Adjusting Encounters

[benfromidaho]

I'm probably just not understanding things, but I'm trying to adjust some encounters for Doomsday Dawn. With individual creatures not having an XP value assigned to them (a feature I like), I'm a little confused at how certain low level creatures factor into calculations. For example goblin warriors are lvl 0, which for a group of 4 level 1 heroes is Party's Level -1. However, an encounter of 4 goblin warriors is rated as a High 1 encounter for a group of 4 level 1 heroes. So my confusion comes to this, according to Table 5 on P31 of the Bestiary a High 1 encounter should be 80 XP worth of creatures, so 20 per goblin warrior. However, according to Table 4 a goblin warrior would be 30 XP each.

Please help me with what I'm not understanding! Thanks!

[Alenvire]

I'm not understanding how the adjustments by rules is supposed to work either.

They really needed to give us some examples. Like, for a party of 3 level 3 heroes a high 1 would mean this. A trivial 5 would mean this. A few examples to get us going would be nice. Trying to decipher the minimalist description they gave is frustrating.

And, if I am supposed to subtract exp from a encounter, what do I do when I have a 3 person party and there is only a high 1 single enemy. Add the reduced... 'template' where all his combat statistics go down per missing hero? Maybe I just don't get it.

[Alric Rahl]

It says the xp will not always be exact for the level of encounter. So a high 1 encounter would be 80xp, this means that the encounter should have 3 Goblin Warriors which works out to 90 xp.

I’ve actually converted Rise of the Rune Lords using this and it works out pretty well to the number of creatures in the original encounters. Except for the glassworks part so far where there are supposed to be 8 goblins that seems completely unmanageable. Unless I give them all the weak adjustment. Which I haven’t tried yet.

Basically you use the 2nd table to determine your budget average then add monsters to meet or slightly exceed/come under the budget to build your encounters.

[Malk_Content]

I've been setting things up for 5 players. It's fine when it is a fight against multiple enemies because I can just add or subtract (maybe swap out a Warrior for a Commando etc) enemies. Its harder against a single enemy, if only to find something fitting that would be in the fight with it that is also PC level-2/4

[Alenvire]

Well, there is the whole elite opponent where you basically just add 2 to everything he rolls and some hps. That entry says it would increase the difficulty by one level right?