D&D 5E Help me balance encounters for Magic Items and Feats

[Oofta]

My experience is that there's no simple formula. I've run simultaneous groups through very similar campaigns and I had to adjust for each group. So really it just came down to adjusting my XP budget until I hit a balance that I and the players enjoyed.

So with my current group the base calculation works decent (they're fun but not particularly effective). With my previous campaigns, one group most encounters were hard to deadly, for the other it was two or three hard and the rest mediums between long rests. Current group? One or two hard encounters, the a mix of low-to-high medium. With my "killer" group I'd sometimes increase their level for my calculation by 2 just to compensate.

I also use a slightly different encounter calculator that doesn't take into consideration the number of monsters. Ultimately though it's just a matter of trial and error. When doing the calculations, just increase the level or size of the group until you get the desired results.

There's a whole slew of advice on how to make encounters more difficult, but that's a different topic.

 

[Flamestrike]

Here's the party composition:

Goliath Barbarian Path of the Ancients
Gnome Artificer Alchemist
Aasimar Cleric of Death
Kenku Rogue (I'm blanking on subclass)
Tiefling Warlock of the Divine

Level and key magic items please?

Also, was point buy used?

 

[NotAYakk]

I also use a slightly different encounter calculator that doesn't take into consideration the number of monsters. Ultimately though it's just a matter of trial and error. When doing the calculations, just increase the level or size of the group until you get the desired results.

Commenting on your encounter building zip file.

The L5 jump is a bit steep.

A CR X monster "worth" about 2.0-2.5 CR X PCs, which is fair. The 40/60/80/100 percentage ratios are also fair in a linear system (as opposed to the 25/50/75/100 from the quadratic base system).

I guess PEL is ok. It matches up at level 1, and 5-14 or so. But I suspect that it is causing rounding artifacts. Like the level 4 to 5 jump; 3 to 5 is a bit high. While extra attack is great and so are 3rd level spells, I don't know if it is a 67% power jump. It is probably that good because 3.5 is a bit high, and 3 is a bit low, for level 4.

Progression is 1, 0.5, 1, 0.5, then 2 in T1.
In T2, it is 1 per level.
In T3, you have 1 per level until you pass 14, when it becomes 2 per level. I suspect that is because you want rounder numbers; that inflection at level 15 should really be smoother than that.

Also, I doubt a level 5 PC can quite handle 5 times as much stuff as a level 1 PC.

I'd be tempted by 1.5/0.5/0.5/0.5/2, but then we don't start out at level 1 is 1 PEL now do we. The level 4 to 5 gap remains a big one.

Another approach would be to start with player level, then add a bonus.

Add 0.5 per T1 PC, 2 per T2 PC, 5 per T3 PC (L 11+) and 10 per T4 PC (L 17+).

That aligns pretty well with your curves, and reflects that PCs get solid power bumps at 5/11/17. And it involves less table lookups.

Level 1-4 has a curve similar to yours. Level 4 to 5 is only a 33% bump instead of 67%.

Level 20 vs level 5 has a ratio of 30/7 or 4.3, while yours has 26/5 or 5.2.

Monsters have fewer tier-aligned power bumps in my experience. So your smoother progression works. "Deadly" happens when the monster CR is about 40% of player level total; you seem to want "deadly" to happen at 100% instead (hence the ~2.5x multiplier you have mapping CR (well, player PEL at that level) to monster-PEL).

In your system, they gain 2 PEL, then 2.5, then 4 per CR starting at 10. Past 20, they ramp up to 16 per CR quickly.

But yes, yours is very close to "add up CR" with some tweaks.

I've done similar tweaks, and I don't think they are worth the extra complexity over "add up CR" and compare, except for under-CR-1 foes, and foes over CR 20.

With "add up player levels" and "add up CR", you'll have to note that at each tier players get tougher and maybe adjust their effective levels a bit. But being able to skip the per-monster PEL table and replace it with an encounter difficulty ratio I think is a win.

Add up CR. Compare to sum of player levels. 1/5 is easy, 1/4 is medium, 1/3 is hard, and 40% is deadly. Learn what your players can handle.

For sub-1 CR monsters, add up CR, then add +1/4 per monster under 1 CR as a horde bonus. If your CR 0 monsters suck, add half the horde bonus for them. (This values them at 0.75 vs 0.75, 0.5 vs 0.5, 0.38 vs 0.33 and 0.13 vs 0.16 each compared to your table based version).

For monsters over CR 20, every CR is "actually" about 3 CR (CR 30 is actually CR 50). Or, if you prefer, they get a +2 badass bonus for every CR over 20.

That gets pretty damn close to your system, but it uses math you can do in your head instead of in a spreadsheet.