[RPG] Are there guidelines for party stats by CR

dnd-5egm-preparation

The 5e DMG provides a table of average monster stats (damage per round, AC, etc.) by CR, along with a set of modifiers to account for special abilities and resistances.

Is there a similar set of guidelines, official or otherwise, for players? For example, is there a table where I can plug in the party's total damage per round and save DCs and etc. and get a "party equivalent" CR?

I often find myself in situations where the PCs experience some significant boost or reduction in their combat power, and I want to be able to properly scale encounters to account for that, or at least to have some idea of how much easier/harder the encounter will be.

It seems that the game designers must have had something like this in mind when designing the CR system and balancing the game.

I've seen this question, but my impression is that bounded accuracy and general rebalancing makes this a much more tractable question in 5e compared to 3.5, at least at lower levels. Additionally, I am not asking for help on the design of particular encounters; I'm looking for some (very) general, overall guidelines.

Best Answer

Compared to the guidelines on calculating CR for custom monsters in the DMG [see note at end], I do not believe there's anywhere near as comprehensive of a set of guidelines in the rulebooks for determining how to adjust the encounter building XP Thresholds for a party that can perform meaningfully above their own character level- but that said, there's at least one decent place that can point you in the right direction to get started.

(Note: Much of the encounter building language in the book uses the experience totals of the enemy in the encounter to determine difficulty rather than CR- When I refer to adjusting experience below, I'm referring to the amount of experience worth of monsters you're sending at the player)

Adjusting for situational advantages/setbacks

I often find myself in situations where the PCs experience some significant boost or reduction in their combat power, and I want to be able to properly scale encounters to account for that, or at least to have some idea of how much easier/harder the encounter will be.

The encounter building section of the DMG actually has a decent subsection to cover this sort of thing if it's a temporary or situational combat power change, specifically the 'Modifying Encounter Difficulty' section on DMG p.84-85. It says to consider the difficulty of the encounter adjusted by one per major drawback, along with some examples of what would be considered appropriate drawbacks to do this for.

What would've been a 'medium' encounter is now a 'hard' one because of whatever's reducing your party's combat power- you can reverse that when designing an encounter to say "Ok, I know the party is going to be blind in this room, so in order to make a 'medium' encounter I have to make one that would normally be considered 'easy' by the encounter building rules" (These guidelines also apply if the enemy is the one suffering the drawback- what would've normally been a 'medium' difficulty fight is now considered 'easy' because the enemies in this room are all blind).

That all said, this section is very general and you should evaluate how much you should adjust the difficulty based on the actual setback level relative to the examples given in the book.

Adjusting for overall party power

Within reason, the above guidelines for situational adjustments can probably be used even for permanent party advantages like extremely potent equipment. Just be careful to not jump the gun on using them before the party's actual increased power level matches up.

It's probably worth slowly adjusting the monster XP total you're throwing at them to get a feel for the effects rather than immediately jumping up a notch, as it's easy to overcompensate when you feel the PCs are doing extremely well- especially considering that the players will have to endure 6-8 encounters in a standard adventuring day.

Making the actual encounter adjustments

Increasing the XP total of what you're sending against the players is safer than increasing the CR of monsters you're sending against the players.

CR, as the sidebar on DMG p.82 mentions, is more or less a 'you must be this tall to ride' bar (at low levels especially). If you increase the CR of what you're sending against the players to much higher than their own level, you run a high risk of making the encounter incredibly swingy as the monsters get mechanics the player can't deal with yet (including but not limited to damage high enough that lower level players' HP are not sufficient to cope with it).

You can still pull higher-than-party-level CRs off, but you need to have a good sense of whether or not the extra power the players have is sufficiently equivalent to actually being a higher level; It doesn't matter that level 1 Timmy the Wizard got a +3 Wand of the War Mage somehow, that CR2 ogre can still oneshot him.

Keeping the CR #s at or under the party's level but using the extra XP allotted to the encounter to send more things at them (or making what you were planning on sending a higher CR that's still at or under their level) is a safer option, so long as you keep the 'Modify Total XP for Multiple Monsters' step of encounter building in mind (DMG p.82).

Summary

When you're building encounters for situations in which you know the players or enemies will have significant drawbacks relative to the other side, judge the severity of those drawbacks against the examples given in the "Modifying Encounter Difficulty" section on DMG p.84-85 and adjust the expected difficulty/XP you're allocating to the encounter accordingly, based on the values in the XP Thresholds by Character Level table on DMG p.82.

If your party is sufficiently powerful to be equivalent to a higher level, you can even consider judging the amount of XP worth of monsters you send their way against the next level's XP thresholds, though this should be done with great care given the power boost some levels contain.

I think it's also worth suggesting to not do this all the time- give the players some chance to feel strong or weak on occasion due to their planning/setbacks/tradeoffs/etc. If they were clever and gave their enemies a major setback, let them enjoy an easy slaughterfest for an encounter or two as a reward!


Note from start: While the DMG contains rules for calculating the effective CR of anything (including player characters) and that might seem useful for the purposes of the question, I think those don't apply here; those rules are effective at determining a PC's CR as an enemy in an encounter, but don't do much to help you figure out what (as an example) the 'medium' encounter XP Threshold for your party is given their effective CR, as there's no chart or conversion for that. Putting your party against an enemy encounter with an equivalent CR/XP value to their calculated CR values would be well into 'deadly' difficulty territory, as you're essentially giving both sides even odds and seeing which one shakes out.

To put it another way, knowing your party of 4 level 5 PCs (were they NPCs with the same abilities) is effectively an encounter consisting of 3 CR3 NPCs and 1 CR4 NPC (note: values are made up) doesn't really help much; There's no encounter building guidelines to determine the difficulty of one set of NPCs fighting against another, and just throwing 3 other CR3s and 1 CR4 against them would have an extremely high chance of party wiping rather than being a balanced encounter.