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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
DM's, what's your experience with suggested Challenge Ratings?
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<blockquote data-quote="Flamestrike" data-source="post: 7067531" data-attributes="member: 6788736"><p>Ignore what most people have said in this thread.</p><p></p><p>CR has very little to do with <strong>encounter</strong> difficulty. It's simply a rough approximation of the average difficulty of particular individual monster.</p><p></p><p>A single CR 5 monster against a party of five fifth level player characters is an <em>easy</em> encounter. The player characters are expected to steamroll it inside of a round or two with little to no resource expenditure and zero risk.</p><p></p><p>To build an encounter you need a combination of monsters of multiple different CRs, or all of the same CR. The only time a solo creature really works is if the CR is substantially higher than that player characters level or it is legendary.</p><p></p><p>Also note when designing encounters <u>the challenge of the encounter isnt the encounter itself</u>. It's the challenge that that encounter presents in the context of the longer adventuring day.</p><p></p><p>A fully rested party is far more dangerous than a party that is out of resources. A party that is forced to hold back on its resource expenditure is not as powerful as one that can afford to nova every single encounter. Killing one dragon a day is hard. Killing one Dragon every hour of the day for the whole day is nearly impossible.</p><p></p><p>The dungeon Master's guide recommends approximately 6 to 8 encounters in between long rests and approximately 2 to 3 short rests given during that time. I personally work off a ratio of around 5 to 6 encounters per adventuring day and giving around two short rests during that day. I stick to this ratio for about 50% of the adventuring days i handout to my player characters.</p><p></p><p>For shorter adventuring days I will increase the difficulty of the encounters. Occasionally I throw in an even longer one with either more or fewer short rests.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Flamestrike, post: 7067531, member: 6788736"] Ignore what most people have said in this thread. CR has very little to do with [B]encounter[/B] difficulty. It's simply a rough approximation of the average difficulty of particular individual monster. A single CR 5 monster against a party of five fifth level player characters is an [I]easy[/I] encounter. The player characters are expected to steamroll it inside of a round or two with little to no resource expenditure and zero risk. To build an encounter you need a combination of monsters of multiple different CRs, or all of the same CR. The only time a solo creature really works is if the CR is substantially higher than that player characters level or it is legendary. Also note when designing encounters [U]the challenge of the encounter isnt the encounter itself[/U]. It's the challenge that that encounter presents in the context of the longer adventuring day. A fully rested party is far more dangerous than a party that is out of resources. A party that is forced to hold back on its resource expenditure is not as powerful as one that can afford to nova every single encounter. Killing one dragon a day is hard. Killing one Dragon every hour of the day for the whole day is nearly impossible. The dungeon Master's guide recommends approximately 6 to 8 encounters in between long rests and approximately 2 to 3 short rests given during that time. I personally work off a ratio of around 5 to 6 encounters per adventuring day and giving around two short rests during that day. I stick to this ratio for about 50% of the adventuring days i handout to my player characters. For shorter adventuring days I will increase the difficulty of the encounters. Occasionally I throw in an even longer one with either more or fewer short rests. [/QUOTE]
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DM's, what's your experience with suggested Challenge Ratings?
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