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<blockquote data-quote="pming" data-source="post: 6910629" data-attributes="member: 45197">Hiya!Easy. I don't.IMHO, &quot;designing daily XP budgets&quot; is a fools errand. As DM, one golden rule that I've learned is this: Players are unpredictable. If I was to spend 10 hours designing a series of ever increasing encounters, each building upon the last, finally cumulating in &quot;Encounter F: The Big Bad Guy Battle&quot;, I can almost guarantee that my players will go from &quot;Encounter A, then to B, C, Purple, 19, X, 3.145, Nacho Cheese, Encounter F&quot;...or, alternatively, &quot;Encounter A, B, F&quot;.My point is that the ENTIRE idea of XP budgets and daily &quot;allotment&quot; of encounter difficulties doesn't work unless I, as DM, outright cheat and railroad the players.As you indicate that your next campaign is going to be Middle Earth based...if I were you I'd just stay away from the whole notion of &quot;numerically balancing XP against expected per-day encounters&quot;. Go ahead and watch, say, Lord of the Rings. Now take those 'encounters' and try and figure out if they were Easy, Moderate, Hard, and how much &quot;daily XP&quot; they were supposed to be. The very FIRST encounter that the quartet of zero-level hobbits have is with a freaking Nazgul. Pretty sure that blows the whole concept of &quot;XP budget&quot; and &quot;encounter difficulty&quot; out of the watter right there. Throughout the rest of the movie it doesn't get any better. Middle Earth isn't about killing monsters, taking their stuff, and getting XP; it's about character development and story.PS: Have an XP for your first post! <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&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />^_^Paul L. Ming</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pming, post: 6910629, member: 45197"] Hiya! Easy. I don't. IMHO, "designing daily XP budgets" is a fools errand. As DM, one golden rule that I've learned is this: [I]Players are unpredictable[/I]. If I was to spend 10 hours designing a series of ever increasing encounters, each building upon the last, finally cumulating in "Encounter F: The Big Bad Guy Battle", I can almost [I]guarantee[/I] that my players will go from "Encounter A, then to B, C, Purple, 19, X, 3.145, Nacho Cheese, Encounter F"...or, alternatively, "Encounter A, B, F". My point is that the ENTIRE idea of XP budgets and daily "allotment" of encounter difficulties doesn't work unless I, as DM, outright cheat and railroad the players. As you indicate that your next campaign is going to be Middle Earth based...if I were you I'd just stay away from the whole notion of "numerically balancing XP against expected per-day encounters". Go ahead and watch, say, Lord of the Rings. Now take those 'encounters' and try and figure out if they were Easy, Moderate, Hard, and how much "daily XP" they were supposed to be. The [I]very FIRST[/I] encounter that the quartet of zero-level hobbits have is with a freaking Nazgul. Pretty sure that blows the whole concept of "XP budget" and "encounter difficulty" out of the watter right there. Throughout the rest of the movie it doesn't get any better. Middle Earth isn't about killing monsters, taking their stuff, and getting XP; it's about character development and story. PS: Have an XP for your first post! :) ^_^ Paul L. Ming [/QUOTE]

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