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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Prism" data-source="post: 6704176" data-attributes="member: 9501">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 wizard1 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 dealer5 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.</blockquote>

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