Balancing Dungeons & Dragons is a complicated process, and according to the game's designers, the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide fixes one area where they simply got it wrong in 2014. With flexible party sizes and combat that can range in intensity, there's no single set of rules for what might make a good encounter in D&D. One common piece of advice is to be careful with large enemy rosters, as players end up with less opportunity to dominate the turn order and strategize effectively.
In an interview with Screen Rant, however, D&D Senior Game Designer James Wyatt explained the multiplier used to calculate the impact of higher monster counts in the 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide didn't work properly. According to Wyatt, the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide cuts the concept because "the math was off," with the multiplier ultimately introducing a less accurate skew to challenge calculations. The change is accompanied by an increase in overall monster XP budget for higher levels of play.
James Wyatt: The revised table of encounter difficulty is meant to be simpler to use. It's a very simple XP budget that you calculate and spend without multipliers for the numbers of creatures involved, because it turned out...