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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MostlyDm" data-source="post: 6987892" data-attributes="member: 6788973">Yeah, this is an important question to answer.  I suspect if you ask 5 DMs this question, though, you will get 6 answers.  Certainly, if you ask me 5 times, I might give you a different answer each time.I hope you don't mind a few long-winded examples: Example AFor the most part, I actually tend towards option #2 in the dichotomy I proposed upthread.  My favorite method with new players is to warm the party up with a freebie encounter, or sometimes freebie plot arc, where I calibrate everything to the party and yet also illustrate that the world is much more dangerous than that. A year ago I began running a game for my wife and one of her coworkers, first time playing 5e for both of them, and that’s how I did it for them.  First adventure was a heist to steal a magic ring from a powerful-ish wizard (juiced up Mage, CR 7 or 8 ish).  He had some low level apprentices and zombie minions, some glyphs of warding, but nothing overwhelming for a level 1 trio (2 PCs plus a DM cleric to keep them alive). Their goal was to gather intel to make sure he was definitely not going to be present when they hit the place.  They were extremely thorough in their recon, and it worked.  They also discovered some stuff is beyond their abilities, when they tried to explore his inner sanctum and found a Helmed Horror at the top of the stairs in tight quarters.  They hightailed it out, and the Horror had instructions not to care about the apprentices or the sundry items in the apprentice labs.  If they’d pushed the Horror, they would have died, either to it or to the pair of spell glyphs it knew to trigger if it was being overwhelmed (it was of course immune to both glyphs.)  They figured out that this was not the best course of action, and they basically got away clean.  Mostly clean.That adventure was largely designed for lowbie characters to cut their teeth.Other than that.... It’s just a world full of stuff.  Some stuff is easy, like a raiding tribe of 40 kobolds and a troll that live in the swampy southern edge of the city.  Some stuff is harder, like the friendly town that’s actually a cult to Far-Realm influenced demons.  Some stuff is really hard, like the black dragon and his minions in the swamp, or the shadow copper dragon in the foothills (hates the black dragon, who trapped him in the plane of shadow centuries ago), or the Lich that rules the main city the campaign takes place in.For this game... I think a champions metric could be useful just as a baseline for my own edification, but it’s not necessary.  As it stands, stuff exists, and they go where they want, and hopefully they don’t run afoul of something that will squash them.  With the champions metric, I could, for example, flag various locations in my notes with “Champions 4.8” and “Champions 4.13” and stuff.  I might then use those flags to be a little more blatant with telegraphing… but maybe not.  I enjoy keeping things fairly organic, and telegraph things that make sense.  I’m not too worried about killing them.  It’s a tough world.Since the metric here would just be for my own edification, it wouldn’t make a huge difference whether the numbers assumed 50% chance of 1 survivor or 75% of 3 out of 4 survivors or anything in between.  As long as I knew what it meant, it would be meaningful for informational purposes.  I wouldn’t be using it for it’s primary purpose of calibrating encounters, though.Example BWhen I ran a game for my oldest nephew's birthday party, the game was specifically requested as an "old school" dungeon crawl that would likely result in multiple TPKs.I made about 25 pregen characters that ranged from 1st to 5th level (with the lower level characters having more optimized stats, feats, and gear; and the high level characters having in many cases terrible important stats, e.g. a sickly albino level 5 rogue with 5 CON or an old out-of-retirement level 5 fighter with 10 or 11 in STR/DEX/CON.  Level 3 characters tended to be more "Average".)  The plan was for them to pick a group, run through the dungeon, and keep picking new pregens as they got picked off.I designed the first couple of encounters to be survivable, to warm them up, but the dungeon overall is probably not.  Dozens of goblins and hobgoblins in entrenched positions. Giant spiders in a great ambush spot. Rust monsters to jack up their gear. A shortcut passage guarded by a spellcasting Wraith, four specters, and a dozen zombies in tight quarters.  Lots of traps everywhere.  Stone Golem as immovable obstacle.  One chamber will have a couple of beholders that have been chained up and reduced to 4 random eyestalks apiece.  The “endpoint” includes an Aboleth, Chuuls, and cultists.Unfortunately, the game was delayed, so they really only went through a handful of "warm-up" encounters, with the nastiest being a Giant Constrictor Snake ambushing a lone guy in waist-deep water, and the party being set upon by dozens of stirges.  They also played smarter than I expected, in that they thought to buy cheap hirelings on their very first excursion.  So far they've lost just the hirelings, but when we called a halt they were about to be ambushed in a dead-end by a pack of 12 ghouls that they sort of knew were on their tail and didn't do much about.  I'm currently suspecting a TPK when we meet up again, but who knows. Even if they succeed in the dungeon crawl, the guy who hired them is actually a Mind Flayer Arcanist with Githyanki bodyguards and dozens of slaves.  He might kill them when they return to him for their reward.So this is a case where I specifically calibrated the dungeon to exceed the general capabilities of the party.  A metric that assumes a 50% chance of having a single survivor sounds kind of awesome, actually… makes it more fun if one guy limps back to the camp to tell tales of what happened to the other adventurers about to make an attempt.Example CI’m now putting together a game for my youngest nephew and some of his friends.  He is not too interested in TPKs and completely de-leveled dangerous worlds.  He wants a bit more of a defined story, with some reasonably appropriate challenges.  None of the players are very experienced with D&D.So I’m going to be handling things more delicately.  I’ll be throwing small groups of weak monsters at them, using bad tactics, and slowly scaling up as I see how they handle stuff.This is a game where your tool sounds like it would be massively useful.  I’d probably be most helped if the metric was closer to the DMG “Deadly” version, aka “a chance someone will die.” Personally, it’s been a while since I ran a game with kid gloves.  So the idea of having a useful tool actually sounds kind of nice. I do think this seems to reinforce my previous assumption that casual/easy/beer & pretzels games are the primary use case for these kinds of tools.Perfect.Yeah, I do think something like the Champion metric has a lot of value to your goal.  It’s easy to envision four champions essentially just auto-attacking, and what kind of power that is, and how to do better than that.  It’s a good floor.I can see that a balanced party might be a better floor, if you can program it effectively and have it run just as straightforwardly.But I don’t think using Champions as a floor is a bad idea, per se.  Still useful for informational purposes.Sure!If Dave dislikes this long post cluttering his thread he can say so, happy to move elsewhere.  <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    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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