Encounter balance is hard. Designing encounters from the book as written is fine, but I often find myself underestimating what a party is capable of based on CRs alone. With that in mind, this week I used the tool at Kobold Fight Club (kobold.club) to build my encounters.
I was really surprised by the results!
1. Low CR monsters can be very effective in a fight, especially in a larger group.
2. I haven't been doing XP for monsters right. My impression has always been that when you give XP, take the base XP of the monster by CR then multiply by the modifier to create a total for all the monsters, so if a Ghoul is worth 200 XP, 6 Ghouls are worth 2*200=400XP. But the adjusted rating is only used to calculate the Encounter Difficulty! For that encounter, the ghouls count as 400XP each of Challenge Rating, for a total of 6*400=2400XP.
The same ghouls are still worth 200 XP each for XP reward. The total of the 6 Ghouls is 6*200XP=1200XP for the party.
I have been doing this incorrectly, awarding XP based on adjusted difficulty, but also awarding XP based on a single creature at the modified value. Live and learn. Thanks, Kobold Fight Club (and the rules, had I bothered to read them more carefully).
It was also great to see that these low-CR encounters were challenges to the players. It wasn't what I would typically do, but I'll definitely learn from the experience.
I was really surprised by the results!
1. Low CR monsters can be very effective in a fight, especially in a larger group.
2. I haven't been doing XP for monsters right. My impression has always been that when you give XP, take the base XP of the monster by CR then multiply by the modifier to create a total for all the monsters, so if a Ghoul is worth 200 XP, 6 Ghouls are worth 2*200=400XP. But the adjusted rating is only used to calculate the Encounter Difficulty! For that encounter, the ghouls count as 400XP each of Challenge Rating, for a total of 6*400=2400XP.
The same ghouls are still worth 200 XP each for XP reward. The total of the 6 Ghouls is 6*200XP=1200XP for the party.
I have been doing this incorrectly, awarding XP based on adjusted difficulty, but also awarding XP based on a single creature at the modified value. Live and learn. Thanks, Kobold Fight Club (and the rules, had I bothered to read them more carefully).
It was also great to see that these low-CR encounters were challenges to the players. It wasn't what I would typically do, but I'll definitely learn from the experience.
Comments
Post a Comment