You’ve designed an encounter for four player characters and want to estimate how difficult it’s going to be. Three of the
four players have 3rd-level characters and one has a character at 2nd level (due to missing a session).
First, note the XP values that define the four categories of difficulty. For each difficulty category on the Encounter Difficulty XP per Character table, you’ll find the number for a 3rd-level character and multiply it by three (for the three 3rd-level characters), then add the number for a 2nd-level character. That gives you the following numbers:
• Easy: up to 375 XP
• Medium: up to 550 XP
• Hard: up to 1,050 XP
• Deadly: up to 1,400 XP
Now you look at the encounter you’ve designed, a fight with four hobgoblins. Each hobgoblin has an XP value of 100, so the total XP is 400. Since there are four hobgoblins, you double the XP value of the encounter; the encounter’s XP value, for the purposes of figuring out its difficulty, is 800 XP. That makes this encounter tougher than a medium encounter, but not higher than the hard threshold—so it’s a
hard encounter.
If you build a later encounter with four bugbears, with an XP value of 200 XP each, you’d end up with a total value of 1,600 XP for the encounter. That number is above the threshold of deadly encounters, meaning it’s probably too hard for your characters to handle. If you adjust it down to three bugbears, your total is 1,200 XP—still deadly, but at least the adventurers have a fighting chance. Two bugbears is probably a better encounter for this party: you multiply the base XP value of 400 by only 1.5 for a pair of monsters, giving you 600 XP—slightly easier than the hobgoblin fight.
Satans påfund. Iaf om det ska vara tillkrånglad CR- och xpmatte inblandat tycker jag.
