D&D 5E [Historical context] Why "6 to 8 medium/hard encounters" meme is obsolete

[jaelis]

Obsolete? I think not.

 

[clearstream]

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

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.

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).

Good observation, I wonder what we can do with that... ?

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.

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

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

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

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."

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.)

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]

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.

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]

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.

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]

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.

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]

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."

Why would you do the conversion? You just use the base unit.

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.

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.

 

[discosoc]

TL;DR 5E guidelines recommend a couple of deadly, a small number of medium-hard encounters or as many as six to eight easy-medium encounters in a day. If you do the math, they don't actually recommend six to eight medium/hard encounters per day. The reason people sometimes think otherwise is due to sloppy editing of the DMG and the Basic Rules, neglecting to update some fluff text when the rule guidelines were updated, somewhere around Basic 0.2. What used to be "hard" encounters back then are now "medium," so it's actually recommending six to eight easy/medium encounters per day or the equivalent in fewer, harder encounters.

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]

I think the most important thing for combat balance is 2 short rests per long rest.

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.

Thank you for pointing out the discrepancy between the text and the chart. I did an analysis for how many medium encounters per day, and it is often under 6 if you go by the DMG guidelines.

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.

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.

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.

Finally, the 6-8 encounters in my view retains usefulness because it expresses something about the way the designers balanced the game.

Agreed. Maybe more frustration factor than usefulness, but still terribly relevant.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

For what it's worth, I did the math for my last campaign below:

View attachment 87738

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.

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.