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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 6883833" data-attributes="member: 20323">As you know from your past DMing experience, you're dealing with a big ball of "It Depends."How many PCs are in your party? What classes are they playing? How skilled are the players? How likely are they to try outside-of-the-box things to circumvent rolling in combat entirely? How intelligently/ruthlessly do you run your monsters? How many encounters/day do you throw at them? Which monsters specifically are they facing? How fresh are they in a given encounter?With slaadi, specifically red and blue slaadi, the danger is less in the immediate encounter and more the effects of the diseases they impart. For your 5th-7th level party (you still should tell us the #'s and composition if you know it), you're probably not going to want to send more than 1 blue/green/gray slaad at them at a time. Possibly with a couple slaad tadpoles. I'll explain my specific thoughts/experiences below, but one thing to consider is the regeneration ability that all slaadi have — there's no RAW way to circumvent it, so the more slaadi you include the more that regeneration is going to really hamper the PCs' day. For that reason alone, they are tough contenders for a 5th-7th level party.You might get away with sending 2-3 red slaad at them when they're fresh, though that would be one hell of a fight.The blue slaad can infect up to 2 PCs/round, preventing them from healing and reducing their maximum HP by 10 every 24 hours, cumulatively. And only a wish ends the transformation! That's a PC-killer monster right there! I would only send 1 blue slaad against them at a time.The green slaad and the grey slaad I've made better use of as subtle enemies thanks to their shapeshifting and ability to detect thoughts. Because of their ability to turn invisible and cast fireball (avg 28 damage on failed save — compared to 38 HP for a 5th level cleric with 14 Constitution), they are very dangerous creatures. So while you miiight be able to throw 2 green slaad at them (most likely at the upper level range for the PCs that you gave), definitely only throw 1 grey slaad at them in any given encounter. I base that off of the 1/day fireball of the green slaad and 2/day fireball of the grey slaad. Hit a 5th level party with 2 fireballs and you're looking at several charred PC corpses at least.First off, you're going to get different answers here because of all those variables I listed above. However, I tried to start an experiment to take this from the purely anecdotal into a spreadsheet with some form of collected data:<a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AAIBDemfxoX8DTxAg2q7AzkZVZxwwONvhsxQ2eHTxXY/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">ACTUAL 5e Encounter Difficulty (GoogleDrive)</a>(1) MY experience with a fresh (uninjured, no resources spent) party of 6 low-level PCs (low to moderate optimization, mix of player skills), is that the answer to your first question is YES, more than half the time I design encounters where the XP budget is hard or deadly.(2) For your second question, for my current games (at 3rd level and 4th level, respectively) I tend to use monsters no more than CR+2 above the party's level. I'm sure as they get to higher levels that threshold will increase. For example, having 3rd level spells once they hit 5th level (like your PCs are starting) will be a power jump. I'll also add that it's HUGELY dependent on the specific monster's capacities. For example, CR 2 carrion crawlers. Even with the way 5e neutered their paralyzation power, a single carrion crawler was scary at 1st level, and a trio of carrion crawlers was terrifying at 2nd level.(3) I think the encounter multipliers work fine if you're using them in a simplistic way. However, when you start combining monsters of significantly different CRs the DMG multipliers break down (i.e. a lich and a crawling claw do not merit a 1.5x encounter budget XP multiplier). As   [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION] mentioned the DMG covers this in an artistic license binary sense — if you think the crawling claws contribute meaningfully add them in, if not leave them out. OTOH    [MENTION=6780929]Gobelure[/MENTION] posted a great mathematical solution to this issue: <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?367697-Encounter-difficulty-how-to-fix-it" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?367697-Encounter-difficulty-how-to-fix-it</a> It gives you slightly different encounter outputs than the DMG, but (arguably) you'll get a bit more accuracy in encounter building...if that's your thing.As an aside, when you say "or even above the deadly difficulty rating," I think you might be misunderstanding the encounter XP guidelines in the DMG p. 82. The values on the chart are interpreted thus: [OOC]5. Compare XP. Compare the monsters' adjusted XP value to the party's XP thresholds. The closest threshold that is lower than the adjusted XP value of the monsters determines the encounter's difficulty.[/OOC]Lastly, I'll say that after having played 5e a bit, I understand all that seemingly frustrating "generic" advice I received at first. There really are a lot of variables and the system is quite robust. I'd treat your first couple sessions as a chance to become familiar with your players's play styles and their PCs' capabilities. Experiment around a bit while the PCs are relatively fresh — throw an encounter you think would be easy, another time throw an encounter you think would be an "average" challenge, and another time throw an encounter you think would be deadly. That will give you a good baseline for your particular group more helpful than any amount of advice (whether from other DMs or from the DMG).EDIT: And make it cool! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="http://i.imgur.com/A9wrQRx.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /></blockquote>

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