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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 9776072" data-attributes="member: 7006">Heh heh... if one wants to become a competent DM, one should be able to use and do both.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The problem oftentimes is too many DMs who want to "build" every single fight they put together using all the CR math and the different levels of "Easy, Hard, Deadly" etc... thinking that they are going to put together a lovely night of board game-like, five straight encounters of HeroQuest group battle fighting... only to discover that the players did all kinds of odd things during those five encounters with how they used their abilities, when they used their abilities, when they took rests to regain abilities to change up how that final fight ends up looking.  To basically blow the DM's perfectly designed and arranged series of combat scenarios to bits... and leaving a DM who is incapable of jerry-rigging on the fly to compensate for all those actions to regain a semblance of how they wanted that string of encounters to work because they never learned the art of "Eyeballing".I personally don't think there's any problem with having the game give a "Challenge Rating" to a monster to get a basic idea of what level of a single PC or party of PCs (whichever way one wishes to create their CR system) can fight in a default, non-extreme scenario.  Tell me an Ogre is an okay basic opponent for a 3rd level party of 5 PCs?  Fine.  But trying to get into even more weeds by trying to design a system that will recalculate the Ogre's CR when you've added 2 more PCs-- both of which have healing spells and thus the party now has four competent healers rather than just two... but this Ogre encounter also taking place after three previous encounters where the party may or may not have used certain abilities or spells and may or may not have had a chance to take any rests to regain abilities or spend hit dice.  And then recalculate things again when you add in a half-dozen kobolds to the fight that might get one-shotted by the great weapon warriors on the field and thus be no real speedbump for the encounter... but also might not if the party doesn't have any great weapon wielders or the ones they do have go down after a single hit because they were low on hit points.  And now these 6 kobolds with Pack Tactics surround the one or more healers the party may or may not have, quickly removing that important recovery potential capable of getting other PCs back on their feet... resulting in a quicker death spiral than the DM was expecting.  Trying to just rely on a convoluted CR encounter builder system like that to create a "fun night of D&D" is a disaster waiting to happen.That's when a DM should know both their party's capabilities and the abilities of all the potential monsters on and off the field to be able to eyeball when it's time to add or remove extra creatures as necessary either to start the fight, or several rounds in as reinforcements or retreating morale casualties... in order to make the fight work out more or less in the manner they were originally hoping to see when they spent 20 minutes building and then calculating the CR of the encounter they were making the night before during their prep.  But if you don't learn that as a DM and instead try to rely strictly on the "spreadsheet calculations" of any potential "Encounter Builder"... invariably you are going to wind up disappointed.  Because no encounter builder can accurately take every potential oddball thing in party make-up and player action into account.</blockquote>

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