Your Results with the Encounter Building Rules in Practice


Monsters and Hazards


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I made this thread for everyone to share their results with the new encounter building rules. I love the design of the encounter building rules and how the XP values are based off of the PCs' level, but it doesn't seem to work in every case.

I ran a playtest one-shot yesterday with three combat encounters for four level 3 PCs.

The PCs: human fighter (focusing on dual-wielding), human rogue, gnome bard, and goblin alchemist.

The encounters: 2 Crocodiles (level 2, low threat), 1 kobold scout and 4 kobold warriors (levels 1 and 0, high threat), 1 young black dragon (level 7, extreme threat).

The fight with the crocodiles took place in difficult terrain (human waist-high water, so greater difficult terrain for the gnome and goblin) and it started off with the rogue falling into the water due to failing a check to maintain grip on a pulley he was using to improvise a zipline across the swamp (I set it to DC 10, he got 8). The fall was short enough it did no damage (25 feet into water). The crocodiles succeeded at their stealth initiative rolls so they were able to use ambush. The rogue nearly dropped to 0 HP even with the crocodiles fighting each other over him. No one else was injured and the crocodiles were dispatched within 2 rounds. Considering the circumstances, it seems to be within parameters of a low-threat encounter (especially since I apparently gave them their jaws' grab for free by mistake).

The fight with the kobolds was a different story though. The kobold warriors were basically unable to do anything with their +0 to hit bonuses. Even if they did, their damage wasn't going to make a dent in the PCs' health at all. I have no idea how this was supposed to be a high-threat encounter. The terrain here was pretty neutral. They were dispatched within 2 rounds as well.

The fight with the dragon was over within one round: the dragon knocked out the fighter with its acid breath weapon (critical failure) and the rogue with one jaw attack (the rogue being the most injured, though he had been healed); the gnome and goblin fled. I have no idea how any party of level 3s is supposed to take on a level 7 creature even when fully rested -- the numbers are just too high.


Tiene wrote:

The fight with the kobolds was a different story though. The kobold warriors were basically unable to do anything with their +0 to hit bonuses. Even if they did, their damage wasn't going to make a dent in the PCs' health at all. I have no idea how this was supposed to be a high-threat encounter. The terrain here was pretty neutral. They were dispatched within 2 rounds as well.

Addendum here: I just found out that level 0 creatures count as level -1 for encounter building purposes. (They're not called "level -1" but in essence, that's how you build it.)


Tiene wrote:
Tiene wrote:

The fight with the kobolds was a different story though. The kobold warriors were basically unable to do anything with their +0 to hit bonuses. Even if they did, their damage wasn't going to make a dent in the PCs' health at all. I have no idea how this was supposed to be a high-threat encounter. The terrain here was pretty neutral. They were dispatched within 2 rounds as well.

Addendum here: I just found out that level 0 creatures count as level -1 for encounter building purposes. (They're not called "level -1" but in essence, that's how you build it.)

Yeah, that's definitely a thing to remember that is obviously not immediately intuitive, but still works functionally. And I imagine the Kobold Warriors are supposed to have a +5-6 on their attacks, similar to the Goblin Warriors (also level 0). There's a lot of editing issues across the initial playtest documents.

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