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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9267562" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I wish the designers luck. They will be actively fighting the system's design if they want to do that. Trying to make a system fundamentally designed for the opposite purpose you intend is a draining effort, even when you're a designer able to actually rewrite things.Because CR (I had understood it as "Challenge Rating"?) is not designed to be a functional system which accurately guides the DM on the impact and utility of a creature. It is designed to feel right, regardless of whether that works or not.I have read what I consider credible claims from actual consultants for 5e that the CRs they use were, originally, developed using the formulae in the game. And then those formulae ended up being wrong. A lot. Instead of correcting the formulae, they ad hoc modified individual CRs of monsters that got enough playtesting to make a better guess at how strong they were. This is a big part of why CR is borderline useless, and why many experienced 5e DMs explicitly advice folks to just "wing it" or the like--because it generally won't make any difference, and may in fact improve encounter design because your intuitions are likely better than weak, often-faulty formulae.This is part of why I found it so frustrating and baffling when Mearls said things like "math is easy, feel is hard" (paraphrased but he did explicitly say that "math is easy.") It's not easy! That's literally why we pay mathematicians and statisticians to do it!I would agree that that is the biggest challenge for someone who desires to be a DM, and is a novice.The biggest challenge for someone who does not desire to be a DM, regardless of whether they are a novice or an expert or anywhere in-between, is obviously that they do not desire to do it. Which is the problem I'm actually dealing with. I know maybe two or three people who have even the tiniest degree of willingness to DM, at all, ever, at any point in their natural lives. One is already running full games (and of a system I would prefer not to use if at all possible); the second is unable to play TTRPGs in general right now due to life issues; and the third wanted to, but I guess the game fell through, as I had been coaching them and then it just sort of petered out without further commentary.If the issue is not "I'm scared of doing it" but rather "I really, really just do not want to do that thing," then no amount of coaching, of minimizing commitment level, of lowering the barriers, of zero-pressure encouragement, will ever get them from not being a DM to being a DM.ETA: Also, I am genuinely impressed at how stable the distribution in the votes has been. Like, this is a pattern that's been going since there were maybe 20 voters. Four times as many voters, and the pattern remains almost completely unchanged.</blockquote>

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