D&D 5E L&L for 7/7

[jodyjohnson]

I think that's the way to approach "encounter building". It takes relatively little effort from the DM and can create some super interesting situations as the PC's come up with absurd plans and the DM-kobolds react. It creates a totally different dynamic than the set-piece 4e encounters found in just about all the premade adventures.

I'd aim for individual moderate encounters and if they pull the area, hard combined.

Two hards without a short rest between seems like a campaign ender.

But if after play and char op it might be needed for a truly hard challenge.

 

[Hussar]

I really liked this article, but I felt my eyes glazing over here:



It's not that its over complicated, in fact much less so than several other games, but it seems jarring compared to the rest of what I read in terms of the level of complexity involved. Just my observation.

Well, kinda/sorta. Remember, you're building an encounter where you are outnumbering the PC's by 2 or 3 to one. That's going to be a very complicated encounter before you even start.

Then again, at least this time around, they are assuming out of the gate that some DM's actually WILL do this. The 3e guidelines for encounters basically broke if you tried to have 5 PC's and 15 bad guys. Yeurgh! That's an encounter I'd never run in 3e. 4e I'd only do it with minions. But it's right on the mark for earlier edition style play.

The thing to always remember with this stuff, is that it's just guidelines. Steeldragon's rant about players complaining about non-standard encounters is just something I've never seen in play. I guess I've just been very lucky, but, I've never actually seen this happen, in any edition that I played. In 3e, used to bomb all sorts of encounters at the party which were way out of their weight class and no one ever complained.

Heck, Paizo adventure paths for 3e were basically built around giving a big middle finger salute to the 3e guidelines - the encounters were often much, much more difficult. I'm thinking that the whole player entitlement thing coming up in play is a pretty corner case and probably indicative of much larger issues than just having encounter guidelines.

 

[Klaus]

I think the intention of 5E is that the XP budget replaces the Solo/Elite/Standard/Minion descriptors, while CR replaces the level of a monster. We'll see how it works in practice when we see more of the monsters!

I think CR replaces the 4e guideline of "monsters more than 4 levels above or below party level are too difficult/easy". With bounded accuracy, very low CR is no longer an issue (you just use more of them), while higher CR means a possible TPK, unless handled with extreme caution.

Apart from that, budget-based encounter building seems to be the same. But I'm eager to try some encounter combinations. Assembling interesting encounters by mixing monsters was one of the coolest parts of 4e.

 

[Dausuul]

I'd aim for individual moderate encounters and if they pull the area, hard combined.

Two hards without a short rest between seems like a campaign ender.

But if after play and char op it might be needed for a truly hard challenge.

That assumes the PCs are going to just wade in swinging, no matter what they encounter. In a campaign such as Savage Wombat is describing, the assumption is that the PCs will behave in a sensible manner. If they alert the area and get the entire kobold tribe down on their necks at once, it means they've screwed up and the proper response is to run like hell.

 

[Blackbrrd]

I'd aim for individual moderate encounters and if they pull the area, hard combined.

Two hards without a short rest between seems like a campaign ender.

But if after play and char op it might be needed for a truly hard challenge.

The reason I liked the thought about just throwing 30 kobolds into a dungeon complex and letting the PC's handle it is that they get to create their own encounters. Let's say they scout it, find that there is a lot of kobolds and makes a plan to just fight some of the kobolds at a time. I think that's a much more interesting approach to play than to just let the players first run into two moderate encounters, and at worst a hard encounter. If you never "plan" for anything worse than a hard encounter, there is little reason for the PC's to ever do anything but to stand and fight. I think it's really interesting when the PC's start shaving off bits of my "encounter" through various means, until they have a bite side portion.

Btw, I am not saying you are doing it wrong, not by any means, I have done something similar a lot, but I the encounters I remember best are the ones that aren't "fair". When I don't make encounters "fair", I do my best to get the PC's to understand the situation. It's no fun if they just blunder into a huge encounter and die. It's much more fun when they think of some funny/weird plan to get an encounter they can handle.

For instance, when the party wanted to get attack a dragon and take it's stuff, but at the opposite side of the small valley, there was a hideout for some bad-ass tribe of monsters. They wanted to just fight the dragon. The plan they hatched was for the druid to shape shift into a reindeer, run past the dragon, let it hunt him to a place where the rest of the PC's waited in ambush.

 

[Mistwell]

Definitely, but when you write a post saying "Those people - who I am not one of -think this dumb thing!", you pretty much always need to think "What the hell am I writing?", because there is a 90%+ chance it's insulting nonsense.

There are lots of 4e fans here, but for some reason you're the only one that seems to take instant offense at any comment about 4e that does not match your experiences with 4e. Seriously you need to chill a bit on the championing of an edition of a role playing game. It' not an insult to you to talk about a game you like. It's not personal, so why do you take it so personal?

 

[Mistwell]

There is enough information in this article, I think, for me to write some scripts using OGRE and the monsters in the Starter Set so people can set the level of the party, the encounter difficulty they want, and it will spit out a list of potential encounters.

Hmmm...maybe when I get back from vacation.

 

[Sadras]

There are lots of 4e fans here, but for some reason you're the only one that seems to take instant offense at any comment about 4e that does not match your experiences with 4e....(snip)...It's not personal, so why do you take it so personal?

Hey, I got onto his ignore list cause I claimed he wasn't the authority on 4e. I dunno, maybe he is an undercover 4e designer

 

[jrowland]

Hmm...in no particular order you have to:

1) Choose a difficulty of the encounter
2) Select Monsters to fill a XP budget
3) Make sure no single monsters 'power' exceeds (or is too far above if the DM chooses) the party level
4) Make sure when using many monsters of low 'power' to adjust budget for sheer numbers

which edition did I describe?

Only you can answer that, because you're being very vague, and may be skipping steps or forgetting them.

That's the point. It could be any edition, more or less. The specific steps are unique to each edition, but the gist is always the same. Just because a new edition has some specific steps/terminology doesn't mean you aren't doing the same thing you always have done. You are, but with the new underlying math.

 

[Cybit]

...Hey, just noticed something about this table: The power curve isn't a curve any more. It's a straight line.

In the last two editions, PC power scaled on an exponential curve. In 3E, the very rough guideline was that PC power was proportional to 1.4^level (doubling every two levels). In 4E, it was 1.2^level (doubling every four levels).

But in 5E, PC power is proportional to level. It's not exact, but it's close. To a first approximation, a "challenging" opponent is one worth 100 XP per level.

This is really interesting. For one thing, it means power scales rapidly at the low levels and semi-plateaus at the high levels, rather like E6. A 4th-level character is twice as powerful as a 2nd-level character, but a 14th-level character and a 12th-level character are almost evenly matched. For another thing, it means you can very easily eyeball NPC encounters simply by adding up the levels of the NPCs.

It also means we're going to have to collectively revisit a lot of assumptions about high-level PCs and the campaign world.

This. Yes. Oh yes, you will. ;-)