Encounter Building 101

The new edition has an interesting encounter building system. Like in 3e, monsters have Challenge rating, indicating roughly how difficult it is for a group of 4 or so equal level characters.  Like in 4e, monsters have a fixed experience value. In 3e, you used the Encounter Level table in the DMG along with the monster's challenge rating to gauge about how many monsters to stick in the encounter based on the party's level. Harder encounters would have ELs over the PCs level, and easier ones has lower ELs. In 4e, you had an experience budget based on the party's level, and used the budget to "buy" monsters. Again, you would move to a higher level for harder encounters and a lower level for easier ones.

In 5e, you create a budget based on the levels of the PCs, with thresholds for easy encounters, normal encounters, hard encounters and deadly encounters. However, 5e seems to acknowledge that larger groups mean more attacks against the PCs, leading to harder encounters. So as more monsters are added, the monsters' xp value gets multiplied for the purposes of determining the encounter's difficulty. In other words, mobs are considered a bigger threat.

By the way, I did the math, and at least two of the encounters we've been through (the kobolds with the drake pen and the re-match with Cyanwrath) qualified as deadly encounters. This was even after the DM nerfed Cyanwrath's back-up. And while a super-challenging dungeon may have been what the designers were going for, I do have to tell them, it's frustrating for players (and for certain kinds of DMs as well). My other theory is that the writers of the adventure weren't privy to the full design rules, so decided to over-estimate the capabilities of the players rather than vice versa. I haven't had a chance to actually play or run the starter set adventure (and I would love to), but it seemed to have some similar problems. And sure, a good DM can tweak the encounters (and our DM has), but part of the reason for using published adventure material is to cut down on prep time.

Well, we have another session this week. Hopefully we can handle the next deadly encounter the adventure throws at us.