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Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
CR and Encounter Difficulty: Is It Consistently Wrong?
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<blockquote data-quote="Tormyr" data-source="post: 6481781" data-attributes="member: 6776887"><p>The one downside of that thread is that the system was written back when the Basic DMG v0.1 was out. v0.2 changed the encounter building rules so that the threshold changed from "up to this number is a hard encounter" to "after this number is a hard encounter." The PEL system can be modified so that everything after 40%, 60%, 80%, and 100% is the Easy, Medium, Hard, and Deadly threshold, and it holds up fairly well and is roughly equivalent to the normal XP based encounter design.</p><p></p><p>The greatest contribution that PEL made in my opinion was the elimination of the hard jumps between numbers of monsters or number of players. A fight of 7 monsters was no longer ridiculously more difficult than a fight of 6 monsters, and 6 PCs did not make the fight super easier than 5 PCs. This can be duplicated with the XP encounter based design if the table of monster and character numbers is expanded to each number rather than covering ranges. More on that after I get back from dinner.</p><p></p><p>EDIT: So my encounter build is in Excel, and it lets you choose a number of PCs at various levels and a number of monsters at various levels. It tells you the encounter XP after the correct multiplier is used. I expanded on the table given by the DMG so that there were separate entries for each number of monsters and each number of PCs. Then I used 1, 4 and 7 PCs as the standard party sizes given in the DMG. So for an encounter with 1 monster, at 4 PCs (3-5 in the DMG) the XP multiplier is 1 and at 7 PCs (6-8 range in the DMG) the xp multiplier is .5. You can then go in 1/6 increments for 5 PCs and 6 PCs. 5PCs is a .83 multiplier, and 6 PCs is a .67 multiplier. It would be annoying to do by hand, but it is fast and easy on a spreadsheet.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Tormyr, post: 6481781, member: 6776887"] The one downside of that thread is that the system was written back when the Basic DMG v0.1 was out. v0.2 changed the encounter building rules so that the threshold changed from "up to this number is a hard encounter" to "after this number is a hard encounter." The PEL system can be modified so that everything after 40%, 60%, 80%, and 100% is the Easy, Medium, Hard, and Deadly threshold, and it holds up fairly well and is roughly equivalent to the normal XP based encounter design. The greatest contribution that PEL made in my opinion was the elimination of the hard jumps between numbers of monsters or number of players. A fight of 7 monsters was no longer ridiculously more difficult than a fight of 6 monsters, and 6 PCs did not make the fight super easier than 5 PCs. This can be duplicated with the XP encounter based design if the table of monster and character numbers is expanded to each number rather than covering ranges. More on that after I get back from dinner. EDIT: So my encounter build is in Excel, and it lets you choose a number of PCs at various levels and a number of monsters at various levels. It tells you the encounter XP after the correct multiplier is used. I expanded on the table given by the DMG so that there were separate entries for each number of monsters and each number of PCs. Then I used 1, 4 and 7 PCs as the standard party sizes given in the DMG. So for an encounter with 1 monster, at 4 PCs (3-5 in the DMG) the XP multiplier is 1 and at 7 PCs (6-8 range in the DMG) the xp multiplier is .5. You can then go in 1/6 increments for 5 PCs and 6 PCs. 5PCs is a .83 multiplier, and 6 PCs is a .67 multiplier. It would be annoying to do by hand, but it is fast and easy on a spreadsheet. [/QUOTE]
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CR and Encounter Difficulty: Is It Consistently Wrong?
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