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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
CR and Encounter Difficulty: Is It Consistently Wrong?
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<blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6480037" data-attributes="member: 2067"><p>Another left-over assumption: that there is supposed to be one encounter per long rest.</p><p></p><p>A "deadly" encounter that turns not-so-deadly is largely because the party is nova-ing, spending their most precious and powerful resources to curb the deadliness. </p><p></p><p>But 5e is not an encounter-based game -- the resources you can bring to bear in one encounter are not the same resources you can bring in the next one, or the third one, or the sixth one, or the eighth one. </p><p></p><p>Some of this I think is the choice of naming convention -- a "deadly" encounter isn't always exactly "deadly" in practice if it's the first thing the party is doing after a hearty breakfast and a daily-resource recharge. But it is going to suck up a LOT of your party's resources for the day as they turn it from deadly. And if that's all you do in every day, it'll seem like everything deadly is really not so deadly. </p><p></p><p>If you actually use the daily XP budget for all its worth, you're going to get a much different experience. Part and parcel of the challenge of an encounter is <em>the other encounters you've been having that day</em>. Ignoring that aspect of challenge is going to distort the experience.</p><p></p><p>Part of this is why I want WotC to address different encounter rates (perhaps as part of their Unearthed Arcana series). Folks who are having one encounter per day should not really be using the existing XP guidelines to determine how much their party can take. There's probably plenty of DMs looking to hurl one random encounter as part of an overland travel at the party and wondering how to make it risky and memorable, and the current RAW doesn't go much into how do to that well.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="I'm A Banana, post: 6480037, member: 2067"] Another left-over assumption: that there is supposed to be one encounter per long rest. A "deadly" encounter that turns not-so-deadly is largely because the party is nova-ing, spending their most precious and powerful resources to curb the deadliness. But 5e is not an encounter-based game -- the resources you can bring to bear in one encounter are not the same resources you can bring in the next one, or the third one, or the sixth one, or the eighth one. Some of this I think is the choice of naming convention -- a "deadly" encounter isn't always exactly "deadly" in practice if it's the first thing the party is doing after a hearty breakfast and a daily-resource recharge. But it is going to suck up a LOT of your party's resources for the day as they turn it from deadly. And if that's all you do in every day, it'll seem like everything deadly is really not so deadly. If you actually use the daily XP budget for all its worth, you're going to get a much different experience. Part and parcel of the challenge of an encounter is [I]the other encounters you've been having that day[/i]. Ignoring that aspect of challenge is going to distort the experience. Part of this is why I want WotC to address different encounter rates (perhaps as part of their Unearthed Arcana series). Folks who are having one encounter per day should not really be using the existing XP guidelines to determine how much their party can take. There's probably plenty of DMs looking to hurl one random encounter as part of an overland travel at the party and wondering how to make it risky and memorable, and the current RAW doesn't go much into how do to that well. [/QUOTE]
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