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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5860072" data-attributes="member: 2067">So over in the thread about determining treasure and monsters, I was reading along, and I wanted to tease something out.See, it's kind of impossible to measure the "difficulty" of monsters in a vacuum. No generic CR or XP value is going to capture the true challenge of a monster. There's too many variables.For instance, quantity. A lone minion in 4e is probably not worth the XP the party gets for it, regardless of what level they are. A group of dozens and dozens of minions is probably worth a good deal MORE XP than the party gets for it.There's also class powers. In 3e, a party of rogues fighting a pairing of a golem and his zombie buddies is going to have a much bigger challenge than CR would indicate. Meanwhile, that same enemy group, if the party is fighters and clerics, would wipe the floor with the opposition. This isn't limited to combat, either. An investigation with a divination spell (or a sky-high Insight or Perception), or a social encounter with a charm effect (or a sky-high Diplomacy skill), or an exploration with characters who can either magically create food and protections, or who can reliably get it with great Endurance, Nature, or whatever. On the other side, an investigation with characters who all dumped Int, or a social encounter with characters who all dumped Cha, or an exploration with characters who all dumped Con. A group of angry wolves with a druid, or a group of angry wolves without a druid. Those are all remarkably different challenges. 4e probably approached the closest, but 4e's careful balance is loaded with assumptions that aren't necessarily palatable for the majority of D&D players. It's a good starting point, but it needs to be able to accommodate what people want out of the game, too.   So, given that it's hardly an exact science to determine individual monster threats, how do you give a DM guidelines? You need to give -- especially newbie DMs -- something to help them navigate the complexities of choosing challenges, and you need to give your designers some broad numbers that your monsters and skill DC's can sit in. Tell me how you think it should be done. I'm listening.Me?[sblock=idea mongering]I tend to think we might be looking at challenge too closely if we're determining the challenge for each individual monster. Perhaps if we're examining adventure-level design, we need to examine encounter-level challenges. Instead of just having "a wolf = 25 xp", we can have "a wolf encounter", complete with monsters, terrain, and guidelines, and give THAT a total target level. Then, we can hand out XP based on the level of the challenge as a whole.Maybe? Clearly, I'm early on in this thought process. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />[/sblock]You now!</blockquote>

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