D&D 5E Fixing Challenge Rating

[Inconnunom]

Hey Mearls! Long time Fan! (we actually met at Winter Fantasy one year.) Make sure to post your patreon when you get it up and running. Love to hear the new ideas!

 

[hgjertsen]

Hey everyone! Like a lot of DMs, I've struggled to get CR to work reliably in my games. Unlike a lot of DMs, I can honestly claim that it's my fault.

5e drafts heavily off of 3e's core mechanics, so it made sense to recruit its encounter building tool. Rodney Thompson and Peter Lee both pushed to do something else, but we already had a small budget, a tiny team, and lots of work. I locked us into CR because it fit with our timeline and was a tool that our existing DM base already understood. Looking back, I think I made the right call as a producer, but it wasn't a great call from a design point of view.

Over the past two weeks I've been tinkering with an alternate approach to encounter building, one inspired by games like Warhammer 40k. It assigns a point value to characters and creatures. A balanced encounter has equal points on both sides. If the characters' point value is below the monsters, it's a tough fight. If the reverse is true, it's an easy fight.

I've put the bones of the system up on GitHub:

GitHub - mikemearls/5e_point_encounters: A system for balancing encounters in 5e using point values

A system for balancing encounters in 5e using point values - mikemearls/5e_point_encounters

github.com

The math is still early, so expect changes as I spin up some code to run a deeper analysis of the monsters and characters in the 5e SRD. Hit me up here with any questions or comments.

I like the system so far, it's definitely more simple than the one outlined in the encounter building section of the DM's guide but still runs with the default assumption I've seen written in the MM and DMG that for a party of four players, a monster of CR equivalent to their level would be a moderate or balanced encounter, with perhaps a chance of death but an unlikelihood of it.

Eventually, trimming down the difference between player level and CR at higher player levels (e.g. 10 and above) would probably be an ideal target.

 

[mearls]

If I'm reading this right, I would need to recalculate each monster point value if the party composition changes?

For context, I'm running AL at a LFGS and I never know my exact party composition until the start of the session. And then some may turn up late. So, I would prioritise being able to make those adjustments on the fly.

In theory (assuming this all works) your point budget would be based on the number of characters who show up. So, in building encounters one way to attack would be:

Assume a minimum number of players show up, let's say 4.
Then, figure out what to add per player beyond that.

So for a moderate encounter, you get one point per character. You could:
Start with one creature with a CR equal to the party. That's 4 points.
Each creature with CR equal to the party's level - 4 is one point, so you could plan on adding one of those per extra player.

For a deadly encounter, you'd have three points per party.
You could pick one 12 point creature, with CR equal to level + 3.
Then, for each extra player, add a creature with CR equal to party level - 1.

Hopefully, that sounds easy to plan for. Shifting things downward is trickier. At least, for how it's built right now.

 

[mearls]

For the last couple of years, I've mostly relied on @SlyFlourish's Lazy Encounter Benchmark when I'm putting together encounters - even those in my published adventures. You can see it here: https://slyflourish.com/the_lazy_encounter_benchmark.html. I'd welcome a more sophisticated system, though.

Sly Flourish does awesome work! Anyone building monsters should check out The Lazy DM's Forge of Foes. It's literally sitting right next to one of my Python books as I work on this stuff.

 

[mearls]

My biggest beef with the current CR system is it doesn't account for non-hp attacks or abilities (stun, banish, walls) very well, so you get wildly off on creatures like Ghouls or Shadow's Strength attacks.

That's a huge issue. I'm hoping that by focus on actions, I can create a model that better accounts for the actual effects of debuffs and conditions. Theoretical, this model can figure out what happens when a character - or monster - is no longer able to act in a fight despite having a bunch of hit points remaining.

 

[tomedunn]

That's a huge issue. I'm hoping that by focus on actions, I can create a model that better accounts for the actual effects of debuffs and conditions. Theoretical, this model can figure out what happens when a character - or monster - is no longer able to act in a fight despite having a bunch of hit points remaining.

When I took a stab encounter math, I used a matrix approach that worked really well. The basic idea is you start off with the full matrix, each character's individual XP along with all of the cross term XP (the damage each would deal in the time it takes the PCs to defeat each other monster), and then you reduce those cross terms based on what's likely to happen. So if a monster get's CCed until the end of an encounter, all of the cross terms with it disappear, reducing the total encounter XP as a result.

 

[FallenRX]

That's a huge issue. I'm hoping that by focus on actions, I can create a model that better accounts for the actual effects of debuffs and conditions. Theoretical, this model can figure out what happens when a character - or monster - is no longer able to act in a fight despite having a bunch of hit points remaining.

I feel like for a lot of this to work consistently youd have to rebalance a lot of the spells in the game.

Though tbh im not sure if that impossible, but would require a bit of dev time.

 

[Davinshe]

Definitely easier to use than the current system and I think it's a good start. However, I am definitely skeptical of the numbers at the upper CR range. CR + 5 = deadly encounter for a party of 6? We just know that this isn't the case. Perhaps the number of points per player could be adjusted a bit per level. a single CR 6 monster might be deadly for 6 people at level 1, but it's a near certaintly that a single CR 16 is not a deadly encounter for a level 11 party.

 

[the Jester]

Yes, with a caveat. Work I did for WotC is owned by WotC, so I can't take it up and expand on it. However, there's tons of empty space beyond those bounds that I want to explore.

Things like psionics, new character class structures, and so on, are high up my list, with DM tools my top priority for now. I'm also building out a world to set all this stuff in, but I think it will be some time before I have anything to publish.

Warlord???????

 

[J-H]

I think instead of just a number, it would be useful to include a role with it.
The role names have probably been done to death since 4e so I probably do not need to give examples, although it would help if there is a melee/ranged tag to go with it.
Monks are melee controller (stun, knockback) while a bard would be a ranged controller.

But now it's too complicated to just go next to a single CR #.

On the other hand, a CR 5 caster that's throwing out Stinking Cloud and Grease impacts the battlefield very differently versus one that's throwing out Fireball and Magic Missile. The DPS one will do more damage, but the control one will make the battle much more engaging.

I don't really do CR, I mostly eyeball stuff and it works out. It's not my job to solve the party's problems, and it's their job to figure out if they need to run away. As long as the terrain and setting is not a big wide flat plain, they have options.