The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide provides a new formula for generating combat encounters for your players. It's actually somewhat similar to the 2014 system - both provide an XP-budget per-player, with different values at each level. The primary difference between 2014 and 2024's systems is that the old one would also apply a very punishing multiplier if using multiple monsters - thus, three 1st level characters in an easy difficulty encounter would face, for example, two Kobolds and an Octopus (that was the first encounter I ever ran, and none of the monsters lived to have a turn).
If I were to build that same encounter again in 2024 rules, it would be, I believe, six Kobolds - something that would probably feel far more substantial.
However, the, like 60xp encounter (and thus 20xp per player,) would only have contributed one fifteenth of what the DMG suggested for an "Adventuring Day" - in other words, it should have been the first of a grueling gauntlet of encounters, in which, surely, once or twice, the kobolds would have gotten decent initiative or the fighter and paladin wouldn't have landed their hits on the first turn (even with a 1 on the damage die, if they have a +3 to their damage, that's a kill).
By contrast, our six-kobold encounter, which would still be doable, but would last long enough to actually present some threat to the party, has a total budget of 150. We still divide that by 3 for the players, so it's only 50xp per player (the low-difficulty budget in the new DMG for one 1st level player) but what that means is that the 300xp daily budget per 1st level player means we're looking at 6 encounters per day. That's... actually quite a lot.
The thing I find interesting about this is that even if individual encounters are easy, the daily xp budget can make things start to feel a lot harder as you start getting into fights after blowing through a lot of your resources and potentially being low on HP as well.
My goal here is to use the 2014 Adventuring Day and the 2024 encounter XP budgets to arrive at a simple "how many of each kind of encounter can we do per day" value.
This might not work out linearly - it depends on how proportional the difficulties are with that daily budget. If it all works out, we can figure out an "encounter point" system similar to what is found in Flee, Mortals!
This will all scale with players, so we only need to figure this out on a single player basis.
So, let's start with level 1:
Encounter Budgets:
Low: 50, Moderate: 75, High: 100
Daily: 300
So, we can fit 6 low encounters, 4 moderate encounters, or 3 high encounters.
I will say, I don't know if any DM uses the 2014 daily xp budget system, because I don't know if I've ever had a campaign that was this hard - a high difficulty encounter is seriously hard in the 2024 DMG. Still, we can at some later point determine what our true daily budget is. With these values, we can easily turn 25xp into one "encounter point," and suggest that a Low encounter is worth 2, a moderate encounter is worth 3, a high encounter is worth 4, and we have a total budget of 12 per day.
How's it work at level 2?
Encounter Budgets:
Low: 100, Moderate 150, High: 200
Daily: 600
The math is easy, because all of our values have doubled. Thus, it's precisely the same "Encounter Point" values and total budget.
If this works at level 3 as well, we'll jump to a much higher level and see if things are the same.
Encounter Budgets:
Low: 150, Moderate: 225, High: 400
Daily: 1,200
Ah, now, here we're clearly off a little. Our daily budget has grown twofold, while low and moderate encounters have gone up by 50% but high has fully doubled.
We could fit 8 low difficulty encounters in a day, moderate encounters are a nightmarish 5 1/3, and high difficulty is once again 3.
In other words, this isn't going to give us a super-clean formula. Two moderate encounters and five low encounters would satisfy this, or a high difficulty encounter and then two moderates, and three low encounters.
To be fair, this makes sense: the thing that grows the most as you level up is the number of resources you have available. A 3rd-level full spellcaster has six spell slots - double what they had at level 2. Even though you'll be pressured to use those resources more liberally, you have greater control over your sustainability. A 1st level character is only going to be able to expend spell slots twice before they need to rest, which makes basically any fight one in which they really have to consider whether they want to expend a spell slot at all.
For my own purposes, let's check things out at level 18, where my players are at the moment.
Encounters:
Low: 5,000, Moderate: 8,700, High: 14,200
Daily: 27,000
The math here isn't super-clean, but roughly, we can do five low encounters (with a bit of spare xp,) 3 moderate encounters (again, with change) and actually just short of enough for two high-difficulty encounters.
This is kind of interesting: this is fewer encounters than we could do at low levels. And having run tier 4 combat now for a good while, that makes sense in just how long fights of these levels go - in tier 4, everything's basically a giant epic clash of titans.
What about mid-levels, though? Do we skew more or fewer encounters?
My Wizard is level 8, currently, and so we'll use this as an example.
Encounters:
Low: 1,000, Moderate: 1,700, High: 2,100
Daily: 6,000
So, like at level 1, we can do 6 low encounters per day, then just under 4 moderate encounters, and just under 3 hard encounters.
Once again, I find myself wondering if all the complaints about 5E being too easy are because people haven't been taking the Adventuring Day seriously enough.
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