I'm sure I'm not the first person on this website to complain about how unreliable CR is, but I'm still yet to find an adequate replacement for it.
As I understand it, CR is made with the idea that your party will be facing "six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day." Its unclear if the DMG means combat encounters specifically, but that seems to be the implication. It also states: If the combat XP "is higher than one-third of the party’s expected XP total for the adventuring day [...], the encounter is going to be tougher than the sum of its parts."
So here's the problem:
Combat takes a very long time. My sessions only last about 2 hours due to scheduling, and I only get to run twice every month. I do not have the time nor inclination to have 6 combats every "day", and have a "day" take two months because of it. It would simply slow down the story too much for my players. How can I recalculate combat difficulty under the new assumption that my players will only be facing one or two combat encounters per day? Putting all their XP budget into one fight seems tremendously risky, but so far even "deadly" encounters have been too easy for them.
I've been told I could switch "short rests" to 8 hours and "long rests" to 1 week, but I'm sort of saving that as a last resort.
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"The beating sound is not my sympathetic heart, but a time bomb."
A “Deadly” encounter should burn about 1/3 of the party’s daily resources, so you should be able to do 3-4 of them per day. If you only want to do two encounters, make them double deadly. The problem there is it might take 2 hours to get through 1 encounter that way.
Have you tried using D&D Beyond's Encounter Builder yet? It should assist you in creating the appropriate challenges. Basically, if you want your players to only go through two combats an adventuring day (with a short rest in between), try to get the "Adjusted XP" to be half of the "Daily Budget" in the encounter summary.
You can have some great fights at higher than deadly level. If they're only having one or two a day, they're going to do way better anyway because they're going to burn all their special abilities and spell slots in one or two fights instead of disperse them out over 6 or 8. Usually when they get to the big boss fight, they've used up some abilities, healing, hit dice, and spell slots. So just turn it up and let them go all out. If it's too easy, make it harder next time.
While you are experimenting with it, you can have waves of bad guys or henchmen. When they've had a good fight, stop sending in the waves. Or you can alter some things in the battlefield besides just fighting. They have to use their action to activate levers or there are traps hidden around the battlefield. And if the traps do some aoe to bad guys and good guys both, that's both fun and shortens the fight.
The DMG uses circular reasoning to design a monster in CR. Start with the CR you think you want, do all the steps and then see what CR you get. Which is the exact opposite of what should happen.
Combat takes too long? Compared to what exactly? Back in the "good old days" a single combat could take 2 hours real time.
Don't worry about adventuring days, worry about pacing. One two hour session could have no combat and covers two months, another session could have four combats and covers two hours, and yet another session could have a single combat and cover a single day. What does it matter how much gets done in real time, you can speed or slow game time at will...
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I'm sure I'm not the first person on this website to complain about how unreliable CR is, but I'm still yet to find an adequate replacement for it.
As I understand it, CR is made with the idea that your party will be facing "six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day." Its unclear if the DMG means combat encounters specifically, but that seems to be the implication. It also states: If the combat XP "is higher than one-third of the party’s expected XP total for the adventuring day [...], the encounter is going to be tougher than the sum of its parts."
So here's the problem:
Combat takes a very long time. My sessions only last about 2 hours due to scheduling, and I only get to run twice every month. I do not have the time nor inclination to have 6 combats every "day", and have a "day" take two months because of it. It would simply slow down the story too much for my players. How can I recalculate combat difficulty under the new assumption that my players will only be facing one or two combat encounters per day? Putting all their XP budget into one fight seems tremendously risky, but so far even "deadly" encounters have been too easy for them.
I've been told I could switch "short rests" to 8 hours and "long rests" to 1 week, but I'm sort of saving that as a last resort.
"The beating sound is not my sympathetic heart, but a time bomb."
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A “Deadly” encounter should burn about 1/3 of the party’s daily resources, so you should be able to do 3-4 of them per day. If you only want to do two encounters, make them double deadly. The problem there is it might take 2 hours to get through 1 encounter that way.
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Have you tried using D&D Beyond's Encounter Builder yet? It should assist you in creating the appropriate challenges. Basically, if you want your players to only go through two combats an adventuring day (with a short rest in between), try to get the "Adjusted XP" to be half of the "Daily Budget" in the encounter summary.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/encounter-builder
You can have some great fights at higher than deadly level. If they're only having one or two a day, they're going to do way better anyway because they're going to burn all their special abilities and spell slots in one or two fights instead of disperse them out over 6 or 8. Usually when they get to the big boss fight, they've used up some abilities, healing, hit dice, and spell slots. So just turn it up and let them go all out. If it's too easy, make it harder next time.
While you are experimenting with it, you can have waves of bad guys or henchmen. When they've had a good fight, stop sending in the waves. Or you can alter some things in the battlefield besides just fighting. They have to use their action to activate levers or there are traps hidden around the battlefield. And if the traps do some aoe to bad guys and good guys both, that's both fun and shortens the fight.
Ignore it. Ignore XP. Your game, your pace.
The DMG uses circular reasoning to design a monster in CR. Start with the CR you think you want, do all the steps and then see what CR you get. Which is the exact opposite of what should happen.
Combat takes too long? Compared to what exactly? Back in the "good old days" a single combat could take 2 hours real time.
Don't worry about adventuring days, worry about pacing. One two hour session could have no combat and covers two months, another session could have four combats and covers two hours, and yet another session could have a single combat and cover a single day. What does it matter how much gets done in real time, you can speed or slow game time at will...