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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fanaelialae" data-source="post: 5856142" data-attributes="member: 53980">In all fairness, DM judgment will always play some role, but I think you're right in that it isn't sufficient. While an experienced DM might be able to eyeball the difficulty of a non-standard encounter, a newb will almost certainly be unable to do so. That said, I think it is feasible to create a system that reasonably balances 10 fights in the same day with 1 big fight. I don't expect it to be perfect, but as long as it works most of the time, I'd be happy. The reason IMO that XP works better than CR is that it is more nuanced. One CR up or down is a large jump in power; you could even often add extra lower CR creatures to an encounter for "free". As I said, XP is more nuanced. A low xp creature might be a low level creature or a higher level minion, for example. If you add a lower level creature into an encounter, the xp total still increases (unless the DM rules that the creature's presence is negligible). Of course, although it's pretty good, 4e encounter design is by no means perfect. Perhaps then, what we need is an even more nuanced approach to encounter design. It might be a table, it might be a formula, I don't rightly know. But the way I envision it, this method would distinguish between the big fight and numerous little fights, and adjust xp accordingly. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that 10 encounters with 5 creatures drains roughly the same resources as 1 encounter with 25 creatures. You'd then decide what kind of encounter you want to run, look it up in the table, and find the xp value (which you'd then deduct from the adventure total). So you might decide on two 5 creature encounters (100xp per encounter), and one 15 creature encounter (500 xp), with some xp left over for non-combat challenges.In a sense, it's like layering aspects of the CR system over the xp system, in order to (hopefully) come away with a more precise metric for judging the difficulty of encounters.</blockquote>

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