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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5879149" data-attributes="member: 54877">This can work for the "group monsters" when the value of the group does not scale linearly by number of monsters. Getting the formula right is the tricky part, though I supposed a certain amount of reverse engineering of monster to necessary stats could get around some of that. Making up numbers, let's say that goblins need at least three members to really get cranking, while giant rats need five. A squad of 3 goblins or a squad of 5 rats are worth 50 XP, maybe. To keep it simple, if you encounter less than a full squad, they are worth either half or zero, depending upon DM judgement. (Or if you don't like "zero", make the lower bound 10%--small enough that it is hardly worth counting, but not zero.) Going the other way, you need some kind of judgment on how often and how long a squad of gobins or rats can form against the PCs (on average). There are multiple party members, goblins get killed, goblin squad reform, and N times 3 goblins get to go after a given PC. Things like corridor bottlenecks will radically affect this, but we don't want to worry about situational stuff for the base numbers--getting around it is part of the fun! So maybe the average party is five members. However, we'll be generous and say seven, on the grounds that a smaller party will probably endure more "squad attacks" per player. So if you fight 21 goblins, you get 350 XP. Or maybe for simpler math, we keep the party size scaling factor as 5, but up the base XP. Or since you are ultimately concerned by the "adventure", not the "encounter," perhaps we go whole hog and make the factor an easy 10. In a 1-hour "adventure", you get full XP for up to 10 squads of a "monster group". So if you clean out such an "adventure" with up to 30 goblins, you get full XP for the lot of them, or 500 XP in this example. Beyond the "squad times scaling factor", any goblins are worth less. My example is getting away from me here, as it is so ivory tower, but as a ballpark, I'd say that the next block is going to count somewhere between 75% to 50% of normal. Rather than get all precise on an imprecise subject, I'd be tempted to work it so that the next two blocks count at 50%. So 30 goblins for 500 XP, 30 more for +250 XP, and 30 more again for another +250 XP.  We are talking "1 hour adventure blocks". So 90 goblins is a lot. For those odd situations where you need to go past the third block of 10 "monster squads," I think you'll need DM judgement anyway. You've got to compare "party got swarmed under" with "party set up a killing field". So better there to just apply an adjustement to the base number, than start factoring by number of goblins. Or in other words, 1000 XP is the most you can get for goblins, base, but you might get a bonus or penalty adjustment to that for the circumstance. Getting swarmed under by 200 goblins in an abandoned dwarven hall is a modifier--at least until the Balrog showed up. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /></blockquote>

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