D&D 5E Encounter difficulty: how to fix it.

[Elric]

I also made a quick PDF for those who prefer landscape like I do since I have the Customizable GM Screen.

This chart is missing the guide to determining what's an easy vs. hard encounter, which seems like it would be useful to have in the same place

Encounter is easy if TMEL ~ 40% to TPEL
Encounter is medium if TMEL ~ 60% to TPEL
Encounter is difficult if TMEL ~ 80% to TPEL
Encounter is deadly if TMEL ~ 100% to TPEL

I think your PEL for NPCs is way off(assuming NPC=PEL, if not ignore since we dont know true NPC equivalents). Even looking at some of the NPCs in the MM or supplements, they are not close to the same as your PEL. Heck, I think a 8th level caster is like a CR3.

NPCs in this system should be treated based on their CR, not based on the PC table.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Nice analysis.

I think your PEL for NPCs is way off(assuming NPC=PEL, if not ignore since we dont know true NPC equivalents). Even looking at some of the NPCs in the MM or supplements, they are not close to the same as your PEL. Heck, I think a 8th level caster is like a CR3.

Dont see how this is any easier or quicker than adding up the monster XP and referring to a chart?

I think the intent was that NPCs would be using the monster CR chart. The PEL chart is for PCs only (if I am reading it correctly).

The advantages I see are for mixed level parties. In the standard system, figuring out an encounter for 3 3rd level, 3 2nd level, and 1 1st level party members is quite the chore.

 

[DM Howard]

This chart is missing the guide to determining what's an easy vs. hard encounter, which seems like it would be useful to have in the same place

Ah yes. I knew I forgot something. Here is an updated PDF with that information on there as well.

 

[Blackbrrd]

Someone at Wizards are going: "doh" now, like in, "why didn't we think of this".

 

[Joe Liker]

Do I understand correctly that this system ignores the number of monsters and computes only their total "threat level"?

If so, that's a dramatic flaw. With bounded accuracy, the number of combatants on either side is a hugely important consideration in estimating the difficulty of the encounter. A single giant is much, much easier to take down than an equivalent number of goblins, and is far less likely to KO one or more party members.

 

[drjones]

Yeah I appreciate the effort to simplify things but to prove that it 'works' reliably in a wide variety of encounters vs. a wide variety of parties will take significant testing.

If the goal is to have portable, paper only DM tools, why not make a generic set of 10, 20 'standard' encounters for your expected party size with generic monsters by CR level while you have the tools available and note them on a sheet. Then plop in monsters that fit your encounter idea and tweak it till it matches one of the templates that you know approximately works. Like if you have 4 level 5 pcs you know 1 CR 5 or 4 CR 1 should be Med difficulty. It will be limiting on how complex things can get but if it's not enough, sites like http://kobold.club/enc/#/encounter-builder are there to help get complicated.

 

[Tormyr]

Someone at Wizards are going: "doh" now, like in, "why didn't we think of this".

They probably did come up with something similar. They question is: "Why did they not use it?"

Do I understand correctly that this system ignores the number of monsters and computes only their total "threat level"?

If so, that's a dramatic flaw. With bounded accuracy, the number of combatants on either side is a hugely important consideration in estimating the difficulty of the encounter. A single giant is much, much easier to take down than an equivalent number of goblins, and is far less likely to KO one or more party members.

The PEL scales both with number of PCs or monsters by a factor of 3/2. The end result is that it gives estimations of encounter difficulty that are similar to WotC's method, but it has a bias toward encounters being easier than WotC's method. Most of that is probably in rounding errors as both the WotC's XP budget and the PEL round a bit.

I don't see how this is all that much easier though. In either case, you have your Easy, Moderate, Hard and Deadly thresholds pre-calculated. Adding the numbers isn't really more or less difficult either way (as my Calculus teacher said, "anything above 4 is a big number"), but the pre-calc of XP budgets will take 4 times as long unless you calculate only the deadly and go for 25%, 50%, and 75% for the other thresholds. In the PEL method, you have to multiply by 40%, 60% and 80% for the other thresholds. There is a small time savings for PEL.

The total monster XP versus PEL is a wash.

Scaling the monster XP is a matter of looking at a table based on # of PCs and monsters and multiplying the XP by the number. Small time advantage for the PEL again.

Now the question comes as to is it fundamentally more or less accurate (hard to discern about guidelines, but what the heck). The PEL has a bias toward labeling encounters as slightly easier than the XP budget. For ease of calculation, I made the cutoffs for the difficulty thresholds right at 40%, 60% and 80%. 41%,61% and 81% read as the next difficulty up. This makes things read a little more difficult than the ~40%, ~60% and ~80% of the OP. Even with that, the assessment of encounter difficulty was coming out at the same or easier difficulty to the XP budget. This even happened with a standard 4 person party versus equivalent CR monster at CRs 3, 8, 9, and 10, where it labeled the encounter as 1 difficulty less than the XP budget. While these are probably accentuated by rounding differences at those particular levels and the fact that XP budgets for creatures are right around the moderate threshold for a standard 4 PC party, it might show a general bias toward labeling the encounter easier than it is.

The next thing is the most contentious. What is done about groups of monsters of varying CR. There are two schools of thought. One is that low CR monsters should not multiply the danger of a high CR monster, and the other is that all the monsters in an encounter should help multiply the total XP budget. I am of the thought that the answer is somewhere in the middle. If a 4 PC 20th-level party is attacking the lich, both systems label the encounter as hard, but if you add anything to the encounter, XP budget changes to say it is deadly, which is the substantial chance of character death.

So the question between either system becomes: "Can a small change like adding a few commoners (or more realistically a couple of CR2 or above creatures to survive fireballs) drastically change the difficulty of an encounter from hard to deadly or beyond deadly. PEL says no; XP budget says yes. The calculation is not really more or less difficult either way, and is no different for me since I use a spreadsheet. Even by hand, you are going to want a calculator for both to speed things up. But if one or the other is more indicative of the difficulty of an encounter more often, that is some real value.

I have several encounters tonight. They were built under the XP budget method. If they come out significantly easier than the XP method indicates, then the PEL method has some real value. Otherwise, it may be easier to calculate, but it does not give as good an indication of encounter difficulty.

My 2cp.

 

[Elric]

Do I understand correctly that this system ignores the number of monsters and computes only their total "threat level"?

If so, that's a dramatic flaw. With bounded accuracy, the number of combatants on either side is a hugely important consideration in estimating the difficulty of the encounter. A single giant is much, much easier to take down than an equivalent number of goblins, and is far less likely to KO one or more party members.

The key is that this system lowers the number of Goblins that a Giant is equivalent to (as opposed to a standard where you compare a Giant to a number of Goblins worth the same XP, and do not consider the "Encounter XP multiplier" in the DM basic guide). That's why it doesn't have to consider the total number of combatants (separately from adding up the total threat level), and still achieves similar results to the original encounter guidelines.

The original post doesn't lay this out that well, which is why I attempted to do that here: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...ow-to-fix-it&p=6402241&viewfull=1#post6402241

 

[Tormyr]

The key is that this system lowers the number of Goblins that a Giant is equivalent to (as opposed to a standard where you compare a Giant to a number of Goblins worth the same XP). That's why it doesn't have to consider the total number of combatants (separately from adding up the total threat level), and still achieves similar results to the original encounter guidelines.

Actually it doesn't really. 15 goblins is the threshold for both systems for changing the difficulty from medium to hard for a 4 PC 6th-level party. This makes 14 goblins roughly equal to a cyclops in both systems. It does not always hold to be the same, but most of the time it is the same for a group of monsters of the same CR. Where things start varying to a greater degree is when the monsters are made up of different CRs.

 

[Elric]

Actually it doesn't really. 15 goblins is the threshold for both systems for changing the difficulty from medium to hard for a 4 PC 6th-level party. This makes 14 goblins roughly equal to a cyclops in both systems. It does not always hold to be the same, but most of the time it is the same for a group of monsters of the same CR. Where things start varying to a greater degree is when the monsters are made up of different CRs.

Updated my post for clarity. This system does adjust the number of Goblins that a Giant is equivalent to, if you don't use the Encounter XP multiplier rule from DM Basic Guide p. 57, and that's why it can do away with the Encounter XP multiplier rule and achieve similar results.

The key is that this system lowers the number of Goblins that a Giant is equivalent to (as opposed to a standard where you compare a Giant to a number of Goblins worth the same XP, and do not consider the "Encounter XP multiplier" in the DM basic guide).