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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 7937260" data-attributes="member: 71699">It's a nice method, and can be simplified further. One might observe that only two kinds of encounter really matter in 5e: attritional (hard or easier) and lethal (deadly+) due to character recuperative powers. Deadly encounters are those presumed to offer a palpable risk of character death. So with the caveat that the non-deadly encounters make sense for your game, the crucial question becomes - is my encounter deadly?Crunching the numbers (finding the CRs that yield the XP for the encounter thresholds) you find that CL/CR >2 at every level (character level over CR for XP threshold) is always attritional (i.e. less than deadly).Therefore Shea's guideline can be simplified to ignore the tier 1 adjustment. Simply CL/CR = ≤2 = potentially deadly.Regards what it means to offer a chance off death, for my campaign I've defined deadly as a 1:12 chance of death in the encounter per character. That is consistent with my data over two years of campaign... but could differ wildly from yours! Attritional are then an order of magnitude lower - 1:120 - but parties go through a great many more such encounters. The two together yield decent expectations for deaths based on cumulative probability over expected number of encounters, given also my assumption that revival is available about half the time (so it takes on average two deaths to kill a character). Expectations for lethality scale and revival should scale together, of course.</blockquote>

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