D&D 5E [Historical context] Why "6 to 8 medium/hard encounters" meme is obsolete
- Thread starter FormerlyHemlock
- Start date
clearstream
(He, Him)
Hmm... it says that Adventuring Day XP is "how much XP that character is expected to earn in a day" but then goes on to refer to "adjusted" XP which seems like it must refer to the adjustment for number of foes due to similar wording in that section; but then in that section it says that "adjusted value is not what the monsters are worth in terms of XP". So is it or isn't it? Take four 1st level characters (Adventuring day = 1200XP). 4 orcs adjusted is 400XP which is Deadly for that party. We can have three of those in the Adventuring Day but... we're only awarding the unadjusted XP for each, right? In conflict with the words in the Adventuring Day section, the PCs can't earn 1200XP in that day.
Good observation, I wonder what we can do with that... ?
Chart preserving first decimal is below. Regarding 6-8 relevance, note the hypothesis: "5e designers tuned classes based on judgement and play testing so that characters can handle 6-8 medium to hard encounters between long rests." If that is valid, then it saves us a lot of work. We can assert that no matter what the XP table says, characters are capable by design of handling 6-8 encounters per Adventuring Day so fewer than that number equates to easy difficulty, higher than that number equates to hard difficulty, and that number equates to medium difficulty.
Level Easy Medium Hard Deadly
1 8.1 4.8 3.4 2.8
2 8.1 4.8 3.4 2.8
3 10.7 6.4 3.8 3.3
4 9.1 5.4 3.9 3.2
5 9.3 5.6 3.8 3.1
6 8.9 5.3 3.5 2.9
7 9.1 5.4 3.6 3.1
8 8.9 5.2 3.4 2.9
9 9.1 5.6 3.8 3.1
10 10.0 5.8 3.8 3.3
11 8.8 5.3 3.5 2.9
12 7.7 4.6 3.1 2.6
13 8.2 4.8 3.2 2.7
14 8.0 4.8 3.2 2.6
15 8.6 5.1 3.4 2.8
16 8.3 5.0 3.3 2.8
17 8.5 5.1 3.4 2.8
18 8.6 5.1 3.4 2.8
19 8.2 4.9 3.3 2.8
20 9.4 5.6 3.8 3.2
mean 8.8 5.2 3.5 2.9
median 8.7 5.2 3.4 2.9
min 7.7 4.6 3.1 2.6
max 10.7 6.4 3.9 3.3
Whichever way we land on "adjusted" I feel like Adventuring Day difficulty settings could work something like this -
Easy - this is the current setting, no modifier needed
Medium - increase encounter XP thresholds by 50% without increasing XP awarded to players
Hard - increase encounter XP thresholds by 100% without increasing XP awarded to players
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FormerlyHemlock
Hero
I don't think it's that useful actually. It's not intuitive to look at the "10" there for level ten and immediately think, "Oh, that implies 6 for Medium and 4 for Hard."
Interesting hypothesis, but you run into the problematic fact that the PHB was already published when they changed the difficulty guidelines. It's not like they redesigned the short rest-based classes based on their difficulty labels. Prima facie, I can't see any reason to think the changed guidelines affected anything except the labels that get slapped on a given encounter difficulty.
We all know that Mike Mearls (like half the DMs on Enworld) doesn't even use the encounter guidelines in his own games in the first place, so there's no reason to take them all that seriously.
FormerlyHemlock
Hero
I feel that the adventuring day XP chart is more roughly "correct" than the individual encounter XP charts are, in the sense that when I check an adventure after the fact I sometimes find that I exceeded the encounter Deadly threshold by an order of magnitude (Deadly x4 up through Deadly x15), but I never exceed the adventuring day XP budget by that much. It's not that uncommon to have had an adventuring day that looks like [30% of budget, Deadly; 30% of budget, Deadly; 130% of budget, Deadly] for a total of 190% of budget.
But, I'm not a big fan of linear adventures in the first place, so even if it was possible to somehow compute the ideal number of monsters which would bring party X of Y Zth level adventures almost-but-not-quite-to-their-knees before they triumph, I still wouldn't want to use that formula. I'd rather have an adventure in which, if the players do everything just right and pick up every clue, they can win without fighting more than 25% of the ideal adventuring day budget; or they can win hard (claim extra rewards) by fighting 75-100% of the ideal adventuring day budget; and if they do everything wrong and miss all the clues, they can still win by beating 200-300% of the adventuring day budget. This way you support all playstyles, including the players who just want to hack and slash and roll dice. Of course in real life there is no way to calculate an ideal budget but you get the idea: if an adventure is a node-based graph or a maze, I'd support using adventuring budgets to bound the lengths of the longest and shortest paths through the maze, but it would be wrong to assume the players will take a particular path through the maze or to try to force them onto one.
RPGs are all about choice, and I want my adventures to support choice. CR and XP budgets are of only limited use toward that end.
FormerlyHemlock
Hero
That chart is definitely and explicitly for the adjusted XP, because those represent difficulty. It happens to also be the earned XP if your PCs face nothing but solo monsters.
If you want your four 1st level PCs to earn 1200 XP today, let the face an Ogre (twice) and then an Orc (three times). Total adjusted XP = 1200, total earned XP also = 1200.
Fundamentally the adventuring day XP budget is not about controlling advancement rate. It's about (crudely) predicting difficulty.
OB1
Jedi Master
Yep, this is where I design as well. I use the guideline as a way to make sure that there is a way for them to make it through the mission to complete their primary objective (and possibly complete secondary objectives), but it's up to them to find that path. On the Hard side, I purposefully try to design so they can't reach their objective if they miss every clue and do everything wrong.
In three years, they've only had a almost-but-not-quite-to-their-knees moment four times, largely because they play to stay away from those types of moments and because they tend to skip high risk secondary objectives that aren't directly story related (ie the big pile of treasure guarded by a 2xDeadly encounter). They have had to abandon their primary objective a few times as well to live to fight another day. But it's all in their hands, and for our group that dynamic is more interesting than if every session was a down to the wire contest of perfect resource management, which I'm not sure is even possible in 5E given how much influence the dice have on any given encounter.
clearstream
(He, Him)
Why would you do the conversion? You just use the base unit.
That fact supports the hypothesis: it's the ideal situation. What we wanted to see is that the character classes were already locked in when they published the text of the DMG. The fact they sustained that line of text most simply suggests that it remained true: the game was indeed balanced around 6-8 encounters. For me the climb down is clearly in the table, where they pulled back on the difficulty. I believe we agree that the number of encounters the table yields produces an easier game difficulty. Difficulty is relative: for that difficulty to be "easier" the classes must be balanced to handle a harder difficulty.
I'm pondering what a good next step would be? I think we agree that the central purpose of the encounter values is to give DMs a good guideline to what their characters can handle both on a single encounter basis and between long rests. And while we may dislike a 5MWD, we want diversity between small numbers of deadly encounters or large numbers of attrition encounters. You advocate optional encounters and we can appreciate that without obviating the value of a good guideline to what characters can handle on per encounter (lethality) and per day (attrition) basis. @OB1 does the same thing - advocates optional encounters but uses concepts such as "deadly" to scale them. The fact is, in RPG's it's super-helpful to DMs to have a way to gauge difficulty without having to run the encounter.
Level....Unit (XP floor)
1..........40
2..........80
3..........150
4..........210
5..........440
6..........500
7..........630
8..........750
9..........940
10........1130
11........1310
12........1440
13........1690
14........1880
15........2250
16........2500
17........3130
18........3380
19........3750
20........5000
By design, 2+ units is attritional (medium) difficulty and 4+ units is lethal (deadly) difficulty. An Adventuring Day is 12 units.
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For what it's worth, I did the math for my last campaign below:
The far right column, Sessions, is the average of Medium, Hard, and Deadly encounters. I specifically didn't factor in Easy encounters because you have to run way too many in order to maintain any semblance of progress, especially for Tier 2 play. All other data is taken specifically from the books.
Tony Vargas
Legend
It's important for balancing fighters, monks, & warlocks with casters ('most everyone else), Barbarians are an odd-class-out that way, and fighters 'balance' with their fellow short-rest classes differently with 1 encounter between short rests than with 2-3 (and EKs further confuse that issue). I know that I'm talking class balance, while you're talking encounter difficulty, but I figure if a Barbarian is trivially able to Rage every combat (for the most obvious instance), that's affecting both.
One disconnect between the 6-8 guideline and the exp/day chart is that notorious modifier for number of enemies. It clearly affects the 'medium-hard' of the former, but doesn't affect the actual exp gained.
There's another elephant for the room. Well, or a polar bear for the ice-flow - also large and even more liable to kill you, but it's more likely you really didn't see it, rather than are willfully ignoring it.
Agreed. Maybe more frustration factor than usefulness, but still terribly relevant.
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FormerlyHemlock
Hero
I don't understand your chart--it doesn't seem to be measuring what I would expect it to measure. For example, at first level, if #Easy is supposed to be the number of Easy encounters a four-man party can fit in a day, it should be 8, not 12. (Easy encounter is from 100-199 XP, so 150 on average, and you can fit in eight of those in a 1200 XP budget day.) Each PC will beat 300 XP worth of difficulty that day, which means they might level up in a single day--the only reason they wouldn't would be if much of that difficulty came from "adjusted" XP. So E Days should likewise be 1, not 1.7.
FormerlyHemlock
Hero
Perhaps I misunderstood what you were trying to say.
It's not plausible to me that, if they were indeed trying to scale the difficulty of the entire adventuring day up in tandem with increasing encounter difficulty, they would recompute and then retain the "six to eight medium/hard" text, but then forget to update the whole chart that comes along with it. Human minds don't work that way--we see large visible charts more readily than we see captions for those charts. It's more plausible IMO that they weren't thinking about adventuring day difficulty at all there--they were just trying to relabel the difficulty of the individual encounters, but not try change their recommendations for the adventuring day.
If you are aware of cases where someone updated a caption but accidentally forgot to update the chart, I'd love to hear about it.
Tony Vargas
Legend
That's tickling a memory, but I can't quite place it...
Yeah, I probably should have described the chart a bit better. Sorry about that. First of all, there is a sheet for backend data that has the core CR chart and a place for group size:
On the main sheet, I'll go over the fields and explain any calculations I made.
Level and XP
Should be self-explanatory.
To Level
Simply a calculation of the current level xp subtracted from the next level xp, to get a total xp value needed by *each* character to level up.
Easy, Medium, Hard, Deadly
These fields are simply extrapolations of the CR Encounter Building chart and party size., using the rules in the DMG. For example, it shows that a medium difficulty (at its lowest xp) encounter for a party of 4 level 1 characters would be 200 xp (50x4=200). A hard encounter would be 300 xp ( 75x4=300).
#Easy, #Med, #Hard, #Deadly
These fields are the number of each encounter type it takes to level up. This is not the same as the number of encounters that happen in a day (or per long rest). At it's most basic, you can consider this a calculation that divides the xp needed to level by the relevant encounter xp value. For example, a group of 4 level 1 characters needs 1,200 xp to level up. An "easy" encounter is 100 xp, which means it takes 12 such encounters to reach the needed 1,200 xp to level. I think where you're differing from me here is that you're trying to average out what an "easy" encounter's xp actually is. I handle averaging thing out later in the process.
E Days, M Days, H Days, D Days
These fields are pretty simple. Since the DMG referenced "6 to 8 medium or hard encounters" per day, I averaged the result to get 7. I then simply take the number of encounters required to level up, and divide by the number of encounters expected each day, to get a baseline. For example, since it takes 12 Easy encounters to level up the above example group, I do 12/7 for a total of 1.7 "adventuring days."
Sessions
Assuming each session equals an adventuring day, the goal of this field is to calculate how many sessions it takes to level. More importantly, this is where I run some averages and attempt to take into considering the differences between the base xp value of an easy/medium/hard/deadly encounter and the actual range (encounters aren't often balanced at the base level). To do this, I simply average the Medium, Hard, and Difficulty results from the previous fields, under the assumption that most encounters will fall in the middle of their encounter difficulties, with the occasional deadly boss fight. I specifically excluded Easy encounters from this calculation because almost no encounters seem to balance close to the bottom of that difficulty.
End result is this chart (linked again in case this post ends up on another page).
Without getting too obsessive over encounter building, I found the chart to be pretty accurate during the course of several AP's and custom campaigns I've run. It also helped me identify interesting quirks in the leveling chart. You'll notice it's separated into the 4 tiers of levels, and the speed at which you level is clearly changed for each one.
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Harzel
Adventurer
Either I don't understand, or you are mixing units. 7 is an expected number of medium-hard encounters per adventuring day, but then you are dividing a # of easy encounters by that. If you go back to the numbers in the original charts, a 1st level character should be able to handle 12 easy encounters in a day, not 7, so E Days should be 1.0, not 1.7. In fact, the apparent differences among the E Days, M Days, H Days, and D Days values for any particular level are an artifact of your pegging the # of encounters at 7, rather than having it vary with the encounter difficulty, which seems to be the clear intent of the original charts.
It has nothing to do with what they "can handle." It's simply seeing how many days it takes to complete the number of encounters that particular difficulty requires to reach the next level.
Assuming an "easy" encounter is 25 xp, and that it takes 300 xp to reach level 2, that's 12 easy encounters. There's nothing terribly complicated about that, unless you're somehow deciding that an "adventuring day" is supposed to equal a level's worth of encounters (which it's not). Otherwise, you just figure out how many days it takes to finish 12 easy encounters, assuming a rate of 7 per day. Nothing more.
Harzel
Adventurer
I assume what you are referring to is this:
DMG said:
Things to note: a) this is talking about how many encounters a party "can handle"; b) the quantity 6-8 is specifically tied to medium to hard encounters; c) this specifically mentions that the number would differ for encounters of other difficulty levels.
"can handle" is part of the DMG's description of the meaning of the number(s) that you chose to use. I'm not sure why you would complain about me referring to them that way. If you are saying that you took the number from the DMG, but are using it to mean something different - ok, but don't you think that requires a little justification? In any case, I don't think the difference between "can handle" and how you seem to be using it is really significant, and that difference is not what I was trying to point out.
You have taken a number that at its source was specifically tied to particular encounter difficulties and applied it across the board. I guess you could justify it as a rough approximation and that would be ok, except that there is a much more direct way to get from what is in the DMG to the final value that you appear to be wanting to calculate. If you want to estimate how many adventuring days are required to get from a particular level to the next, just take the XP per character needed to advance (column C in your spreadsheet) and divide it by the appropriate value from the Adventuring Day XP table. I think someone already did this calculation in another of the many related threads, but the first few results look like this.
| Current Level | Next Level | XP to Level | XP per Adventuring Day | Adventuring Days Needed |
| 1 | 2 | 300 | 300 | 1.0 |
| 2 | 3 | 600 | 600 | 1.0 |
| 3 | 4 | 1800 | 1200 | 1.5 |
| 4 | 5 | 3800 | 1700 | 2.2 |
| 5 | 6 | 7500 | 3500 | 2.1 |
Of course, as someone noted earlier in this thread, the XP per Adventuring Day table values are adjusted XP, which will generally be greater than the XP that the PCs actually get, so the results above would be underestimates. However, your method has the same problem since it uses the XP Thresholds table, which also reflect adjusted XP.
Harzel;7209308 "can handle" is part of the DMG's description of the meaning of the number(s) that you chose to use. I'm not sure why you would complain about me referring to them that way. If you are saying that you took the number from the DMG said:
Actually, "can handle" is in the description for what the DMG calls an "Adventuring Day." My sheet isn't concerned about how many such encounters happen in a day, beyond needing to use *some* number to figure out how many sessions each level would take. I could update a single field to change the number of encounters per day to 20 and all it would do it change how many sessions a level takes.
The difference -- and the reason I even did mine in the first place -- is that mine ignores "easy" encounters entirely, and takes the average of the lower threshold for medium, hard, and deadly encounters. This reality was far more representative of my personal play experience, where fights were often a mix of high-medium to low-deadly encounters.
Also, all the calculations are handled directly rather than attempting any shortcuts because other pages hook into that data in ways that values can be adjusted if I want to try changing something. For example, I have an SQL database of all the 5e monster stats, and another page that I can use to build encounters based on all the normal data (type, size, CR, special abilities, AC limits, etc) exposed via drop-downs and such. I can pretty easily change a few things in an encounter -- perhaps because an extra player is showing up -- and immediately get updated data on where things like character levels will end up at the end of the session and how that will effect later sessions. With the number of sessions needed usually being fractions, I found that it meant every 2 or 3 sessions we'd have levels that only needed 1. Being able to anticipate this meant being able to plan my stuff further out than a week away.
Lastly, I did not link that sheet here because I thought it was some kind of ultimate data source to rule all other data sources. I linked it because it proved incredibly accurate and useful well above it's intended purpose, and figured someone else might be interested in seeing the same values I came to, because they *are* my values and not based on the DMG Adventuring Day xp expectation -- values which indicate a sever bias towards many low-end medium encounters. If you don't like my data, feel free to ignore it.
Harzel
Adventurer
Oooooh. Ok, I think I understand better. At least partly. Sorry for being dense about what you were doing.
But now I have a different question. Proceeding from the fact that the results of your calculations are pretty good predictions, working backward, I am curious about whether the constituent parts of the calculation also reflect reality at your table. In particular, do you find that, on average, you get through 7 encounters per session?
It ended up being closer to 5 with Storm King's thunder, with the standard flow being an intro fight (low-end medium), 3 main fights (acts 1,2, and 3), and a random encounter thrown in when I felt the pacing was needed. The biggest reason for this was that the "sessions to level" numbers were things like 1.7 and 1.1. I wasn't going to actually level them up in the middle of a game, but that fractional difference gave me room to drop the total encounters down a bit. Every once in a while (I remember level 7 did this).
My custom campaign averaged about 6 per day. I didn't want to try and shoehorn 7 encounters in just because it was the average of 6-8. I figured that the 1.7 value that was pretty common gave me the room to design some less-combat heavy sessions and there -- and being able to see the math unfold weeks in advanced meant I wasn't having to change stuff on short notice.
clearstream
(He, Him)
On average I feel the number of encounters needs to go more toward a max of 6 between long rests. Obviously one can string encounters between rests over multiple sessions (simply don't allow a rest every session), but I feel like the pace of levelling versus real time gets very slow if XP is spread too thin.
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