected with the inherently "easy" setting of 5e.