Success! Where I previously failed, I now have managed to (mostly) do away with XP budgets. Dungeon Masters can now use the combined monster levels as a guide for the encounter difficulty for our system.
Mostly.
I also end up working out the REAL reason why in 5E, higher numbers of monsters have a higher difficulty multiplier compared to single higher CR monsters of the same combined XP value.
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Summary of part 1:
When I previously tried to revamp the XP budget system into something more intuitive, I hit a roadblock. I had wanted the combined CR of all the monsters in the encounter be a direct representative of the difficulty. However, for this to work, monster strength needs to increase in direct proportion to monster level/CR, and the same goes for PC strength and PC level. Unfortunately that is not the case. In every edition of D&D, a CR2 creature is not twice as strong as a CR1 creature. That's because monster strength tracks PC strength, and a level 2 PC is not twice as strong as a level 1 PC.
At the end of that blogpost, I asked the question, " Is it worth completely retooling how the PCs progress so that building encounters which challenge the PCs becomes much faster?"
In this blogpost, I'm going to talk about how I did just that. It was a lot of work, but I think it was worthwhile.
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The secret is quite simply to make a level 2 PC twice as strong as a level 1 pc. PCs gain the strength of a level 1 PC every level up. The PC's health is less of a problem: we just increase the health of the PC by 100% every level. The real problem is the PC's damage. Each level up, the PC needs to do 100% more damage. That can get really unwieldy really quickly.
13th age does this: "In the hands of player characters, each weapon attack deals 1 die of damage per character level + ability modifier, notated as WEAPON + [Ability].
At 5th level, double the ability score modifier before adding to the damage roll for all attacks. (Negative modifiers get are doubled too).
At 8th level, triple the ability score modifier."
Perfect solution right? Well, no. This method introduces the problem of rolling too many dice with every attack. The level limit in 13th age is level 10 instead of 20 so that the players don't need to roll more than 10 dice every time they hit something with a basic attack at high levels. Imagine what happens when if you could reach level 20 in 13th age! I've seen players insist on rolling each dice one at a time. You'd think players will change the way they roll once they have to roll 20 dice every hit, right? Right?
... yeah, right. I'd better avoid causing the slow the game down to a crawl (*cough* Exalted *cough*)
I really don't want players to roll more than 5 dice every time they roll for damage for basic attacks.
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The first thing I tried to do was to compress smaller dice into bigger dice as the dice rolls get higher. So I had to compare the values of rolling multiple numbers of the same dice.
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| d4 | 2.5 | 5 | 7.5 | 10 | 12.5 | 15 | 17.5 | 20 | 22.5 | 25 |
| d6 | 3.5 | 7 | 10.5 | 14 | 17.5 | 21 | 24.5 | 28 | 31.5 | 35 |
| d8 | 4.5 | 9 | 13.5 | 18 | 22.5 | 27 | 31.5 | 36 | 40.5 | 45 |
| d10 | 5.5 | 11 | 16.5 | 22 | 27.5 | 33 | 38.5 | 44 | 49.5 | 55 |
| d12 | 6.5 | 13 | 19.5 | 26 | 32.5 | 39 | 45.5 | 52 | 58.5 | 65 |
| 2d6 | 7 | 14 | 21 | 28 | 35 | 42 | 49 | 56 | 63 | 70 |
| d20 | 10.5 | 21 | 31.5 | 42 | 52.5 | 63 | 73.5 | 84 | 94.5 | 105 |
| d100 | 50.5 | 101 | 151.5 | 202 | 252.5 | 303 | 353.5 | 404 | 454.5 | 505 |
From here, we can see that:
4d4=10=1d20
3d6=10.5=1d20
7d8=31.5=3d20
2d10=11=1d20
5d12s=32.5=3d20s
Close enough anyway.
Not bad right? Well, the problem was the 2-handed sword which clocks in at 2d6 at level one and 40d6 at level 20. 40d6 compressed to d20s gives 13d20,1d6.
13d20 and 1d6 is still too unwieldy to work with. And that's before someone casts enlarge person on the fighter (weapon upgrades by a d4)! An enlarged greatsword wielder would swing for 18d20, 1d6 at level 20. Awesome, but unwieldy.
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My next solution was that for the fifth dice onwards, the players took the average value of the roll, rounded down. So for a dagger (d4), the first four d4s are rolled and for every d4 thereafter players would gain a flat 2 damage. This made life MUCH simpler. Players still get to roll up to four dice every damage roll, so that should satisfy their need to roll lots of dice.
What's that? Players will insist on rolling all 20 dice?
Well, we can provide some other options:
1) Using a dice rolling app in an Iphone
2) Compress the dice using as per the rules I've outlined above.
3) Compromise: Roll first 10 dice, take average for the rest.
In any case, I imagine that players who insist that many dice will stop after the fifth or sixth time they had to roll that many dice. The default rule states that players must take the average value for the fifth dice onwards, and it is only at the DM's discretion that they are allowed to roll manually. After the fifth or sixth time the player rolls all 20 dice, I think it'll become quite clear that it's taking too long and players should usually relent.
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Interestingly, my system takes LESS time in dice rolls compared to 5E D&D at high levels. No, really! Because in my system PCs don't get extra attacks: they only roll a d20 once then roll for damage. Compare that with a fighter with 3 attacks, who needs to take time to confirm each attack connects with the DM after each attack roll, then roll for damage.
Talk about having your cake and eating it!
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My next issue was the damage formula. I had wanted a formula which tracked player damage more precisely. The simplest would be:
"Each weapon attack deals 1 die of damage + ability modifier per character level, notated as (WEAPON + Ability)*level"
Sounds good right? Well, kind of. The problems were:
1) The PC's ability score increases every 4 levels were screwing it up.
2) The damage numbers were really getting too high.
1) The PC's ability score increases every 4 levels were screwing it up.
Do I need to show the math here? My system kind of needs PCs to be increasing in strength as a direct proportion of their strength at level 1. Ability score improvements every 4 levels screws these calculations over royally.
Ability score increases were first introduced in 3rd edition so that players could even out useless odd ability score numbers. It was only in 3rd edition onwards that odd ability scores didn't provide any improvement in ability score modifier (egs. Strength 12 and 13 both give +1 ability score modifier). So in 3rd edition PCs gained +1 to an ability score every four levels (+5 over 20 levels) so that they could round up whatever odd numbers they have in their ability scores.
Instead what happened was that players would avoid odd numbers like the plague and then stuff all their ability score increases into their primary ability score (say, Strength for Fighters). 5th edition D&D correctly assumes that players will do this, and made ability score increased by +2 every four levels instead of +1 but capped ability scores at 20.
Anyway, players really really love ability score increases when leveling-up. I can't do away with that. What I can do is reduce the impact of that by making ability score increases only kick in at new tiers. That way, Dungeon Masters can anticipate that higher tier monsters are significantly more difficult, which these monsters will be ANYWAY due to the increases in AC and hit chance every tier. All I need to do is say "monsters from higher tiers of play are about 20% stronger and give 20% more XP per difference in tier" or something to that effect. It's just an issue of calculating out these differences.
2) This is an issue of number bloat. Higher numbers are harder for players to work with. We already have the damage increasing by an additional dice every level. But ultimately this issue isn't so severe as players like to see high damage numbers anyway. So I can probably just ignore it.
So all I really need to do is calculate the jumps in monster difficulty every tier based on my earlier specifications (PC ability score increase, higher AC & attack bonus). Plugging in the numbers into a spreadsheet... HUH. Higher tier monsters really work out to be about 25% stronger per difference in tier! How about that!
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HUGE AMOUNT OF SPREADSHEETS AHEAD.
(feel free to skip if you take my word for it)
Monster HP: vs PC Damage, martial, one-handed, 3 attacks at 60% hit chance
| Lvl | Weap D | Str mod | Total | Mon HP | Mon HP* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4.5 | 3 | 7.5 | 13.5 | 13.5 |
| 2 | 4.5 | 3 | 15 | 27 | 27 |
| 3 | 4.5 | 3 | 22.5 | 40.5 | 40.5 |
| 4 | 4.5 | 3 | 30 | 54 | 54 |
| 5 | 4 | 4 | 40 | 72 | 72 |
| 6 | 4 | 4 | 48 | 86.4 | 86.5 |
| 7 | 4 | 4 | 56 | 100.8 | 101 |
| 8 | 4 | 4 | 64 | 115.2 | 115.5 |
| 9 | 4 | 4 | 72 | 129.6 | 130 |
| 10 | 4 | 4 | 80 | 144 | 144.5 |
| 11 | 4 | 5 | 99 | 178.2 | 178 |
| 12 | 4 | 5 | 108 | 194.4 | 194 |
| 13 | 4 | 5 | 117 | 210.6 | 210 |
| 14 | 4 | 5 | 126 | 226.8 | 226 |
| 15 | 4 | 5 | 135 | 243 | 242 |
| 16 | 4 | 5 | 144 | 259.2 | 258 |
| 17 | 4 | 6 | 170 | 306 | 306 |
| 18 | 4 | 6 | 180 | 324 | 324 |
| 19 | 4 | 6 | 190 | 342 | 342 |
| 20 | 4 | 6 | 200 | 360 | 360 |
Monster Damage: vs PC HP, Rogue/cleric, 4.5 hits at 50% hit rate
| Lvl | PC HP1 | Mon D | Mon D* |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 12 | 5.3 | 5.5 |
| 2 | 24 | 10.77 | 11 |
| 3 | 36 | 16 | 16.5 |
| 4 | 48 | 21.3 | 22 |
| 5 | 60 | 26.7 | 27.5 |
| 6 | 72 | 32 | 33 |
| 7 | 84 | 37.3 | 38.5 |
| 8 | 96 | 42.7 | 44 |
| 9 | 108 | 48 | 49.5 |
| 10 | 120 | 53.3 | 55 |
| 11 | 132 | 58.7 | 60.5 |
| 12 | 144 | 64 | 66 |
| 13 | 156 | 69.3 | 71.5 |
| 14 | 168 | 74.7 | 77 |
| 15 | 180 | 80 | 82.5 |
| 16 | 192 | 85.3 | 88 |
| 17 | 204 | 90.7 | 93.5 |
| 18 | 216 | 96 | 99 |
| 19 | 228 | 101.3 | 104.5 |
| 20 | 240 | 106.7 | 110 |
Assumes players have a 60% chance to hit and monsters have a 50% chance to hit.
ABx is the modifier due to the increase in attack bonus monsters get at that level.
ACx is the modifier due to the increase in AC the monsters get at that level.
XPD is XP contribution from damage/AB.
XPHP is XP contribution from HP/AC.
Tier mod shows how much higher tier monsters are significantly stronger
| Lvl | Mon D* | ABx | MonD** | XPD | Mon HP* | ACx | Mon HP** | XPHP | XP total | XP total* | Tier Mod |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 5.5 | 1.00 | 5.5 | 50 | 13.5 | 1.00 | 13.50 | 50 | 100 | 100 | |
| 2 | 11.0 | 1.00 | 11.0 | 100 | 27 | 1.00 | 27.00 | 100 | 200 | 200 | |
| 3 | 16.5 | 1.11 | 18.3 | 167 | 40.5 | 1.00 | 40.50 | 150 | 317 | 300 | 1.06 |
| 4 | 22.0 | 1.11 | 24.4 | 222 | 54 | 1.00 | 54.00 | 200 | 422 | 400 | 1.06 |
| 5 | 27.5 | 1.25 | 34.4 | 313 | 72 | 1.09 | 78.55 | 291 | 603 | 500 | 1.21 |
| 6 | 33.0 | 1.25 | 41.3 | 375 | 86.5 | 1.09 | 94.36 | 349 | 724 | 600 | 1.21 |
| 7 | 38.5 | 1.25 | 48.1 | 438 | 101 | 1.09 | 110.18 | 408 | 846 | 700 | 1.21 |
| 8 | 44.0 | 1.25 | 55.0 | 500 | 115.5 | 1.09 | 126.00 | 467 | 967 | 800 | 1.21 |
| 9 | 49.5 | 1.25 | 61.9 | 563 | 130 | 1.09 | 141.82 | 525 | 1088 | 900 | 1.21 |
| 10 | 55.0 | 1.25 | 68.8 | 625 | 144.5 | 1.09 | 157.64 | 584 | 1209 | 1000 | 1.21 |
| 11 | 60.5 | 1.43 | 86.4 | 786 | 178 | 1.20 | 213.60 | 791 | 1577 | 1100 | 1.43 |
| 12 | 66.0 | 1.43 | 94.3 | 857 | 194 | 1.20 | 232.80 | 862 | 1719 | 1200 | 1.43 |
| 13 | 71.5 | 1.43 | 102.1 | 929 | 210 | 1.20 | 252.00 | 933 | 1862 | 1300 | 1.43 |
| 14 | 77.0 | 1.43 | 110.0 | 1000 | 226 | 1.20 | 271.20 | 1004 | 2004 | 1400 | 1.43 |
| 15 | 82.5 | 1.43 | 117.9 | 1071 | 242 | 1.20 | 290.40 | 1076 | 2147 | 1500 | 1.43 |
| 16 | 88.0 | 1.43 | 125.7 | 1143 | 258 | 1.20 | 309.60 | 1147 | 2290 | 1600 | 1.43 |
| 17 | 93.5 | 1.67 | 155.9 | 1417 | 306 | 1.33 | 408.00 | 1511 | 2928 | 1700 | 1.72 |
| 18 | 99.0 | 1.67 | 165.0 | 1500 | 324 | 1.33 | 432.00 | 1600 | 3100 | 1800 | 1.72 |
| 19 | 104.5 | 1.67 | 174.2 | 1584 | 342 | 1.33 | 456.00 | 1689 | 3273 | 1900 | 1.72 |
| 20 | 110.0 | 1.67 | 183.4 | 1667 | 360 | 1.33 | 480.00 | 1778 | 3445 | 2000 | 1.72 |
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Tier 1 (Level 1-4): Adventurer
Tier 2 (Level 5-10): Heroic
Tier 3 (Level 11-16): Paragon
Tier 4 (Level 17-20): Epic
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5th edition D&D seems to believe that the sheer number of enemies makes an encounter harder. I'm less certain this is the case in my system since my monsters are balanced differently. I'm guessing it holds more true for 5E due to the way monsters are balanced as a solo vs a full party of players and the way monsters progress. In 5E numerous lower level monsters have actually more total HP and damage than a single monster with the same combined XP.
In my system however, monsters are scale similar to the scenario I'm describing below:
Let's say we have 4 PCs, each have 8 health and do 5 damage
Compare these scenarios:
a) One monster with 40 HP, does 8 damage
b) Four monsters, each with 10HP and do 2 damage
c) Eight monsters, each with 5HP and do 1 damage
Which is of these monster packs is more dangerous against these 4 PCs? Assume players and monsters always hit and players always go first.
You probably realize that (a) is the most dangerous by far. The single big monster though is going to keep dealing full damage to players until the fight ends. By breaking up the same monster into smaller chunks such as group (b) and (c), the monster pack weakens as a whole when smaller monsters are killed by players. So comparing these groups in this manner, the bigger monster is far more dangerous. This is made much more apparent when there is a PC wizard with strong AoE damage, who is far more effective against large numbers of weak enemies.
What these numbers do NOT indicate are the tactical advantage of superior numbers. It's easier for players to CONTROL a single monster by parking a well shielded fighter next to it, preventing that one big monster from reaching the more vulnerable back-lines of the party of PCs (egs. wizard, archer). A large army of small monsters are much harder for that fighter to hold back, and thus some monsters will tend to 'leak' out to the vulnerable back-lines of the PCs and prevent them from casting spells and shooting arrows. An artillery boss (egs. beholder) or highly mobile lurker boss (egs. invisible stalker) is much more dangerous if there are damage-soaking minions typing up the party's front-line fighters.
It's a toss-up. Sometimes more monsters is harder, sometimes a single monster is much harder. So I'm not sure we really need a rule to consider a larger quantity of monsters harder.
Keep in mind this logic may not work for 5E D&D because numerous lower level monsters with the same combined XP as a high CR monster in 5E may very well have more total HP and damage the single monster.
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Fine, I'll confirm it with MATH.
In 5E, one CR 4 creature has an XP budget of 1100. It gives as much XP as five CR1 and one CR1/2 creature.
Referring to the (somewhat undependable) custom monster stats on page 274 of the DMG,
A CR4 creature has 116-130 HP and 27-32 Damage per round, average 123HP, 29.5DPR
A CR1 creature has 71-85 HP and 9-14 Damage per round, av 78HP, 11.5DPR
A CR1/2 creature has 50-70 HP and 6-8 Damage per round, av 60HP, 7DPR
Five CR1 and one CR1/2 have a combined 450HP and 64.5DPR.
Yeah.
And that's the real reason why in 5E we have to multiply when there's a large number of lower CR monsters compared to when there is only a single high CR monster.
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And so, the rules of this encounter building system:
1) To build a moderate difficulty encounter, the combined level of monsters should be about equal to the combined levels of the PCs.
2) Monsters from higher tiers of play are about 25% more difficult per difference in tier and thus give about 25% more XP per difference in tier.
If we're worried about that sheer numbers of monsters will overwhelm players, we can also have this rule I outlined back in part 1.
3) If monsters outnumber the players, double the levels/XP contributions of the additional monsters. This should be usually be the weakest monsters, but may the the hardest monster if it is much more dangerous due to the additional monsters.
Personally I think (3) is not needed for the reasons I've outlined above.
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If the extensive spreadsheets weren't a big clue, this took a lot of work. I'm really happy with the results though! Encounters are easy to build using these new rules.
Another side benefit is that warrior characters do a lot more damage every level. That means that I can more easily make warriors strong compared to mages at higher levels.
The big con is that the damage numbers get really big. This makes life a bit harder for players who have to work with these bigger damage numbers. I suspect players won't really mind however: Which player will be sad that their PC is doing *higher* damage?
"What these numbers do NOT indicate are the tactical advantage of superior numbers." Good point!
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