Reducing the number of encounters in a day

[Tony Vargas]

the DMG makes it plain (in its muddled, poorly-written way) that adjusted XP is what the chart refers to.

The DMG also makes it clear that a party is supposed to be able to handle 6-8 medium-hard encounters per day.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

The DMG also makes it clear that a party is supposed to be able to handle 6-8 medium-hard encounters per day.

The tables in the DMG make it clear that there is no such expectation.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The tables in the DMG make it clear that there is no such expectation.

Your analysis of them does. So your analysis of what some tables in the DMG imply contradicts what the DMG comes right out and says. And that analysis relies on an assumption that rests upon the DMG being 'muddled' and 'poorly written.'

What'd the DMG ever do to you? ;P

Seriously, though, it looks like you've found a bit of a contradiction, there. So, after two years of playtesting, what number do you think Mearls messed up. The number of encounters parties could handle based on those playtests and /should/ have to handle based on his own class designs, or how 3 tables apparently generated fairly late in the process (since the poor guy who wrote HotDQ clearly didn't have access to them) interrelate to eachother mathematically?

 

[Xeviat]

I feel like the xp per difficulty chart was originally intended to be xp caps, not baselines.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I feel like the xp per difficulty chart was originally intended to be xp caps, not baselines.

So, 1st level 'medium' per character was meant to be over 25 up to 50 exp, not medium starting at 50?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I feel like the xp per difficulty chart was originally intended to be xp caps, not baselines.

Originally (early versions of the Basic rules) it was. Sometime between 0.1 and 0.3 the ceilings turned into floors: if Medium is 200 and Hard is 300, 250 was originally Hard but with the rules change it is now Medium. And now there is no difficulty harder than Deadly, whereas originally anything over Deadly had no label. (Kobold.com used to refer to these encounters as "Ludicrous" difficulty, and would warn you, "Do not use these encounters against your party." But now they are fair game.)

My theory as to why the "6-8 encounters per day" guideline is in the DMG is that they forgot to update that paragraph when they changed the rules for computing encounter difficulty. If you use the original Basic rule (XP caps, not baselines, as you put it) then you get 6-8 "Medium" encounters as an average; but by DMG rules those are Easy encounters, not Medium.

 

[Tony Vargas]

My theory as to why the "6-8 encounters per day" guideline is in the DMG is that they forgot to update that paragraph when they changed the rules for computing encounter difficulty. If you use the original Basic rule (XP caps, not baselines, as you put it) then you get 6-8 "Medium" encounters as an average; but by DMG rules those are Easy encounters, not Medium.

OK, so the mistake isn't 6-8 encounters per day (which presumably takes into account the diverse range of resources available to different PC classes), but how difficult those encounters should be? Maybe. Or maybe 'adjusted' shouldn't be in the titles of one of the charts. :shrug: Neither way really inspires a lot of confidence.

Or maybe we're completely misinterpreting the whole thing, and neither classes nor encounters are meant to 'balance' at all. ;P

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

OK, so the mistake isn't 6-8 encounters per day (which presumably takes into account the diverse range of resources available to different PC classes), but how difficult those encounters should be? Maybe. Or maybe 'adjusted' shouldn't be in the titles of one of the charts. :shrug: Neither way really inspires a lot of confidence.

Or maybe we're completely misinterpreting the whole thing, and neither classes nor encounters are meant to 'balance' at all. ;P

If you look at the math of 5E it seems clear that classes and encounters are "meant" to balance in combat--they tried really hard to build a structure which would deplete PC resources at a predictable rate. For example, the XP multipliers are basically an implementation of Lanchester's Square Law (not that they necessarily got the idea from military theory, since it's a fairly obvious analytical technique) which predict total loss to a force over the course of a combat: losses scale with the square of the size of the enemy force, up to a point. Or look at the shape of the DMG CR table, and the guidelines they give for CR: they practically come right out and say that DPR and HP are the only factors they care about. (Mobility is worth zero, according to the DMG.)

Just because the 5E designers apparently tried to create a balanced system doesn't mean they succeeded, of course. In fact the whole system is completely broken from a balance standpoint, in that there are tons of brokenly good strategies and tactics that let you vastly exceed baseline expectations. (Another Enworld thread recently brought up the fact that a 1st level wizard can potentially solo kill the Tarrasque through judicious use of Longstrider, his starting gold, and Acid Splash. Back in AD&D you needed to be at least 7th level to kill the Tarrasque, and 9th was better.)

I'm 100% fine with that state of affairs. 5E is interesting to me in the same way as Master of Magic: not only is it possible to utterly break the game difficulty, but there isn't a single dominant strategy for doing so. You can break the game in a dozen different ways, and each of them gives a different experience. Therefore it is fun, or at least it has been so far.

(As an aside, if you've never played Master of Magic, you must try at least four things: evocation Channeller with Flame Strike to nuke enemy armies from afar; eleven-book Black Magic wizard to create armies of self-replicating Ghouls and Lycanthropes that are immune to normal armies; Rune Magic + Artificer to create invincible heroes who solo entire armies; and fleets of flying invisible (spell-locked) warships bombarding enemies from the air with catapult stones. All of these tactics are game-breakingly good, which leads to a metagame of breaking the game in new and different ways.)

TL;DR they tried to balance it, but failed, and if they'd succeeded 5E would be boring (IMO).

 

[Tony Vargas]

If you look at the math of 5E it seems clear that classes and encounters are "meant" to balance in combat--they tried really hard to build a structure which would deplete PC resources at a predictable rate.

The traditional 'attrition model,' yes.

Or look at the shape of the DMG CR table, and the guidelines they give for CR: they practically come right out and say that DPR and HP are the only factors they care about. (Mobility is worth zero, according to the DMG.)

Still just a guideline. DM judgement is clearly meant to count for a lot in 5e.

Just because the 5E designers apparently tried to create a balanced system doesn't mean they succeeded, of course.

It's not like balancing at 6-8 medium/hard encounters per day is all that lofty an ambition. Take the vast universe of possible ways to pace a campaign, and only balance one of them. That should be doable.

In fact the whole system is completely broken from a balance standpoint, in that there are tons of brokenly good strategies and tactics that let you vastly exceed baseline expectations.

If there's enough of them, and they're not that much better than eachother, that's not so much broken/imbalanced as 'rewarding system mastery' and everything else being a 'trap option.'

(Another Enworld thread recently brought up the fact that a 1st level wizard can potentially solo kill the Tarrasque through judicious use of Longstrider, his starting gold, and Acid Splash. Back in AD&D you needed to be at least 7th level to kill the Tarrasque, and 9th was better.)

White room** 'kiting' silliness.

5E is interesting to me in the same way as Master of Magic: not only is it possible to utterly break the game difficulty, but there isn't a single dominant strategy for doing so. You can break the game in a dozen different ways, and each of them gives a different experience. Therefore it is fun, or at least it has been so far.

Well, it's captured the feel of 3.5, then, for you at least.

TL;DR they tried to balance it, but failed, and if they'd succeeded 5E would be boring (IMO).

If it's boring, it's not balanced*.


* for values of 'balanced' approximating "provides the player with many choices that are each both meaningful and viable."

** white room with no walls or ceiling, that is.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

The traditional 'attrition model,' yes.Still just a guideline. DM judgement is clearly meant to count for a lot in 5e.

The attrition model is newfangled, very nontraditional. Attrition has always been one component of (A)D&D, as far back as I've played (Mentzer Red Box, but mostly AD&D2) but usually only a minor aspect of the game. 5E has almost completely removed save-or-die from the system and leans primarily on attrition if you're not careful, and that's new, and has implications which can make the game boring if not managed correctly.

Well, it's captured the feel of 3.5, then, for you at least.

I wouldn't know. The only 3.5 I ever played was the ToEE videogame, which was quite boring.

* for values of 'balanced' approximating "provides the player with many choices that are each both meaningful and viable."

That's an interesting definition of "balanced." By that standard, 5E is extremely well-balanced, but the encounter guidelines are far too weak because there are a number of builds that shred them utterly. (Or maybe it's the MM which is the problem, and not the encounter guidelines--after all there are a handful of monsters in the MM which are challenging (scary!) and interesting, and a large number of boring meatsacks which are there only to die in three rounds or less.)

That's not the standard I'm using when I discuss DMG encounter balance though. The DMG is designed so that there are no "trap options" as you call it, and so that a casual player who makes a basic Champion fighter can kill monsters and get treasure. It's easy by design, and the fact that he isn't making a "viable" choice by your apparent standards (i.e. some options dominate others) doesn't stop him from having fun. I claim that the 5E guidelines were designed with such players in mind; but the fun part of 5E is that it's a floor on effectiveness and not a ceiling.