CR/EL System View

[greywulf]

Fishbone, you've piqued my interest. What's "the NPC debacle"?

 

[Fishbone]

What we've just been bantering about for the last 4 pages or so.
The NPC Debacle: Pure NPCs are not nearly as strong as pure monsters. Give the monster class levels and the disparity grows even further. Despite this, WOTC has pretended for the past 7 years that NPC level=CR.

 

[FireLance]

I agree that tweaking a stone giant the way you describe would probably boost its CR by one. However, giving exactly the same feats/equipment/tactics to the fighter would not, IMO, make him CR 9. Doesn't that tell you something right there?

What it tells me is that CR is a range, not a point value. Optimizing a creature at the upper end of the scale might bump its CR up, while optimizing a creature at the lower end of the scale might just make it as effective as an "average" creature of the CR band. Either way, the CR isn't off by more than one point. Whether or not one point is significant (Celebrim's point) is another matter - I'm guessing (I haven't done the math to find out) that it gets more significant the greater the difference between the creature's CR and the PCs' level. If a baseline CR 8 opponent will cause an 8th level party to expend 20% of its resources, a high CR 8 opponent might make it expend 30% of its resources and a low CR 8 opponent might make it expend 15%. This is a fairly small range (15%). However, if the opponent's CR is 2 higher than the party's level and is expected to cause them to expend 40% of their resources, then a high CR could cause a 60% expenditure and a low CR could cause a 30% expenditure. The range is much larger (30%). For a really tough fight (CR 4 higher than party level), a high CR could easily result in a TPK.

Wait. The fighter you're listing here is significantly tougher than the one in the DMG. I think it's best if we compare creatures straight out of the book - after all, it's not a fair comparison if you're comparing a tweaked-to-the-gills fighter with a troll that's straight out of the MM (whose feat selection is about as far from combat-optimized as you can get).

The difference between the DMG NPC fighter and the creatures in the MM is that the DMG fighter is incomplete. It takes into account his base stats and some basic gear, but he's missing the effect of racial abilities, 8 feats and 4,900 gp worth of equipment. Given that the fighter's class abilities are his feats, if you only give him three feats, he isn't much better than an 8th-level warrior (CR 7). Of course he'd be easily outclassed by a CR 8 monster. As for tweaked to the gills, the eight feats in question are: Weapon Focus, Weapon Specialization, Greater Weapon Focus (total +2 to hit and damage), Dodge, Power Attack, and Toughness taken three times (+9 hp). I also made him a dwarf (the iconic fighter race, +8 hp), gave him a two-handed weapon, and gauntlets of ogre power. I've kept to core, but if I had access to non-core material, I could tweak him further.

Because, as I've already illustrated, it's much more than a "slight" difference we're talking about here. Having twice as many hit points and doing 3 times as much damage isn't a "slight" difference.

It's only twice as many hit points and three times as much damage if you don't take into account the abilities and equipment an 8th-level fighter should have.

 

[Grog]

The difference between the DMG NPC fighter and the creatures in the MM is that the DMG fighter is incomplete. It takes into account his base stats and some basic gear, but he's missing the effect of racial abilities, 8 feats and 4,900 gp worth of equipment. Given that the fighter's class abilities are his feats, if you only give him three feats, he isn't much better than an 8th-level warrior (CR 7). Of course he'd be easily outclassed by a CR 8 monster. As for tweaked to the gills, the eight feats in question are: Weapon Focus, Weapon Specialization, Greater Weapon Focus (total +2 to hit and damage), Dodge, Power Attack, and Toughness taken three times (+9 hp). I also made him a dwarf (the iconic fighter race, +8 hp), gave him a two-handed weapon, and gauntlets of ogre power. I've kept to core, but if I had access to non-core material, I could tweak him further.

So you took the NPC and made him 100% optimized for combat. Which is fine, but in order to have a fair comparison, you need to do the same for the creatures in the MM you're comparing him to. The troll, for example, has Alertness and Track for two of its feats, and they're both useless in combat.

Also, making him a dwarf to give him more HP is kind of cheesy IMO - not every single NPC fighter the players meet is going to be a dwarf.

(You also gave him a two-handed weapon, which is a significant difference from what's listed in the DMG. And saying he's AC 21 is incorrect, since Dodge only works against one opponent per round, and as many people in this thread have pointed out, the CR system is designed for use vs. a party of four. That's pretty minor, though).

It's only twice as many hit points and three times as much damage if you don't take into account the abilities and equipment an 8th-level fighter should have.

Fine. Give him all the feats and equipment you listed and (keeping him with weapon-and-shield style as listed in the DMG) it's only nearly twice as many hit points and ~2.5 times as much damage or so. The point still stands.

 

[Hussar]

Hey, if you want NPC fighter cheese - mounted combat, power attack, ride by attack and spirited charge and presto - 60+ points of damage on a charge. No magic needed.

To be fair, since I rarely use NPC opponents, I haven't run into this issue very often. OTOH, I do use fairly liberal use of templates and find that CR and EL works as advertised fairly often. Actually, that's why I find it so strange that people have so many problems with it. Not that the math is difficult or anything like that, I don't mean that. It's just that for 200+ combat encounters with my group, it's been pretty spot on (certainly within expectations) most of the time.

I'm wondering what I'm doing differently to get such widely varying results.