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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5615397" data-attributes="member: 82106">Challenge Difficulty: I don't think the mix they give is bad, but my advise is to design your encounters based on what makes narrative sense. You can always modify absolute difficulty in all sorts of ways, but if it makes logical sense for there to be X bad guys in some area, then use X bad guys. Note too that XP budget is a good general measure of difficulty but it certainly isn't the ONLY determinant. You can make a quick but highly dangerous encounter for instance using a few weaker monsters that have some nasty terrain advantage. For example I used 8 orc artillery minions once against an 8th level party. The thing was the minions had good range and the party could only get to them by either spending 3 rounds making some skill checks or plowing through a nasty little terrain obstacle. It was something like a level 5 encounter, and was blown through pretty quick, but it was fun, gave the party several interesting choices, and definitely forced them to use up several surges. I rated it equal level for XP purposes just because it was mean, lol.You can also use chain encounters as a way to vary things. One or two relatively weak monsters show up at the start, but then more stuff arrives a round or two into the fight. Treasure: I pretty much try to make the interesting treasure story-related. The guidelines for parcels are fine, but remember you can distribute them in all sorts of ways. Some can be rewards from allies, prizes, payment for services, equipment looted from monsters, ritual ingredients that can be harvested, etc. In any case the game is pretty resilient, you can drop a big extra treasure and if the PCs get ahead of the curve a bit it is no big deal, you can always cheat them out of something else later on <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> and the difference will become insignificant in a level or two anyway.Mostly though my advice is, make up the adventure you want to, then look at it from the standpoint of guidelines. The guidelines are good, but they shouldn't be seen as a formula for making a good adventure.</blockquote>

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