D&D 5E do CRs seem a bit arbitrary?

[evilbob]

Of course I forgot the one best tactic, of course: bring a druid! Turn into an octopus, grab 7 seahorses each round and eat them. Done.

(I know, I know it won't work - but it'd be funny. Honestly I am not sure how you'd complete this scenario without just using the skill checks if you didn't think any of those other ideas would work. Minor illusion is the only one I could come up with. Actually, I guess as long as you had 4 party members, you could ready an action each round to grab a seahorse when it was swallowing the egg and break its little neck. They'd still get 9 but otherwise you'd win without blood! I'm guessing that's more or less what you expected - each member ambush or otherwise attack a seahorse? Seems like the most straightforward way. Maybe try to "capture" at least 3 of them with a crab trap or something. But that will likely take too long. Oh, and I would probably rule that if you did get the statue going, the shark would leave at that point - then again, if you fixed the statue, you wouldn't care about the shark.)

 

[iserith]

Of course I forgot the one best tactic, of course: bring a druid! Turn into an octopus, grab 7 seahorses each round and eat them. Done.

(I know, I know it won't work - but it'd be funny. Honestly I am not sure how you'd complete this scenario without just using the skill checks if you didn't think any of those other ideas would work. Minor illusion is the only one I could come up with. Actually, I guess as long as you had 4 party members, you could ready an action each round to grab a seahorse when it was swallowing the egg and break its little neck. They'd still get 9 but otherwise you'd win without blood! I'm guessing that's more or less what you expected - each member ambush or otherwise attack a seahorse? Seems like the most straightforward way. Maybe try to "capture" at least 3 of them with a crab trap or something. But that will likely take too long. Oh, and I would probably rule that if you did get the statue going, the shark would leave at that point - then again, if you fixed the statue, you wouldn't care about the shark.)

I try not to think up solutions when I design stuff. That's the players' job! (Though I did think up a solution that might work: Kill 9 sea horses, grab the rest, and stuff them in sacks, nets, or fish traps. The latter two are in the boat.) Feel free to take a look at other scenarios of mine if you enjoy coming up with solutions.

Bringing it back around to the topic of the thread, I think this sort of thing goes to show how much CR/XP budget is really worth in terms of predictability. I use it now as only a vague guideline and that's probably its intent. Sometimes I go way over on XP or CR and other times way under. Often the challenge of the scene depends on more than just the monsters in play.

 

[evilbob]

(Yeah, I guess a bag of holding would solve this problem real quick. Re: nets, don't you have to spend like 2 hours untangling them if they are tangled up? Or is that just me in real life? )

 

[Jack99]

There are tools to make this very easy. My comments on the reliability of judging difficulty solely based on numbers stands, however.

Not sure what this link helps with, that simple math can't do.

 

[iserith]

Not sure what this link helps with, that simple math can't do.

It provides the adjusted XP without needing to look at a table and figure it out. There are other uses for it as well when building encounters such as easily cross-referencing the 5e monster list to fill out an encounter based on filters. It also generates random encounters.

I didn't create it, but I use the hell out of it!

 

[evilbob]

There are tools to make this very easy.

WOW - I just clicked that link and it is amazing! That's worth this whole thread ten times over. What an amazingly helpful tool!

This is also the sort of stuff WotC should have released last November at the latest.

 

[iserith]

WOW - I just clicked that link and it is amazing! That's worth this whole thread ten times over. What an amazingly helpful tool!

This is also the sort of stuff WotC should have released last November at the latest.

I think a fun thing to do with it is click on Random Encounters (set whatever filters) and then force yourself to improvise a cool scene out of it. I show that here, for example.

 

[Elric]

I'd just like to say that "encounters on a budget" is such a pain in 5e. If you want to start with an XP budget and build backwards, you have to figure out the magical quantity of a mob that matches up with your budget when the multiplier for that quantity is applied. So awkward.

I'm just going to end up designing encounters and then see how hard they happen to be instead.

The original encounter design guidelines are flawed and overstate encounter difficulty when you have monsters at very different CRs (and, as you mention, also make designing encounters difficult). I haven't looked at the update to the DM Basic Guide from November in detail, but it looks much the same.

I recommend Gobelure's thread on how to modify the encounter design guidelines to fix this problem, so that you don't need an "encounter XP multiplier." http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?367697-Encounter-difficulty-how-to-fix-it The key is that in Gobelure's new tables PC and monster power scales more slowly with CR/levels, so that you don't need the "fudge factor" of a multiplier.

Here's how I described the issue in that thread:

It seems to me that PC and monster power doesn't scale as fast in general as the XP numbers alone would imply (e.g., a CR 5 Hill Giant worth 1,800 XP is not as deadly as 4 CR 2 Ogres worth 450 XP each). So large numbers of lower CR monsters would be too strong relative to what the XP total suggests.

The encounter XP multiplier (basic DM guide, p. 57) helps to address that design flaw. However, the XP multiplier is itself flawed (as an encounter with an Adult Red Dragon and 3 Kobolds demonstrates).

My take is that some monsters are particularly dangerous in groups (e.g., with their own kind, like Intellect Devourers, or with any melee combatant, like Hobgoblins). Those should have been handled with special guidelines in their stat blocks (CR varies based on group composition), and XP should have simply scaled more slowly as CR increased (with the corresponding decrease in the XP budget encounter guidelines), thus obviating the need for a multiplier.

 

[Evenglare]

I think CR is a terrible system. D&D has too many moving parts for any sort of consistency. They should just divide up the enemies into 3 or 4 tiers or something. All the steps taken to determine CR is just more trouble than it's worth IMO. I like how numenera / cypher system enemies are made. You get one number, and bam. Done.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You can count me among those who think they seem "arbitrary," or (to be more precise) that they seem so loose as to not actually be a particularly good guide. For a DM who only cares about whether a monster is clearly definitely absolutely out of line, it works, but anything more narrow than that? Hardly.

I think CR is a terrible system. D&D has too many moving parts for any sort of consistency. They should just divide up the enemies into 3 or 4 tiers or something. All the steps taken to determine CR is just more trouble than it's worth IMO. I like how numenera / cypher system enemies are made. You get one number, and bam. Done.

And yet 4e's encounter budget system worked perfectly fine, and provided a highly robust system. You couldn't just throw special abilities on willy-nilly, but as far as stats and level were concerned, the budget worked more or less exactly as advertised.