CR/EL System View

[Celebrim]

Does anyone else feel that certain types of monsters are underCRd because of the "wowee! Neato!" nature of their type?
I'm thinking of outsiders, especially demons, devils, and angels, and things with the Dragon subtype.

This has been admitted by the designers.

In general, you should add one to two to the CR of all Dragons if you want to represent thier true difficulty - and the appropriate XP award.

 

[Fishbone]

I wish I had the link to the article where someone, I believe Monte Cook, copped to it and said "Yeah, we deliberately kept dragon CRs low."

 

[FireLance]

I wish I had the link to the article where someone, I believe Monte Cook, copped to it and said "Yeah, we deliberately kept dragon CRs low."

I thought that was 3.0, and dragon CRs were revised in 3.5.

 

[Fishbone]

Yeah, Cook was 3.0. I think in the article for the 3.0 thing someone flat out admitted that the Dragon CRs were deliberately kept low. It was close to the time of 3.5, perhaps a bit after when I read the article.
I'm not too big a fan of dragons period in Dungeons and Dragons.

 

[Celebrim]

I thought that was 3.0, and dragon CRs were revised in 3.5.

Celebrim checks the SRD, "So they were!" Good for them.

Allow me to ammend the above:

In general, you should add one to two to the CR of all Dragons if you want to represent thier true difficulty - and the appropriate XP award - if you are using the 3.0 monster manual.

It looks like in 3.5 they went across the board and added 1 CR to all the dragons. In some cases (say Juvenile Blue) I'm not sure that's quite enough, but at least its close.

What's amazed me about this thread so far is that mostly its been an argument between a few argumentative people like myself, a few hold out posters that are insisting in the face of all the evidence to the contrary that the existing RAW work quite well. I mean, I guess that shouldn't be surprising since it seems like half the arguments here are between people that insist that the RAW are complete and perfect as they are and the ones that think otherwise, but still; it's CR. It's not like its a secret that it has problems. Anyway, as I was saying, what's amazed me about this thread so far is that more of the 96.5% of all people who say that it has problems haven't been trying to convince the rest of us that they have a better guidelines.

 

[FireLance]

Hold on a second. Why doesn't the stone giant have Improved Disarm and/or Improved Trip? He can take those feats just as easily as a fighter can. After all, if the fighter can switch his stats around to qualify for feats, so can the stone giant. And the stone giant will be much more likely to win the opposed rolls for disarming and/or tripping than the fighter will.

And the fighter can't get extra reach for free. If the fighter uses a spiked chain, he gives up his +1 large steel shield, which reduces his AC by three points. Also, the stone giant could use a spiked chain, too, giving him a 20' reach.

A stone giant could take Improved Disarm and Improved Trip, but that requires Combat Expertise and an Intelligence of 13. However, going by the rules, it isn't as easy to switch around the giant's ability scores. Using the standard methods, the elite array increases the giant's CR by 1, and the nonelite array gives a bonus to two ability scores and a penalty to two. We can penalize Wisdom and Charisma, but that means a slightly lower Will save. Since we're min-maxing for combat effectiveness, the other ability bump should probably go to Strength to increase attack and damage rolls, but it could also go to Dexterity to improve AC and missile capability, or Constitution to increase hit points and Fortitude saves.

The real problem is that a stone giant only has five feats. After taking Combat Expertise, Improved Disarm and Improved Trip, he only has two available feat slots. If he wants a spiked chain, that's another feat for Exotic Weapon Proficiency, but I think he would be bettter off using a heavy flail (the extra reach doesn't help him that much). If he doesn't take Power Attack, he misses out on the chance to deal extra damage to low-AC foes. If he doesn't take Iron Will, his Will save drops further. Possibly the feat that he afford to give up most easily is Point Blank Shot.

So yes, you can build a stone giant to be a better tripper than an 8th-level fighter, at the cost of some abilities that probably don't mean too much. Since you've boosted its combat ability without taking away too much, it's probably closer to a CR 9 than a CR 8 in terms of combat effectiveness. But 9 is just one more than 8.

I strongly disagree that the 8th level NPC fighter is closer in power to a stone giant than he is to a troll. He's better than the troll in meele, but not by a huge amount. Factor in the troll's regeneration and they're even closer. He's certainly not even close to even a hill giant in meele capability.

The 8th-level fighter (with the feats and equipment he should have) can attack at +15/+10 against the troll's +9/+9/+4 with the possibility of a rend, deals 2d6+9 damage against the troll's 1d6+6 for claw, 1d6+3 for bite, and 2d6+9 rend, has an AC of 21 against the troll's 16, and has hit points of 81 compared to the troll's 63. The fight has to last four rounds for the troll's regeneration to catch up to the fighter's starting hit points. The difference between the troll and the 8th-level fighter is greater than the difference bewteen the 8th-level fighter and the stone giant. If the fighter is "not even close" to the stone giant, the troll is even less close to the fighter.

Well, I think a system this bad is worse than no system at all, personally.

I'm curious to know what would be the ill effects of using the CR system compared to no system at all. So far, in terms of combat effectiveness, the 8th-level fighter and the stone giant are at most one point off the given CR of 8. If an 8th-level party has a slightly easier time with the fighter and a slightly more difficult time with the stone giant, how does that wreck the game?

 

[Aaron L]

Celebrim checks the SRD, "So they were!" Good for them.

Allow me to ammend the above:

In general, you should add one to two to the CR of all Dragons if you want to represent thier true difficulty - and the appropriate XP award - if you are using the 3.0 monster manual.

It looks like in 3.5 they went across the board and added 1 CR to all the dragons. In some cases (say Juvenile Blue) I'm not sure that's quite enough, but at least its close.

What's amazed me about this thread so far is that mostly its been an argument between a few argumentative people like myself, a few hold out posters that are insisting in the face of all the evidence to the contrary that the existing RAW work quite well. I mean, I guess that shouldn't be surprising since it seems like half the arguments here are between people that insist that the RAW are complete and perfect as they are and the ones that think otherwise, but still; it's CR. It's not like its a secret that it has problems. Anyway, as I was saying, what's amazed me about this thread so far is that more of the 96.5% of all people who say that it has problems haven't been trying to convince the rest of us that they have a better guidelines.

I haven't seen anyone saying that it's perfect. What I have been seeing is people defending it against others who are calling it completely worthless.

I haven't had any problems with CR since I've been playing 3.X. It's worked very well for me.


CR is a pretty good guess at how hard a fight a monster will give a party. That's how it's described and how it plays out, in my experience (15,000 experience!)

 

[Grog]

So yes, you can build a stone giant to be a better tripper than an 8th-level fighter, at the cost of some abilities that probably don't mean too much. Since you've boosted its combat ability without taking away too much, it's probably closer to a CR 9 than a CR 8 in terms of combat effectiveness. But 9 is just one more than 8.

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?

The 8th-level fighter (with the feats and equipment he should have) can attack at +15/+10 against the troll's +9/+9/+4 with the possibility of a rend, deals 2d6+9 damage against the troll's 1d6+6 for claw, 1d6+3 for bite, and 2d6+9 rend, has an AC of 21 against the troll's 16, and has hit points of 81 compared to the troll's 63.

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).

Also, given that you've had to do so much tweaking to boost his effectiveness, I think you're just proving my point that the 8th level DMG fighter is way too weak for a CR 8. And I should note that, even with all the tweaking you've done, the fighter still isn't even as tough as a hill giant, let alone a stone giant.

I'm curious to know what would be the ill effects of using the CR system compared to no system at all. So far, in terms of combat effectiveness, the 8th-level fighter and the stone giant are at most one point off the given CR of 8. If an 8th-level party has a slightly easier time with the fighter and a slightly more difficult time with the stone giant, how does that wreck the game?

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.

 

[Celebrim]

I haven't seen anyone saying that it's perfect. What I have been seeing is people defending it against others who are calling it completely worthless.

I don't think its completely worthless, though I do understand the position of people that do. The problem with CR is that it is not very fine grain. Not only is there no such thing as CR 5.6 or CR 4.3, the CR scale is logrithmic. So a CR 8 challenge is not 'just one point' harder than a CR 7 challenge, but something like 50% harder. This means that if the CR is off by as much as one, its a pretty big deal. If it's off by two, its a really big deal. And likewise, a CR could arguably be correct - it could be the best number that we can come up with - but the difference between a CR 7.5 monster and CR 8.4 is still pretty darn big.

I haven't had any problems with CR since I've been playing 3.X. It's worked very well for me.

I have had all sorts of problems, though admittedly 3.5 gives somewhat better guidelines than 3.0.

Part of the problem is that I use alot of advanced monsters and alot of templates. I've found that alot of the time if you do this, you can hide the monsters CR because the advancement is synergistic (in addition to making the monster all around tougher, it elimenates some critical disadvantage that the monster had) or the template similarly covers up weaknesses that the monster had. In playing, I've found you sometimes have to fudge the CR up a point or two.

Another problem is not so much with the rules as written but the inherent limitations of the rules as written. The RAW say, 'No more than 12 creatures'. Now, I can understand the basis of that advice, but sometimes you want to design an old skool encounter and sometimes an old skool encounter occurs just because the PC's stumble into despite your design. The RAW written say, 'More than 12 creatures' is tricky and leave it up to the DM to decide. I can deal with that, but its something you can't get the rules to help you on.

What I've found is that the rule that doubling the number of monsters increases the EL by +2 works well only for creatures with a CR that is relatively high in comparison to the PC's. For creatures with relatively low CR's, doubling the number of monsters is closer to EL + 1 not +2. I'm not sure what rule you would use, if even a good one can be devised, but the problem is there. It comes from the fact that when the monsters need a 15 or more to hit, and/or the PC's only fail saves on a 5 or less, the difference of one or two points means a big big deal. It's not such a big difference if something happens 50% of the time or 60% (or 40%) of the time. But as you get closer to 20 or 1, funny things start happening. Needing to get a 19 is 50% 'harder' than needing to get an 18. Needing to get a 20 is 100% 'harder' than needing to get a 20. When you get on that part of the curve, the difficulty of the encounter goes exponentially down and its not really as tough as the EL suggests. This happens most often in my experience when you are in a campaign involving some mook villain race (orcs, gnolls, goblins, whatever) and in the space of just a level or two the PC's get up on the curve. When that happens, doubling the monsters doesn't work.

The problem is that the CR/EL system suggests that it does. For example, it suggests to a novice DM that 8 gnolls (or 1st level human fighters) is EL 7. But whether it really deserves that rating depends alot on the player level. If 3rd or 4th level characters go up against 8 gnolls, I'll award the full XP for a very tough EL 7 encounter. But by 5th level I'll probably treat it as EL 6, and by 7th level or higher I'll probably only award XP for a EL 5 encounter. This is because the rewards on the XP table are going up in a linear fashion, but the difficulty is actually going down exponentially. The lower award better represents the challenge of the encounter.

The biggest problems of all though relate to adding classes to monsters or PC classed NPC's. In brief, adding PC classes usually doesn't increase the CR by a flat 1 per level. There are a couple of ways to see this. Lets start with one of the obvious. Adding 2 HD of dragon or outsider to a creature increases its CR by 1. But dragon and outsider are really powerful 'classes'. Dragon gets d12 hp, good saves, full BAB, and above average skill points. Outsider trades d8 hp for even better skill points. PC classes lose out to this. Six levels of fighter just don't add as much as 12 HD worth of dragon or outsider do. The few extra combat feats you'll pick up just don't make up for the missing +6 attack bonus, much improved will and reflex saves, vastly superior skills and 50 or more odd hit points. You could spend alot of feats just trying to make up for any one of those things. Clearly even adding a relevant class to a monster isn't necessarily increasing its CR in a one to one fashion. And the same thing is true of adding PC's classes to human, orc, or any other base creature. PC's classes are really good. But they aren't that good.

At best, in my experience a PC class is about character level - 1. An 8th level fighter or barbarian is probably CR 7. But support classes are probably lower CR than that in most cases because so much of what balances them with a more combat oriented classes doesn't really impact a combat. A 8th level bard, cleric, monk, or even rogue is probably more like CR 6. On the other hand, a bard or cleric might be worth thier full CR if they have a supporting cast or are part of one. Spell casters are tricky and depend alot on spell selection. At low levels they tend to be closer in power to support characters. At high levels, they tend to closer in power to combat characters.

NPC classes are closer in power to class level/2 or even class level/4 than CL - 1. A 10th level warrior is much closer to CR 5 than CR 9. Again, warrior isn't remotely as powerful of a 'class' as dragon or outsider.

In addition to all of that, it would be nice if there were at least some suggestions and reminders for what happens with non-standard treasure. Suppose I give an Ogre an extra 900 gp worth of equipment, or 4500 gp? Doesn't this make a difference. What if the 10th level fighter has the equipment you'd usually expect of a 5th level fighter, or even a 1st level fighter?

To give you an example of the sort of problems I run into, its not uncommon for elderly women in my campaign world to be level 9 commoners with STR and CON around 5 and little combat equipment to speak of. They have combat ability more in line with CR 1/2 or 1/3 (or less), but if you don't treat the CR/EL system as a guideline you would end treating these as CR 8 individuals. Of course, I don't expect anyone to be so silly, and I expect most DM's would not award XP for killing harmless little old ladies, but that's using your judgement and what I'm saying is simply, "Use your judgement. If it doesn't make sense to you, it probably doesn't make sense."

 

[Fishbone]

I think its okay, but it does have its weaknesses. The NPC debacle, classed/non-associated classed monsters(especially casters and stacking with innate casting), free elite scores for NPC monsters, monsters of significant variance in strength and underCRd monsters, lowballing the CR of "cool" subtypes, etc. Its better than nothing but I've been going by my own judgment more often than seemingly arbitrarily assigned CRs.
The Stone Giant/NPC Fighter seems a perfect illustration of that.
Edit:Wow, way to post just a little before me and far more eloquently, C. Goddang!
You won the internets.