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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 5686093" data-attributes="member: 32740">By the book - you find the average level of the party first and calculate the base xp award just on CR.  Calculating the Encounter Level is strictly intended as a tool for designing survivable encounters, not handing out the xp awards for them.  That doesn't mean you IGNORE encounter level when determining xp awards though.  XP should be adjusted according to the difficulty of the overall encounter. The DMG suggests that an encounter roughly half as difficult as its EL would suggest should be worth only half the xp and actually have the EL adjusted by -2.  At the other end of the scale an encounter twice as difficult as its normal EL might suggest should be EL+2 and twice the XP.  Note that these adjustments are based more on CIRCUMSTANCES of the encounter that make it easier or harder. If your party is an average level of 8 and you throw an EL10 encounter of two CR8 monsters at them they're still going to get xp for two CR8 monsters.  Only if something ELSE about the encounter would make it easier or harder than EL10 should you adjust the XP.  So, if you think that the PC's can't handle the two CR8 monsters then you should either use different monsters or otherwise adjust the encounter in other areas than the actual monsters used to make it easier.  That's what EL is there for - to show where the characters should be in relation to the challenge of the encounter.  But the base xp still comes from the monster CR.</blockquote>

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