Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6481216" data-attributes="member: 42582">On "difficulty multipliers" and arbitrariness:, Gygax had this to say in his DMG (p 84), although he was talking about actual XP reward being multiplied by difficulty, not just using adjusted XPs for purposes of encounter balancing:The judgment factor is inecsapable with respect to weighting experience . . . With respect to monsters, each hit die balances 1 experience level . . . If the numerator [monster HD] is greater than the denominator [total levels of all participating PCs] then full experience should be awarded. If the denominator is greater, use the fraction to ajdust the amount of experience by simple multiplication. . . . 12 orcs are not equal to a wizard! . . . Therefore, the following rule applies: If the average hit dice or level is 10 times greater than the average level or hit dice, there must be an adjustment of at least halving or doubling the experience point (x.p.) award as the circumstances dictate, except if the lesser group is approximately 20 time more numerous than the greater value group. (20 orcs might prove troublesome to a wizard, but even that is subject to the circumstances of the encounter.)Page 85 sets out similar guidelines for reducing the XP value of treasure taken from guardians that are relatively weaker than the PCs.There is a clear recognition that encounter difficulty depends not just on numbers but upon party composition - in particular, reliable AoE attacks (which are the stock-in-trade of the AD&D wizard) make even large numbers of low-level monsters relatively easy to defeat.I also think it's interesting that he doesn't factor in the balance of numbers until the ratio reaches 20:1. Otherwise it's just a straight comparison of levels/HD. This is closer to 4e than 5e (because in 4e you just add XP values, don't factor in numbers, and will almost never be reaching ratios of 20:1 unless using minions, who are designed to be used only in numbers in any event).Someone on these boards worked out a system for eliminating the numbers multiplier from 5e, by instead reducing the XP values of higher-CR monsters relative to lower ones, meaning (speaking roughly) that you had to add fewer low-CR monsters together to reach the higher-CR equivalent encounter values. But I can't now remember the name of the poster or the thread.</blockquote>

Verification