Xeviat
Dungeon Mistress, she/her
Hi everybody!
I often see people say that 5E is too easy, so I wanted to share a little system I made back while running a long 5E game. For reference, each adventuring day in game tended to have 3 deadly fights with a short rest in between, but sometimes I'd swap 1 deadly fight for 2 hards or 3 mediums. Generally that is.
But this isn't about the adventuring day, I just wanted to explain the conditions this was used under. What I wanted to show is a player level adjustment metric.
The 2014 DMG monster creation system suggests that a creature's CR should be adjusted up or down based on how much higher or lower it's Attack and AC are compared to the expected. It takes +2 Attack and +2 AC together to increase a creature's CR by 1, or -2/-2 for -1 CR. Thus, giving your PCs +2 attack and AC effectively reduces the monster CRs by 1, or increases the PCs effective level.
A +1 weapon is an uncommon magic item, as is a +1 shield (I know armor is higher, but just go with me), and +2 would be rare. So 2 rare items would increase a PC's level by 1.
We can then assign a numerical value to magic items based on their rarity:
Common: 0.5
Uncommon: 1
Rare: 2
Very Rare: 3
Legendary: 4
Add up the player's magic items. Single use items, like potions and scrolls, count as 1/4th. For every 4 points a PC has, increase their effective level by 1 when determining encounter difficulty.
For instance, at level 12, each PC had 8 points of magic items (each had a very rare and a rare and a smattering of other things, they were a little decked out since the campaign was based on a 3E campaign). That increased their effective level by 2. So I used the encounter level calculator line for 14th level.
This little metric also served as a nice way for me to ensure I was keeping the PCs relatively balanced among each other in their magic items. It's hard not to be jealous if one player keeps having all the random magic items especially suit them.
I often see people say that 5E is too easy, so I wanted to share a little system I made back while running a long 5E game. For reference, each adventuring day in game tended to have 3 deadly fights with a short rest in between, but sometimes I'd swap 1 deadly fight for 2 hards or 3 mediums. Generally that is.
But this isn't about the adventuring day, I just wanted to explain the conditions this was used under. What I wanted to show is a player level adjustment metric.
The 2014 DMG monster creation system suggests that a creature's CR should be adjusted up or down based on how much higher or lower it's Attack and AC are compared to the expected. It takes +2 Attack and +2 AC together to increase a creature's CR by 1, or -2/-2 for -1 CR. Thus, giving your PCs +2 attack and AC effectively reduces the monster CRs by 1, or increases the PCs effective level.
A +1 weapon is an uncommon magic item, as is a +1 shield (I know armor is higher, but just go with me), and +2 would be rare. So 2 rare items would increase a PC's level by 1.
We can then assign a numerical value to magic items based on their rarity:
Common: 0.5
Uncommon: 1
Rare: 2
Very Rare: 3
Legendary: 4
Add up the player's magic items. Single use items, like potions and scrolls, count as 1/4th. For every 4 points a PC has, increase their effective level by 1 when determining encounter difficulty.
For instance, at level 12, each PC had 8 points of magic items (each had a very rare and a rare and a smattering of other things, they were a little decked out since the campaign was based on a 3E campaign). That increased their effective level by 2. So I used the encounter level calculator line for 14th level.
This little metric also served as a nice way for me to ensure I was keeping the PCs relatively balanced among each other in their magic items. It's hard not to be jealous if one player keeps having all the random magic items especially suit them.
