D&D 5E CR and Encounter Difficulty: Is It Consistently Wrong?

[GMforPowergamers]

I'm not convinced there should always be a direct correlation between int score and tactical cleverness. I feel like a pack of wolves could very well have more tactical skill than a disorganized room full of scholars.

yes my chess club all have int of 13+ with atleast one 16 in there... the football team bearly matches the average 10... with atleast one 8 in there an no one above 13... in a fight I will bet on the football team.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I've found the CR system to be quite consistent so far. Obviously when the rogue gets the drop on the enemy (which he loves to do) the fights are much easier than indicated, but that just seems like common sense. In direct confrontations, barring a long hot / cold streak of the dice, it has produced expected results.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I'm not convinced there should always be a direct correlation between int score and tactical cleverness. I feel like a pack of wolves could very well have more tactical skill than a disorganized room full of scholars.

<tangent>

FWIW, I was oversimplifying when I said "low Int score", and I agree with your example (wolves vs. scholars).

Wolves will still not have extremely sophisticated tactics--I've always run them as mostly limited to ambushes and night attacks (if the D&D combat system were more sophisticated then they'd attack to disrupt and exhaust, but in the rules as written it's more efficient to simply go for the kill) but that is more than the scholars are likely to come up with. (Or rather, the scholars might come up with extremely sophisticated tactics but there is no guarantee the sophistication will actually enhance effectiveness.)

</tangent>

The larger point here is that all combat encounters with unsophisticated tactics and melee sluggers resemble each other, no matter how much you scale up HP/damage and therefore CR. They are all vulnerable to the exact same counters. This ceases to be true if tactics change: an earth elemental or bulette doing hit-and-run using burrowing and tremorsense requires different counters than an Iron Golem.

 

[DaveDash]

Here's how a lot of my encounters have gone. Some of these are custom monsters, but they have fitted in reasonable well with the DMG guidelines for creating monsters.

Party started at level 11, and is composed of Paladin, Lore Bard, Abjurer Wizard, and Light Cleric.

"Life and Death" refers to greater than deadly.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

"Life and Death" refers to greater than deadly.

Per DMG guidelines, there is nothing greater than deadly. 1st level party fighting Tiamat? It's over the Deadly difficulty threshold, so it's "Deadly."

For a while there was a bug in kobold.club which caused people to misinterpret the difficulty guidelines as ceilings rather than floors. It's fixed now, but from the looks of it you may have stumbled into that same error. For example, 4 11th level PCs vs. 3 Ropers is 10,800 XP, which is over the 9600 XP "Hard" threshold but not up to the 14,400 XP "Deadly" threshold, so it is a Hard encounter. Your spreadsheet has it listed as "Deadly." Similarly, 1 Ghost + 1 Stone Golem is also Hard, not Deadly. 4 Elementals is indeed Deadly though.

 

[DaveDash]

Per DMG guidelines, there is nothing greater than deadly. 1st level party fighting Tiamat? It's over the Deadly difficulty threshold, so it's "Deadly."

For a while there was a bug in kobold.club which caused people to misinterpret the difficulty guidelines as ceilings rather than floors. It's fixed now, but from the looks of it you may have stumbled into that same error. For example, 4 11th level PCs vs. 3 Ropers is 10,800 XP, which is over the 9600 XP "Hard" threshold but not up to the 14,400 XP "Deadly" threshold, so it is a Hard encounter. Your spreadsheet has it listed as "Deadly." Similarly, 1 Ghost + 1 Stone Golem is also Hard, not Deadly. 4 Elementals is indeed Deadly though.

Hmm ok. I used to think it worked this way until reading the example in one of the earlier free rulesets. I'll have to go and double check.

 

[Tormyr]

Hmm ok. I used to think it worked this way until reading the example in one of the earlier free rulesets. I'll have to go and double check.

The first version of the Basic DMG had difficulty thresholds explained as "everything up to this number is a hard encounter." Version 0.2 of the free DMG replaced that with "everything over this threshold is a hard encounter."

 

[Shadowdweller00]

I'm not convinced there should always be a direct correlation between int score and tactical cleverness. I feel like a pack of wolves could very well have more tactical skill than a disorganized room full of scholars.

But once you start putting those scholars in neat, tidy rows...watch out! (Apologies, couldn't resist)

 

[DaveDash]

The first version of the Basic DMG had difficulty thresholds explained as "everything up to this number is a hard encounter." Version 0.2 of the free DMG replaced that with "everything over this threshold is a hard encounter."

Interesting thanks. That changes things a bit. I never bothered to reread that section carefully enough obviously.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

The first version of the Basic DMG had difficulty thresholds explained as "everything up to this number is a hard encounter." Version 0.2 of the free DMG replaced that with "everything over this threshold is a hard encounter."

Oh, no wonder everybody read it "wrong" then--it wasn't wrong, we just didn't notice the delta when it changed. That explains a ton, thanks.