Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AaronOfBarbaria" data-source="post: 6714161" data-attributes="member: 6701872">Since real encounter building advice (try things out, note what works and repeat that, note what doesn't and avoid doing that again, eventually you'll not even have to really think about it) is very poorly received by a significant number of gamers, they have to give some kind of advice, and the XP value math is the easiest to remember and use version of the same concept that has been around for a long time (that monsters don't add a linear amount of challenge) that has been thought up - and it errs on the side of the DM ending up with an easier encounter than expected, rather than one that is more difficult than expected.And I think the point to not having the effective XP for difficulty purposes be the actual reward is because that would mean a high-level party dropping a meteor swarm on a goblin army and ending the encounter in one action is worth the same amount of XP as some potent demon (or whatever) the party dedicates a lot more effort and resources to taking down, for no reason that "well, if the party hadn't had that spell available right when this encounter happened it might have actually been a tough one."I've found that I don't like that, and my players like it even less. We spent some time playing a game that uses a system by which the XP gained is directly proportional to how badly the fight went for the party, so if you came up with a good idea that would sway the odds in your favor and take the threat down faster with less chance of someone ending up with a dead character, you were incentivized to skip doing that and hope to get through the fight the hard way because otherwise you were stopping yourself from gaining levels.</blockquote>

Verification