D&D 5E How many encounters in an adventure? (math question)

[Gilladian]

Okay, I admit that math is not my strong suite. So bear with me if this is a really silly series of questions. I did try to figure it out on my own, and gave up in despair.

I'm trying to design an adventure that will roughly cover the PCs advancement from level 6 to level 8. There are 5 PCs (on average) in my party. So, if I were to budget every encounter as "medium" or "moderate" or whatever they call it, how many encounters would there be between 6th level and 7th? Between 7th and 8th? Normally, I don't worry about these things. I just write what I want and the adventure goes as it goes. But this is for a workshop, and in general I'd like it if other folks who might use the adventure could be certain it isn't too long or too short to accomplish its goal.

The next question, I can probably figure out on my own - is shifting difficulty between encounters - if my answer for question one is that there should be 10 encounters to advance from 6-7 when they're all medium encounters, can I then just shift one to easy for each one that I shift to hard? do I need to balance one deadly encounter with two easy encounters? Or three? Is there any real ratio?

I was sure there were answers to these questions (or at least the first one) somewhere in the DMG. Have I missed it, going back to look? If so, please let me know where!

 

[MerricB]

Have a look at the PHB and calculate how much XP it takes a character to go from 6th to 7th level, then from 7th to 8th level.

Go to the DMG and see how much XP a moderate encounter is worth for 6th level and for 7th level.

Divide the XP required by the XP encounter value - this is how many encounters it will take.

Note that this doesn't really take into account monster numbers, which affect how difficult an encounter is, but don't give more XP.

Cheers!

 

[DEFCON 1]

And of course in the end it doesn't really matter, since you also can and probably should give out "quest XP"... so however big you make your adventure, just fill in however much needed that remains to get to Level 8 with XP for actually completing the adventure. Or if that doesn't feel completely right... have a couple extra side quests within the adventure itself for the group to accomplish at the same time (a guys hires them to find the body of his friend, alchemist asks the group to acquire 8 of a certain type of plant, etc.)

 

[Coredump]

Because I am a math geek, and bored...

The first problem is "Medium" is a range of XP, not a static number.
Second problem is that the encounter difficulty is determined by XP *and* number of creatures, while leveling XP is only determined by XP.
IOW, for your calculation to work, every encounter would have to be with a single creature.
EX. Using 3 creatures means the encounter is Hard difficulty, but they will only get a Medium amount of XP towards leveling.

EX: A level 6 PC fighting 1 Hell hound is just over a medium encounter, and will grant 700XP towards leveling
A level 6 PC fighting 3 ghouls is beyond Hard and almost a Deadly encounter, and will grant 600XP towards leveling.


Now, the middle of Medium is 750XP, and it takes 9,000XP to go from 7th to 8th, so if fighting single creatures, that means about 12 medium encounters, but if fighting multiple weaker creatures, that would be 12ish Hard encounters. (Or 20ish medium encounters) etc

Or if fighting single Deadly creatures... only 4-5 encounters.....

Not sure if this helps or not.... but there are really too many variables to give a straight answer.

 

[delericho]

If you want your adventure to take PCs from level 6 to level 8, the best way to be sure of this is to use milestone XP - simply declare that once the PCs reach certain points they should level up.

As others have noted, the disparity between X-for-encounter-building and XP-as-reward makes it difficult to give a good estimate of encounters-per-level. I'd shoot for 10ish, but then once I'd done it go back and double-check the rewards given.

Plus, of course, you probably shouldn't assume the PCs will hit every encounter along the way, so they may well not get all the available XP anyway.