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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tormyr" data-source="post: 6402695" data-attributes="member: 6776887">They probably did come up with something similar.  They question is: "Why did they not use it?"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.</blockquote>

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