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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 9832820" data-attributes="member: 710">I think that kinda represents a move from the players always fighting a monster, versus the characters fighting against other people?I don't know if that was always the case, or true in all campaigns, but I think most combats in games involve fighting against opposition that are vaguely humanoid, only occasionally you fight a big bad evil like a dragon or some archmage or bandit king.So there seems some assumption that you are basically putting in a number of monsters equal to the number of party members. You have a smaller party, you take less monsters, but you can still take the same ones, if you have a larger party, you can take more monsters.It gets more complicated of course then when you want to have a big bad boss supported by his henchmen, or a big lone monster that the party is going to engage on its own, or if you want to fight a horde of enemies. Suddenly you need to use much lower or higher CRs.4E monster and encounter building guidelines were a bit more open about this, and they also realized that just a higher CR is not neccessarily enough to create a viable "boss" or "lone monster" type challenge, and that a hoard of low level CR monsters still requires a lot of book-keeping, so it created minions, Elite and Solo monster types.Monsters of your level basically had damage output, defenses and attacks suitable for a party of that level.4E then scaled the XP per monster so it could suggest encounter budgets to help you guide toward what kind of challenge a given group of enemies would be. (Whether you use that prespective or descrptively is ultimately up to you). EIther way, you still have an extra step to take, because just the level is not enough to tell you the real threat level for your party.Either way, even if a Level 4 monster was a suitable challenge for a 4th Level party. What if you want them to fight 4? What's a reasoanble CR value then? You kinda always have a situation where you can't just take equal level = reasonable challenge. ANd the math always ends up more complicated then you'd like.</blockquote>

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