Level Up (A5E) acolyte squad casting sleep

[lichmaster]

I can see the strangeness here. I'm going to guess that you won't get much satisfaction cuz the rules just don't cover this instance.

Squads treat their damage as a single attack. A spear, x5 damage, single attack roll.
Casting a cantrip, same
Say they're casting inflict wounds.. lvl 1 inflict wounds, x5, 1 attack roll.

My question exactly: if they casted Burning Hands, would they be able to inflict 15d6 fire damage?
Or even just 3d6 but in a much wider area (like circle around the squad, partially overlapping areas of effect)?
What about Force Punch (single target, 3d8 force damage)? Would it become 15d8?
Otherwise this mostly works on single target cantrips and healing spells
I'm kinda baffled by the spike in damage for supposedly low CR encounters

Really you'd just end up rolling 5 separate instances of sleeps base dice, and taking the highest result? Maybe that. Or roll them all and take the highest dice.

My point exactly: they cast 5 separate instances, so they should be able to affect 5x the normal number of HP, but the single cast should only affect the normal amount of HP. So they don't stack (in terms of HP), but can of course affect 5x the normal number of creatures

 

[lichmaster]

I'm running some numbers and I think there may be a problem with the maths :/

Guidelines for squads indicate that they should be used with intelligent creatures with individual CR lower or equal to 3.
Hit point, damage inflicted and healing is 5x the normal, and they have vulnerability to aoe attacks.
CR of the squad is 4x original cr +2, rounded up

Let's take an Apprentice Mage Squad (cr 1/2 -> cr 4)
HP: 55
Attacks:

• dagger 5d4 piercing
• fire bolt 5d10 fire
• magic missile 15d4+15

Hit points are 26% lower than guidelines for CR4 creatures, damage with dagger and fire bolt are more or less on par of 25dmg/round (12.5 for the supbar dagger attack, and 27,5 for the more appropriate fire bolt)
But average damage with Magic Missile is 2x higher at 52,5dmg/round! And they have enough spell slots to cast this 3 times, once each round of typical combat!
Guidelines indicate that if HP is changed by up to 10% wrt guidelines, no changes are needed. Beyond that, every additional 5% warrants either a +1 in AC or 5% in dmg. So We should expect an average dmg of around 15% extra, or 28,75/round. This is 1 point shy for the fire bolt, but still a far cry for the magic missile!
The other guidelines don't seem to help either, because this is not an AOE, nor it's a limited-use ability (defined as 1 per long or short rest, or 5-6 recharge).

 

[W'rkncacnter]

I'm running some numbers and I think there may be a problem with the maths :/

Guidelines for squads indicate that they should be used with intelligent creatures with individual CR lower or equal to 3.
Hit point, damage inflicted and healing is 5x the normal, and they have vulnerability to aoe attacks.
CR of the squad is 4x original cr +2, rounded up

Let's take an Apprentice Mage Squad (cr 1/2 -> cr 4)
HP: 55
Attacks:

• dagger 5d4 piercing
• fire bolt 5d10 fire
• magic missile 15d4+15

Hit points are 26% lower than guidelines for CR4 creatures, damage with dagger and fire bolt are more or less on par of 25dmg/round (12.5 for the supbar dagger attack, and 27,5 for the more appropriate fire bolt)
But average damage with Magic Missile is 2x higher at 52,5dmg/round! And they have enough spell slots to cast this 3 times, once each round of typical combat!
Guidelines indicate that if HP is changed by up to 10% wrt guidelines, no changes are needed. Beyond that, every additional 5% warrants either a +1 in AC or 5% in dmg. So We should expect an average dmg of around 15% extra, or 28,75/round. This is 1 point shy for the fire bolt, but still a far cry for the magic missile!
The other guidelines don't seem to help either, because this is not an AOE, nor it's a limited-use ability (defined as 1 per long or short rest, or 5-6 recharge).

this is why i manually calculate CR for squads

 

[lichmaster]

this is why i manually calculate CR for squads

That's a very reasonable thing to do IMO
However here there is a significant gap between HP and damage. Even fiddling with AC the squad will come out heavily min-maxed.
In this case, we can find an in between solution as a CR6 "creature", with approx 50% less hp and approx 50% more damage.

 

[lichmaster]

I did some digging in the math.
First of all, the table for designing monsters has a very weird quirk at CR 7 an 8. Except at those levels, from CR 1 to CR 21 it's simply HP=15x(CR+1). If we were consistent with this rule, we'd have 120HP for CR 7 (instead of 125). This is 100% what I'm going to do.
Damage is simply HP/3, so 5x(CR+1).

From this we can deduce:

• multiplying HP and damage by the same factor gives consistent results (doubling HP results in double damage).
• results will stay reasonable if original creature's HP and damage are not too far off from the target value. The more actual values diverge from the target, the worse the deviation will be after multiplication (even dramatically so, as the example just made)
• within this range of CR 1-21, the rule for computing the squad's CR is wrong. The mathematically correct rule is squad CR = 5x creature CR +4 (dramatically higher). For example, a squad of textbook CR 1 creatures (30 HP, 10dmg per round) will become a CR9 creature (150HP, 50dmg per round).
• The above implies that there's not much granularity. CR1 creatures will generate CR9 squads, CR2 creatures will generate CR 14 squads and CR 3 creatures (the max suggested) will generate CR 19 squads.
• Given the simplicity of the system, and to partially reduce the problem with lack of granularity, we could have customizable squad sizes (2x, 3x, 4x etc). Same general rule, and to compute the CR of the squad we simply look up on the table. Or, given the "squad multiplier n", CR squad = n*(Creature Cr) + n-1

This is also making me think deeper about encounter CR, but will be for another post

Edit: The above analysis doesn't consider the lack of progression of proficiency bonus, AC and DCs. If we wanted to be consistent, we should bump the squads' values for those stats to the value given by their CR. Not sure how bad would it be if we didn't do so