When creating combat encounters for yourDungeons & Dragonssessions, properly balancing them can often be a mind-bending endeavor. You’ll often follow a creature’s challenge rating to decide how hard it is, but that number is made for parties with four members, something you might have less or more of.
This is why the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide added a new way to balance combat difficulty, and that is through the XP budget system. This system might sound more complicated, but it is far easier to use than challenge rating, and simple to customize for parties of any size.
What Is The XP Budget?
The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide hasa new way of balancing encounterscalled XP budget. It isa table divided by levels, showinghow much experience a player should earnfrom aneasy, normal, or hard encounteragainst the creatures in your campaign.
Since the table showshow much a single player earns, you may easily know how much experience to give to your entire party bymultiplying that by the number of total players.The numbers shown in the table arethe maximum possible experience, so earning more than that would make the encounter a higher tier of difficulty.
1
50
75
100
2
150
200
3
225
400
4
250
375
500
5
750
1,100
6
600
1,000
1,400
7
1,300
1,700
8
2,100
9
2,000
2,600
10
1,600
2,300
3,100
11
1,900
2,900
4,100
12
2,200
3,700
4,700
13
4,200
5,400
14
4,900
6,200
15
3,300
7,800
16
3,800
6,100
9,800
17
4,500
7,200
11,700
18
5,000
8,700
14,200
19
5,500
10,700
17,200
20
6,400
13,200
22,000
How To Make An Encounter With The XP Budget
You’ll first need to decideif you want a low, moderate, or high-difficulty encounter, thencheck the table for how many experience pointsthat would entail.Multiply that with the number of playersin your party, and now you haveyour initial XP budget.
You now need to look forcreatures and check the experience points they giveupon being defeated.You ‘buy’ each creature you want to put into your encounter, and as long as you don’t go overboard, the resulting encounter will beof the difficulty you chose.
Low Difficulty Encounter
You shouldbe careful with low CR creatures, particularly ones that don’t give experience sincethey still add challengeto an encounter. While they fit ascreatures for low-level adventurersto encounter, you canoverwhelm them easilywithout really noticing.
The easiest encounters tend to be the ones whereplayers can focus on one thing at a time, even if that thing is a large monster. Simplymatching the CR of one monster to the party’s levelwill net you an easy encounter, with special mechanics and environmental hazards aside.
Moderate Difficulty Encounter
Moderate difficulty doesn’t mean ‘standard’, since this encounter wouldn’t be a walk in the park. If the players aren’t properly prepared,things can easily turn dire, with one or more of them getting knocked out of the fight; terrain and otherfeatures of the encounter can vastly alter how it plays out.
These moderate encounters aregreat ways to close out sessionssince they are hard enough to keep things interesting without the players needing to go all out every time. If you feel the encounter istoo hard or too easy, you can always adjust it on the fly, either byhaving creatures fleeornew ones entering the fray(using the same stat blocks, of course).
High Difficulty Encounter
This isyour hard limit for what your players can reasonably facebefore it becomes too much. Spending more experience points than what your budget for a high-difficulty encounter gives you can likely end ina battle that will wipe out your players, depending on how much extra you spent.
If you need toraise the difficulty beyond this budget, you are better offaltering other areas of the encounterrather thanadding bigger and badder creatures.Giving creaturesadditional traits or resistancescan get the job done, as well asfighting them in a dynamic scenarioinstead of a static one.
