Shardstone
Hero
I mean no disrespect by this, but I think you have completely misunderstood my post. What I said and what you are responding to are completely different messages.I actually think that more robust, holistic, and transparent mathematics facilitate making more creative monster designs.
I agree with what you're observing – that 5e's monster design presents a "sameness" trap that it is easy for a designer to fall into, and even more so if the designer prioritizes creating a monster whose CR can be clearly modeled under the existing guidelines.
One of my projects involves lots of really wild / creative monster design within the 5e umbrella – some is stuff that has no parallels in the game. Evaluating those divergent/creative ideas from a CR standpoint with the current system? Hah. It's educated guesswork at best, nightmare at worst.
I understand wanting to push back against an unfortunate trend in online discussions to hyperfocus on this one number (CR) at the expense of pushing the creative frontiers of the design – heck, I hate that tendency more than most folks, and push against it with my own stuff – but I think it's inaccurate to assume that Maths & Creativity are inherently opposed forces such that developing Maths must come at the expense of Creativity. Nothing about that is inherent.
I do not think they are seperate forces (Maths and Creativity), and my argument isn't that CR gets in the way of creative monsters. My argument is that CR does not describe anything that you can relate to beyond "Is this creature 95% likely to TPK my party" or "Can I expect a harder fighter then fighting 3 mooks in a box" etc etc. Furthermore, knowing that 10% resources can be used doesn't make sense because every class has different resources used in different ways, and some classes have no resources other than HP and HD (rogue) vs two or more resources (Sorcerer, Cleric, Druid). Furthermore, various features give their own independent pools of uses instead of sharing a pool. On top of that, not all resources are equal; a high level spell slot is worth a lot more than a 1st level spell slot. So if I'm playing a FIghter Champion and someone is playing a Fighter Battlemaster, how can we create a definition of resources that fits both?
Furthermore, monsters like the Lich only match their CR in specific instances and when played in specific ways. This applies very often to other creatively designed monsters (I know this since I also do design work). Therefore, you can never be quite sure if this creature will use X amount of your resources or not.
So not only is the term "resources" difficult to pragmatically define, but non-standard monsters (and what monster over CR 10 or 15 is really standard?) cannot be accurately described under a CR using "resources" as a framework.
If we got more specific and said JUST Hit Points, it could make more sense, though we'd still need two kinds of CR -- one to describe something "standard" and one to describe something "nonstandard." The shadow doesn't threaten your hit points all that much, but boy does it threaten your strength and thus your life. And what resource can help you replace your strength? Or is the resource I'm counting something more esoteric?
To @mearls -- I'm not saying this to stop your project. In fact, I want you to continue it, because I think it's fascinating and can lead to a lot of cool ideas. But I really do think a pragmatic definition of resources needs to be interrogated again (as I'm sure you've thought about this a lot already) because right now, I don't know how to quantify resources given how D&D classes function.