Paul Farquhar
Legend
They talked about what mythic actions did in one of the videos, but it's very much spoiler territory.
D&D 5E Mythic Odyssey's Mythic Actions
Teemu
Hero
Xanathar’s guideline on solo encounters suggests that a group of 6 level 10 PCs could take on a CR 16 legendary monster. Probably influenced by magic items and feats.
For what it’s worth, Roll20 has baseline support for mythic actions in their 5e sheet. It doesn’t use the same block as legendary actions, which seems to suggest that mythic actions come from their own pool.
For what it’s worth, Roll20 has baseline support for mythic actions in their 5e sheet. It doesn’t use the same block as legendary actions, which seems to suggest that mythic actions come from their own pool.
dave2008
Legend
First and foremost, when building encounters everything is dependent on the group your building the encounter for (size, skill, optimization, etc.). Unfortunately, that is an issue that is never discussed in the DMG (except size). 5e allows for a wide range of play styles and this needs to be considered when designing encounters.
OK, first I am strictly speaking about solo monsters. Next, notice in the paragraph you quoted it specifically warns you of the danger of higher CR monsters at low level. This is true. However, as PCs go up in level their strength relative to monsters of equivalent CR goes up. I have not plotted the divergence, but if level+1 is dangerous at First. it is probably level +7 or so when you get to 10th. Then there are some oddities when it comes to the DMG encounter builder. First it is noted to be for groups of 3-5 PCs. However, a 5 person group does a lot more damage, and can take a lot more damage, than a 3 person group. On top of this, the DMG recommends that a 6 person group consider a solo monster to be 1/2 its XP value when calculating encounter difficulty. Therefore, I think it is safe to say the encounter guidelines are really built around a 3 person group and need to be adjust for groups larger than 3. So, IMO, a solo monster should be, when making encounter budgets, 80% is XP value for a 4 person group, and 65% is XP value for a 5 person group.
If you look at a CR 21 monster (33,000 XP) that is:
6 PC party = 16,5000 (33,000 *0.5) XP budget (16,800 is deadly for lvl 10 group)
5 PC party = 21,450 (33,000 * 0.65) XP budget (22,500 is deadly for lvl 12 group)
4 PC party = 26,400 (33,000 * 0.8) XP budget (25,600 is deadly for lvl 15 group)
This seems to work well to me, depending on your groups composition, equipment, and skill.
Last edited:
dave2008
Legend
FYI, per the DMG a group of 6 level 10 PCs could take on a CR 21 monster (just under deadly encounter) and a CR 16 monster would be a medium encounter.
OB1
Jedi Master
Right, CR relates to how deadly a monster is to individual PCs. XP Budgeting relates to how difficult the encounter is for the party.
A party might emerge victorious in a High CR/Medium XP Budget encounter but with dead PCs. Critical to note is that as PCs are taken out of the fight, the challenge for the party rises quickly.
I find a good rule of thumb is to have CR at no more than 1.5 times party level. If they are going after something 2x party level, they better have some pre-planning for how to deal with the monster's abilities.
For example, I just ran a session with 5 level 3 PCs against a young white dragon. They won, but only because they had acquired potions of cold resistance. I would have TPKd them in the 2nd round otherwise (based on the damage of the initial breath attack).
Simply adding up monster CR and comparing with sum of player level /4 gives a much quicker way to look at encounter balancing.
Easy: PL / 6
Medium: PL / 4
Hard: PL / 3
Deadly: PL * 2/5
This is rough, and doesn't work well for sub level / CR 4 stuff as well. CR of stuff over 20 should be rescaled by a factor of 2 to 2.5 (so CR 30 is (30-20)*(2 to 2.5) + 20 = 40 to 45.
I can give you more complex charts that more exactly match the 5e encounter balancing system in the DMG, but "adding up CR" gets you like 80% of the way there and is really easy to explain.
Optimization, of course, throws this out. And higher level characters have more room for optimization in 5e.
So a group of 6 level 10s has a PL sum of 60, so:
Easy: CR 10
Medium: CR 15
Hard: CR 20
Deadly: CR 24 (but really 4/2.5 + 20 = about CR 21.5).
The annoying party size multipliers reflect that XP isn't linear in CR basically (I could go on about the product of DPR times HP times mitigation times accuracy and how that lines up with XP, but I've written about that before)
Easy: PL / 6
Medium: PL / 4
Hard: PL / 3
Deadly: PL * 2/5
This is rough, and doesn't work well for sub level / CR 4 stuff as well. CR of stuff over 20 should be rescaled by a factor of 2 to 2.5 (so CR 30 is (30-20)*(2 to 2.5) + 20 = 40 to 45.
I can give you more complex charts that more exactly match the 5e encounter balancing system in the DMG, but "adding up CR" gets you like 80% of the way there and is really easy to explain.
Optimization, of course, throws this out. And higher level characters have more room for optimization in 5e.
So a group of 6 level 10s has a PL sum of 60, so:
Easy: CR 10
Medium: CR 15
Hard: CR 20
Deadly: CR 24 (but really 4/2.5 + 20 = about CR 21.5).
The annoying party size multipliers reflect that XP isn't linear in CR basically (I could go on about the product of DPR times HP times mitigation times accuracy and how that lines up with XP, but I've written about that before)
dave2008
Legend
This basically corresponds to an earlier thread when Sly Flourish's Lazy Encounter Building was discussed.
I can believe it. You can do a lot of fancy math (fudging CR up and down) to improve it, but that is half decent.
(I'm doing some work "balancing 5e upwards" (improving classes that fall behind the power curve, balancing single class characters against multiclass combos, etc) and attempting to make a similarly simple system to build tier-based scene and chapter building.)
But he missed that CR 24 monsters are "actually CR 30" in terms of power (the budget per CR goes way up past level 20), and I think he over budgets deadly (or maybe I under budgeted it).
Now, you can play with "PC less content" by using the endpoint of each tier (1-4,5-10,11-16,17-20; but use 24 for T4, because evil). "easy" encounters are far from easy at the start of a tier.
T1: 2.5/4/5/6
T2: 6/10/13/16
T3: 11/17/22/25
T4: 16/24/32/38 (note that CR over 20 is "worth" more).
Now, as noted, the T1 power curve doesn't line up as well with CR. Shae is a bit passive tho; he's under estimating low level characters.
You can map (or value) CR 1/8 as 1/3, CR 1/4 as 1/2 and CR 1/2 as 2/3, and you'll get something a bit better (and matches the XP rules better).
CR at low levels is a bit fiddly. My solution is to give level 1 PCs a racial HD (d6 for small, d8 for medium, d10 for powerful build and dwarves) and a feat (blocking variant human), and that ups the power of characters by about 1 level, and makes a CR 2.5 fight doable for L 1 PCs (if hard).
Now build tier-based scenes (something players can be expected to defeat between short rests). A scene has 4 points, and easy costs 1, medium 2, hard 3 and deadly 4. A chapter has 3 scenes in it, and should be defeatable in between long rests (by the mid-end of the tier).
Defeating a single encounter in a scene shouldn't do much of interest plot-wise. Ie, if they defeat 1 encounter and run, they "lose the scene" (scenes should have stakes) in some way (it can be "not win as much" but you should arrange story-based consequences). Similarly for chapters.
At the start of a tier, players will "lose the scene" pretty often. They'll win fights, but suffer plot setbacks. Towards the end of the tier, they'll start winning scenes. This hopefully will give them incentive to advance instead of taking 5 minute adventuring days.
T1 -> T2 has the steepest power curve. I'm almost tempted to make a T1.5.
But he missed that CR 24 monsters are "actually CR 30" in terms of power (the budget per CR goes way up past level 20), and I think he over budgets deadly (or maybe I under budgeted it).
Now, you can play with "PC less content" by using the endpoint of each tier (1-4,5-10,11-16,17-20; but use 24 for T4, because evil). "easy" encounters are far from easy at the start of a tier.
T1: 2.5/4/5/6
T2: 6/10/13/16
T3: 11/17/22/25
T4: 16/24/32/38 (note that CR over 20 is "worth" more).
Now, as noted, the T1 power curve doesn't line up as well with CR. Shae is a bit passive tho; he's under estimating low level characters.
You can map (or value) CR 1/8 as 1/3, CR 1/4 as 1/2 and CR 1/2 as 2/3, and you'll get something a bit better (and matches the XP rules better).
CR at low levels is a bit fiddly. My solution is to give level 1 PCs a racial HD (d6 for small, d8 for medium, d10 for powerful build and dwarves) and a feat (blocking variant human), and that ups the power of characters by about 1 level, and makes a CR 2.5 fight doable for L 1 PCs (if hard).
Now build tier-based scenes (something players can be expected to defeat between short rests). A scene has 4 points, and easy costs 1, medium 2, hard 3 and deadly 4. A chapter has 3 scenes in it, and should be defeatable in between long rests (by the mid-end of the tier).
Defeating a single encounter in a scene shouldn't do much of interest plot-wise. Ie, if they defeat 1 encounter and run, they "lose the scene" (scenes should have stakes) in some way (it can be "not win as much" but you should arrange story-based consequences). Similarly for chapters.
At the start of a tier, players will "lose the scene" pretty often. They'll win fights, but suffer plot setbacks. Towards the end of the tier, they'll start winning scenes. This hopefully will give them incentive to advance instead of taking 5 minute adventuring days.
T1 -> T2 has the steepest power curve. I'm almost tempted to make a T1.5.
Last edited:
