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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Michael Goguen" data-source="post: 6868371" data-attributes="member: 6842096">Hey folks, this has been stewing in my mind a bit and someone suggested posting it here to get people's thoughts on game balancing and so on.  There's going to be a bit of fairly simple math in this post, please bare with me.  1. -allies and enemies will hit well armoured opponents about 50% of the time  -in a day, pc's can get back average 50% of their hp in 5e dnd from recovery dice  -if everyone can take an attack on everyone essentially every round, the average is about 3hp dmg per creature to the opposing side with a normal weapon and no special powers (taking into account the 50% chance of hitting)  -assuming an avg 8hp /lvl /char , and if there are 10pcs at 4th level each, we get about 480hp for the total party, or 720hp /party /day without extra healing.  so against a similar enemy of similar number, with half the hp, they will take the party down to about 1/3 hp per day. this assumes the damage is spread around about equally as well  both sides are doing about 30hp to each other per round, it takes about 8 rounds to defeat the lesser group (of enemies).  if it takes 1 min per char action, and their are 10char per side, and 8 rounds, that's 20x8 min for the battle, 160min, or about 3 hours.  So I was thinking a suggestion might be have a fewer number of opponents who are slightly tougher than the average party member, and could have the leader escape via  -fog, darkness, invisibililty, fly away, teleport, fortress/secret passages before the battle is actually through, too...  This should take less real game time to play as well because there are less opponents to run... and when there are lots of enemies, tending to make them generally pretty weak... like minions in 4th ed almost (so you don't have to track hp, either)  another thing is, if you lower the number of enemies but keep the same hp total, you reduce the amount of pc damage by the ratio of reduction of numbers or opponents, and battle time by half that ratio (since they are only half the pieces on the board if you start with an equal number)  i know make things math is annoying for some people, but my group keeps getting tpk'd in 5e dnd, and I think maybe it is because we are facing superior odds that haven't been balanced for our numbers (relatively inexperienced dm, but with some experience in 5e... since its been out basically and in the game testing).  So i'm kind of wondering what might be the numbers people would want to shoot for that are fun?  factors that will affect the game play, number of pc's/players, how long the average battle is, how many battles per session, what kind of amount of extraneous healing might there be, and how would the pc's get access to it (should they just long rest, or stock up on potions or wands or...?)  I remember a dm was telling me 4e had some useful descriptions about some encounter types, like I can't remember what they were called, but like big boss, thugs, elites, minions, like set up in a way so you could see how that configuration would affect the story and game play, like time, difficulty, etc. like one was where one baddy was the whole encounter.  Also, using 4e terminology again, rp 'challenges' that come up, spreading puzzles and rp stuff in, how much of that, how to space it out, etc.  Our games are usually about 4 or 5 hours, from about 3pm to 7pm at a gaming store on the edge of town a bit of a ways for most people to bus to.  k thx folks.  Hopefully this will help other players and dm's too, as kind of a template... maybe most dm's already have this kind of stuff kind of in their head, but I'm just wanting to see what concrete suggestions I might give... or at least calculate the challenge difficulty of battles better so our party knows if we're outgunned, so we can retreat or make better strategy or whatever... the group used to be 10 plus players, now its down to 4-5 pc's, the players are thinking of doubling up on characters to improve numbers survivability, etc.  I know in 5e and neverwinter nights computer game, magic summons or animal companions were often really useable as tanks to absorb some of the damage that didn't really take from the total party pool (well animal companions would I guess).  ok thx.</blockquote>

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