Unearthed Arcana Unearthed Arcana Presents Alternative Encounter Building Guidelines

WotC's Mike Mearls has posted the latest Unearthed Arcana, presenting an alternate set of encounter-building guidelines for D&D. "Though this approach uses the same basic math underlying the encounter system presented in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, it makes a few adjustments to how it presents that math to produce a more flexible system. These guidelines will be of interest to DMs who want to emphasize combat in their games, who want to ensure that a foe isn’t too deadly for a specific group of characters, and who want to understand the relationship between a character’s level and a monster’s challenge rating."

It's four pages, and includes various tables divided into a series of five steps - Assess the Characters, Encounter Size, Determine Numbers and Challenge Ratings, Select Monsters, and Add Complications. The latter step includes d8 monster personalities, d6 monster relationships, terrain, traps, and random events. Find it here.

At the D&D website:

 

[Sunseeker]

Are you saying your average combat lasts 150 rounds or 15 minutes to play? 15 minutes of play could be a large range of rounds. My group can typically get through 2-4 rounds in 15 minutes, if they are really on task maybe up to 6 rounds.

15 IRL minutes. I would say that typically carries us through about 10 rounds. Which IMO, feels about right to me. Most of the time my players know what they're going to do ahead of time and we spend very little time adjudicating rules questions or player attempts to do something weird. It's not that weird things don't happen, we just don't spend a lot of time figuring out how we're gonna roll them. IE:

*Fight starts*
couple rounds later:
Bob: I run up the nearest wall and jump down upon the BBEG from above!
DM(me): Do you have Spider-Climb?
Bob: No.
DM: Okay make an acrobatics check, DC whatever based on appropriate conditions.
Bob: Okay, I beat it.
DM: Cool carry on. Alternatively he fails, falls on his face and loses the rest of his turn.

I give my players very little for attempting to game the system to gain advantage, attack bonuses or extra damage. If they want to do something, they do it because they'd think it's fun or cool. Getting my players to avoid gamesmanship tends to speed up turns significantly because I'm not constantly being asked "If I jump off the wall, will I get XYZ bonus?" or "What if I attack him like such-in-such, will that help my attack?" My style of DMing is "You don't know until you do it, so just do it, or don't do it, and roll with the consequences."

I think the more pertinent point is asking Shidaku how challenging those fights are.

Because I can certainly see a fifteen minute fight. But I have trouble seeing an interesting fifteen minute fight.

Well, due to my players being experienced and 2/3 are powergamers, my typical fights are a minimum, of double CR. But "challenge" is what 5E attempts to set guidelines for, which I don't much like. Some fights are easier or harder because my players play smarter or take better advantage of skills, terrain and tactics. But after I've reviewed my fights, I find I have typically pitted my players at a bare minimum of double CR. This usually results in a fight of say, 4 PCs against 6-8 NPCs of .75x to 1.5x CR. Like I said, I custom build almost all my NPCs for how I want the fight to play out, so it's hard to say what exactly the CR of each one is.

(That is, not all fights need to be difficult. And even a level 11 party vs three goblins aka a fifteen second fight could concievably be interesting, but then that would be for story reasons, not for game mechanics reasons)

I don't even run these. I tell the players "You have encountered XYZ creatures who intend to fight you, but clearly pose no challenge to you, please tell me what you would like to do." If they want to enter combat, I will have them role-play the results. It makes for some interesting results sometimes though, as these "fights" are often actually minor plot points. That is what makes them interesting, the why of the fight.

A large reason why we're playing the game is for the fights to be challenging. For a fight to be challenging, it needs to feature sufficiently powerful monsters in number and CR.

Sure, but challenge is relative in a large degree to player skill. I've had fights I intend to be quite challenging be toppled easily simply be creative players.

And that kind of fight simply isn't over in 15 minutes of real time, not for our group anyways.

*shrug* everyone is different.

We abandoned 4E because we could barely fit in two fights in a eight-hour game session. The actual combat (the tactical considerations on the battlemat) was great. The fact there was no time for PC characterization, NPC interaction and story progression was a deal-breaker however. We want more out of our Sunday afternoons than merely a great tactical battlegame - we want the full roleplaying experience (albeit one heavily focused on the mechanics of combat).

Though I often agree that 4E fights were a slog, MM3 and the revised monster math did a lot to alleviate that. Fights were still long but they felt more engaged and less "I hit it with my stick. He hits you with his stick. Repeat." What I like about the longer fights though is that it did away with a lot of the irrelevant fights. You fought 1-3 fights per session and they REALLY mattered. If they didn't, you went home asking yourself if a fight that doesn't matter was necessary to play, and often the resulting answer was: it's not, lets just do the fights that are relevant to the "story".

That a challenging fight now in 5E takes only one or two hours is a huge improvement. It lets us have plenty of fun-filled and challenging fights and still squeeze in a modicum of roleplaying in between (PC characterization; NPC interaction; story progression)

Just saying that to provide background from where I'm seeing this.

I guess we have different definitions of "long" from 4E, because in the games that I played, a "long 4E fight" was 1-2 hours. I almost never spend that much time on a 5E fight unless the fight is designed to be absolutely insane.

 

[ArwensDaughter]

As a new DM, who has been pushed to create my own adventure when my players went completely off the rails of at the end of the published one we were using, I was pleased to see this UA article. While I'm perfectly capable of doing the math as laid out in the DMG, it feels long and cumbersome to do so. The math in the UA guidelines is much simpler, and doesn't require nearly as much recalculating if the first run through proves to be more challenging than desired.

Other things i like:
-the reminder to consider the party first, and particular statistics to look at in doing so
-the related sections under assessing monster's stats and how they line up with that of the party
-the "complications" section, especially the encouragement to give the monsters personalities and relationships (which also implies thinking about tactics, etc.)

Things I think could have been improved:
-An addendum with one or two examples of using the system from beginning to end.
-a list (or link to a list) of legendary monsters
-some discussion of what difference being fully rested vs. low on resources makes (which is at least mentioned in passing in the DMG but not at all in the UA guidelines)

Whether or not the math works isn't something I can assess yet. I'll be interested to see how it works for our group. The next several encounters were designed using the DMG. But I'll be using the UA guidelines for the next stage that I write.

 

[pemerton]

Ranged combat is dominant in 5E from a powergaming perspective. There's very little reason not to be a range-specialized combatant, even if you specialize in dungeon crawling.

I have seen you articulate this point before.

It seems to me one of the biggest changes in 5e compared to earlier versions of the game.

You're making the claim that 5E is less robust than AD&D when it comes to writing an adventure that accomodates a wide range of levels (e.g. 4-6 players of levels 3-5), so I don't think you get to ignore 2nd edition here. Unless you're limiting your claim to 1E? My only exposure to 1E is the Gold Box games, which don't really count, so if you're making a 1E-specific claim I'll have to bow out.

I was talking only about 1st ed AD&D. I know that giants in 2nd ed are much tougher, but don't know the details - and my 2nd ed experiences were mostly with GMs who believed in GM-controlled pacing and I'm sure a fair bit of fudging to make it work.

In any event, when you force me to think more about the significance of ranged combat in 5e, that makes it easier to see how 5e, like 1st ed AD&D, could be pretty forgiving in terms of the "level-appropriateness" of encounters.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Oh yes--5E is also far more forgiving in almost any encounter involving undead. AD&D (2nd edition) Wights appeared in groups of 2-16, had a THAC0 of 15 and about 21 HP each, and every time they hit you, you lost a level... permanently. 5E undead make you lose some HP until your next long rest. 5E wights are officially "level-appropriate" starting at level 3, but AD&D wights are never level-appropriate: no one in their right mind ever wants to fight them, at 3rd level or 11th level or 20th level. There is nothing you can do with 5E wights to make tangling with them as unattractive as tangling with AD&D wights.

The stakes for underestimating a threat, tangling with it, and losing are lower in 5E. Hence more forgiving and more friendly to player-driven pacing.

 

[discosoc]

I've never had a hard time with the CR system in 5e. The problem is the expectation of 6-8 encounters per day (long rest). Otherwise, monsters with proper fighting tactics are going to be as tough as you let them, unless the party is willing and able to dump an entire day's worth of resources in the fight.