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[Historical context] Why "6 to 8 medium/hard encounters" meme is obsolete
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<blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 7204469" data-attributes="member: 6787650"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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 <em>hard</em> (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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="FormerlyHemlock, post: 7204469, member: 6787650"] 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 [I]hard[/I] (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. [/QUOTE]
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