D&D 5E D&D Next Q&A: 04/25/2014

[Plaguescarred]

D&D Next Q&A

04/25/2014
By Rodney Thompson


You've got questions—we've got answers! Here's how it works—each week, our Community Manager will be scouring all available sources to find whatever questions you're asking. We'll pick three of them for R&D to answer.

 

[Minigiant]

Enemy caster solos are hard to gauge because they can dump a whole days worth of spells in one fight.
You don't say?

It would be a good idea for enemy casters in Next to take a 4e approach. Don't give them a full suite of magic that a caster of their level. Unless you like the evil wizard dropping 3 Ice Storms and 3 Fireballs and the players praying they can gut him before they become frostbunt smears.

 

[Ruzak]

Enemy caster solos are hard to gauge because they can dump a whole days worth of spells in one fight.
You don't say?

It would be a good idea for enemy casters in Next to take a 4e approach. Don't give them a full suite of magic that a caster of their level. Unless you like the evil wizard dropping 3 Ice Storms and 3 Fireballs and the players praying they can gut him before they become frostbunt smears.

Giving enemy casters a full daily allotment of spells also assumes both they have not cast any today, and that they know they are going to die this fight. Presumably they often think they are going to live to cast more spells that day. In this way the 4e models fighting a class level foe better than just putting an off the shelf PC on the table.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Sounds like that's being taken into account -- what matters in CR is what the enemy is actually capable of. So someone who can spam big spells or multiple attacks is going to have a higher CR than someone limited to encounter effects or whatnot, since they'll be a bigger challenge in the fight.

Or to put it in explicit terms: class levels and powers are maily for PC's, CR is for NPC's, and the two don't have to be the same thing.

I'm not totally happy with the answer for #2, if only because it seems to kind of dodge the question. A "challenging" encounter is of a higher CR, of course, but what makes an encounter challenging is different from what makes a monster a good "solo" (namely, action economy).

It's also interesting that the CR assumes 4-on-1 fights. Which means that the CR of a kobold is the CR of 4 people wailing on it at once. But if you add a bucket o' kobolds, that encounter's overall CR presumably changes...?

I also like that XP and CR are separated from each other, measuring two different things. That's curious!

 

[Blackbrrd]

It’s also worth noting that, because you use the monsters’ XP value, not their CR, when gauging the difficulty of encounters and adventures, the actual CR value is of little significance beyond being a relative gauge of power among all monsters.

When the XP value is what you use to check how badass a monster is when creating encounters, why bother with CR at all?

 

[Klaus]

When the XP value is what you use to check how badass a monster is when creating encounters, why bother with CR at all?

Seems like a mix of the 3e and 4e approach. This is pure conjecture, but let's make up some numbers to wrap our heads around them:

(THIS IS ALL MADE UP!)

Kobold: Level 1 (1 Hit Die), CR 1/8 (8 can challenge a 1st level party of four), XP 15 each.
Orc: Level 2 (2 Hit Dice), CR 1/2 (2 can challenge a 1st level party of four), XP 35 each.
Pixie: Level 3 (3 Hit Dice), CR 5 (1 can challende a 5th level party of four), XP 200.
Red Dragon, Adult: Level 12 (12 Hit Dice), CR 10 (1 can challenge a 10th level party of four), XP 3000.

So level (or Hit Dice) becomes a measure of overall toughness, while CR measures not only that, but the various abilities that the creature can bring to bear in an encounter (such as action economy stuff, [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION] ). A pixie may not be super tough, but between invisibility, sleep arrows and magic resistance, it'd be quite challenging for an average party.

 

[Ruzak]

When the XP value is what you use to check how badass a monster is when creating encounters, why bother with CR at all?

I can see two ways this works.
1 - There is a one-to-one mapping from CR to XP. What XP does is them replace the 3e system for dealing with multiple lower CR bad guys. This is useful, but not anything interesting. Everyone is a solo at low level and a mook later on.
2 - Different bad guys of the same CR have different XP, as in 4e. XP then tells you if this guy can handle multiple PCs by itself. This differentiates a solo from a mook at each CR.

The 4 to 1 comment makes this sounds like the standard ratio at equal CR, and so leans toward #1 above.

 

[Blackbrrd]

I can see two ways this works.
1 - There is a one-to-one mapping from CR to XP. What XP does is them replace the 3e system for dealing with multiple lower CR bad guys. This is useful, but not anything interesting. Everyone is a solo at low level and a mook later on.
2 - Different bad guys of the same CR have different XP, as in 4e. XP then tells you if this guy can handle multiple PCs by itself. This differentiates a solo from a mook at each CR.

The 4 to 1 comment makes this sounds like the standard ratio at equal CR, and so leans toward #1 above.

There won't be any 1:1 mapping between CR and XP, because as they stated:

the actual CR value is of little significance beyond being a relative gauge of power among all monsters.

In other words, you can't make an appropriate challenge by adding the CR of the monsters together (except maybe when CR = Character level). You need to add the xp together. If that's the case, comparing xp instead of cr is a much more accurate gauge and could be used both when you want to compare the monsters and when you create encounters, not just when you want to compare monsters.

I am assuming that xp compared to CR scales about as fast as the character power. In other words:
Let's say

• a CR 1 monster gives 10 xp
• a level 2 character is about 50% stronger than a level 1 character,

then a CR2 monster gives 50% more xp, or 15 xp.

If you want to create an encounter for 4 level 2 characters, you check a chart that says the xp budget per character is 60. You could then create an encounter with 2x15xp mobs and 3x10xp mobs for a total of 60xp. If you looked at the CR, this just doesn't add up, which is why they don't want to use CR for creating encounters.

 

[I'm A Banana]

You might think of the purpose of CR to provide a quicker, easier guideline than XP when you're scanning the statblock.

Like, if a monster is worth 6,000 XP, what level do I pitch it at the PCs? Is it OK for 5th level? For 10th? CR gives you that estimation.

 

[Blackbrrd]

You might think of the purpose of CR to provide a quicker, easier guideline than XP when you're scanning the statblock.

Like, if a monster is worth 6,000 XP, what level do I pitch it at the PCs? Is it OK for 5th level? For 10th? CR gives you that estimation.

I think you are right here, but with the much wider level of monsters you can use in 5e (due to bounded accuracy), the CR just doesn't tell that much, and it gets outright confusing at low levels when a CR2 monster looks twice as tough as a CR1 monster (look, the CR is double!), and completely useless when creating encounters with mixed xp/cr monsters.