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Hi. I downloaded the Encounter Planner of Hero Lab & it is nice but it has a different calculation for my groups APL than I do. I probably messed up somewhere so if anyone can help me figure out where I went wrong I would appreciate it. I have 6 players. Two at level 5, Three at level 4, & one at level 3. I figured APL 6 but Hero Lab says APL 5. Thank you.
At first glance, APL 5 looks correct. It would be APL 6 if all six characters were level 5, but in this case four of them are levels 4 or 3.
Anyway, the calculation would be: 5+5+4+4+4+3 (=25), divide by 6 (=~4,17), add 1 (=~5,17). The rule says to round to the nearest whole number, which is 5.
Edit: That said, it would be easier for you to determine encounter difficulties and such if all the PCs were the same level. How did they come to be so separated in terms of character level?
Floor(25 / 6) + 1 = 5.
But difficulty is a relative thing, and I strongly discourage letting PCs end up more than one level apart--unless this is a West Marches-style or ultra-sandbox game, in which case never mind.
5.4 is it.
This is the one I use for quick calculating, the formula is still the same for wealth, and party level and challenge level. Only thing that is different is the EXP as 3.5 and Pathfinder calculations for EXP are drastically more different. our group uses 3.5 because we don't want to deal with millions of experience points.
http://creaturecatalog.enworld.org/fiend_factory/elc/encounter_calculator.h tm