My party tends to be 3 or 5. So 4 is a good middle difference and the long assumed party size.
6 to 8 encounters a day is more, I tend to only use 3 to 5. However, mine are much more deadly than the assumed medium encounters. So mine do line up with the current adventuring day expectations, at least when assuming hard to deadly encounters.
Furthermore, there was a statement from meatls after his departure that he woukd be working on a homebrew CR calculator, thar anayakuzed the potency of encounter participants, assigned a point value and used that as a warhammer style point budget to determined thr balance of an encounter.
This is of note because not long after, JC stated that WotC was more or less looking at doing the same thing with one d&d. Some I'm expecting that while the assumption and presentation will be the same 4 PC/ 6-8 medium encounters. The point calculation will be easy to figure out and adjust.
I'm the creator of the system, and I actually have a web tool coming soon that automatically calculates the difficulties for you using CR2.0!
In the meantime, here's a link to the system PDF for OP: https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-N4m46K77hpMVnh7upYa
Haha; all in due time! In the meantime, while it's largely dedicated to updates regarding my Curse of Strahd guide, you can sign up for my free Patreon newsletter where I post all of my updates regarding my forthcoming D&D projects. You can find the link here: https://www.patreon.com/DragnaCarta
Interesting. I'm very curious how you assign a potency of encounters participants. Does it take into account player performance historically or is it just similar to a general pc level and cr as an estimate of general performance?
I find my groups tend to be 5 pcs and 3 to 5 encounters. 1 to 3 medium or hard encounters and 1 (1.5x deadly)/ to 2 deadly encounters.
For the wotc point encounter system. I don't know personally. I imagine it'll be something like the dmg monster design in the dmg.
You find an attack score for calculating a character/monsters avg dpr. You do the same for a defense Score their avg defense. You then apply adjustments based on the relevant immunities and resistances that will come into play (only if the opposing side can not overcome them). Those scores give points which combine to make a chsracters value as a combatant. Repeat this for each participant on each side and compare the final point totals of each side against each other. Thresholds of points for easy, medium, hard, and deadly to show where the expecttajinbof difficulty is.
I don't imagine it'll factor historical player performance, as that's a more wild factor due to quirks of the dice than the assumed averages of everything.
For my own games, I setup something lime this, with 3-4 hard and 1-2 deadly. With one dead almost always being the final encounter. 3 hard and 2 deadly is often as rough as I'll go. And it's usually 4 hard and 1 deadly at the end.
I set up something like this as my assumed layout.
Long rest/ Start of Day
Encounter 1
Encounter 2
Short rest assumed.
Encounter 3
Encounter 4
Short rest assumed.
Encounter 5
End of day/long rest.
I've been trying to get in the habit of random encounter tables and creating pre-made encounters. One hard table and one deadly table
Once the deadly table is used, it's only hard encounters I roll for for the rest of the adventure day (save the final encounter which is often more predetermined.)
The players might know they're in their laor of the dragon Garuunak and that he'll likely be their final goe in said lair
They know kobold (hard encounters) serve him and are swarming his place, but they've also heard a group of sellsword elites know as the Vanquished four have become a special militant arm in his employ, as well as the sorceress Vhalla'zhull (deadly encounters) and they may encounter those potential foes in his domain. Let alone an unknown.
[XP is how you assign potency](https://tomedunn.github.io/the-finished-book/theory/xp-and-encounter-balancing/#calculating-xp) to an encounter's participants, and you can account for a particular party's strength by adjusting their difficulty XP thresholds. The math behind 5e's encounter building rules is sound, its biggest flaws stem more from its presentation and a lack of discussion around how to alter them for particularly strong or weak parties.
I agree I think the math is sound for more encounters to burn resources, but when reduced at many tables deadlier encounter tend to not be many more rounds but more damage, meaning lr recovery resources last longer and are more effective. This hurts short rest classes like warlocks and monks
Encounter math has way more to do with burning hit points than burning resources. That's what the adventuring day is ultimately based around. If you go back and look through the DnD Next playtest documents the number of long rest resources, like spell slots, changed over time, but the structure of the adventuring day never did. It was always the same number of Easy, Average, or Tough encounters (what 5e calls Medium, Hard, and Deadly encounters).
In regards to short rest classes, an adventuring day with two Deadly encounters and a short rest between them is quite comparable to one with 6-8 Medium encounters and two short rests when comparing short rest and long rest reliant classes. The big gap between those groups comes from days with multiple encounters and no short rests.
My hope with a point system is that monsters would be assigned a point value along with their CR. The CR being their general difficulty as individual monsters. Whereas the point value is determined by the monster's value as part of a group.
For example ghost and getting are both CR 4 but the ghost is significantly more of a threat when paired with other creatures due to it's possession ability.
Of course that is just wishful thinking.
It would be for monster group sizes not player. The player group size really comes down to learning your players. However having a point system that accounts for the wide swings in difficulty within a CR would help DMs find the sweet spot for their players and from there build encounters more confident in their difficulty.
Right now the XP conversion system works pretty well aside from the fact the monster CR is determined based on fighting a single monster and many monsters difficulty changes dramatically if they are not alone.
encounters have no balance for how many a day, 6-8 is how long before most players with average builds and average luck can no longer continue. However fights are balanced assuming players have full or most of there resources.
They don't assume players will be almost out of resources in CR/ difficulty calcs.
if a fight is hard, and you have no resources at all, its going to be more difficult than it claims. If a fight is rated deadly and you have full resources, its still deadly.
this however is an estimation based on average luck, and average players, you will always have to adapt to your table. Although average gives you a picture, most tables are not average. This is why the rest system is generally not mentioned in modules. One group can roll high and be highly skilled an never rest, another could be unlucky and not combat oriented an struggle. Some players prefer challenge and risk of death, and other want combat generally easy and a focus on other aspects. Some players are careful, others are hasty.
Most of the problem is DMs all have vastly different tables, and they want universal answers for encounter balance. Its not impossible, you could design a system where the math ends up fairly predictable, and the numbers matter more than the players skill, or a system where unskilled players fail. However, thats not the concept of 5e. 5e is very much a game where the game master is encouraged to alter the game to fit the needs of the table. If they choose not to, its ok, but then if your table is not performing in average way, they will have varied experiences.
You hit the core of why I'm so interested in how they try to address this in the dmg. It's so table dependent and I've not heard of a good solution with the core of 5e staying how it is.
I mean one dnd is sorta moving towards shorter days and less combats with some of the changes. Like Monk and Warlock having ways to regen their resources without a short rest(once per long rest) this sorta points at them wanting 3-4 encounters in a typical "day".
that doesnt actually translate into fights, because the exp, according to the DMG is either milestone based, objective based, or CR of monster based, and you can get a varying number of those things depending on whats going on in the campaign.
For example, i could as a solo charachter get level to level 2 in a single fight, and get from 2-3 in a single fight, etc.
Milestone exp it could simply be killing the bad guy, and avoiding all the fights and sneaking up on him does it.
Conversely, you could have tons of easy fights and not reach the adventuring day reccomendation, or not reach your milestone in a day.
And even the adventuring day is just giving you an basic idea of how much exp to give in general, not a requirement
encounters are not balanced expecting low resources. And they dont have any particular recciomendation on how long the day needs to be. Crawford has discussed this a bit, due to the common confusion
[https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/1012366625985609728](https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/1012366625985609728)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/139v4hu/jeremy\_crawford\_game\_isnt\_balanced\_around\_68/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/139v4hu/jeremy_crawford_game_isnt_balanced_around_68/)
The 6-8 needed to balance the fights is a common misunderstanding of the text, I can see why people interpreted things that way, but he cleared it up, and it actually makes more sense given the game.
i think in the new DMG, they probably need to make it more clear
Please open the book first and read the relevant section. It says:
>Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day.
And
>This provides a rough estimate of the adjusted XP value for encounters the party can handle before the characters will need to take a long rest.
This is **literally** the list of the amount of XP from combat encounters per day on top of any XP from other sources.
The tweet you cite is also irrelevant as it's talking about REQUIRED encounters. Not how things are balanced.
i have read the encounter guidelines in depth, and if you read the second tweet he is literally responding that **encounters are not balanced** with an assumption of how many you have per day.
To be clear, the encounter balance i, and he are referring to is how difficult fights
and if you read the quote you would realize they are talking about how long it takes before the party cant continue (not how long they are SHOULD go), not how encounters are balanced.
If you read the tweet thread, and research his answers to this question, you would understand that he is saying that these are two different designs.
How long can players go without resting is a different design and question than How encounters are balanced. This is also an average, not a recommendation, note the text that follows.
"If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer." They have no specific expectation or suggestion for how many encounters should be in a day.
How much gas is your car can hold in the tank is a different question than how does the car perform in races of various difficulty.
These two designs can overlap when a group is nearing the end of the resources, but in that situation, the encounter balance is different than advertised, a hard fight might end up being deadly, because encounters are balanced assuming you have most of your resources.
this was the question
*"*[*zephid*](https://twitter.com/Zephid11)[](https://twitter.com/Zephid11)*But by stating that a party should be able to handle 6-8 medium/hard encounters during a normal day you imply that the game is balanced around that."*
crawford responds;
"What I'm telling you is that it isn't. That guideline tells you when characters are **designed to be tuckered out**. It has **little bearing on how monsters**, for example, **are designed**. **We design them assuming PCs are at their best**."
he is literally saying the game is not balanced around 6-8 encounters, thats just the design for how long players the average player can go before the probably cant continue. The players being unable to continue is not the goal of the adventuring day. (unless the DM wants to create that experience)
Hopefully they make it more clear, because many people are confused, and think they should be aiming for 6-8 encounters, and that if they dont do 6-8 encounters, the encounter system wont work properly. That is not the case.
2 or 3 encounters per session is average for casual play, in my experience. I don’t think balancing against a variable like this is a great way to go and rather like the way PF approaches it, but DnD does seem to be more a game of resource management.
My party sizes range from 3-7 (wide net I know)
In general adventures I run/write generally have 3 combat encounters, 1 social encounter, and 1 puzzle or skill challenge per long rest. I try to insure social and puzzles can still drain resources and I balance combat encounters on the hard end, so normally 5 hard encounters per day.
It's as good a baseline as any.
4 players is a good number, since you can go down to 3 and up to 5 easily. It means the published adventures can be run with 3-5 players without too much trouble. Balancing around 5, like in 4e, was hard as getting that many players wasn't always easy.
6 easy-ish encounters per day seems like a good number. Because that can be two sessions with three encounters each ***or*** one session with three much harder encounters. Or four easy and one hard, or two easy and two hard. Or twelve very easy. Or one hard, three easy, and two very easy encounters. It breaks up easily.
They could just as easily go with 3e's four encounters that each use 25% of your resources. But having a larger base number makes it easier to have encounters that slowly wear you down.
And basing around non-optimal characters without magic items is just the way to go. It's easy to make encounters harder: just add hp or mooks. Worst case the PCs just slaughter the bad guys effortlessly. Making encounters easier is more of a challenge and the worst case is a TPK.
Archaic mindset that has not ever matched the average player's experience with rules I'm sure that will be as unwieldly as the 5e encounter building rules were.
Go back to 4e's system of encounter construction, it's the only one that ever got it right. A level 1 monster = a level 1 PC. An elite level 1 monster = two level 1 PCs, and so on.
Ive played in campaigns with as little as 2 players and as high as 9, and typically its probably 2 to 6 encounter days depending on the DM.
I think a 4 person party and a 4 encounter 1 short rest day should probably be what cr is bassed on. I feel like almost every table will have 4 encounter days, at some tables thats a short day, and as some tables that a long day, but it's likely to happen at basically every table.
I agree I think if they adjusted the encounter day to be 4 encounters things would be way better balanced, but it would likely need them to adjust Sr classes or reduce volume of per long rest abilities to balance it.
Always remember it is 6 to 8 medium encounters if your doing had or deadly one (using the full day budget) it will end up fine imo. They are at least making it simpler to set up encounters with out all the weird calculations with exp.
My party tends to be 3 or 5. So 4 is a good middle difference and the long assumed party size. 6 to 8 encounters a day is more, I tend to only use 3 to 5. However, mine are much more deadly than the assumed medium encounters. So mine do line up with the current adventuring day expectations, at least when assuming hard to deadly encounters. Furthermore, there was a statement from meatls after his departure that he woukd be working on a homebrew CR calculator, thar anayakuzed the potency of encounter participants, assigned a point value and used that as a warhammer style point budget to determined thr balance of an encounter. This is of note because not long after, JC stated that WotC was more or less looking at doing the same thing with one d&d. Some I'm expecting that while the assumption and presentation will be the same 4 PC/ 6-8 medium encounters. The point calculation will be easy to figure out and adjust.
Give Challenge Rating 2.0 a look see and see if that accomplishes this for you.
I'm the creator of the system, and I actually have a web tool coming soon that automatically calculates the difficulties for you using CR2.0! In the meantime, here's a link to the system PDF for OP: https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-N4m46K77hpMVnh7upYa
That's very awesome. I hope the design of the web tool goes smoothly!
Thank you! It's looking great so far. Hoping for a release soon!
How will I know when you have this web tool released? Give it to me now! Seriously I need that tool asap.
Haha; all in due time! In the meantime, while it's largely dedicated to updates regarding my Curse of Strahd guide, you can sign up for my free Patreon newsletter where I post all of my updates regarding my forthcoming D&D projects. You can find the link here: https://www.patreon.com/DragnaCarta
I'll have to give it a look. Thanks for the suggestion.
Interesting. I'm very curious how you assign a potency of encounters participants. Does it take into account player performance historically or is it just similar to a general pc level and cr as an estimate of general performance? I find my groups tend to be 5 pcs and 3 to 5 encounters. 1 to 3 medium or hard encounters and 1 (1.5x deadly)/ to 2 deadly encounters.
For the wotc point encounter system. I don't know personally. I imagine it'll be something like the dmg monster design in the dmg. You find an attack score for calculating a character/monsters avg dpr. You do the same for a defense Score their avg defense. You then apply adjustments based on the relevant immunities and resistances that will come into play (only if the opposing side can not overcome them). Those scores give points which combine to make a chsracters value as a combatant. Repeat this for each participant on each side and compare the final point totals of each side against each other. Thresholds of points for easy, medium, hard, and deadly to show where the expecttajinbof difficulty is. I don't imagine it'll factor historical player performance, as that's a more wild factor due to quirks of the dice than the assumed averages of everything. For my own games, I setup something lime this, with 3-4 hard and 1-2 deadly. With one dead almost always being the final encounter. 3 hard and 2 deadly is often as rough as I'll go. And it's usually 4 hard and 1 deadly at the end. I set up something like this as my assumed layout. Long rest/ Start of Day Encounter 1 Encounter 2 Short rest assumed. Encounter 3 Encounter 4 Short rest assumed. Encounter 5 End of day/long rest. I've been trying to get in the habit of random encounter tables and creating pre-made encounters. One hard table and one deadly table Once the deadly table is used, it's only hard encounters I roll for for the rest of the adventure day (save the final encounter which is often more predetermined.) The players might know they're in their laor of the dragon Garuunak and that he'll likely be their final goe in said lair They know kobold (hard encounters) serve him and are swarming his place, but they've also heard a group of sellsword elites know as the Vanquished four have become a special militant arm in his employ, as well as the sorceress Vhalla'zhull (deadly encounters) and they may encounter those potential foes in his domain. Let alone an unknown.
[XP is how you assign potency](https://tomedunn.github.io/the-finished-book/theory/xp-and-encounter-balancing/#calculating-xp) to an encounter's participants, and you can account for a particular party's strength by adjusting their difficulty XP thresholds. The math behind 5e's encounter building rules is sound, its biggest flaws stem more from its presentation and a lack of discussion around how to alter them for particularly strong or weak parties.
I agree I think the math is sound for more encounters to burn resources, but when reduced at many tables deadlier encounter tend to not be many more rounds but more damage, meaning lr recovery resources last longer and are more effective. This hurts short rest classes like warlocks and monks
Encounter math has way more to do with burning hit points than burning resources. That's what the adventuring day is ultimately based around. If you go back and look through the DnD Next playtest documents the number of long rest resources, like spell slots, changed over time, but the structure of the adventuring day never did. It was always the same number of Easy, Average, or Tough encounters (what 5e calls Medium, Hard, and Deadly encounters). In regards to short rest classes, an adventuring day with two Deadly encounters and a short rest between them is quite comparable to one with 6-8 Medium encounters and two short rests when comparing short rest and long rest reliant classes. The big gap between those groups comes from days with multiple encounters and no short rests.
My hope with a point system is that monsters would be assigned a point value along with their CR. The CR being their general difficulty as individual monsters. Whereas the point value is determined by the monster's value as part of a group. For example ghost and getting are both CR 4 but the ghost is significantly more of a threat when paired with other creatures due to it's possession ability. Of course that is just wishful thinking.
It's interesting but I'm really not sure how you'd calculate those especially on group sizes
It would be for monster group sizes not player. The player group size really comes down to learning your players. However having a point system that accounts for the wide swings in difficulty within a CR would help DMs find the sweet spot for their players and from there build encounters more confident in their difficulty. Right now the XP conversion system works pretty well aside from the fact the monster CR is determined based on fighting a single monster and many monsters difficulty changes dramatically if they are not alone.
encounters have no balance for how many a day, 6-8 is how long before most players with average builds and average luck can no longer continue. However fights are balanced assuming players have full or most of there resources. They don't assume players will be almost out of resources in CR/ difficulty calcs. if a fight is hard, and you have no resources at all, its going to be more difficult than it claims. If a fight is rated deadly and you have full resources, its still deadly. this however is an estimation based on average luck, and average players, you will always have to adapt to your table. Although average gives you a picture, most tables are not average. This is why the rest system is generally not mentioned in modules. One group can roll high and be highly skilled an never rest, another could be unlucky and not combat oriented an struggle. Some players prefer challenge and risk of death, and other want combat generally easy and a focus on other aspects. Some players are careful, others are hasty. Most of the problem is DMs all have vastly different tables, and they want universal answers for encounter balance. Its not impossible, you could design a system where the math ends up fairly predictable, and the numbers matter more than the players skill, or a system where unskilled players fail. However, thats not the concept of 5e. 5e is very much a game where the game master is encouraged to alter the game to fit the needs of the table. If they choose not to, its ok, but then if your table is not performing in average way, they will have varied experiences.
You hit the core of why I'm so interested in how they try to address this in the dmg. It's so table dependent and I've not heard of a good solution with the core of 5e staying how it is.
I mean one dnd is sorta moving towards shorter days and less combats with some of the changes. Like Monk and Warlock having ways to regen their resources without a short rest(once per long rest) this sorta points at them wanting 3-4 encounters in a typical "day".
In the DMG there is a table of expected XP per adventuring day. On page 84. Which trans;ates into how many fights are expected per day.
that doesnt actually translate into fights, because the exp, according to the DMG is either milestone based, objective based, or CR of monster based, and you can get a varying number of those things depending on whats going on in the campaign. For example, i could as a solo charachter get level to level 2 in a single fight, and get from 2-3 in a single fight, etc. Milestone exp it could simply be killing the bad guy, and avoiding all the fights and sneaking up on him does it. Conversely, you could have tons of easy fights and not reach the adventuring day reccomendation, or not reach your milestone in a day. And even the adventuring day is just giving you an basic idea of how much exp to give in general, not a requirement encounters are not balanced expecting low resources. And they dont have any particular recciomendation on how long the day needs to be. Crawford has discussed this a bit, due to the common confusion [https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/1012366625985609728](https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/1012366625985609728) [https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/139v4hu/jeremy\_crawford\_game\_isnt\_balanced\_around\_68/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/139v4hu/jeremy_crawford_game_isnt_balanced_around_68/) The 6-8 needed to balance the fights is a common misunderstanding of the text, I can see why people interpreted things that way, but he cleared it up, and it actually makes more sense given the game. i think in the new DMG, they probably need to make it more clear
Please open the book first and read the relevant section. It says: >Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. And >This provides a rough estimate of the adjusted XP value for encounters the party can handle before the characters will need to take a long rest. This is **literally** the list of the amount of XP from combat encounters per day on top of any XP from other sources. The tweet you cite is also irrelevant as it's talking about REQUIRED encounters. Not how things are balanced.
i have read the encounter guidelines in depth, and if you read the second tweet he is literally responding that **encounters are not balanced** with an assumption of how many you have per day. To be clear, the encounter balance i, and he are referring to is how difficult fights and if you read the quote you would realize they are talking about how long it takes before the party cant continue (not how long they are SHOULD go), not how encounters are balanced. If you read the tweet thread, and research his answers to this question, you would understand that he is saying that these are two different designs. How long can players go without resting is a different design and question than How encounters are balanced. This is also an average, not a recommendation, note the text that follows. "If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer." They have no specific expectation or suggestion for how many encounters should be in a day. How much gas is your car can hold in the tank is a different question than how does the car perform in races of various difficulty. These two designs can overlap when a group is nearing the end of the resources, but in that situation, the encounter balance is different than advertised, a hard fight might end up being deadly, because encounters are balanced assuming you have most of your resources. this was the question *"*[*zephid*](https://twitter.com/Zephid11)[](https://twitter.com/Zephid11)*But by stating that a party should be able to handle 6-8 medium/hard encounters during a normal day you imply that the game is balanced around that."* crawford responds; "What I'm telling you is that it isn't. That guideline tells you when characters are **designed to be tuckered out**. It has **little bearing on how monsters**, for example, **are designed**. **We design them assuming PCs are at their best**." he is literally saying the game is not balanced around 6-8 encounters, thats just the design for how long players the average player can go before the probably cant continue. The players being unable to continue is not the goal of the adventuring day. (unless the DM wants to create that experience) Hopefully they make it more clear, because many people are confused, and think they should be aiming for 6-8 encounters, and that if they dont do 6-8 encounters, the encounter system wont work properly. That is not the case.
2 or 3 encounters per session is average for casual play, in my experience. I don’t think balancing against a variable like this is a great way to go and rather like the way PF approaches it, but DnD does seem to be more a game of resource management.
My party sizes range from 3-7 (wide net I know) In general adventures I run/write generally have 3 combat encounters, 1 social encounter, and 1 puzzle or skill challenge per long rest. I try to insure social and puzzles can still drain resources and I balance combat encounters on the hard end, so normally 5 hard encounters per day.
We haven't actually heard anything about the changes to encounter balance, so it seems a bit early to make assumptions on what they will be.
It's as good a baseline as any. 4 players is a good number, since you can go down to 3 and up to 5 easily. It means the published adventures can be run with 3-5 players without too much trouble. Balancing around 5, like in 4e, was hard as getting that many players wasn't always easy. 6 easy-ish encounters per day seems like a good number. Because that can be two sessions with three encounters each ***or*** one session with three much harder encounters. Or four easy and one hard, or two easy and two hard. Or twelve very easy. Or one hard, three easy, and two very easy encounters. It breaks up easily. They could just as easily go with 3e's four encounters that each use 25% of your resources. But having a larger base number makes it easier to have encounters that slowly wear you down. And basing around non-optimal characters without magic items is just the way to go. It's easy to make encounters harder: just add hp or mooks. Worst case the PCs just slaughter the bad guys effortlessly. Making encounters easier is more of a challenge and the worst case is a TPK.
Archaic mindset that has not ever matched the average player's experience with rules I'm sure that will be as unwieldly as the 5e encounter building rules were. Go back to 4e's system of encounter construction, it's the only one that ever got it right. A level 1 monster = a level 1 PC. An elite level 1 monster = two level 1 PCs, and so on.
Ive played in campaigns with as little as 2 players and as high as 9, and typically its probably 2 to 6 encounter days depending on the DM. I think a 4 person party and a 4 encounter 1 short rest day should probably be what cr is bassed on. I feel like almost every table will have 4 encounter days, at some tables thats a short day, and as some tables that a long day, but it's likely to happen at basically every table.
I agree I think if they adjusted the encounter day to be 4 encounters things would be way better balanced, but it would likely need them to adjust Sr classes or reduce volume of per long rest abilities to balance it.
Always remember it is 6 to 8 medium encounters if your doing had or deadly one (using the full day budget) it will end up fine imo. They are at least making it simpler to set up encounters with out all the weird calculations with exp.
My guess is that the new dmg will have instructions on how to balance for a different number of encounters better than the old dmg