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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pickles III" data-source="post: 6665082" data-attributes="member: 6793942">This exercise highlights the whole mess of the encounter building system which is predicate on what I consider s design error in the game (not one that effects game play directly so it's not a biggy). There are two factors why having more monsters makes for a harder fight. One is "Lanchester" - fighting 5 monsters then 5 monsters is easier than fighting 10 monsters all at once. The other is that the XP value of lower CR monsters is disproportionately high. Wizards managed to conflate these two issues & come up with their overly cumbersome system. Ie XP value of monsters rises faster than their threat. The true XP values of the monsters should be proportionate to their PEL, so if a CR 1 monster is the baseline worth 200 xp then a CR 1/4 should be 80 not 50 & CR 3 should be 320 not 450. If these values were used you could just add up the XP budget & get the right results. Somehow, given that this is what 4e did correctly & well, WotC managed to completely screw this up & got the complex mess now cleaned up by #Gobelure.The next step would be to disassociate PEL from CR so we can have elites solos & especially minions back <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />*The DM encounter building guidelines could then address how swarms of monsters are rather vulnerable to AOE at higher level & how higher than party CR monsters are especially dangerous.Whether you should get more XP for fighting tougher fights or the same XP for seeking out & ganking individual orcs has always been an issue with D&D. It is not an especially big one but the wonky maths of the encounter building guidelines drew attention to it (what they were really highlighting is the bad XP values for low CR critters.As as side effect of this maths conjure animals & its ilk are pretty broken** - you get 2 CRs worth of critters adding up the CR literally. Clearly you get twice the bang for your buck with 8 PEL of CR 1/4 wolves than with 4 PEL of polar bear.Not helped by the fact that wolves are very good CR 1/4. Also not a problem for their use as monsters - bad when the PCs will cherry pick the best summons they can.Thanks for the table referenced above! I use milestones too.* Jk bounded accuracy largely fixes this. Monsters with lots of attacks they cannot focus on individuals work as solos (lair actions?) & CR<1 work as minions.** I was going to say "broken but not game breaking" but since it was a major factor in me stopping DMing the game I ran maybe not. YMMV in fact almost certainly will.</blockquote>

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