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Message: <blockquote data-quote="shoak1" data-source="post: 6723549" data-attributes="member: 54380">I have two remaining questions pertaining specifically to the DMG encounter building formulas:1)  How would you scale the encounter budget by the number of PCs?:  The DMG recommends adding a 1.5 multiplier if 6+ PCs.  I am thinking +.25 per PC over 4.  That means 8x L10 PCs would have an xp budget for a "hard" (slim chance of a PC death) encounter of 30,400, or basically 2 Balors.  That seems about right.  And 8x L1 PCs would have a budget of 1200 xp, just about enough for 2 gargoyles.2)  How would you scale the encounter budget based on less than 7 encounters a day?  I am thinking 40% extra per encounter less than 7, so +240% if its the only encounter of the day (and the PCs know it and can use all their yum-yums).  That means if I sent 8 L1 PCs in on an encounter that was clearly going to be the only encounter of the day, I would have them face a stone giant, and the same party at L10 would face a kraken.  Now that's where the rub comes in - L1 PCs are much more brittle, so the scaling is a lot different in low levels vs. high.  That stone giant could 1 shot PCs at L1 and its a lot more likely to be a TPK than the kraken vs the more durable L10 guys.And please - there are a lot of nihlists out there that want to keep pointing out that other variables in the CR system, like relative skill levels, magic items, feats, incorrectly rated monsters, etc, make any kind of meaningful analysis of encounter building useless (ie dont worry about it and just wing it).  That's just not scientifically sound reasoning.  As I said at the beginning, I have fixed those other variables at constant levels for purposes of this analysis - ie equal skill levels, DMG recommended magic item levels, etc.  It's just like algebra guys - if you have multiple variables in an equation, you need to isolate individual variables and solve them individually.So if you don't have something to contribute to this analysis, and just want to defend the CR system, pls go to one of the innumerable threads on the subject and do so there.</blockquote>

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