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<blockquote data-quote="Elric" data-source="post: 6400787" data-attributes="member: 1139">The encounter guidelines have the &quot;XP multiple for determining difficulty&quot; for larger groups, but this multiple makes little sense when applied to a small number of strong creatures plus a few very weak creatures. For your encounter, the 2 skeletons and 2 cultists increase the &quot;encounter difficulty&quot; as measured by &quot;adjusted XP&quot; by almost a factor of 50% over the encounter with the CR 4 vampire spawn and CR 2 priest per the invaluable site <a href="http://asmor.com/5e/monsters/#/encounter-builder" target="_blank">http://asmor.com/5e/monsters/#/encounter-builder</a>. Adding an extra (CR 1/8) Cultist would have increased the difficulty of the encounter beyond &quot;deadly&quot; (by increasing the multiplier). But that doesn’t make a lot of sense.The basic problem is that character and monster power doesn't scale as fast in general as the XP numbers alone would imply (e.g., a CR 5 Hill Giant worth 1,800 XP is not as deadly as 4 CR 2 Ogres worth 450 XP each). So swarms of lower CR monsters can be too strong relative to what the XP total suggests. The multiplier helps to address that design flaw.Some monsters are legitimately much more dangerous in groups (e.g., with their own kind, like Intellect Devourers, or with any melee combatant, like Hobgoblins). Those should have been handled with special guidelines in their stat blocks, and XP should have simply scaled more slowly as CR increased (with the corresponding decrease in the XP budget encounter guidelines), thus obviating the need for a multiplier.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Elric, post: 6400787, member: 1139"] The encounter guidelines have the "XP multiple for determining difficulty" for larger groups, but this multiple makes little sense when applied to a small number of strong creatures plus a few very weak creatures. For your encounter, the 2 skeletons and 2 cultists increase the "encounter difficulty" as measured by "adjusted XP" by almost a factor of 50% over the encounter with the CR 4 vampire spawn and CR 2 priest per the invaluable site [url]http://asmor.com/5e/monsters/#/encounter-builder[/url]. Adding an extra (CR 1/8) Cultist would have increased the difficulty of the encounter beyond "deadly" (by increasing the multiplier). But that doesn’t make a lot of sense. The basic problem is that character and monster power doesn't scale as fast in general as the XP numbers alone would imply (e.g., a CR 5 Hill Giant worth 1,800 XP is not as deadly as 4 CR 2 Ogres worth 450 XP each). So swarms of lower CR monsters can be too strong relative to what the XP total suggests. The multiplier helps to address that design flaw. Some monsters are legitimately much more dangerous in groups (e.g., with their own kind, like Intellect Devourers, or with any melee combatant, like Hobgoblins). Those should have been handled with special guidelines in their stat blocks, and XP should have simply scaled more slowly as CR increased (with the corresponding decrease in the XP budget encounter guidelines), thus obviating the need for a multiplier. [/QUOTE]

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