Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr_Ruminahui" data-source="post: 5017286" data-attributes="member: 81104">I know that I tend to do it Keterys's way - okay, there attacking a hobgoblin patrol, and I want it to be a +2 encounter... okay, that's x XP. I want a couple of soldiers, a leader, an archer, some minions... okay, now I have y xp left over - that lets me add another minion (or I'm z xp over - let me subtract a minion). That said, when I purposefully buy minions, I tend to buy them in sets of 4, as that makes the math easier, and really only deviate from that to add/reduce points to fit my XP budget - for one, I don't like how the MMs round minion XP values, and buying them in groups of 4 allows me to ignore the XP value in the MM. And to address Abdul's point, I'm not firmly wedded to my XP budget, but do like to stay generally around that point level - if I'm over or short, I'll typically think about whether the encounter would suffer or improve from having an extra monster (typically a minion), and adjust accordingly. One reason its important to me is that whenever I plan an encounter, I need to do it for 3, 4 or 5 persons, as I have a couple of players with a little one and I never know if both, one or neither of them will be attending - so, whenever I do an encounter, I do it for 4 players, then adjust that for 3 and 5 (so, subtract monster y for 3 players, add monster x for 5).  I find that if I do this when I'm doing my planning its not really any extra work, and by sticking to my XP budget, it helps ensure that the encounter will be of appropriate difficulty regardless of the number of players. So, when my adventure hits paragon (which will be a bit, as we are on hiatus and they only just hit level 6), I guess I'll just do them in groups of 5 instead of sixes - not decided whether for the ones I add/subtract whether I will modify their XP values - probably, as the math is pretty easy and I'll be sitting there with a calculator anyway.</blockquote>

Verification