Looking for a table about encounters and xp.

[Bootlebat]

I'm pretty sure this is in the Player's Handbook or Dungeon Master's Guide but I can't find it. It was a table of various levels, how much xp encounters give, and how hard the encounter will be for the players (I only remember the hardest rating which was "deadly" and the book listed 700 xp worth of monsters as a deadly encounter to level 1) I can't find it and it's driving me nuts.

 

[Bootlebat]

Lol found it a few minutes after posting (is in the DMG on page 82 if anyone is wondering)

 

[Ath'kethin]

Glad we could be of help.

Incidentally, an invaluable resource for encounter building can be found here:

https://kobold.club/fight/#/encounter-builder

It includes all the monsters from the Monster Manual plus a bunch of other sources (and allows you to select which sources you want to pull monsters from), allows you to set the average level of your party, and handles all the math - including the weird multiples and stuff that are easy to overlook if you're doing everything manually.

Have fun, and good gaming!

 

[Bootlebat]

Thanks!

 

[clearstream]

Incidentally, an invaluable resource for encounter building can be found here:

https://kobold.club/fight/#/encounter-builder

I love Kobold Fight Club.

For the OP, I've found in play that the guideline encounters are for an easy level of challenge with a quick pacing. If you were to use the DMG guidelines for rate of advancement and challenge, you'd need to fit in several encounters per session, most of which would be mechanically inconsequential. This possibly reflects an assumption of principally dungeoneering, with minutes between encounters.

If you are running a more open campaign (as nearly every published adventure falls into so far) and want players to experience moderate challenge, a straightforward correction is to use a mostly-hard-or-deadly weighting to your encounters. The multipliers for numbers of foes are way too high, so I'd probably correct that table to something like 1-2 = x1, 3-10 = x1.5, 11+ = x2. TBH with experienced players you can ignore that table and it works out fine. I have a veteran player group, and need to use a challenge level above Deadly if I want to put them in real danger, and that is with ignoring the multipliers.

So while the CRs are a fairly good guide to creature power, the XP thresholds for building encounters are low-balled and the Encounter Multipliers are way over-stated. It is true that creatures are weaker alone, probably even by the inverse of the multipliers; but the baselines thresholds don't seem to assume creatures will be alone. Relative to a more realistic, multi-creature baseline, the multipliers are far too big.

The quick fix is something like this - read 1-2 lines above the line for your party on the XP Thresholds table. So you treat your 8th party as 9th or 10th etc. Ignore the Encounter Multipliers or use my adjustments. In order to get the advancement rate right, if using encounter XP for that, you need mostly hard and deadly encounters. FWIW Easy encounters are mechanically meaningless in most campaigns, anyhow.

 

[clearstream]

Below is an image of a spreadsheet I made, that reverses out the assumptions from the DMG to find the expected pacing. This one is for my campaign, and it doubles the sessions/level assumption from the DMG (i.e. slower pacing) and goes from there. (I do have one that uses the DMG sessions.) It also uses my Encounter Multipliers. The light-blue band is roughly what I am using for my party of five level 8-10 PCs right now. I think they can handle everything in this band. An "Easy" encounter is one the book suggests would be Hard-Deadly for their average level (9). A "Deadly" encounter is one the book suggests would be Hard-Deadly for a party 3 levels higher (12).