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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MostlyDm" data-source="post: 6860198" data-attributes="member: 6788973">I mostly like the idea of giving spells to demons and dragons and other big scary monsters. Plenty of such variants are discussed explicitly in the MM... such as the Mind Flayer Arcanist. Precedent doesn't seem to increase the CR much... Because CR is very clearly just a baseline descriptor of damage/HP/attacks/defenses. It isn't trying to take into consideration tactical flexibility. I was getting at this earlier, though. They don't need to design every monster with a dozen answers when many parties only ask one question. If a low optimization/tactics party charges a bog standard dragon head-on and is challenged... Great! Does the dragon need fifteen spells for the DM to keep track of in this scenario? Probably not. If an optimized party or a party with advanced tactics faces a dragon that has fifteen spells and the flexibility to support advanced tactics... Awesome. They'll probably be challenged. By having CR entirely dependent on damage/survivability they actually have largely divorced advanced tactics from CR. Some monsters are already tactically interesting, some aren't. But it's trivially easy for low tactics DMs to avoid complex monsters. And it's trivially easy for high tactics DMs to add basic functions like...1) give them a spell list of the appropriate level. 2) take all of the monsters melee attacks and give them *identical* ranged attacks at whatever range you like. Seriously. Yeah you can give the Marilith longbows, and if that's not good enough then she can make 7 attacks per round with those bows.3) increase mobility via teleportation  or even just the equivalent of cunning action. Of these, only spells even have any *chance* of increasing CR, and only if the spell list can reliably increase damage, attack, or AC in a purely mathematical way, e.g. Shield of faith, or a spell that has skews higher on DPR than the normal attack pattern. In black and white, CR isn't trying to account for much tactical flexibility. That's probably a good thing, because by definition doing so is basically impossible. 3e and 4e certainly never  managed it, with 4e getting closest by dramatically flattening the field of available tactical options.  (That's not meant as a slight.)Not all monsters are equally interesting, tactically. I don't really understand why this means anything is broken.</blockquote>

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