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WotC's Mearls Presents A New XP System For 5E In August's Unearthed Arcana
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<blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 7722716" data-attributes="member: 6787650"><p>Since you're asking: </p><p></p><p>No, not really. It seems founded on an arbitrary premise: that 6-8 medium/hard encounters represents better game balance than the XP table does. I mean, why would you assume that? As I've illustrated elsewhere, the only reason the DMG even has that sentence is because they forgot to update it when they changed the definition of medium/hard. It's a mistake built off of the very difficulty tables you're trying to get away from!</p><p></p><p>My personal experience is that the XP per adventuring day table isn't too bad as long as you make the individual encounters deadly enough; that is, I may sometimes exceed the adventuring day budget by a factor of two or three, but never by a factor of ten or fifteen like I do the encounter difficulty tables. The biggest problem with the XP per adventuring day table is that it's imperfectly coupled to encounter difficulty--encounter difficulty has a number of tweaks to it which involve bumping the difficulty up or down without adjusting the XP in it (e.g. if the environment has ongoing damage sources to which the monsters are immune, increase difficulty by one level), which means those adjustments don't affect the adventuring day budget, which seems wrong if you're actually trying to be predictive.</p><p></p><p>Ultimately I think it's a lost cause to try to use CR precisely, because it isn't a precision tool. Instead of using it to create adventures, use it as a sanity check for the adventures you create ("does the straightest path through the adventure roughly conform to the adventuring day budget?"), and supply lots of opportunities for the players to self-pace and fine-tune their own difficulty level by taking on optional challenges for greater rewards. RPGs are all about choice; if you give the players the right choices, they'll have fun, no formulas needed.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="FormerlyHemlock, post: 7722716, member: 6787650"] Since you're asking: No, not really. It seems founded on an arbitrary premise: that 6-8 medium/hard encounters represents better game balance than the XP table does. I mean, why would you assume that? As I've illustrated elsewhere, the only reason the DMG even has that sentence is because they forgot to update it when they changed the definition of medium/hard. It's a mistake built off of the very difficulty tables you're trying to get away from! My personal experience is that the XP per adventuring day table isn't too bad as long as you make the individual encounters deadly enough; that is, I may sometimes exceed the adventuring day budget by a factor of two or three, but never by a factor of ten or fifteen like I do the encounter difficulty tables. The biggest problem with the XP per adventuring day table is that it's imperfectly coupled to encounter difficulty--encounter difficulty has a number of tweaks to it which involve bumping the difficulty up or down without adjusting the XP in it (e.g. if the environment has ongoing damage sources to which the monsters are immune, increase difficulty by one level), which means those adjustments don't affect the adventuring day budget, which seems wrong if you're actually trying to be predictive. Ultimately I think it's a lost cause to try to use CR precisely, because it isn't a precision tool. Instead of using it to create adventures, use it as a sanity check for the adventures you create ("does the straightest path through the adventure roughly conform to the adventuring day budget?"), and supply lots of opportunities for the players to self-pace and fine-tune their own difficulty level by taking on optional challenges for greater rewards. RPGs are all about choice; if you give the players the right choices, they'll have fun, no formulas needed. [/QUOTE]
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WotC's Mearls Presents A New XP System For 5E In August's Unearthed Arcana
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