Myrhdraak
Explorer
4th Edition Monster XP and Encounter Building
I did a small exercise to help those of you that do not want to use my 4.5 Edition but would like to have a new XP curve that better reflect the monsters actual challenge difference towards the party in 4th Edition. The standard deviation is here 4.22% so it is a decent match between the XP and the actual monster challenge as to their HP and Damage output in 4th Edition. Quite interestingly it is quite far from the XP ladder given in 4th Edition.
The way I calculate this is to look at monsters down to 5 levels lower and up to 5 levels higher than the party and rounds needed for the party to kill the monster and multiplying this with the average monster damage to see how much damage the monster manage to infect on the party before they kill the monster. Then I optimize the XP to reflect the challenge difference over these 10 levels. So it gives an XP ladder that is optimized for encounter building.

The curve is much steeper than my 4.5 Edition that ended at 150,000 XP for a monter of 30th level (here it is 880,000 XP). The reason is that bounded accuracy makes the monster easier to hit and therefore more useful in a wider level range. In 4th Edition monsters sooner get irrelevant due to them loosing the ability to hit and do damage with wider level difference.
I did a small exercise to help those of you that do not want to use my 4.5 Edition but would like to have a new XP curve that better reflect the monsters actual challenge difference towards the party in 4th Edition. The standard deviation is here 4.22% so it is a decent match between the XP and the actual monster challenge as to their HP and Damage output in 4th Edition. Quite interestingly it is quite far from the XP ladder given in 4th Edition.
The way I calculate this is to look at monsters down to 5 levels lower and up to 5 levels higher than the party and rounds needed for the party to kill the monster and multiplying this with the average monster damage to see how much damage the monster manage to infect on the party before they kill the monster. Then I optimize the XP to reflect the challenge difference over these 10 levels. So it gives an XP ladder that is optimized for encounter building.

The curve is much steeper than my 4.5 Edition that ended at 150,000 XP for a monter of 30th level (here it is 880,000 XP). The reason is that bounded accuracy makes the monster easier to hit and therefore more useful in a wider level range. In 4th Edition monsters sooner get irrelevant due to them loosing the ability to hit and do damage with wider level difference.