D&D 5E (2014) [Historical context] Why "6 to 8 medium/hard encounters" meme is obsolete

[Mistwell]

Interesting stuff Hemlock.

Would be cool if we could put together a new chart that covers the proper rule and XP.

 

[Ristamar]

Any idea when the error was corrected on Kobold Fight Club?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Any idea when the error was corrected on Kobold Fight Club?

Looks like it was commit e354d4ca96e885733c5c02899f371cc5281e03ef on Dec 8, 2014.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Interesting stuff Hemlock.

Would be cool if we could put together a new chart that covers the proper rule and XP.

No need. The Adventuring Day XP chart is still valid; the only change needed is in the fluff text, which you should read as if it said:

"Assuming typical adventuring conditions and averageluck, most adventuring parties can handle about three to six medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer."

If you want more precise numbers than that, vonklaude has a nice table around post #128 of this thread: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...em-For-5E-In-August-s-Unearthed-Arcana/page13. Quoted here for convenience:

So here is the number crunching. I simply divided encounter XP at each level and risk threshold into adventuring day XP. At the bottom are means, modes and medians. And the correlation of medium to hard encounters, which is significant and tight meaning that they are good predictors of each other (from a game design point of view, it suggests that the table is coherent).

Level Easy Medium Hard Deadly
1 12.0 6.0 4.0 3.0
2 12.0 6.0 4.0 3.0
3 16.0 8.0 5.3 3.0
4 13.6 6.8 4.5 3.4
5 14.0 7.0 4.7 3.2
6 13.3 6.7 4.4 2.9
7 14.3 6.7 4.5 2.9
8 13.3 6.7 4.3 2.9
9 13.6 6.8 4.7 3.1
10 15.0 7.5 4.7 3.2
11 13.1 6.6 4.4 2.9
12 11.5 5.8 3.8 2.6
13 12.3 6.1 4.0 2.6
14 12.0 6.0 3.9 2.6
15 12.9 6.4 4.2 2.8
16 12.5 6.3 4.2 2.8
17 12.5 6.4 4.2 2.8
18 12.9 6.4 4.3 2.8
19 12.5 6.1 4.1 2.8
20 14.3 7.0 4.7 3.1

mean 13.2 6.6 4.4 2.9
mode 12.0 6.0 4.0 3.0
median 13.0 6.5 4.3 2.9
correll 0.97091184

The way to read this table is to equate columns to difficulty thresholds. For example, at 3rd level you have the row:

3 16.0 8.0 5.3 3.0

This means that the daily adventuring budget for 3rd level can accomodate 3.0 just-barely-Deadly encounters per day. If you have 4 encounters per day, either you are over budget or they can be no more than Hard. Hard runs from 3.0 up to 5.3 encounters per day; Medium runs from 5.3 up to 8.0 encounters per day; Easy runs from 8.0 up to 16.0. If you have more than 16 encounters per day, either you are over budget or they must be so easy that they don't even count as Easy encounters. (Back before the rule change, this category didn't exist--even a 1 XP encounter would have been classified as Easy.)

Anyway, vonklaude's table might be just what you're looking for.

For your convenience, here is the Medium-Hard range for each level, extracted from vonklaude's table:

Level Number of Medium/Hard Encounters that can fit within budget
1 3.0 to 6.0
2 3.0 to 6.0
3 3.0 to 8.0
4 3.4 to 6.8
5 3.2 to 7.0
6 2.9 to 6.7
7 2.9 to 6.7
8 2.9 to 6.7
9 3.1 to 6.8
10 3.2 to 7.5
11 2.9 to 6.6
12 2.6 to 5.8
13 2.6 to 6.1
14 2.6 to 6.0
15 2.8 to 6.4
16 2.8 to 6.3
17 2.8 to 6.4
18 2.8 to 6.4
19 2.8 to 6.1
20 3.1 to 7.0

 

[clearstream]

I'll cross post this here for convenience

The typical (median) Medium encounter will be worth (50 + 74)/2 = 62 XP. Since the adventuring day budget is 300 XP, that means you can fit 300/62 = 4.83 Medium encounters in the adventuring day budget. Or you can fit 300/((75 + 99)/2) = 3.49 Hard encounters in the budget. The easiest possible Medium encounter is however 50 XP, and you could fit in 6 of those before running out of budget--and 6 encounters is what your table reports. In this case your table is clearly measuring from the thresholds, not the medians, and is therefore highballing the actual number of typical encounters that you can fit.

Here is the table you wanted, rounded to one digit for easier reading

Level Easy Medium Hard Deadly
1 8 5 3 3
2 8 5 3 3
3 11 6 4 3
4 9 5 4 3
5 9 6 4 3
6 9 5 3 3
7 9 5 4 3
8 9 5 3 3
9 9 6 4 3
10 10 6 4 3
11 9 5 4 3
12 8 5 3 3
13 8 5 3 3
14 8 5 3 3
15 9 5 3 3
16 8 5 3 3
17 8 5 3 3
18 9 5 3 3
19 8 5 3 3
20 9 6 4 3

mean 9 5 3 3
median 9 5 3 3
min 8 5 3 3
max 11 6 4 3

Using this method, our mean and median round to 5 Medium and 3 Hard per day, with a max of 6 Medium and 4 Hard. And here is the table again with Easy and Deadly omitted

Level Medium Hard
1 5 3
2 5 3
3 6 4
4 5 4
5 6 4
6 5 3
7 5 4
8 5 3
9 6 4
10 6 4
11 5 4
12 5 3
13 5 3
14 5 3
15 5 3
16 5 3
17 5 3
18 5 3
19 5 3
20 6 4

mean 5 3
median 5 3
min 5 3
max 6 4

As you can see, 3-5 Medium-Hard encounters is what the Adventuring Day budget covers, assuming that in practice most encounters fall between the floor and the next highest difficulty.

Another feature of the table is that each higher difficulty is close to a simple multiple of the Easy XP. That is 2x, 3x and 4x if you take the floors, or 1.7x, 2.5x and 3x if you take your averages. That makes the Easy XP numbers a useful common unit.

Level Easy
1 8
2 8
3 11
4 9
5 9
6 9
7 9
8 9
9 9
10 10
11 9
12 8
13 8
14 8
15 9
16 8
17 8
18 9
19 8
20 9

Finally, the 6-8 encounters in my view retains usefulness because it expresses something about the way the designers balanced the game. I hypothesise that even though they changed the Adventuring Day XP (making the game easier) they still balanced encounters to rests based on that expectation. If that hypothesis is valid, then it saves us a lot of work because we can use it to anchor efforts to redress challenge. (Rather than having to empirically re-derive the encounters per rests power balance.)

 

[CapnZapp]

Interesting.

From a highly abstract ivory tower type of angle, but still.

Sent from my C6603 using EN World mobile app

 

[clearstream]

Interesting.

From a highly abstract ivory tower type of angle, but still.

That's the thing, we abstract the values to see the underlying patterns... but the impact of those patterns is thoroughly practical. This is the maths that the game is balanced by and that CR values and encounter compositions are built upon. Practically, any time a DM uses the book guidance and sets up a level appropriate encounter for their party, they implicitly use this math.

Provided that the 6-8 thing is an honest statement based on the game designers' intent, experience and tuning, we show that we need to discount encounters about 30% to produce the level of challenge that the character classes were set up to handle at each level.

 

[clearstream]

Interesting stuff Hemlock.

Would be cool if we could put together a new chart that covers the proper rule and XP.

Unfortunately it can't be done by simply upping the Adventuring Day XP, because that will also accelerate levelling. The simplest approach I can think of is to increase the encounter by +50% while awarding the same XP. So if we have 4 Orcs at 200XP, we increase that to 6 Orcs while still awarding 200XP. And we only take 200XP out of our budget for the "day".

 

[OB1]

Unfortunately it can't be done by simply upping the Adventuring Day XP, because that will also accelerate levelling.

Not necessarily. Adventuring Day XP is based off Adjusted XP not the XP used for leveling.

This does make it clear that 3 Deadly encounters always make for an adventuring day, which also allows for 2 short rests (one between each).

One thing I noticed is that because of the rounding, significant amount of Daily XP is being left off. At level 8, for example, you have 3 Hard fitting into the XP budget, but that leaves room for 2 Medium as well.

I'd also be interested to see how these values average if you round to the nearest tenth instead of whole number. That should give a better feel for the difference between hard and deadly. Even better would be to look at what percentage of a full day a single easy, medium, hard and deadly would be. That way you can easily add up the total from multiple types of encounters. If you can easily convert your chart @vonclaude perhaps you could post, otherwise I'll work on it this afternoon and post later.

As I side note, I've never used the 6-8 rule of thumb guideline when designing adventuring days. I always use the charts and have felt that they have been roughly correct (given d20 randomness for any particular adventuring day). My sense is that it's the 6-8 encounter guideline that is an artifact of a previous iteration and thus no longer precisely relevant, not the charts.

 

[OB1]

Edit: OMG so embarrassed I completely missed that vonklaude had already posted to the nearest 10th. Hope that the percentage breakdown is useful at least

Sorry to double post, but here are the lists expressed as percentages of daily XP and as number or encounters rounded to the nearest tenth.

Most interesting to me here is that when rounding to the nearest 10th, you end up with an average range of 4.4 Hard to 6.6 Medium. So again, I would argue that the 6-8 rule of thumb guideline is an artifact of a previous iteration and the PHB should read 4 to 7 Medium to Hard or 3 Deadly.

Level Easy Medium Hard Deadly
1 8.3% 16.7% 25.0% 33.3%
2 8.3% 16.7% 25.0% 33.3%
3 6.3% 12.5% 18.8% 33.3%
4 7.4% 14.7% 22.1% 29.4%
5 7.1% 14.3% 21.4% 31.4%
6 7.5% 15.0% 22.5% 35.0%
7 7.0% 15.0% 22.0% 34.0%
8 7.5% 15.0% 23.3% 35.0%
9 7.3% 14.7% 21.3% 32.0%
10 6.7% 13.3% 21.1% 31.1%
11 7.6% 15.2% 22.9% 34.3%
12 8.7% 17.4% 26.1% 39.1%
13 8.1% 16.3% 25.2% 37.8%
14 8.3% 16.7% 25.3% 38.0%
15 7.8% 15.6% 23.9% 35.6%
16 8.0% 16.0% 24.0% 36.0%
17 8.0% 15.6% 23.6% 35.2%
18 7.8% 15.6% 23.3% 35.2%
19 8.0% 16.3% 24.3% 36.3%
20 7.0% 14.3% 21.3% 31.8%

Average 7.6% 15.3% 23.1% 34.4%

Level Easy Medium Hard Deadly
1 12.0 6.0 4.0 3.0
2 12.0 6.0 4.0 3.0
3 16.0 8.0 5.3 3.0
4 13.6 6.8 4.5 3.4
5 14.0 7.0 4.7 3.2
6 13.3 6.7 4.4 2.9
7 14.3 6.7 4.5 2.9
8 13.3 6.7 4.3 2.9
9 13.6 6.8 4.7 3.1
10 15.0 7.5 4.7 3.2
11 13.1 6.6 4.4 2.9
12 11.5 5.8 3.8 2.6
13 12.3 6.1 4.0 2.6
14 12.0 6.0 3.9 2.6
15 12.9 6.4 4.2 2.8
16 12.5 6.3 4.2 2.8
17 12.5 6.4 4.2 2.8
18 12.9 6.4 4.3 2.8
19 12.5 6.1 4.1 2.8
20 14.3 7.0 4.7 3.1

Average 13.2 6.6 4.4 2.9