D&D 5E Challenge Levels (Deadly Question)

[lobo316]

Question for the DMs out there, when building an encounter, by the (RAW, p.82 DMG) you add up the encounter difficulty numbers for each character to get the Party's "XP Threshold" for each difficulty level. Narrowing this down to just the "deadly" encounter level, if we have five 6th level characters, the deadly threshold would be 7,000 (1,400x5).

My question is, what do you use for the "max" number for your deadly encounter range?

Again, using the five 6th level characters, we know the Easy range is from 1500 t0 2999. At the 3000 mark, the encounter becomes Medium.

So...what's the "maximum" for what I'll call the "Deadly Threshold Range"?

What I've been doing is taking the difference between the "hard" encounter total and the "Deadly" total and adding the difference to the Deadly total. Example (again, using the five 6th level characters) the "Hard" threshold is 4500 and the Deadly threshold is 7000. The difference between those numbers is 2500, so add that 2500 to the deadly threshold to get a "Deadly Threshold Range" of 7000 to 9500.

So I use that range when building "deadly" encounters and if I go above that number (in the example, above 9500), I treat that like a whole different "encounter level" (I call it Insane, lol).

How do you DMs out there handle this?

 

[Uller]

Daily XP budget. So for five 6th level characters: 20,000 XP...the bigger you get for a deadly encounter the more of a one encounter day you have. I've found parties, if well rested, can generally handle 2X deadly without much risk of death unless there is some factor making it more challenging (monsters have surprise or other very advantageous terrain/environment/circumstances). Once you get above 2x deadly then things get tougher.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Question for the DMs out there, when building an encounter, by the (RAW, p.82 DMG) you add up the encounter difficulty numbers for each character to get the Party's "XP Threshold" for each difficulty level. Narrowing this down to just the "deadly" encounter level, if we have five 6th level characters, the deadly threshold would be 7,000 (1,400x5).

My question is, what do you use for the "max" number for your deadly encounter range?

Well, there is no max on Deadly. "Deadly" is supposed to mean "the players could actually lose this one," and so whether it is a 1% chance of failure or a 99.999% chance of failure, it is all Deadly.

In practice I usually don't go above Deadly x4, and I almost never go above Deadly x10. (Note: I don't use the DMG tables when planning encounters, but I mean that when I add things up afterwards, there have only been one or two encounters in the past year which added up to more than 10x the Deadly threshold--and even in those cases I wasn't running the monsters for maximum deadliness. E.g. there were 24 Umber Hulks present on the neogi deathspider that the players rammed and boarded (plus various neogi and a neogi wizard and some slaves manning catapults), but I only had 1d4 of them emerge onto the shipdeck per turn, instead of all 24 showing up on turn 1.)

In practice, circumstances such as terrain, visibility, mission objectives, who has missile weapons, total or partial cover, mobility, etc. tend to matter more than XP budgets, at least in Combat As War campaigns. When the players are going up against intelligent tool-using foes like hobgoblins and drow on their home ground, the enemies tend to do much better, and I would bet on the hobgoblins/drow in any fight above Medium difficulty, given how those fights have played out in the past. Low-CR creatures in 5E are very strong.

 

[lobo316]

Daily XP budget. So for five 6th level characters: 20,000 XP...the bigger you get for a deadly encounter the more of a one encounter day you have. I've found parties, if well rested, can generally handle 2X deadly without much risk of death unless there is some factor making it more challenging (monsters have surprise or other very advantageous terrain/environment/circumstances). Once you get above 2x deadly then things get tougher.

Yea, I get that, but two things...I honesty never look at the XP/Day "chart". I just build my encounters and run the game as I always have. The players are well experienced and have a very solid feel for when the should be taking breaks/rests. The other think, I swear, those number on the Daily XP Bonus just seems really, I dunno, restrictive to me. I've added some of my encounters up, and my XP total go well about what the party "should have" been able to handle.

I just design my encounter by feel, and by what their place is in the structure or setting of where the encounter takes place.

 

[lobo316]

Well, there is no max on Deadly. "Deadly" is supposed to mean "the players could actually lose this one," and so whether it is a 1% chance of failure or a 99.999% chance of failure, it is all Deadly.

In practice I usually don't go above Deadly x4, and I almost never go above Deadly x10. (Note: I don't use the DMG tables when planning encounters, but I mean that when I add things up afterwards, there have only been one or two encounters in the past year which added up to more than 10x the Deadly threshold--and even in those cases I wasn't running the monsters for maximum deadliness. E.g. there were 24 Umber Hulks present on the neogi deathspider that the players rammed and boarded (plus various neogi and a neogi wizard and some slaves manning catapults), but I only had 1d4 of them emerge onto the shipdeck per turn, instead of all 24 showing up on turn 1.)

In practice, circumstances such as terrain, visibility, mission objectives, who has missile weapons, total or partial cover, mobility, etc. tend to matter more than XP budgets, at least in Combat As War campaigns. When the players are going up against intelligent tool-using foes like hobgoblins and drow on their home ground, the enemies tend to do much better, and I would bet on the hobgoblins/drow in any fight above Medium difficulty, given how those fights have played out in the past. Low-CR creatures in 5E are very strong.

I get this and respect this. Deadly x4 is pretty flexible. I doubt that I would go as far as deadly x10. It sounds like you build yours similar to mine, by "feel", though I do go back and check the ELs and find most of them end up the hard or deadly range.

I think a simpler formula for what im doing would be to simply create another "threshold" (I called it Insane above), but just add the difference between the hard and deadly thresholds to get the insane level, and just add it right up along with the other thresholds. Numbers seem to come out the same or similar to what I'm been doing anyway, lol. I did an example with five 7th level characters and it come out....

Thresholds: EASY 1750 MEDIUM 3750 HARD 5500 DEADLY 8500 and INSANE 11,500

So that Insane Threshold is well below your X4 potential, but I may keep that in mind.

 

[discosoc]

I've found two things influence this more than anything:

The first is how efficient your players are at maximizing their characters. A well-constructed group played intelligently and with purpose can basically handle anything that doesn't have a high chance of 1-shotting them.

The second is how many encounters you throw at them between long rests. If you run with the style of one two encounters, followed by 3 days of travel, then another encounter, etc, your group will be able to handle DEADLY encounters pretty effectively because they are basically walking into every fight fully stacked with resources.

The later issue actually breaks the whole CR and Encounters per Day dynamic, however, so I'd recommend changing the frequencies of short and long rests rather than throwing higher CR stuff their way.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

So that Insane Threshold is well below your X4 potential, but I may keep that in mind.

I found my players' PCs to be surprisingly robust, in that they keep heading into situations that I expect to TPK them, and then they somehow survive anyway. The Horn of Valhalla (Chogorath; made of tightly-wound twine; must be soaked in blood of a humanoid prior to use) has been instrumental at least twice. I know the players know things are getting bad when the monk whips out Chogorath and starts mopping up blood from a downed PC's gut wound...

Anyway, my point isn't necessarily that your PCs can or should handle a particular difficulty with aplomb. However, 5E PCs have a lot of resource depth which makes them deceptively robust. I suggest that you don't really know how they'd perform in a test to destruction until you actually try a few. If you really want to know their limits, either use something like a dream sequence (possibly caused by the Dream sleep from a bad guy) or borrow their character sheets and run some mock combats. My guys had a lot of fun when I offered to spend twenty minutes letting them fight a beholder with no consequences, in a dream; two died and one ran away.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

So that Insane Threshold is well below your X4 potential, but I may keep that in mind.

I found my players' PCs to be surprisingly robust, in that they keep heading into situations that I expect to TPK them, and then they somehow survive anyway. The Horn of Valhalla (Chogorath; made of tightly-wound twine; must be soaked in blood of a humanoid prior to use) has been instrumental at least twice. I know the players know things are getting bad when the monk whips out Chogorath and starts mopping up blood from a downed PC's gut wound...

Anyway, my point isn't necessarily that your PCs can or should handle a particular difficulty with aplomb. However, 5E PCs have a lot of resource depth which makes them deceptively robust. I suggest that you don't really know how they'd perform in a test to destruction until you actually try a few. If you really want to know their limits, either use something like a dream sequence (possibly caused by the Dream sleep from a bad guy) or borrow their character sheets and run some mock combats. My guys had a lot of fun when I offered to spend twenty minutes letting them fight a beholder with no consequences, in a dream; two died and one ran away.

That was before they figured out how to fight beholders of course.

 

[Uller]

Yea, I get that, but two things...I honesty never look at the XP/Day "chart". I just build my encounters and run the game as I always have.

So do I. The only thing I use the encounter difficulty thresholds and XP budget for is to look ahead at how difficult the upcoming game session will be and maybe think about how I will play the NPCs to make it more or less challenging or at least foreshadow to the players what they can expect. I also some time use it to look back and see how a particular session played out to see if things matched expectations.

So far (up to 8th level) it's been pretty good.

 

[lobo316]

Thanks for the input all. I'm thinking I just need to keep increasing some of the challenges to really push the characters in some of the "climactic fights" cuz, dang, even at 6th level, they can just tear some stuff up. Almost feels futile sometimes running them up against the baddies.