D&D 5E DMG's definition of "Deadly" is much less deadly than mine: Data Aggregation?

[Psikerlord#]

Party size and level?

3 PCs at level 7

 

[I'm A Banana]

Keep in mind that a deadly combat that doesn't ALSO eat up the party's daily XP totals isn't going to tax them to their maximum.

If you want something where they have to throw everything at the wall, just dump their daily XP total into one encounter. This will be a few stages beyond deadly.

(You might want to give the party a way to recover short-rest abilities 2-3 times if you do that...you don't have to, of course, but short-rest-reliant characters will feel weaker without it)

"Deadly" is deadly in the context of the 6-8 encounter day. If it's the first encounter in the morning, Deadly might not do much more than make them rest earlier. If it's the last encounter in the day, it might be a TPK.

 

[Quickleaf]

Keep in mind that a deadly combat that doesn't ALSO eat up the party's daily XP totals isn't going to tax them to their maximum.

If you want something where they have to throw everything at the wall, just dump their daily XP total into one encounter. This will be a few stages beyond deadly.

(You might want to give the party a way to recover short-rest abilities 2-3 times if you do that...you don't have to, of course, but short-rest-reliant characters will feel weaker without it)

"Deadly" is deadly in the context of the 6-8 encounter day. If it's the first encounter in the morning, Deadly might not do much more than make them rest earlier. If it's the last encounter in the day, it might be a TPK.

Ok, so going by that reasoning, if my party of six 2nd level characters run into a encounter early in their adventuring day that's supposed to be DEADLY it should be worth 3,600 adjusted XP?

The adjusted XP of the 3 carrion crawler encounter I threw at them was adjusted XP 2,700.

According to your suggestion, what I should have done for "desired" Deadly result is 4 carrion crawlers with adjusted XP 3,600.

Is that right?

 

[Prism]

Here are some examples from my last game including the DMG difficulty calculation. Three PC's at 4th level - goliath barbarian, half elf cleric, tiefling wizard

1 grell (easy) - yeah this was pretty easy although if the barbarian had been paralyzed on the first round it might have been a bit harder since he is the damage dealer

5 shadows (medium) - shadows are sneaky and therefore only attacked when they had surprise. The barbarian was down to 2 Str by the second round of combat. Then the cleric turned 4 of them and the last one missed the barbarian before it was destroyed. Does this count as deadly? One dice roll from likely permanent death for a character. Had there been no cleric it would probably have been a TPK. Had the shadows hit the cleric in the surprise round it would have been a TPK as she only has low strength.

3 quaggoths (deadly) - the barbarian was in no difficulty but the wizard fell to a flank from one of the quaggoths. Still, a pretty easy fight even though the wizard fell and the cleric only had one spell left for the day.

The encounter guidance system was a bit all over the place here. A fight listed as deadly was easy. A fight listed as medium was deadly. Lots of factors effected the encounters. Number of creatures, ability to get at the wizard and cleric rather than barbarian, stealth and getting surprise, having turn undead as an ability, and obviously the dice rolls.

I use the DMG guidance very loosely as I know the party so I can use my experience to judge encounters. Publishers of modules don't have this luxury and I'm sure have quite a difficult time predicting the difficulty of fights. There are some interesting random encounter tables in Out of the Abyss which can vary the number of monsters encountered by 1d4 or 1d6 which massively changes the difficulty. When rolling these I might quickly plug the results into the Kobold Fight Club calculator to see what the difficulty is supposed to be to determine if I should try and give the monsters surprise or favourable terrain. Mainly though you have to know your party.

The only generally accurate encounter design system I have seen was for 4e but that came hand in hand with an undesirable predictability to the fights which we got a little bored of. I'm fairly happy with the unpredictability of this system when it comes to encounter design. However I do think that certain high level monsters have problems though and are too weak for their individual CR.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Last session in one of my campaigns, a party of 7 PCs encountered a group of 5 mutated trolls. These trolls were smart (INT 10 WIS 13), had prepared the area around their lair with nasty traps, and were mutated (fire and acid could regen normally- cold and electrical stopped the process). They were blue skinned and looked different than regular trolls. Because of the traps, and mutation I bumped their CR to 7.

Total challenge adjusted XP was 21,750. Deadly for this group was 7700.

The paladin died alone and miserable at the bottom of a deep troll punji pit. The rest of the party was battered and several members went down more than once, but no one else died. It was a vicious and tense fight that the party shouldn't have had a chance to win (on paper).

I used the mutants from The Hills Have Eyes as inspiration for these trolls.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Uller]

I tend to reverse the estimates in the DMG. Instead of an Easy encounter being the Easy XP threshold or below, I set it as an Easy encounter is anything between Easy and Medium thresholds. Anything below easy is simply trivial.

"Deadly" should be viewed as "potentially Deadly". It's going to depend greatly on circumstances. Does the party have surprise? Is the party surprised? Is there some factor that gives one side some significant advantage?

The encounter you describe sounds like it went as I would expect it to go if the PCs played reasonably well and neither side had any big advantage. The party had to expend most of it's resources. A couple bad rolls and things could have gone very badly.

By the book they should be able to face two (potentially) deadly encounters in a day. Since that one was pretty well about the deadly threshold I would not expect them to be able to face another one.

About every 2 or 3 sessions I will plan for an encounter that is 1.5-2 times the deadly threshold. Usually the party handles it pretty well.

Oh...and I think 5 or more PCs really is a factor here...The numbers probably need to shift up a bit more as you start getting to those numbers of PCs. When you only have 3 or 4 PCs, a single PC being incapacitated is a huge hit.

 

[Rhenny]

I agree with what others are saying.

Additionally, I'm finding that the encounter guidelines (and my own personal challenge level preference) works much better with a party of 3. Yes, for me, 3 is the magic number. With 3, when 1 PC goes down, the others feel it. With 3, I don't have to use as many foes, and the party has less resources to deal with each situation as the adventuring day continues. These issues are all part of bounded accuracy.

 

[ccooke]

Generally, I take the difficulty of an encounter to the effect that it has on that adventuring day.

If I want to give my party a hard day, I throw a deadly encounter at them, then another medium. Even an easy. The point is, a deadly encounter eats up the party's resources such that every encounter after it is harder. In 5e, my goal for a difficult day is to get the party to use more than half of their hit dice to recover. If they do, then the next day they will be harder pressed. Basically, I want them to feel that they're in a bad situation because they have multiple threats, not just one day of bad luck that might kill them (although that's fun, too - it's just a different thing).

Examples I've recently played with:

1) The party assault (and win!) against an entire small fortress, killing about thirty enemies. Later that day, they end up hiding from two trolls inside a tiny hut because they're feeling the pain and decide not to risk facing them. Because of this, the trolls eat their horses and throw the party's plans into disarray (This, by the way, is a big weakness of Leonmund's Tiny Hut: You can't fit horses into it. If you think it's too powerful, give the party a difficult choice!)

2) A massively overdeadly encounter a couple of weeks ago that involved four hobgoblin assassins against the (five character, level 7) party. 1d6+2d6+4d6 if they qualify for sneak, plus 7d6 poison on a con save? Deadly. The only reason the party survived (and hence why I threw this at them) was that the fight took place in dense forest with 15' visibility and the party had a better ability to coordinate (familiars and magic). The party then spent the next two days travelling with stealth, avoiding all the traps and encounters I sent at them, because they knew they couldn't face the threat.

Basically, a deadly fight should be enough of a threat that your party has to change their tactics afterwards; they should know that they will die if they don't.

 

[Remathilis]

From three levels of play (so far).

Group: 6 PCs: human berserker barbarian, human moon druid, half-elf valor bard, human champion fighter, wood elf thief rogue, mountain dwarf evoker wizard. All 3rd level.

Encounters so far: goblins, hobgoblins, giant rats, snakes, crocodiles, lizardfolk, zombies, gargoyles, bandits, thugs, cultists, and a young black dragon.

Char Gen: Point buy, average hp per level. (Important).

Magic Items: Two +1 weapons (longsword and dagger), a few potions and scrolls, and a couple utility items (rope of climbing, periapt of health)

General impressions: I can usually get the one of the three frontliners (bbn, ftr, drd) down to single hp if not downed (the fighter usually drops once per session, the other two can usually mitigate the damage thanks to rage and wild shape). I've dropped the bard and wizard once each as well. (The bard is our primary healer). The rogue just hides/snipes most turns. I find rarely is any one encounter "deadly" but I can usually tax them with smaller encounters and spreading the damage around.

Thanks two players missing, I've also run these PCs in four- and five-character parties. I find that encounters that they were taxed more (more short rests, more HD used) than the six person party, even adjusting encounters for party size. I think that's key. Even using the DMG guidelines, six person parties just bring a LOT more to bear. I'm reaching the point where I'm going above the challenge level (CR 4 for 5 for a boss-fight) and I almost never use solo monsters except for "easy" encounters. (I have yet to use a monster with legendary/lair actions though).

For me, the thing that is keeping things balanced is average hp. Our fighter has 26 hp, our barbarian 35. I can still crit-them into single digits or downed using relatively normal monsters (a beserker NPC one-shotted the fighter at 2nd level on a crit). Similarly, none of them have super-high to hits, so a creature with an 18 AC (like a hobgoblin) is still hard to handle. Nothing has been a TPK yet, but there have been enough dropped PCs that the group is careful with their resources.

I wager things will get crazier when they hit 5th level; two PCs will get extra attacks, and the wizard will learn fireball. They'll also have their first stat-bump/feat. We'll see how crazy things get then.