Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 669178" data-attributes="member: 3146">Too bad I don't know how to do big red blinking fonts. It is utterly irrelevant to the Pit Fiend's CR that a hyper-optimized Red Wizard can get a 35% chance of dropping him in the first round. At all levels, optimized characters using save or die spells have a chance of taking down much more powerful foes in one round. That's what Save or Die spells are for. An optimized 11th level Necromancer has a good chance of taking down a generic 20th level wizard with a Finger of Death in round 1. That doesn't make the 20th level wizard CR 11.An optimized 3rd level cleric has a reasonable chance of taking down a generic 12th level fighter (+5 cloak, Iron Will=Will save +11; the cleric's DC can easily be 19 (16 wisdom, greater spell focus) yielding the exact same chance as the Red Wizard has for a round 1 kill) in round 1 with a hold person. That doesn't make the fighter CR 3.The wizard example has never proved anything and never will.[Sarcasm on]Hmm. Iconic wizards should all start out with 18 int, a 16+ dex, spell focus, greater spell focus, spell penetration, greater spell penetration, have the highest level int item they can afford and have 2 wishes or a +2 Tome by level 16? Oh yeah, and he also carries around a heightened disintegrate.Let me guess, you're expecting that the default stat generation for 3.5 e to be all 18s?[/Sarcasm Off]Other than the fact that there are a lot of people who like playing D&D at power levels where their characters aren't guaranteed to (and probably won't have) a single 18, the argument is flawed when it comes to challenge ratings because it assumes that the character is perfectly optimized for the situation. Why not an Evoker with an Empowered Otiluke's Freezing Sphere or an empowered, maximized Sonically Substituted Fireball? That wizard is also optimized. Will we assume that wizard when you want to know the EL of thirty eighth level fighters supported by an 11th level wizard and a 10th level cleric? Because if we can, those fighters won't last very long. On the other hand, our save or die optimized wizard is going to be at a significant disadvantage.That was "the last time" you ran a high level campaign. What happened the time before that? Was there a time before that? Do you fudge your die rolls? Do you use save or die monster abilities? Do you coup de grace players? What kind of stats did you let the PCs start with (If you ask me, more than 32 point equivalent is worth at least ECL +1)? Are your players better tacticians than you are?Anecdotes are not evidence. Unless there are a lot of people with demonstrated skill and experience DMing who keep a handle on PC power levels who have this problem I'm not going to jump to the conclusion that your PCs had it easy because high end CRs are underestimated. There are plenty of other explanations of the evidence available.Let me see, defeating a monster of the PC's level should take up 20% of the PCs resources. . . . So if it's CR 16 then a party of 16 level characters shouldn't have much problem taking it out should they?Doesn't "uses up 20% of the party's resources" sound like a pushover to you? Tough encounters are supposed to be higher than the PC's level or come at the end of a series of encounters (which should either use up things like the heightened disintegrate or the fighter's hit points or the clerics (healing) spells).</blockquote>

Verification