Dungeon Master Forum

I've just finished making my latest dungeon, but have one last question that is stumping me.
How is party effectiveness calculated?
I saw a thread here concerning a party being too strong, but i have the opposite issue.
When selected and saved from my hall of champions, the party (indeed almost any party) is rated at 15% effectiveness.
The same party loaded into CSB is rated at 117% effectiveness.

There is no way this dungeon is as hard as CSB.
I ran through the new dungeon no problem with this party, but it is hard to gauge since i know where everything is and which monsters are in which places (so my run doesn't really count).
But still, 15% seems ridiculously low.

Does it take this figure mainly from the number/difficulty of monsters or are there other factors, such as size? It is a bit bigger than CSB but not a great deal (certainly not enough to warrant a 102% decrease in party effectiveness).

Any suggestions as to why this is?

I believe it compares your imported party to those available in the dungeon, and then applies the difficulty scaling selected to that comparison.

Sounds like you've left a mirror with a 999 stat-ed test character somewhere that's throwing off the calculations?


This is going off of quite old recollection, btw. So I am willing to be contradicted by anyone with recent experience.

Aaaaahhh....You are of course right Beo.
After i read your post it dawned on me what i had done.
I had removed test from the party but not deleted him, so even though he wasn't available to choose, he was still a character in the dungeon..
Party now rated as 95% effective.... Happy days!
Thank you.

When importing a too strong party, there is an adjustment.
It seems: The difficulty is evaluated from comparing the imported characters statistics versus the statistics of the characters in the dungeon.
So, in my logic, the required adjustment is about the imported champions statistics to eventually change them to be consistent with the champions resident in the dungeon.

I was on a wrong track.........Actually, the adjustment is about the dungeon.

Are there informations available, about this dungeon adjustment ?
Who knows what is adjusted in the dungeon ? Monsters, more ?
Who knows the full story, who knows wether the adjustment gives a well balanced game ?

Lunever kept importing a DM party back in to DM. If you can his thread on comments for tweaking the import system, you can get a feel for what changes. I think it is monster speed/stat draining speed and damage?

Lucky for me i asked....

I had done the same thing with DR2.
Could've imported a ridiculously strong party, with no difficulty scaling.