I’ll be DMing some more 5e soon and I want to take the opportunity to try some different ways of playing (I’ll post my own suggestions as comments so they can start their own discussion threads). What alternate rules have you tried that you thought worked well? They can be larger changes to the game or little QoL tweaks (though if you can respond to the suggestion with “at this point just play [different game] instead” then that’s probably more than what I’m looking for!)
Cheers, the actual XP is less of a concern, I’m more concerned that I throw the right number of them at the players to be challenging without being fatal!
I found long ago that trying to balance my 5E encounters in any way, shape, or form is just a hopeless endeavor.
I just throw things at my party and kind of let 'er rip. Some end up hard, some end up easy, after a while you get a general gist for what they tend to be able to handle.
Fair enough, I know everyone likes to shit on the encounter builder but I’ve never had a problem with the results!
I’ve found that the encounter builder is usually fine, but I would spend lots of extra time setting up encounters using it only to find that the things I plucked haphazardly were only about, say, 20% less balanced on average.
At the end of the day it became a question on if it was worth it to run every encounter through that for being only marginally better than just grabbing and going. For some, they have the time to spare and it is worth it, and that’s perfectly great! For myself I found that the extra variance just made things interesting and that 20% extra imbalance could be made up by the odd sneaky adjustment on the fly if I was ridiculously off base in where I expected the fight to end up in difficulty.