Wulf Ratbane said:
Step One: Determine the Encounter Budget
[...]
Step Two: Determine Desired Difficulty
[...]
Step Three: Purchase Creatures from the Budget
[...]
(warning: very imho)
It's nifty, but is that really simple?
With CRs you had to simply use one (or two) digit numbers to find out appropriate (I know, I know - CRs don't work...) encounter mobs. And now you have to spent points going into 3-4 digits to perform operation similar to building a war band or army in a strategic game.
Is it really better than CR?
CRs caused problem because there was no real way to calculate them reliably apart from playtesting. They were also subject to unforeseen interactions (apropriately matched monsters were more effective than their CRs would indicate, and vice versa). However, the same goes true for xp method... xp cost of a monster does not really indicate monster weakness and strengths.
What about support for monsters from other third party publications?
If you don't know monster's associated xp, how are you to fit the monster into encounter design process?
Summarizing:
- nice, but complicated,
- does not seem to improve over CR method,
- does not support monsters from other OGL products.
Suggestions:
- tie the system to CRs instead of abstract xp numbers.
- introduce properties reflecting monsters weaknesses and strengths (Girallon entry could look similar to this: CR 6, strengths: melee, weakness: ranged, will save).
- introduce standard encounter packages by EL/CR (EL8/CR6,CR6/strong melee, weak ranged, weak will save - example: 2 Girallons)
- introduce improved CR calculation method (based rather on canonical class similarities than actual stats, for example: Girallon CR6 should prove to be an equal match of Canonical Melee Fighter 6).
Advantages:
- improved support of other 3rd party publishers,
- ease of adjudicating monsters needed for encounter,
- faster encounter assembly (any CR6 strong melee, weak ranged, weak will mob would do fine in place of missing Girallon),
- CR6 monsters would finally be comparable to classed characters.
Regards,
Ruemere
PS. Edit: errors, loads of them.