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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="redrick" data-source="post: 6714166" data-attributes="member: 6777696">This is true — as written, there is no "difficulty bonus" awarded to PCs for larger numbers of combatants.This works well for me. First of all, calculating the difficulty bonus could be tedious, as it's not always clear how many enemies will be faced at once at the outset, and how do you calculate fights where reinforcements show up halfway through? What if monsters are funneled through a choke-point? The difficulty multipliers are meant to illustrate how much more effective combatants are when they fight in groups, but there are many other factors that can impact the difficulty of an encounter.It also seems weird to me to reward PCs for engaging in dumb combat tactics (fighting more enemies at once instead of dividing and conquering, etc.)Finally, I think it is fitting that fighting a few high CR monsters will yield a bit more XP satisfaction than fighting a bunch of low-CR monsters, even if the overall difficulty is comparable. 4 goblins are about as "deadly" to a 1st level party as 1 ogre, but killing that single ogre feels like a much "bigger" fight, and getting the higher xp value seems fitting. DMs just have to be cognizant of the fact that lots of solo, high-CR monsters will lead to relatively easy fights with big xp rewards, whereas lots of mook-hordes will slow the leveling down a bit.Beyond that, re: the OP. Side quests can be very difficult to estimate in terms of time spent. I've frequently had side-quests take up 2-3 times as much table-time as I expected. Hopefully the players are enjoying the side quest? Otherwise, what's the point?As for the difficulty of the dungeon. If it's too hard, either tweak the encounters down to make things a little easier (slightly less obvious than granting everybody a level up), or level up the PCs a little earlier than you'd planned (if they've been surviving your harder-than-expected dungeon, maybe they've earned it?), or encourage the players to look for ways to play a little smarter and try to shift the odds a bit. It all depends on your playstyle and your group. I don't really think it's an xp-vs-milestone problem.</blockquote>

Verification