Grim Tales and CR

[Kapture]

Hola.

I'm thinking of fiddling with my campaign's cosmology, creating new sets of Lawful and Chaotic outsiders. One thing I often have trouble with is estimating CR.

Grim Tales was recomended as a good system to calculate CR for a creature. I bought the guidelines and calculator, and it seems straightforward and flexible (if complicated).

However, testing it out on a creature I had modled on a Minor Xorn, it came up with a CR of 4. I was aiming for a CR of 3. Testing it out on a minor Xorn, which is a CR of three, it came up with a CR of 4.

So my questions to any one who's used the system is:

Compared to the SRD RAW, does the Grim Tales CR system consistently under or over value CR's?

If so, does this have anything to do with the Grim Tales system? The logo says: High Adventure, low magic. I know that when I play D20 Modern, DND monsters can be wildly inappropriate challenges for their DND CR. If I were using the Grim Tales system to create monsters for DND, should I consistently lower the CR by 1? Or a certain percentage?

Any opinion is appreciated.

I'm thinking about using the SRD monsters and just rearranging their alignments and appearences. It seems easier, but the problem I have is that I'd like outsiders that were lower level challenges, and teh SRD is woefully short on those. I'd like to be able to do groups and hoards of outisiders at lowish levels (8th to 10th?)

 

[takyris]

I think D&D monsters are usable in GT, but their CRs probably need to be fiddled with a BUNCH.

Some monsters are pretty much the same -- zombies are zombies, for example, and they're always gonna be weak. But in a fight with 2 10th level PCs against a bunch of zombies, several ghouls, and 4 dire wolves, the dire wolves were horrifically overpowered. The dire wolves' strengths -- high attack bonus, good tripping, decent damage -- still held true, and were in fact exacerbated (ain't no GT character can deal with a +11 Trip opposed roll), and the wolves' weaknesses (low Will save, can't fly, no real defenses against area-of-effect stuff) were pretty much negated. The wolves were MUCH deadlier than I thought they'd be.

The ghouls, by contrast -- ghasts, actually -- had instakill-threats (their paralyzation stuff), but they rarely hit, and the PCs never failed a save. Maybe if they had, I'd be complaining about them.

So I'd suggest that a Grim Tales monster might or might not have an accurate D&D CR, because it depends on what you give that monster. But a D&D monster will almost definitely NOT be accurate, CR-wise, in a GT game.

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't use 'em. They're great and easy to use. But use them in test cases in easy fights first, to get a sense of how they do against your party.

 

[ValhallaGH]

The GT CR calculator is a very good estimate of a monster's challenge. I'm actually more inclinded to trust it than I am whatever the SRD says, but I'm weird like that.
It seems to give more weight to certain features, such as special movement modes and damage reduction, than the SRD but when I look at monsters that are consistantly higher CR by calculation than by SRD, I find myself siding with the calculator.
The minor xorn, for example, has the ability earthglide, which is easily capable of killing half a party when cleverly used. Combined with it's hp and attacks, equivalent of a third or fourth level Ranger, I'm not surprised that it comes out at CR 4. That's about where my gut places it.

To be clear, there are numerous creatures that come off at exactly the same CR, using the GT calculator. It simply codifies the increased challenge of special abilities and qualities that are ... fuzzy in other CR establishing systems.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

If you would like to contact me directly by email, I'll be happy to weigh in with my opinion.

Off the top of my head I can think of a few things that might skew the CR one way or another. The Xorn has a couple of magical qualities but it's just a big angry bag of hit points at the end of the day. So, the calculator shouldn't have a lot of trouble with it.

So the natural place I would start looking is its body density, HD, base attack damage, size, and baseline attributes.

Try clicking on and off its burrowing ability to see how much that is changing the final result.

And, of course, make sure you're actually looking at the final CR tabulation, not the raw score. There's an interesting "two-thirds" calculation that gets applied last, which would knock a CR4 down to a CR3. (I know that's kind of obvious and I hate to suggest it, but you never know...)