DMG Encounter Building & Advancement Guidelines

Hey folks, I'm back for another week! This time, let's take a very deep look at the character advancement and progression rules for D&D 5e as they are expressed in the DMG. People frequently complain that the rules for building encounters and campaign progression are broken. That they're too easy on the players. I'm going to take a look at that and find out what's what. Let's start with a critical analysis of the rules as written. The section in question begins on DMG pp.81 under the heading Creating Encounters, and continues to pp.85, ending with a section about making combat encounters fun. (I will get to the UA and XGtE encounter building guidelines at some point in the future.) I tore into the charts and did some cross-referenced analysis of what the numbers mean. The result is the following two charts. An explanation and commentary follows the charts, highlighting the important things I discovered.

Right away though, the most notable detail is that all of the numbers are geared toward controlling play duration from level 1 through 20. These charts seem to be almost entirely about controlling the rate over real time that a character will advance in level. It is possible that, by being stingy on the XP budgets to "fatten up" a campaign's progression rate, they have accidentally made too narrow of a budget to effectively challenge the players. That will take further research, but it's my hypothesis.

EDIT: It has come to my attention that the blog smushes these charts. You can download them properly formatted from this file here.

CHART A

(Advancement Framework)

L	XP	XP+	XP/D	D2L	R	XP+A
1	0	300	300	1	0	300
2	300	600	600	1	0	600
3	900	1800	1200	2	600	1200
4	2700	3800	1700	2	200	3600
5	6500	7500	3500	3	3200	4300
6	14000	9000	4000	2	2200	6800
7	23000	11000	5000	2	1200	9800
8	34000	14000	6000	3	5200	8800
9	48000	16000	7500	2	4200	11800
10	64000	21000	9000	2	1200	19800
11	85000	15000	10500	2	7200	7800
12	100000	20000	11500	2	10200	9800
13	120000	20000	13500	1	3700	16300
14	140000	25000	15000	2	8700	16300
15	165000	30000	18000	2	14700	15300
16	195000	30000	20000	1	4700	25300
17	225000	40000	25000	2	14700	25300
18	265000	40000	27000	1	1700	38300
19	305000	50000	30000	2	11700	38300
20	355000	0	40000	0	0	0

CHART B

(Encounter Counter)

	EE			ME			HE			DE
L	XP	#/D	#/L	XP	#/D	#/L	XP	#/D	#/L	XP	#/D	#/L
1	25	12	12	50	6	6	75	4	4	100	3	3
2	50	12	12	100	6	6	150	4	4	200	3	3
3	75	16	32	150	8	16	225	5	11	400	3	6
4	125	14	27	250	7	14	375	5	9	500	3	7
5	250	14	42	500	7	21	750	5	14	1100	3	10
6	300	13	27	600	7	13	900	4	9	1400	3	6
7	350	14	29	750	7	13	1100	5	9	1700	3	6
8	450	13	40	900	7	20	1400	4	13	2100	3	9
9	550	14	27	1100	7	14	1600	5	9	2400	3	6
10	600	15	30	1200	8	15	1900	5	9	2800	3	6
11	800	13	26	1600	7	13	2400	4	9	3600	3	6
12	1000	12	23	2000	6	12	3000	4	8	4500	3	5
13	1100	12	12	2200	6	6	3400	4	4	5100	3	3
14	1250	12	24	2500	6	12	3800	4	8	5700	3	5
15	1400	13	26	2800	6	13	4300	4	8	6400	3	6
16	1600	13	13	3200	6	6	4800	4	4	7200	3	3
17	2000	13	25	3900	6	13	5900	4	8	8800	3	6
18	2100	13	13	4200	6	6	6300	4	4	9500	3	3
19	2400	13	25	4900	6	12	7300	4	8	10900	3	6
20	2808	14	0	5700	7	0	8500	5	0	12700	3	0

CHART A EXPLANATION:

The first chart shows the framework under which characters gain levels through adventuring days.

L Is a level index.

XP shows the XP threshold to attain a level.

XP+ shows how much XP must be gained at a level in order to achieve the next.

XP/D shows the recommended XP per adventuring day based on current level.

D2L shows how many adventuring days must be completed, at the recommended XP rate, to cross the next threshold.

R is the remainder XP earned above the threshold, which is deducted from the XP required for next level during the D2L calculation.

XP+A is the actual XP requirement, after residual, to reach the next threshold. It is equal to XP+ - R.

CHART B EXPLANATION:

The second chart shows how many encounters of a given threat level can fit into a single adventuring day per individual character, and also how many of that type fit into all the adventuring days for a level.

L is a level index.

EE is easy encounters,

ME is medium encounters,

HE is hard encounters, and

DE is deadly encounters.

XP represents the value of an encounter of that type,

#/D shows how many of that encounter fit in an adventuring day for that level, and

#/L shows how many could fill all of the adventuring days for that level, assuming a player plays the full adventuring day regardless of levelup threshold.

NOTES:

L1 has no XP threshold. It is free. Characters are made at L1.

L20 has no XP+ because there is no further threshold to cross. Likewise, without a threshold to cross, it is impossible to calculate D2L. All XP earned at L20 is technically R.

There is no #/L for L20 because L20 is the limit. You can play an infinite number of adventuring days at L20.

Commentary:

If we assume that an adventuring day is equal to 1 diegetic day, that means a character should reach level 20 in 35 days. Just a little over a month. Following the tiers of play, they will have spent 6 days saving local farms and villagers, 14 days saving cities and kingdoms, 10 days saving regions and continents, and 5 days saving the multiverse.

A character will have spent the longest at levels 5 and 8. They will have breezed through levels 1, 2, 13, 16, and 18.

Levels where characters gain ASIs are the dead levels unless a player is allowed to take a feat. Not counting level 20, as no adventuring is required once you reach it, they will have spent a total of 8 diegetic days slogging through these levels, which are (for some reason) not afforded shorter play time. In fact, the second ASI at level 8 is one of the longest levels. (Seems rather bone-headed to me. Perhaps this guideline was planned without consideration of class content activity level.)

If each adventuring day is equal to 1 session, it will take you varying real time to reach the campaign's completion depending on your play frequency:

• Weekly:               8.75 months
• Biweekly:            1.5 years 
• Monthly:             3 years

This is, of course, obviously insane. It would be a good way to run a weekly game for a bunch of newbie teenagers with no attention span, but would otherwise be far too fast, diegetically speaking.

You can extend it a bit in the following ways:

• Interpret the adventuring day as an abstraction meaning just a whole adventure. Adventures can take multiple diegetic days and still count as only one abstract adventuring day. The only problem with this interpretation, is that the "adventuring day" is determined by estimated rest frequency. In other words, for every AD worth of XP you dish out as monsters, the players should get 2 short rests and 1 long rest. By handing out more frequent long rests within that framework, you will make things much easier for the players, especially spellcasters. You can fix this by also including the Gritty Realism Rest Variant on DMG pp.267. That way those two short rests represent an evening at camp, and the long rest is a week in town.
• Allow the players to travel and do not count travel time as part of adventuring days, nor award XP for travel activities. Kind of rude, but if you only award XP at the end of the adventure like you're supposed to, nobody will know the difference. If, however, you award XP as it is earned and allow players to level up mid-combat, players might feel cheated. It's an illusionism trick that actually benefits play.
• Award the players with downtime days at the completion of each adventuring day. This will slow down the diegetic time by a bit. (The Adventurers League set the standard of 5 days per adventure. That would extend diegetic time to reach level 20 to about 6 months.) Real play time can be further extended by having the players roleplay their downtime days before presenting them with their next adventure. This effect can be further expanded by allowing the players to choose to take more downtime days of their own accord.
• You can extend real time play by allowing adventures, and even diegetic days, to take more than a single session. One easy way to do that, is to build your adventures to contain 1 encounter per session. That way, if you want to slow things down, you can hand out a larger number of easy encounters, and if you want to speed things up you can give them some deadly encounters, or you can mix it all up into a big crazy encounter stew. (If you went with all deadly encounters, you would be multiplying your session count by 3.)

If you run monthly games, handing out 5 downtime days per adventuring day completed, and running one session per encounter, and running all deadly encounters, it would take your characters 3.45 diegetic years to reach level 20, and it would take your players 8.75 years to get there.

OK, SO! The next step in this project is to test the encounter building rules at each tier. I'm going to make a party of 4 characters and run them through a whole bunch of test combats, 3 for each tier. I'm going to analyze the results of those combats and determine how much of a threat over time that combat class would be to characters of that tier. That'll take some time, so please be patient and enjoy the other articles I'll be uploading in the meantime.