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Message: <blockquote data-quote="l0lzero" data-source="post: 6994800" data-attributes="member: 6855137">Sorry, I have diarrhea of the mouth ;.;Well see that's just it, I think the encounter table works fine for the basic rules and for stock character options. At low levels you don't have to worry about things like perfect accuracy at 600 feet, bards/sorcs with eldritch blast, any class other than fighter with action surge, and so on. There are a couple of hybrid subclasses, but otherwise the classes tend to stick fairly well to their roles, so without feats or MC, I feel the base encounter table is right. Monsters are tuned for those kinds of PCs, and the challenge they represent is much more accurate; no twinned cure wounds, no quickened action surge EB spam, no pact-smites, etc.Well, I think you could, largely, get away with a single table, but it would be for MC and Feat games. Consider great weapon master is close to an additional attack in damage (a longsword with 20 str is only going to average 9) from each power swing, a normal monster isn't designed to sustain that kind of damage round to round, but a +2 or 3 or 4 from raging, not such a big deal because it still takes 3 attacks to start approaching the bonus damage from a single power attack from GWM. So your focus should be, I feel, and feel free to do it however you want, on accounting for feats. I think you're spending a lot of time and effort trying to tune for conditions that rarely exist if you stick with basic rules 4 person party setup. Again, do it however you want, but I think you'd be better off looking more towards what an individual character could handle on average, and then the DM can add up the xp budget for each member of the party. Not that you'd create a fighter table or a ranger table, but rather you'd take a stable of characters at various levels with mild optimization and run them individually against a solo, a small group, a medium group, and a large group, to see what kinds of effects it has on that character's ability to survive the fight. I may actually invest the time in doing this, by the by, I'm thinking two fights per tier myself, for a total of 10 test runs across the 20 levels and using average damage from all involved in a specially created arena (no rolling to hit, but rather creatures move and whatnot and when they attack it auto-hits for damage based on hit probability and average damage), but I don't actually expect you to do that, I'm just suggesting how I would (possibly am) go about performing the tests. I, personally, am thinking lore bard, totem barb, life cleric, ek fighter, moon druid, OH monk, ven pally, hunteranger, assassin, dsorc, BS wizard, and feylock (chain for familiar cheese). I just gotta look up the formulas for accounting for crits and how to average damage based on likelihood of a target saving vs an effect like a breath weapon. Again, not putting this all on you, I'm really interested in running these challenge tests now lol. I also think a 4 person party assumption would skew results against 3 or less parties, and probably end up weak against 5 or more parties. But, I'm not a math go, I'm going with intuition as of this moment. I could be entirely wrong for all I know.See, I don't think so. The versatility added by feats and MC, as well as the increase in power, largely counter-acts the action economy hit. If you have a party of 4 PCs, and two of them heal, then it's less of a threat to have multiple people getting beaten on. That's what I suggest so heavily against changing the base table for a stock game with no variant rules. In a stock game your healers heal, that's it. I've long advocated for judicious use of the healer feat because over the course of a day it's far more effective than a single healing spell and the resource cost is a mere 5 gp per 10 uses, leaving you slots to attack and deal damage with, letting you heal the party up between fights with things like hit dice and potions to compensate for the lack of direct healing. Feats and MC open up new synergies and abilities that, I feel, more than mitigate the extra actions of more monsters in an encounter. Additionally, the tougher the group of monsters in your horde, the less XP you have to budget. Hordes are best constructed from low CR mobs as their only real purpose is to soak up actions and resources, consider the CR 9 with 13 CR 1 creatures example vs the 4 CR 5 creature example, both use up almost all of the budget, but the tougher group has significantly less monsters. In the latter example of 4 CR 5 as a deadly encounter for a PCL 3 group of 4 characters, that's actually a pretty solid fight right there, because it's a CR 5 vs each 3rd level PC. The multipliers would reduce the number of tougher creatures you could throw in a fight, and so you'd end up with, maybe 2 or 3 monsters with a multiplier based on group size, which would allow for focus fire efficiency and diminished depletion of resources. If you leave the multiplier out, then you can sick a monster on each PC, making focus fire tactics less effective, draining resources better from the party, and I think it would probably fit the definition of deadly because your low AC, low HP players are going to have monsters dedicated to them, specifically, which could quickly result in them being dropped. For instance, I believe gladiator is CR 5? A 3rd level barbarian is going to be able to fight a gladiator and have a fairly good chance of winning, thanks to rage resistance, but a 3rd level wizard, maybe not so much. There's the very real possibility that your wizard is going down, even if you don't gang up on him and you're just sending the one gladiator at him.See, that's the issue is there needs to be a solid understanding of how access to new spell levels is going to affect the damage output and mitigation abilities of a party. A spell like fireball is going to be very effective at inflicting damage, and a spell like wall of stone is going to be good at mitigating it (in the sense that you can block creatures from using their actions to attack you by forcing them to maneuver around the wall), which is why the rate of increase needs to intensify as the levels climb.I think I'm going to start working on getting those characters drawn up now and then see if I can't find the formulas for calculating the average damage of a spell with a given DC vs a known save bonus (I can't imagine it's too different from the hit% calculations, but I don't know how to account for criticals either, so, yay google!). New semester is about to start, and I'm a procrastinator, so I feel like this is something I can get done soonish in lieu of schoolwork, if you'd be interested in the data I come up with (probably an excel spreadsheet or a formatted text file).I'm thinking I'm going to run the tests at lvls 1, 3, 5, 8, 11, 14, 17, and 20, with Plvl +2 (solo), = (small group, 2 mobs), -2 (medium group, 4 mobs), and -8 (large group, 16 mobs). I think I'm going to have to look up MC builds too, and run a few of the more extreme combos as their own tests as well, probably pallock, BMbarb, and some kind of rogue MC, assassin shadow monk?Damn your interesting and timely topic... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" /></blockquote>

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