Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-108.80.61.221-20151210070519

Disclaimer: I'm aware of how much nitpicking, math, and overthinking I'm doing. I realize that just winging it would work 99.9% of the time. I'm just not interested in that as an answer. I am a DM, and I run 5th Edition D&D. I have a pretty good grasp of the 5E CR system and how to build a variety of combat encounters at any difficulty for a given group of PCs. However, my PCs often have NPCs or monsters as allies who fighting alongside them, or even just happen to be fighting on the same side of a fight as a group of NPCs, such as intervening in a fight that has already started. Unless I build these NPCs using PC character creation, with a certain number of levels in a class, I have a hard time determining how much "Encounter XP" I should budget to keep the difficulty at Medium or Hard or whatever. For example: For 4 Level 5 PCs, 5 bugbears is a Medium fight.2000EXP ≣ ( 4 * 500 ) = [ ( 5 * 200 ) * 2 ] ≣ 2000EXP No problem, right? If these 4 PCs have "their friend Sir Devin Martuse the Triadic Knight (who I built as a human Level 3 Oath of Devotion Paladin, therefore adding to the party as much as another level 3 PC would, 75EXP Easy, 150EXP Medium, or 225EXP Hard) fighting alongside them, 5 bugbears is a slightly easier Medium fight, and 6 is a low Hard fight. { [ ( 4 * 250 ) + 75 ] < [ ( 5 * 200 ) * 2 ] < [ ( 4 * 500 ) + 150 ] } ≣( 1075EXP < 2000EXP < 2150EXP ) { [ ( 4 * 500 ) + 150 ] < [ ( 6 * 200 ) * 2 ] < [ ( 4 * 750 ) + 225 ] } ≣( 2150EXP < 2400EXP < 3000EXP ) No problem, right? What if they have a Guard, a Veteran, and a Werebear fighting alongside them against the bugbears? How many bugbears do I need to scale up to? Where are the lines for Easy, Medium, Hard, Deadly? At low levels, even a single ally might change a Hard fight to an Easy one. Problem. This issue makes planning encounters, and therefore planning full sessions, just that much harder, and I think it's a failure of the DMG to address this, in either the Building a Combat Encounter section or NPC Party Members section. Other than winging it, I can think of one really calculation-intensive solution, one semi-cop-out solution that doesn't give me the accuracy and mathematical rigor I want, one cop-out I consider unacceptable, and one guess and check method that's too much work. First, Figure out how much damage each class of PC is expected to deal and defense PCs are expected to have, etc at each level, average it, and build a table like the Monster design table on pg. 274 of the DMG.Compare any NPC allies to that chart and give them an "adjusted PC level" analogous to an "adjusted CR" for a designed monster. Use that to give them a EXP budget in combination with the XP Thresholds by Character Level table on pg. 82 of the DMG - lots of number crunching, +s lots of accuracy, usable ever after Second, Add the XP of the NPC ally onto the EXP budget of your party, use as new EXP budget.For the example above, PCs + Guard, Veteran, Werebear ≣ [ 2000EXP + ( 25XP + 700XP + 1800 XP ) ] ≣ 4525 newEXP ≣ vs. 9 Bugbears I consider this a cop-out because it compares apples and oranges, and. Third, Disallow NPC allies in combat. cop-out, plus it curtails RP, player decisions, story potential, etc a lot. Fourth, Play out potential fights in advance, with more enemies than with just the PCs, until you find the number of enemies that feels right. essentially just intuition, plus waaaay too much work, when the alternatives are the elegant encounter design system already in place, or not caring as much. So here's what I'm asking: does anyone know an obvious solution I'm ignorant of, can anyone suggest a clever solution I didn't think of, or is there a resource somewhere I haven't found that answers this question? Failing all that, anyone interested in helping figure out the "XP Thresholds by NPC Party Member CR" table?  