These guidelines are for Jim and Marc who will be creating the slates of foes used in the arena.
4E Standard XP Budget for Encounters
Per the standard rules for a level 1 party of 5 PCs:
| Encounter Difficulty | XP Budget |
|---|---|
| Easy | 375-499 |
| Standard | 500-749 |
| Hard | 750-1249 |
Arena Foes Guidelines
These guidelines apply to each arena team.
- No more than 12 foes
- No more than 6 minions
- All creatures level 4 or less
- No solo creatures
- No flying creatures
- No undead creatures
- Only three unique types of creatures
- Budget of 950 XP (lower middle of the hard difficulty range)
Special Rules
Recharge
Rather than roll a dice for recharging powers which may introduce to large a luck factor into the arena fights, the ability will recharge at a fixed time per the chart below:
| Recharge Roll | Rounds until recharge in the arena | Math |
|---|---|---|
| 6 | four rounds | (4/6)^4 is 0.48 so 4 rounds is the average time to recharge |
| 5-6 or better | two rounds | for 5-6, (2/3)^1 is 0.66 and (2/3)^2 is 0.44, so 2 rounds is closer to the average. For abilities at 4-6 recharge or better, they are penalized in this scheme. |
Example: a naga has a recharge "6" ability. On round one, he uses that ability. On round five he can use that ability again.
Example: a hell hound has a recharge "4-6" ability. It may use that ability on round 1, 3, 5, etc. Or alternately, it may use the ability on round 2, 4, 6, etc.
Reasoning
These guidelines to keep things running quickly. Our goal is an arena battle per hour, including breaks. So we don't want a slower encounter caused by flying foes or the ref to have too much on their plate due to having too many creatures or creature types to manage.
At a budget of 950 all the parties will probably be reasonably successful but hopefully it will be challenging enough to still differentiate the groups.
I believe we said no undead, right?
I wasn't sure whether to leave those out or not. They do provide a large number of low level foes but there is the whole vulnerability thing which is made murkier by the fact that most of the new undead are radiant vulnerable but the original ones are not. I'll prohibit them to avoid a problem.