NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Uller" data-source="post: 6709951" data-attributes="member: 413">Today my group will be making their second foray into a dungeon. Four 8th level PCs with a daily adjusted xp budget of 24,000xp.  Last time they managed to defeat about that amount of xp before having to retreat but that was without any short rests.Here are the thresholds: Easy: 1800Medium: 3600Hard: 5400Very Hard: 8400 ("deadly" is not the right word)Here is a list of the adjusted xp for all the encounters present should they remain static (which they won't.  My dungeon denizens react):1100 Trivial1800 Easy2000 Easy*2500 Easy*2700 Easy*2700 Easy3200 Easy4200 Medium5400 Medium6150 Hard#9375 Deadly*10500 Deadly*11400 Deadly!*Necessary to achieve the party's goals#unnecessary but achieves secondary goals! Meant more of an RP encounter.That's a total of 63K adjusted xp, 54K if you don't count the "RP" encounter.  If they follow just the right path towards their goals and play cleverly it is 27K and if they pick up the bonus goal it's 33K.  What is this good for? What does it tell me as a DM? When you start pushing over your XP budget is when life begins to feel challenging. With a budget of 24K, it tells me that they should be able to achieve their goal with a single foray into the dungeon if they play their cards right and they can even pick up the bonus goal if they push it but things will start getting tough.  It also tells me that the overall difficulty of the dungeon is such that they probably can't take down every encounter in one go.That is what these tables are for.  They are just to allow a DM to gauge the overall difficulty of what lies ahead. Based on my xp with 5e so far, my group will likely tackle this adventure with relative ease but there is enough potential danger there that I have foreshadowed some of the dangers they will face.  In the past when they have gone into similarly challenging dungeons they had the advantage of surprise.   This time the inhabitants are prepared.  So that will make life more difficult for them.These tables are a tool for that sort of thing.  Using them to gauge he difficulty of a single encounter or even a couple against a well rested party is like using a screwdriver to hammer nail.If you are looking for a party smackdown against a well rested party your best bet is to use the daily adjusted xp budget as your guide to where the upper limit is.  Somewhere between 2X deadly and the daily budget.  Use one or two tough monsters and a handful of weaker ones.  Have at least as many monsters as PCs or use the solo variant monster rules AngryDM came up with.</blockquote>

Verification