Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="cooperjer" data-source="post: 6951033" data-attributes="member: 6862150">I didn't read beyond the first page of the thread, but this is the question I had come to mind after reading the first page of data.  What I understood from the first few posts was that the players used a lot of the resources, and some very significant encounter changing resources, during this combat.  Thus they made short work of the encounter.  By the DMG calculations, a Deadly rated encounter is 22,800 XP for the 14th level characters.  However, the four 14th level characters have up to 60,000 XP for an expected adventuring day.  The encounter you presented is 74,200 XP.  By the standard calculations.  What I would have done differently in the calculations is this:1. Assign a weight of 0.5 to the Deathnight because it most likely would have been a single target by all of the PCs since it's the highest XP and is far above other NPCs in CR rating.2. Assign a weight of 1.0 to the Archdruid since it is also above the remainder of the NPCs.3. Assing a weight of 2.0 to the remaining three NPCs as per the recommended DMG guidelines for 3 creatures in an encounter and because they are similar enough in CR value.The net result of these changes gives a calculated CR XP value of 38,800, which is about 2/3 of a daily XP total and my be about in ling with the resources used by the PCs in this encounter.  In my group, we have a decent amount of experience in character optimization and encounter tactics.  I've found that increasing the number of PCs in the calculations by 1 helps with getting the encounter to feel right (i.e. hard feels hard, medium feels medium, etc.).  The PCs in the game also have rolled states with a minimum of a +10 sum of bonuses.  This drives the calculations up by 1 level as well.  The same may apply to your PCs.  In my game the PC calculations would have been for five level 15 PCs.  This puts the encounter described to be about 43% of their daily resources consumption.  I'm willing to bet if the players look at what was used they have used between the 40% and 60% of their characters resources in the encounter.  This leaves room for more encounters during the day.  This also may increase the risky feeling of the future encounters.I'm also in line with you regarding monster design.  I don't want to have to think too much about encounter tactics of monsters, so a well built monster makes my life much easier.</blockquote>

Verification