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First of all, I want to say I don’t have much experience designing PFRPG encounters. I’ve played 3.5 quite a while ago and have only recently started DM’ing a homebrewed Mythic campaign (Grey Dawn) for four 1st-level (well, 3rd in the mean time) players.
Secondly, I’m not posting the following as a rules suggestion or anything like that. I simply wish to present you with the reasoning behind designing my own adventures and balancing the number of encounters per sleep cycle. For me, it works – so far at least- but your mileage may vary quite a bit, depending on the level of your players (no idea how this will scale at higher levels) or level of actual game experience (experienced players with strong builds).
Designing encounters in PF is relatively easy, but for a new GM with little experience it can be a daunting task to design a string of encounters; you don’t want the adventure to be a spring picnic, nor do you want it to devolve into a curbstomp TPK. Of course, there’s always reference materials, such as existing modules and good ol’ trial-and-error’. However, the following rules of thumb I extrapolated are far less time-consuming than that and seem to work, for me at least.
The idea is to assign an ‘Attrition Rate’ to every type of encounter (Easy, Average, Challenging, Hard and Epic). This AR (for short) reflects the amount of resources the encounter is likely to consume. Of course, this is nothing new; I got the idea from the 3.5 DMG initially:
“Since every game session probably includes many encounters, you don’t want to make every encounter one that taxes the PCs to their limits. They would have to stop the adventure and rest for an extensive period after every fight, and that slows down the game. An encounter with an Encounter Level (EL) equal to the PCs’ level is one that should expend about 20% of their resources — hit points, spells, magic item uses, etc. This means, on average, that after about four encounters of the party’s level the PCs need to rest, heal, and regain their spells. A fifth encounter would probably wipe them out.”
So that provided me with a baseline: If APL=X, then a CR(X) encounter has an Attrition Rate of 20%, as it would cost the party around one fifth of their resources.
In order to allow a little room for error, I decided (entirely arbitrarily) that I would not normally tax the PC’s beyond four-fifths of their capacity. In other words, 80% total AR worth of encounters before resting.
Still with me? Ok then.
Since I find it easier to work with 100% as a suggested maximum for AR, I reworked the numbers to reflect this: Average encounters have a 25% AR rate now (20 divided by 80 to get the new percentage)
Then the following paragraph allowed me to extrapolate AR to lower and higher CR encounters:
“The PCs should be able to take on many more encounters lower than their level but fewer encounters with Encounter Levels higher than their party level. As a general rule, if the EL is two lower than the party’s level, the PCs should be able to take on twice as many encounters before having to stop and rest. Two levels below that, and the number of encounters they can cope with doubles again, and so on.”
It makes sense that if an encounter with CR = (APL-2) consumes half as much resources, an encounter with CR=(APL+2) consumes double as much. Not sure about the math behind it all, but that’s what I thought sounded plausible anyway. Extrapolating the numbers, that gives us:
• 1 Dead Easy CR(X-2) encounter has a 12% AR
• 1 Easy CR(X-1) encounter has a 18% AR
• 1 Average CR(X) encounter has an attrition rate of 25%
• 1 Challenging CR(X+1) encounter has 37% AR
• 1 Hard CR (X+2) encounter has a 50% AR
• 1 Very Hard CR (X+3) encounter has a 75% AR
• 1 Epic CR (X+4) encounter has an 100% AR
(note that I changed the classes somewhat to account for APL-2 and APL+4 encounters, not mentioned in the PFRPG Core book)
The rest is pretty easy; when designing an adventure I now simply add up the Attrition Rates of encounters in chronological order until I reach around 100%. At that point, I ask myself if it would be a good idea to give the PC’s an opportunity to rest for a bit. Of course, they are free to rest before that point; if I don’t think they’ve earned it, however, there’s a (greater) chance of encountering a wandering monster – see below.
Now I want to say once more that this is nothing more than a helpful DM tool which allows you to gauge more or less accurately when your PC’s will decide to set up camp. Feel free to allow them to do so sooner or much later – that’s the DM’s prerogative. Use these ideas as much or as little as you like.
Lastly, I’ve some personal advice that I use in conjunction with the AR guidelines, inspired by the excellent articles mentioned below.
- Low-level encounters: I use these quite often, as it adds to the sense of heroism in the campaign. Read this: http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/2050/roleplaying-games/revisiting-encou nter-design. AR lets you gauge how much of those they can take and thus invites you to use them more often.
- Wandering monsters: don’t forget about these! Wandering monsters discourage PC parties from taking early naps to stock up on spells, hit points etc. Also, fighter-type PC’s tend to be less useful early in the adventure when magic-users are still chock-full of lethal spells but become more important later on as those spell reserves are nearly or fully depleted. Read the full article here: http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1668/roleplaying-games/the-death-of-the -wandering-monster Anyway, I nowadays always keep a few wandering monster encounters on hand to use whenever the party declares it an early night and I don’t feel they’ve earned it yet . Chances of encountering such a wandering monster are equal to 100-(AR since last rest) – or whatever you want it to be as a DM. I also tend to make such an encounter hard enough to bring the total Attrition Rate before resting close to 100%. Again, do what you like – it’s just guidelines.
Enjoy!
-B
Love this. Favorited and bookmarked.
I've been struggling with exactly this! A brand new GM thanks you!
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Thanks for the comments - glad this is of use to you guys :-)
It's been a few encounters and I've tweaked the numbers a little. The following table contains the new attrition rates.
• 1 Dead Easy CR(X-2) encounter has a 10% AR
• 1 Easy CR(X-1) encounter has a 15% AR
• 1 Average CR(X) encounter has an attrition rate of 25%
• 1 Challenging CR(X+1) encounter has 40% AR
• 1 Hard CR (X+2) encounter has a 60% AR
• 1 Very Hard CR (X+3) encounter has a 85% AR
• 1 Epic CR (X+4) encounter has an 115% AR
The main reason I did this is so that the numbers are easier to work with, being multiples of five. There now is a logical progression between each step (+5, +10, +15, ...). In addition, the easier encounters have had their AR reduced a little (they're easy after all) while harder encounters got assigned a higher AR (since they will most likely be an even bigger drain on resources).
In addition, I've chosen to check for wandering monsters using the following formula:
Chance of encountering wandering monster = [110 - (Total AR defeated since last rest)]%
This increases the threat, as well as offering you a little more leeway in selecting the resulting encounter, the AR value of which should near, but not exceed,[110 - (Total AR defeated since last rest)]
E.g. An APL 4 party decides to call it a day after only three easy encounters. Since their last break, they have defeated 45% AR's worth of monsters. So, the chance of encountering wandering monsters is now 110-45= 65%. The resulting encounter can have an AR of up to 65%, so you could pick a hard CR6 encounter worth 60% AR to redress the balance.
While I don't think your math is bad, this is the sort of thing that is definitely (as you note) a YMMV. Some parties are going to blow big guns (in terms of spells and per day abilities) on weaker encounters (either because they don't realize they are weaker or because they choose to). Similarly, others are going to be heavy on resource conservation. Sometimes one leads directly to another.
Still, I'm glad you found a formula that works for you.
Indeed, the rates I provided are simply a starting point for new campaigns and individual DM's should assign their own values according to how well (or poorly) the players perform over the course of the campaign. (In my own campaign, I've changed some of these base values already to reflect party composition and player preference)
While the numbers will always vary, I do believe it pays off for most DM's to utilize this (or a similar) system; it really forces you to think about the adventure's pacing and gives you a solid idea of how much you can throw at the PC's before they turn belly-up (which you generally want to avoid).
As soon as you get the hang of designing encounters / adventures and things are running smoothly, you should probably drop the math and let DM experience take over. Still, I suppose it's good to have some sort of benchmark to fall back on in case you need it. :-)