Encounter Lab
Creating encounters for your players that are just challenging enough can always be tricky. The Encounter Lab gives you the tools you need to tune your encounters to your players’ power level.
To create encounters that map to your players’ power levels, all you need to do is:
- Determine your Players’ TOTAL and AVERAGE POWER levels,
- Determine the DIFFICULTY LEVEL of the Encounter you want to create,
- Multiply your Players’ TOTAL POWER by the ENCOUNTER DIFFICULTY modifier to get the ENCOUNTER THREAT you want to aim for, and
- Add Monsters to the ENCOUNTER until the sum of their THREAT levels equals the ENCOUNTER THREAT.
Use the guide that follows to first estimate your players’ power level, then to determine the encounter’s difficulty, and then finally to identify the kinds of monsters you can throw at them - to produce everything from easy filler encounters to hard-as-nails boss fights.
Whether you’ve used the Roll or Buy method for Character Creation, this part’s fairly easy: you’ll generate the following stats before a session and use them to build your encounters both before and during the session:
| PARTY STAT | TLA | FORMULA | PURPOSE |
|---|---|---|---|
| TOTAL POWER | TP | Sum of Characters’ XP | Define min/max power for entire encounter group |
| AVERAGE POWER | AP | TP / Party Size | Define min/max power for individuals in an encounter group. |
Using the guide pages that follow, you’ll use the APL to determine min and max strengths for each individual monster in an encounter, and the TPL to determine the appropriate total strength for all the monsters in the encounter.
You already have the TOTAL POWER of your players, and you’ve learned how to find the THREAT LEVEL of your Monsters, so now you can set the ENCOUNTER THREAT of the encounter you want to plan based on how difficult you want that encounter to be. Basically: create monsters and add their threat to the ENCOUNTER THREAT value until it reaches one of the following difficulty levels:
| DIFFICULTY | PARTY TOTAL POWER MULTIPLIER | MAX MONSTER TIER |
|---|---|---|
| STEAMROLL | 0.33x | THUG |
| EASY | 0.50x | THUG |
| AVERAGE | 0.75x | RIVAL |
| HARD | 1.00x | RIVAL |
| DEADLY | 1.25x | NEMESIS |
| SUICIDAL | 1.5x | NEMESIS |
Note that while our examples will leverage pregenerated monsters, you can use these THREAT numbers to determine what a Monster’s ability budget looks like as well - just think of the THREAT numbers as a kind of Monster XP and add ABILITIES or TAGS appropriately, with each tag or ability level costing 4 XP - just like Characters.
MONSTER THREAT is what you’ll use to calculate whether the encounter you’re designing is too easy, too hard, or just right. To do that, all you need to do is use this handy chart where the Monster’s CAMPAIGN LEVEL and their MONSTER TIER match up is their THREAT LEVEL.
| MINION | THUG | RIVAL | NEMESIS | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DOOMED | 4 | 8 | 12 | 16 |
| NORMAL | 8 | 16 | 24 | 32 |
| AWAKENED | 12 | 24 | 36 | 48 |
| FATED | 16 | 32 | 48 | 64 |
| CHOSEN | 20 | 40 | 60 | 80 |
| MYTHIC | 24 | 48 | 72 | 96 |
The numbers represent a monster’s INDIVIDUAL THREAT, and you’ll be adding them together to come up with an Encounter’s TOTAL THREAT - much like you add up the Characters’ EXPERIENCE to determine their TOTAL POWER.
For an alternate (and more tailored) approach, use the following table for encounters scaled to exactly your Characters’ POWER levels:
| MINION | THUG | RIVAL | NEMESIS |
|---|---|---|---|
| AVG POWER * .33 | AVG POWER * .67 | AVG POWER | AVG POWER * 1.33 |
Andy, the game’s Referee, wants to plan a HARD encounter for her players.
She runs a quick check, and sees that the TOTAL POWER of her players is 120, and their AVERAGE POWER is 30 (120 TOTAL POWER, divided by 4 CHARACTERS). This means that:
- The ENCOUNTER THREAT of the monsters in the encounter should roughly equal the party’s TOTAL POWER, and
- The individual THREAT of any one monster in the encounter should be no higher than the party’s AVERAGE POWER.
Grinning, Andy notes that if she sticks to NORMAL campaign types, she could have 5 RIVALS working against the Party at the same time, but she wants some more dynamism than that for her session’s centerpiece - and to let her Players have some easy wins before they hit the harder enemies. Instead, she chooses:
MONSTER
TYPENUMBER MONSTER
THREATDESCRIPTION ENCOUNTER
THREATMINIONS 8 64 Go down fast but hit hard 64 THUGS 2 32 Subcommanders with attacks and buffs 96 RIVALS 1 24 Leader with active defenses and multiple abilities 120
With this loadout, Andy can have eleven combatants instead of five, providing a target-rich environment and giving her an opportunity to threaten the party in many different ways - the Minions are only likely to have weapons attacks, but the Thugs will probably have some additional defenses or utility, and the Rival may even have some magic ability given their Threat level of 24.
Andy could just as easily have chosen to go with 6 Minions and 3 Thugs for a more focused encounter, or even dropped the monsters’ Campaign Level to DOOMED and doubled their numbers while halving their individual THREATS.