D&D 5E Encounter Building: Revised XP Threshold by Character Level Table

[dave2008]

wel I think you shoulden't compare it to another CR but the level of the party.
I think the low range would start at party level -4

That is a possibility, but that is not how it is applied in the DMG. Of course I am trying to improve upon the effort in the DMG

 

[dave2008]

based on the comments of [MENTION=27385]aco175[/MENTION] and [MENTION=6801554]discosoc[/MENTION] I have revised the table to adhere more closely to the official table and then ramp up around CR 8-9.

 

[discosoc]

Does it specify the delta though? At what point is it considered low compared to a CR 23 Kraken for example.

It depends on the encounter, and the purpose of the lower CR creatures. If they can more or less just be ignored in favor of attacking the Kraken, then there's no reason to factor them in. But if they are there and somehow shield the Kraken (maybe by making it harder to get to it until they are dealt with), or otherwise impact the action economy of the Kraken, then they probably would factor in.

Because let's face it, in a combat system where most fights are resolved in 4 or 5 rounds, being able to delay engagement with the guy who's putting the hurt on you for even a single round is a pretty major deal. If that guy also got a high initiative, the fight could go very differently compared to a solo Kraken.

 

[dave2008]

Because let's face it, in a combat system where most fights are resolved in 4 or 5 rounds, being able to delay engagement with the guy who's putting the hurt on you for even a single round is a pretty major deal. If that guy also got a high initiative, the fight could go very differently compared to a solo Kraken.

Yes, but this is something a simple table cannot cover. It will require some text guidelines and DM judgement.

FYI, I intended to give you XP for this post I accidentally hit the laugh button.

 

[Xeviat]

Once the players have reliable access to big booms like fireball, lower level chaff starts to become ignorable. I've been having a hard time in my "Red Hand of Doom" conversion challenging the party when their wizard is fireball happy (especially now that he has five a day).


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[dave2008]

Once the players have reliable access to big booms like fireball, lower level chaff starts to become ignorable. I've been having a hard time in my "Red Hand of Doom" conversion challenging the party when their wizard is fireball happy (especially now that he has five a day).


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Yep, I think party composition is also important. The baseline I intend to use is a party of 4: 1 fighter, 1 wizard, 1 cleric, & 1 rogue - the 4 from the basic rules. And then give suggestions/ guidelines for how to revise the encounter based on different classes and numbers of PCs.

 

[MostlyDm]

True, but I think better/ more accurate guidelines could be helpful. That is what I am trying to work on.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I think you're making a mistake here.

I've talked a lot on a couple other posts about why CRs are determined the way they are (that is: only considering damage/hp, and ignoring versatility, even when versatility can massively impact a fight) and I think that the XP thresholds are, similarly, also determined a specific way intentionally.

XP Thresholds aren't for you.

They aren't for any of us, really. I'd hazard a guess that the majority of people who care about D&D and think about D&D in their spare time so much that they feel compelled to post about D&D on a web forum are categorically not the people the XP thresholds were designed for.

So of course they will seem woefully low to you. Because they're designed to assist casual/novice DMs who need help getting a quick-and-dirty handle on how difficult an encounter is going to be. They err on the side of too-easy... because casual/novice players are often orders of magnitude less effective than experienced players.

I guess the logical response to this is "Okay, so, if that's true... all the more reason to create a new threshold for experienced groups!" Which might be true. Except that CR... you know, the thing that determines the XP values themselves... is calibrated the same way.

So XP values are not remotely a reliable metric for how difficult a fight will be, overall. 6 goblins can be much more deadly than an ogre, if run by an experienced DM utilizing brutal tactics against PCs that also utilize good tactics.

So any threshold you care to make will not actually be the tool you want it to be. The only way to have that tool is to redesign CR from the ground up and try to take into account every bit of tactical flexibility a creature has.

And... I don't think that's a feasible task. Though I have 20+ years experience DMing, I'm still confident that the amount of tactical flexibility I will wring out of my monsters is not the same as what [MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION] will be able to manage, for example. Such discrepancies, on a specific level, will occur over and over between each of us. You simply can't take every variable into account in a codified system that way.

So instead, CR is based purely on the monster's damage capacity, taking and receiving. And XP Thresholds will always be rough/loose approximations. Any truly seasoned DM is going to do one of two things:

#1: He's going to build his encounters with acute awareness of the monster abilities and tactics he will use, and his party's ability to overcome those. He will craft the encounter to be precisely the level of challenge he wants, irrespective of CR and XP Threshold.

...or...

#2: He's going to populate his world with the monsters and NPCs that make sense. The party will find them as they exist, engage with them on whatever terms occur in the story, and whether or not the challenge is easy, deadly, or a TPK will be something the table figures out together. CR will be useful to find out how much XP they get after the fact, and the thresholds won't enter into it at all.

I appreciate your quest. It's a noble one. But I think it's never going to yield the results you want.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

FYI, I intended to give you XP for this post I accidentally hit the laugh button.

FYI, laughing also grants XP.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

So instead, CR is based purely on the monster's damage capacity, taking and receiving. And XP Thresholds will always be rough/loose approximations. Any truly seasoned DM is going to do one of two things:

#1: He's going to build his encounters with acute awareness of the monster abilities and tactics he will use, and his party's ability to overcome those. He will craft the encounter to be precisely the level of challenge he wants, irrespective of CR and XP Threshold.

...or...

#2: He's going to populate his world with the monsters and NPCs that make sense. The party will find them as they exist, engage with them on whatever terms occur in the story, and whether or not the challenge is easy, deadly, or a TPK will be something the table figures out together. CR will be useful to find out how much XP they get after the fact, and the thresholds won't enter into it at all.

I appreciate your quest. It's a noble one. But I think it's never going to yield the results you want.

There's a third option, I think: #3 he may evaluate monsters against a new metric for monster deadliness (possibly one which takes monster tactics into account), possibly one invented by someone else, before inserting them into his adventure. I think this is distinct from both #1 (acute awareness of every detail) and #2 (complete indifference to outcomes).

Employing that metric may or may not be as simple as adding up a bunch of numbers and looking the result up in a table. It could a neural network, or a support vector machine, or some kind of deep learning algorithm, but at the end of the day what you're doing is taking a bunch of known inputs (monster stats and behaviors; the circumstances under which the encounter occurs) and partially-known inputs (player stats and behaviors; if you're writing a published adventure or if you have objections to too much anti-PC customization, the amount of information you have here could be very limited) and some unknowable stochastic inputs (die rolls) and trying to say something about the outputs (e.g. how likely the players are to TPK, or what fraction of total PC resources are likely to be expended).

You can tell I've been thinking a lot lately about how to apply machine learning to 5E, and what kinds of predictions might be useful to make.

I've considered the idea of rating encounters in terms of "Champions", as in "this is a Champion-4/15 adventure" meaning "four 15th level Champions played straightforwardly have a 50% chance of at least one of them surviving." Then you could also quantify things like, "If the party finds the Sunsword, Strahd drops from a Champion 3/10 threat to a 2/10 or 1/13," or "letting Strahd exploit Greater Invisibility, crazy Stealth, and his legendary actions increases his difficulty from Champion-2/10 to Champion 5/10." I'm not sure if that's the best form for guidance to take but it's something to consider. Input is welcome. Would that kind of language be useful?

 

[Flamestrike]

But the DMG doesn't give any percentages. Party of 4 against their 4 clones is going to be a 50/50 shot of a tpk. I think that's a little beyond deadly. Deadly, from my interpretation of he DMG guidelines, means 1 or 2 of the PCs might die, not the whole party.

I've been running almost nothing but hard and deadly fights per the DMG xp assessments, and I've had a few drop to 0, but no deaths. It does seem like they're a little on the easy side.


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The difficulties are based on the 6-8/ 2 short rest paradigm.

Less encounters per day makes the encounters you do have much easier (because of the 5MWD).