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Encounter Balance holds back 5E
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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9330787" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>Nah.</p><p></p><p>The DM can guess/eyeball, and the DM can use the CR system. But the CR system 5E uses is not great. Like I said in another post, it's much better than 3.XE's one, which was actively misleading, in that the power disparity between two CR 10 enemies could be absolutely insane - like one could potentially wipe the party in round 1, another would barely do significant damage, best case, and that compounded with the game insanely and flatly incorrectly just going by PC level and number, not PC class, in an edition where there was truly gigantic disparity of power between classes.</p><p></p><p>5E has far less disparity in class power. In 5E If the worst class/subclass combo is say, 6.5/10, the best is 10/10, where in 3.XE it was more like 2/10 vs 13/10 (once PrCs etc. got involved). 5E also has a less insane approach to rating enemy power, and doesn't let you slide in fully classed PC-style NPCs and then give you wildly incorrect CRs for them (AFAIK). But 5E does pretend magic items don't exist and avoids factoring them in, even though realistically, most groups will have them.</p><p></p><p>So you get a better result than that, but predict? No. 5E is swingy. Especially below level 10 or so, but even above it doesn't entirely vanish. 5E's CR system is not perfect. There is variation in class/subclass power. The wilful blindness to magic items means you have to basically crank encounters up and down for that with very little, if any, guidance. 4 weaker PCs with no magic items will fit better with the default CR guidelines than 4 stronger ones with even a "normal" number of magic items, let alone even slightly above that.</p><p></p><p>4E did a vastly better job if balance is what you want. In 4E, once the monster math was corrected, it was genuinely possible to predict things very well, as long you were following guidelines, and no PCs used truly broken charop.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 9330787, member: 18"] Nah. The DM can guess/eyeball, and the DM can use the CR system. But the CR system 5E uses is not great. Like I said in another post, it's much better than 3.XE's one, which was actively misleading, in that the power disparity between two CR 10 enemies could be absolutely insane - like one could potentially wipe the party in round 1, another would barely do significant damage, best case, and that compounded with the game insanely and flatly incorrectly just going by PC level and number, not PC class, in an edition where there was truly gigantic disparity of power between classes. 5E has far less disparity in class power. In 5E If the worst class/subclass combo is say, 6.5/10, the best is 10/10, where in 3.XE it was more like 2/10 vs 13/10 (once PrCs etc. got involved). 5E also has a less insane approach to rating enemy power, and doesn't let you slide in fully classed PC-style NPCs and then give you wildly incorrect CRs for them (AFAIK). But 5E does pretend magic items don't exist and avoids factoring them in, even though realistically, most groups will have them. So you get a better result than that, but predict? No. 5E is swingy. Especially below level 10 or so, but even above it doesn't entirely vanish. 5E's CR system is not perfect. There is variation in class/subclass power. The wilful blindness to magic items means you have to basically crank encounters up and down for that with very little, if any, guidance. 4 weaker PCs with no magic items will fit better with the default CR guidelines than 4 stronger ones with even a "normal" number of magic items, let alone even slightly above that. 4E did a vastly better job if balance is what you want. In 4E, once the monster math was corrected, it was genuinely possible to predict things very well, as long you were following guidelines, and no PCs used truly broken charop. [/QUOTE]
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