FallenRX
Adventurer
I recently made a post on Reddit about rebalancing your game to center around "hard" according to the XP budget being your average encounter, to make for shorter, more efficient adventuring days, with a bit of challenge to then, I came across this post, the top rated one saying this.
This baffled me, and I actually looked at the final playtest Document, and found out...this is true, but not as he explained.
Basically, In the original playtest of the Game, there were only 3 difficulties, Easy(Now Medium), Average(Now Hard), and Tough(Now Deadly). With clear guidelines on how to run this, with 4 on Average, 6-8 on Easy, and 2 or 3 on Deadly.
After the playtest for some reason, despite this being fine and fitting the typical balance paradigm that DnD has always had(at least 3-4 encounters per day), they added a new difficulty called "EASY", changing the old Easy to Medium, making the Average to Hard, and making Tough slightly easier and making it Deadly, and did this without actually changing the math much.
What this causes is, Medium encounters are still easy, because Medium Encounters WERE the Easy encounters, and the math didnt change much at all, so they never stopped being easy.
This leads to the adventuring day dragging out on easy encounters, and kinda ruins the pacing of the game, and the challenge the game was actually playtested around, which makes the game simply feel worse, all because of a Last minute not publically playtested changed, that drags out the expectations of the adventuring day. No wonder people feel Medium encounters are too easy because they were, and since the math didn't change much STILL ARE the Easy encounters.
The game was and still is designed around 3-4 Encounters per day, Its just a simple dumb naming change shifted expectations, making the "Easy" encounters the Default for some reason, ruining the pacing of the game. My Advice is? Simply as my previous post, Design your game around "Hard" Encounters, as that is actually the "Average" encounters the game was designed around, not the last-minute switch to make the "Easy" encounters the average.
My only question is, Why did Wizards purposely make their game feel worse with this last-minute change without public playtesting, Why?
TL;DR. The game was originally designed around "Hard" Encounters being the average, but last-minute wizards added a new, easier difficulty, and downshifted the game's average encounters to the "Easy" Encounters without changing the math. So now the game feels too easy.
Again the original playtest Adventuring Day is still in the game, it's just Hard Encounters now, so as per my last point, again, simply just use Hard as your average, its actually what the game was designed for.
" Funny bit of trivia, during the open playtest for 5e, what we call Hard encounter we called Average and what we call Medium were called Easy. The math behind the adventuring day hasn't changed since then, still 6.5 Medium (playtest Easy) and 4 Hard (playtest Average), but there are still people who swear the playtest adventuring day was better, when all that changed were the difficulty names. "
This baffled me, and I actually looked at the final playtest Document, and found out...this is true, but not as he explained.
Basically, In the original playtest of the Game, there were only 3 difficulties, Easy(Now Medium), Average(Now Hard), and Tough(Now Deadly). With clear guidelines on how to run this, with 4 on Average, 6-8 on Easy, and 2 or 3 on Deadly.
After the playtest for some reason, despite this being fine and fitting the typical balance paradigm that DnD has always had(at least 3-4 encounters per day), they added a new difficulty called "EASY", changing the old Easy to Medium, making the Average to Hard, and making Tough slightly easier and making it Deadly, and did this without actually changing the math much.
What this causes is, Medium encounters are still easy, because Medium Encounters WERE the Easy encounters, and the math didnt change much at all, so they never stopped being easy.
This leads to the adventuring day dragging out on easy encounters, and kinda ruins the pacing of the game, and the challenge the game was actually playtested around, which makes the game simply feel worse, all because of a Last minute not publically playtested changed, that drags out the expectations of the adventuring day. No wonder people feel Medium encounters are too easy because they were, and since the math didn't change much STILL ARE the Easy encounters.
The game was and still is designed around 3-4 Encounters per day, Its just a simple dumb naming change shifted expectations, making the "Easy" encounters the Default for some reason, ruining the pacing of the game. My Advice is? Simply as my previous post, Design your game around "Hard" Encounters, as that is actually the "Average" encounters the game was designed around, not the last-minute switch to make the "Easy" encounters the average.
My only question is, Why did Wizards purposely make their game feel worse with this last-minute change without public playtesting, Why?
TL;DR. The game was originally designed around "Hard" Encounters being the average, but last-minute wizards added a new, easier difficulty, and downshifted the game's average encounters to the "Easy" Encounters without changing the math. So now the game feels too easy.
Again the original playtest Adventuring Day is still in the game, it's just Hard Encounters now, so as per my last point, again, simply just use Hard as your average, its actually what the game was designed for.
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