Level Up (A5E) Encounter Difficulty Thresholds

[hipster_benches]

In general, I really like the new encounter building rules. The math is easier than O5e, which makes it easier to make appropriately difficult encounters. I also like the Encounter Points system, because it makes it easy to budget encounters for an "adventuring day" as well as to compare the relative difficulty between encounters. I'm a little unsure about how these systems interact, though.

Are the encounter difficulty thresholds meant to be maximums or minimums? If the total monster CR is somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the total party level, is that a medium (1 encounter point) or hard encounter (2 encounter points)? Or could you do proportional fractional encounter points? So if the total CR is halfway between 1/3 and 1/2 total party level (5/12, I suppose), do you just say it's 1.5 encounter points and be done with it?

My engineer brain is probably putting too much thought into this, but I'm curious how other people are using the new encounter building math.

 

[tetrasodium]

I started out aiming for easy & cranking it a bit as players got over the level 1 new character new system learning & by late level 2 they were handling medium encounters that felt medium Now at 3 I'm mostly throwing encounters in the upper half or third of medium towards hard, often with the AC bumped a couple points. The results definately feel more on the mark for where they should be.

To be fair though my players are only level 3 so there's only so much they can handle & I hope it holds up at higher levels. The first time an enemy converted a crit to fatigue (they were L3) was eye opening to them . The heavy armor types are starting to notice that opponents prefer to target the squishier players when they can & I keep telling them to use press the attack whenever they get frustrated about their high ac doing it's job if they want opponents to target them