D&D 5E The adventuring day is based HP/Hit Dice as the primary resource.

[FallenRX]

So during one of the many debates on the 6-8 adventuring day balance, apparently there was one comment that caught my attention, that confirmed something fascinating about the math of the adventuring day, its not balanced around class resources, its balanced around HP. Here is a chunk of it that explains it a bit.

You can calculate XP values for PCs as well. If you do, and average across several encounters, you'll find that the XP thresholds listed in the encounter building rules are just fixed ratios of these values. For Easy encounters this ratio is roughly 15%, for Medium 30%, for Hard 45%, and for Deadly it's roughly 70%. This means, for a Medium difficulty encounter, a typical group of PCs are expected to take around 30% of their maximum hit points in damage, or expend sufficient resources to offset it.
Now, full adventuring days are slightly different than single encounters. For a single encounter, the amount of hit points available to the PCs is their maximum hit points, plus whatever healing they can efficiently do during combat. For a full adventuring day, though, the PCs have all the hit points they can recover outside of combat. The biggest source of these extra hit points is their hit dice. This means for most PCs, their total hit points for a day is roughly twice their maximum hit points.
If you take those ratios I mentioned before, and apply them this new hit point total you neatly get the number of encounters for each encounter difficulty given by the adventuring day calculations.
What all of this means is that the primary resource defining the adventuring day is the PCs hit points, not their other class resources.

Full post here , but this recontextualizes a lot of the debate on the "Encounter day". its not based on Class resources like spell slots, just how much damage they can take in a day, and are expected to take, and heal back with Hit dice. Looking further into his findings on his site here(which show the math proving this), it turns out XP actually is a formula on how much damage/health a monster can do, rounded to certain numbers to suit speed of progression in levels, more on this here.

Now note, he does say class resources can affect these calculations, but the primary encounter day is designed around mainly HP, and Hit Dice. A Deadly encounter is deadly, because they do enough damage to do about 70% of the players health at that level over a 2-3 round period, and monsters XP values are actually a calcuation of how much damage they can do/take rounded to a number to fit progression speed, Its why XP actually matters in calculating encounter balance, XP is literally a Monsters "Power Level" rounded for rewards to keep progression between level consistent, CR is just a simplification of this to be easier on DM's, so you dont have to do literal algebra to make monsters/calculation monster power.

Now looking into more into his findings at the sites, some interesting confirmations come forward about how classes are balance, since encounters are balanced around HP, Martials surprisingly come out on top, becuase they can always take the most damage, and wizards at the bottom because they can take the least damage, but this changes with class resources, Wizards(and casters) seems to be balanced around the idea that they must spend resources to make up for this using spell slots, but the problem is the same problem as when calculating CR, it doesnt account for non-damaging effects that circumvent whole encounters, i wouldnt be surprised if WOTC simply just calculated the power of them as equal too whatever the average DPR of a damaging spell in the same slot level(Crawford said they do this in a interview about encounter balance a long time about), but definitely leads to a better understanding of the game.

All and all what this means is, if you want to challenge your players more you need to actually damage them equal to the amount the encounter needs, and if you do not damage them, that encounter almost doesnt count toward the "Adventuring Day/XP Budget", and you can basically run more.

Either way this is all fascinating stuff, please correct me if im wrong about anything. If im completely wrong in my understanding of this, ill just delete the post and explain it better.

Tell me your thoughts on this?

TLDR: The games adventuring day and encounter design is primarily done by HP, and Hit Dice, so damage is what matters the most.

Monster XP's are literally their calculated Power Level of how much damage they can take/dish out, just rounded to a number for the sake of progression pacing. Balance your games around the damage done to PC's in a Single Encounter+Resources they can use to recovery.

 

[NotAYakk]

Spending spells shortens fights and saves HP.

You are finding one small part and grabbign onto it and ignoring the other parts.

A PC's ability to kill monsters depends on spending spells. Spending spells both boosts the PCs damage which reduces enemy damage, because it makes foes die faster.

If you spend spells or other resources on a non-combat encounter, there will be less available for the combat encounter. So your damage taken will be larger from those combat encounters.

But yes, 5e is balanced around "how close to death each side gets". You have to do the model iteratively, because daily offensive/defensive resource use depends on the length of the days fights, and the length of the days fights depends on how many daily offensive resources you have!

As wizards who are burning high end spells do 2x to 5x as much damage per round as those that use cantrips, the idea that running out of spells doesn't impact the daily adventuring budget is nonsense. Doing 5x the DPR shortens fights by a factor of 5, which in turn drops HP lost by a factor of 5.

Wizards have a limited number of such high end spells, so their daily encounter budget does depend on their spell slots.

They are measuring 1 side of a box becoming thinner (Daily HP * DPR) and saying that things making the other side of the box smaller are secondary.

But what matters is the area -- the remaining threat of the PC -- which doesn't care if you shorten the (HP) or the (Damage) side of the box. Most character resources are on the Damage side.

 

[squibbles]

Spending spells shortens fights and saves HP.

You are finding one small part and grabbign onto it and ignoring the other parts.

A PC's ability to kill monsters depends on spending spells. Spending spells both boosts the PCs damage which reduces enemy damage, because it makes foes die faster.

[...]

I don't think @FallenRX would disagree that spells are a factor in daily encounter balance. As I understand it, the thing that's being pointed out in the OP is that THE DESIGNERS calculated encounter balance this way when they wrote the monster manual, CR, and XP guidelines.

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It's always funny to see these sorts of design assumptions pointed out. I wonder if WotC recognizes that these assumptions (as with the 6-8 encounters a day one) are clearly wrong in A LOT of cases and use them because they think its better than nothing, or if they truly expected most people to play in line with their assumptions (if the reddit poster has correctly identified the design intent, anyway).

 

[LordEntrails]

I thought the adventuring days was all balanced around rations. You can only buy and carry so many, when you run out you quickly go through the stages of exhaustion and end up dead. So, no rations, no adventuring.

 

[Hussar]

When I ran my no caster campaign a few years ago (by no caster, I mean no class that has a cantrip - half casters were an option, so, yes to paladin and ranger, but, no to bard or druid), I discovered that HP works incredibly well for encounter balancing. The characters after 5th level (until about 10th when the campaign ended) averaged about 20-25 points/character/round. Pretty much like clockwork. The 5 PC group did 100-125 points of damage/round.

Because of that, I could very easily change the difficulty of encounters. Simply make sure that the encounter had X HP to last Y rounds and that meant that I got a difficulty that I wanted. A very hard encounter had to last at least 3 rounds, and preferably 4 or 5 if I wanted the party to get very scared.

Now that I have an all caster party, those calculations get SO much harder, simply because of the enormous amount of options the group has. There are so many encounter ending spells - the group warlock drops Banishment on something, and, being higher level, means that he's removing two, sometimes three baddies from the encounter. The party mops up the remainders and then effectively gains a surprise round on the baddies when they come back (if they come back - being higher level means that lots of baddies get Banished back to a home plane).

The idea that the game is based around HP is true, but, only insofar as the group make up presumptions are followed - 4-5 PC's, and only 2 core casters.

Add to this the number of new spells and whatnot that casters have gotten over the years - while modest compared to other editions, are not insignificant, and encounter balance goes straight out the window for groups that really dive deep into the magic system.

 

[Charlaquin]

This is really interesting. Like, on a certain level I was aware of this - I knew that CR was based on a monster’s expected damage output over the number of turns it was expected to survive, which of course means that encounter difficulty is measured based on how much damage the PCs are expected to take. But for some reason I didn’t put together that adventuring day XP budgets were therefore based on how much damage the PCs can take over the course of the day. What’s really interesting about this is that it kind of deconstructs how we as players tend to think about class balance. We often focus primarily on damage output as intrinsically valuable, but the game’s actual math really just treats damage output as a means of increasing survivability. It fits with my understanding of said math, but it reframes it in a way I hadn’t really considered.

 

[NotAYakk]

I don't think @FallenRX would disagree that spells are a factor in daily encounter balance. As I understand it, the thing that's being pointed out in the OP is that THE DESIGNERS calculated encounter balance this way when they wrote the monster manual, CR, and XP guidelines.

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It's always funny to see these sorts of design assumptions pointed out. I wonder if WotC recognizes that these assumptions (as with the 6-8 encounters a day one) are clearly wrong in A LOT of cases and use them because they think its better than nothing, or if they truly expected most people to play in line with their assumptions (if the reddit poster has correctly identified the design intent, anyway).

He reproduced much of the WotC design with a bunch of errors. Those errors are usually bounded by 25% ish.

The errors he gets include:
1. Spellcasters aren't worth the same XP as other classes.
2. Classes with rest-based resources are worth less XP than other classes.
3. Classes with HP-boosting resources are worth more XP than other classes.
4. Encounters with lots of creatures assume a huge amount of AOE damage.
5. The XP values used seem to over-value lower level monsters compared to higher level monsters
6. The spell-building guidelines reflect actual spells used by PCs.
7. PCs only use spells for dealing damage.

I can't help but notice that those errors are all consistent with the warped conclusions.

If he is systematically undervaluing rest resources and spell slots, then suddenly wizards aren't the weakest class XP-budget wise.

If lower level monsters higher than expected XP value (compared to higher level monsters) is multiplied with encounter size multipliers, you'll see that the real encounter size multiplier is larger; which no longer requires unreasonably large amounts of AOE damage.

If real spells are used, the value of spell slots goes up compared to "casting a cantrip". Making the resources matter more.

I mean, the work is really well done. I'm just saying drawing conclusions from an analysis that has known errors and not checking "are those errors what is leading to this quirky conclusion" is a bad plan.

 

[FallenRX]

i still think those errors are very minor and not far from the actual design

 

[NotAYakk]

i still think those errors are very minor and not far from the actual design

If spells are 30% better than his model indicates, then when you subtract away at-will, consumables are like 50%-75% better than the model indicates.

The conclusion is not supported by the data.

Like the data is great, the conclusion is way stronger than the data provide evidence for.

 

[Ancalagon]

7. PCs only use spells for dealing damage.

A cleverly used spell can do FAR more than whatever damage it does ...