D&D 5E do CRs seem a bit arbitrary?

[Sunseeker]

I haven't found that to be the case. I like the section on Giants, but other than that, this MM is pretty meh when it comes to habits/ecology/motivations.

Pop quiz: ghouls are lurking in the sewers. What spoor can the PCs find to clue them in to the nature of the threat, and what weaknesses can the PCs exploit once they do?

I can make something up here, but the MM doesn't actually have anything useful for me. It doesn't even tell me what the organizational structure of ghouls is, in the absence of a ghast. There's plenty of info if I just want to plop the ghouls onto a combat grid and have at it, and some backstory around how the race was created, but not much about how ghouls actually live or behave.

I don't think anyone besides you really cares about the lifestyle habits of ghouls. I say this for two reasons:
1: ghouls are a fairly basic creature, putting too much on them limits their use (which is fine for specific creatures).
2: ghouls are a very common creature in real-world mythology and have a wide variety of methods of creation, motivations and reasons for unliving and it is rather unnecessary to burden the MM entry with lore because most people are going to have their own ideas on how ghouls came to be and how they act in their own games.

Personally, I feel the section on Ghouls is over the top. Undead servants of some undead elf of some evil deity? And I think it is fairly clear what a ghoul lives for and how they behave in the prefacing section to that backstory.

Now if we're talking something specific or something unique, it's great to have lore, because people are going to be largely unfamiliar with those things and not know how to integrate them into the game.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

While the Banshee is a great example of a lower CR monster that stays relevant at higher levels, I think some of the other parts of this argument do not hold up very well.

The first part is that fighters are being looked at in isolation. The relevant improvement a fighter gets in levels 6,7, and 8 is some combination of 4 ASI or 2 feats. Unless Con ASI was chosen, the Con save is not getting better. However parties are usually somewhat diverse. Barbarians get advantage on initiative. Clerics will generally get better at turn undead. Moon druid's beast strikes are magical. Monks' attacks are magical. Paladins grant the aura of protection. Sorcerer's can have elemental affinity or Bend Luck. Fiend Pact Warlocks get Dark One's Own Luck. Much of this can be a moot point though as silence is a 2nd level spell and daylight is a 3rd level spell. Both of these are available by the time the PCs are 5th level, rendering the banshee fairly powerless. And full spell casters get 4th level spells.

The second part is that no 8th level party handles twice as much of anything as well as they handled it at 5th level. A medium encounter of CR 2 creatures for a fifth level party is 3. A medium encounter of CR2 creatures for a 8th level party is 4. A 8th level party can only handle 1 more CR2 creature than a 5th level party for encounter difficulty up to medium. Hard and Deadly are 2 more CR 2 creatures, but at that point we are taking about 6 and 8 CR 2 creatures for the 8th level party.

The fighter does not necessarily have to be better at dealing with the banshee, but the party most likely will be better at dealing with the Banshee.

1.) There's a reason I say "twice as much Banshee" instead of "twice as many Banshee"--because I wanted to avoid exactly the argument you're making right now. Twice as many Banshees could be anywhere from 2x (going from 3 to 6 Banshees) to 4x (going from 1 to 2 Banshees with a solo character) the XP due to quantity multipliers. So if you're saying "they aren't expected to handle twice as many Banshees" I say "I agree!", for most difficulty levels and party compositions. I never claimed otherwise.

2.) Note that Daylight doesn't help against Banshees at all. It doesn't produce sunlight at all, just a bright light. You need the Sunbeam spell, which is much higher-level and shorter-duration. This is a pet peeve of mine because there's a player in my peer group who keeps trying to use Daylight as a long-term sunlight substitute.

3.) So when you say, "I think some of the other parts of this argument do not hold up very well," here's my key claim:

The real difficulty factor for Banshees has very little to do with PC level. It is, "Is the Banshee in sunlight?", because in sunlight her wail doesn't function and she is just a double-strength zombie. It is in this sense that I claim that 5E is robust and CR can be largely ignored: due to Bounded Accuracy, player smarts (research/intel/tactics) tends to dominate the relatively minor bonuses that come from PC level. Banshees are hard when you meet them in the dark, and easy when you meet them in sunlight. No CR needed, unless you are using it as a relatively arbitrary metric for handing out XP gains.

If you're claiming that 5th to 8th is a "relatively minor bonus" against a Banshee only specifically for fighters, and that player smarts does not dominate class abilities against Banshees, then we've got ourselves a disagreement. If you're just claiming that an all-fighter group is a simplistic and somewhat extreme example chosen for the sake of illustration, then I would fully agree. It's the same reason I chose specifically the 5 to 8 spread: the effect is more obvious there, although really it's present at almost every level including 19 to 20. Obvious effects make better illustrations.

 

[Tormyr]

1.) There's a reason I say "twice as much Banshee" instead of "twice as many Banshee"--because I wanted to avoid exactly the argument you're making right now. Twice as many Banshees could be anywhere from 2x (going from 3 to 6 Banshees) to 4x (going from 1 to 2 Banshees with a solo character) the XP due to quantity multipliers. So if you're saying "they aren't expected to handle twice as many Banshees" I say "I agree!", for most difficulty levels and party compositions. I never claimed otherwise.

2.) Note that Daylight doesn't help against Banshees at all. It doesn't produce sunlight at all, just a bright light. You need the Sunbeam spell, which is much higher-level and shorter-duration. This is a pet peeve of mine because there's a player in my peer group who keeps trying to use Daylight as a long-term sunlight substitute.

3.) So when you say, "I think some of the other parts of this argument do not hold up very well," here's my key claim:



If you're claiming that 5th to 8th is a "relatively minor bonus" against a Banshee only specifically for fighters, and that player smarts does not dominate class abilities against Banshees, then we've got ourselves a disagreement. If you're just claiming that an all-fighter group is a simplistic and somewhat extreme example chosen for the sake of illustration, then I would fully agree. It's the same reason I chose specifically the 5 to 8 spread: the effect is more obvious there, although really it's present at almost every level including 19 to 20. Obvious effects make better illustrations.

I am interested in this.

1. How do you define twice as much of a creature then? (Sorry, went back and found the answer to my question. You had mentioned XP worth of banshees) Double the encounter XP is roughly the same encounter difficulty for the 8th level party over the 5th level party. Do I think a 8th level party will have the same difficulty as a 5th level party if they both have the same encounter difficulty worth of banshees (i.e. 1 for 5th and 2 for 8th or 2 for 5th and 3 for 8th)? Absolutely. That is the point of encounter difficulty, of which CR, and the resulting XP, is a building block. The party should have the same number of casualties for the same encounter difficulty.

2. I think that regardless of player smarts, metagaming, knowledge checks, etc. That the average 8th level party will have a better improvement over banshees than the 5th level party compared to an 8th level fighter's improvement over the 5th level fighter. Natural attacks are magical, saving throws improve, spell power increases, earlier initiative, more damage, etc. This is what allows the 8th level party to handle twice as much banshee as the 5th level party and expect the same results. But the 8th level party will do better than the 5th level party against the same number of banshees.

3. While the biggest factor in a banshee fight is whether there is daylight, that is divorced from CR. Per the DMG, environmental factors that benefit one side over the other alter encounter difficulty one way or the other. It is not a weakness of CR. It is a strength of encounter building to know how the environmental factors apply or that the PCs know how to deal with the creature to target its weaknesses.

An interesting thing I noticed. While the Banshee can take a creature to 0 hp, the creature is stable. An affected creature would need to take more damage before needing to start death saving throws. The description of wail says that the creature is taken to 0hp, but that is it. Compare that to suffocating (PHB 183) that says the creature is taken to 0 hp and is dying.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Okay, we've got a genuine disagreement then. You think average mixed party will improve as much against Banshees by going from 5th to 8th as the Banshees do from getting more Banshees (twice as much XP, whatever that works out to be). I on the other hand look at the factors you list (initiative increase, possible spell DC boost from ASI, possible saving throw boost from ASI) and see them as negligible factors (+10%-25% maybe) compared to the 100% increase in Banshee. Since we're both interested in this question, do you want to collaborate on a scenario to test this?

Dropping to 0 HP doesn't stabilize you except in the rare case where the attack says you are automatically stable. (E.g. nonlethal attacks on page 198 of PHB, "the creature falls unconscious and is stable," emphasis added.) Otherwise page 197 of the PHB dictates that you must make death checks at the start of each of your turns. Besides, it's a Banshee's death wail. If it autostabilized you it would be a stun wail, and then Banshees wouldn't be so famous.

3. While the biggest factor in a banshee fight is whether there is daylight, that is divorced from CR. Per the DMG, environmental factors that benefit one side over the other alter encounter difficulty one way or the other. It is not a weakness of CR. It is a strength of encounter building to know how the environmental factors apply or that the PCs know how to deal with the creature to target its weaknesses.

You're conflating two of my arguments:

1.) CR is kind of broken, since mathematically it's essentially just a measure of the 3/2 power of DPR and HP, meaning that anything which is dangerous for something other than DR won't be measure correctly by it.
2.) CR is largely ignorable in 5E, since tactics and situation tend to dominate.

Sunlight is about factor #2, and I agree with you that that is divorced from CR and is part of encounter difficulty. The Banshee's wail and visage are more about #1.

CR is so bad in 5E that you're IMO better off mostly ignoring it and just focusing on environmental factors and raw monster abilities. The encounter tables will give you a precise number N of Banshees whom the 5 8th level PCs can face in the crypts and still defeat. (N=4, 4 Banshees is a Hard fight for them.) The encounter tables will also tell you that N+1 Banshees is Deadly in the Crypts, but Hard in the sunlight above the crypts (reduce difficulty by 1 step for favorable environment). My judgment tells me that one of both of these ratings is wrong. The one in sunlight is definitely wrong (it's more like fighting 10 zombies than 5 Banshees, and even 22 zombies would steal be an Easy fight even by encounter building rules). The one in the crypts is probably wrong, possible TPK, but it's difficult to evaluate in isolation except to say that even (or especially!) a tactically-smart party would far rather face 9 Ogres in the crypts below the city (10,125 XP) than 4 Banshees (8,800 XP). The Banshees are worse. If that's non-obvious to anyone I would gladly run the encounter for you.

 

[Tormyr]

Okay, we've got a genuine disagreement then. You think average mixed party will improve as much against Banshees by going from 5th to 8th as the Banshees do from getting more Banshees (twice as much XP, whatever that works out to be). I on the other hand look at the factors you list (initiative increase, possible spell DC boost from ASI, possible saving throw boost from ASI) and see them as negligible factors (+10%-25% maybe) compared to the 100% increase in Banshee. Since we're both interested in this question, do you want to collaborate on a scenario to test this?

*snip*

CR is so bad in 5E that you're IMO better off mostly ignoring it and just focusing on environmental factors and raw monster abilities. The encounter tables will give you a precise number N of Banshees whom the 5 8th level PCs can face in the crypts and still defeat. (N=4, 4 Banshees is a Hard fight for them.) The encounter tables will also tell you that N+1 Banshees is Deadly in the Crypts, but Hard in the sunlight above the crypts (reduce difficulty by 1 step for favorable environment). My judgment tells me that one of both of these ratings is wrong. The one in sunlight is definitely wrong (it's more like fighting 10 zombies than 5 Banshees, and even 22 zombies would steal be an Easy fight even by encounter building rules). The one in the crypts is probably wrong, possible TPK, but it's difficult to evaluate in isolation except to say that even (or [/COLOR]especially!) a tactically-smart party would far rather face 9 Ogres in the crypts below the city (10,125 XP) than 4 Banshees (8,800 XP). The Banshees are worse. If that's non-obvious to anyone I would gladly run the encounter for you.

So I ran a couple of encounters with a "standard" 4 character party. I used the 5th level melee fighter, life cleric, evocation wizard, and rogue. The 5th level party had 2 banshees for a hard encounter. For the 8th level party, I bumped the primary stat to maximum. The fighter's extra ASI was split between Con and Wis which bumped both those stats. The 8th level party had hard encounters vs. 3 banshees. I ran 3 encounters, 1 at 5th and 2 at 8th. I did not really have time to do more. I used the same initiative, which was rolled at the beginning, for every encounter. The initiative was B1 C W B2 R F (B3). The one thing I added to the initial level 1 equipment was a potion of healing to pop people up when they went to 0 hp. The encounters started assumed everyone could reach someone to attack on the first turn.

The encounter at fifth was a long, drawn out affair. The initial wail took out everyone except the Wizard (!?). The wizard made note of where the cleric was, cast fog cloud, and sneaked over to the cleric. The second banshee came to the edge of the fog cloud and let out a wail. The wizard saved again. The first banshee was failed an Intelligence (Investigation) check to find the wizard in the cloud. The wizard gave a potion to the cleric, and a couple more failed Intelligence (Investigation) checks later, the cleric used preserve life to get everyone back on their feet. The wizard dropped the fog cloud and gave the fighter magic weapon (although it should have been give to the rogue in retrospect). Several rounds later, the banshees were dead, and the party was able to rest and heal from low hp. This encounter may have been a TPK if the third Banshee was in play.

The first encounter at 8th level was a slaughter. The first two banshees wiped everyone out with their wails in the first round, but the banshees were unable to hit anyone for a couple rounds even with advantage. The wizard eventually rolled a 20 on a death saving throw, noted where the rogue was, cast fog cloud, and crept over to the rogue. The banshees failed intelligence investigation checks to find them. The cleric and fighter had bled out. The rogue rolled a 20 on a death saving throw as the wizard got there, and the wizard used dimension door to get them out of the area. The third banshee was absolutely useless. If this had been a 5th level party, it would have been a TPK at 5th level, but the 4th level spell saved two of the party.

The second 8th level encounter was a cakewalk. The cleric survived the initial wail and cast silence over the party. The party hunkered down, protected the cleric, turned some of the banshees, and fought them one at a time.

A few things I noticed not all of which are a difference between the 5th and 8th level party:
* Like most special abilities or surprise, this is highly dependent on initiative as to whether the party has a good chance at survival.
* The extra ASI helped with damage, saving throws, and spell DCs.
* The cleric is a pivotal piece in this encounter. Preserve Life, Turn Undead, and silence are all game changers in this sort of encounter. At 6th level, the cleric gets the second channel divinity which helps make sure that no one dies. Preserve Life can pull the whole group off the floor, and Turn Undead can make it so the party can focus on one banshee at a time.
* Horrifying Visage is not that big of a deal. An affected creature does not have to run away and still has a reasonable chance to hit even with disadvantage.
* The 4th level spells can save (some of) the party or at least make a big difference.
* The extra damage made a difference in the last encounter to overcoming the damage resistance of the banshees.
* magic weapon can make a big difference against the creatures that have weapon resistance if magic weapons are not in the party. The 8th level monk and moon druid would essentially be doing double damage compared to their 5th level versions. Shillelagh would also be very useful.
* Anyone who survives the wails is probably going to survive the whole encounter.

The first encounter encounter might have gone worse for the 8th level party. The first 8th level party encounter definitely went better than it would have for the 5th level party, and the last encounter was probably easier for the 8th level party because of more resource, but it might have been about the same. So from my limited look at 3 encounters, I would say that the 8th level party will do about as well as the 5th level party while fighting twice as much encounter xp of banshee as the 5th level party.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

In the interests of not quibbling about how you run your game ("In Scenario #1, when the Banshees failed to find the wizard, did they not find anyone at all?"/"Banshees didn't break the Silence or fall back to wait for it to run out?") I'll focus on the element common to all three of your scenarios: if the cleric goes down without casting Silence, the party loses. Rather than analyzing an anecdote, let's just examine the numbers. I don't have stats for your test parties so I've generated a little table (using exhaustive simulation) that you can simply use to look up your cleric's odds of getting off a Silence spell successfully before one of the Banshees wails him to death. Stats in parentheses are for 3 banshees, unparenthesized are for two banshees.

Dex 10 Con 10 Mean number of wails 1.203343 (1.811870) Survival rate 0.439249 (0.319372)
Dex 10 Con 12 Mean number of wails 1.203343 (1.811870) Survival rate 0.473660 (0.350690)
Dex 10 Con 14 Mean number of wails 1.203343 (1.811870) Survival rate 0.510311 (0.385692)
Dex 10 Con 16 Mean number of wails 1.203343 (1.811870) Survival rate 0.549201 (0.424659)
Dex 12 Con 10 Mean number of wails 1.104835 (1.661136) Survival rate 0.479432 (0.363342)
Dex 12 Con 12 Mean number of wails 1.104835 (1.661136) Survival rate 0.511940 (0.393717)
Dex 12 Con 14 Mean number of wails 1.104835 (1.661136) Survival rate 0.546425 (0.427419)
Dex 12 Con 16 Mean number of wails 1.104835 (1.661136) Survival rate 0.582887 (0.464686)
Dex 14 Con 10 Mean number of wails 1.000000 (1.500000) Survival rate 0.523158 (0.412632)
Dex 14 Con 12 Mean number of wails 1.000000 (1.500000) Survival rate 0.553487 (0.441678)
Dex 14 Con 14 Mean number of wails 1.000000 (1.500000) Survival rate 0.585526 (0.473684)
Dex 14 Con 16 Mean number of wails 1.000000 (1.500000) Survival rate 0.619276 (0.508849)
Dex 16 Con 10 Mean number of wails 0.895165 (1.338864) Survival rate 0.567494 (0.463891)
Dex 16 Con 12 Mean number of wails 0.895165 (1.338864) Survival rate 0.595547 (0.491352)
Dex 16 Con 14 Mean number of wails 0.895165 (1.338864) Survival rate 0.625052 (0.521415)
Dex 16 Con 16 Mean number of wails 0.895165 (1.338864) Survival rate 0.656009 (0.554238)

I was surprised to find that increasing the number of banshees only increase the deadliness by a small fraction, 15 to 30%-ish, as long as the cleric casts Silence immediately. In any case, if you have a middling cleric with Dx 12 and Con 14, adding a third Banshee increases the odds of immediate disaster (dead cleric) by 26%. In order to claim parity, the party needs offsetting advantages at 8th level which decrease the risk of disaster by a corresponding percentage (21%).

Edit: By the way, this table is a nice illustration of bounded accuracy and illustrate the "robust system" principle mentioned earlier. You can see that boosted stats are nice on the margins, but an extra +4 points of stats doesn't fundamentally alter the difficulty of an encounter. A 47% chance of TPK and a 55% chance of TPK aren't all that dissimilar from a experiential perspective: the banshee encounter will "feel like" about the same difficulty to this party whether the cleric is Dex 16 Con 16 or Dex 14 Con 14. Clearly 16 is objectively better, but if you need to use math to detect the advantage, you can probably still have lots of fun at 14.

 

[Tormyr]

In the interests of not quibbling about how you run your game ("In Scenario #1, when the Banshees failed to find the wizard, did they not find anyone at all?"/"Banshees didn't break the Silence or fall back to wait for it to run out?") I'll focus on the element common to all three of your scenarios: if the cleric goes down without casting Silence, the party loses. Rather than analyzing an anecdote, let's just examine the numbers. I don't have stats for your test parties so I've generated a little table (using exhaustive simulation) that you can simply use to look up your cleric's odds of getting off a Silence spell successfully before one of the Banshees wails him to death. Stats in parentheses are for 3 banshees, unparenthesized are for two banshees.

Dex 10 Con 10 Mean number of wails 1.203343 (1.811870) Survival rate 0.439249 (0.319372)
Dex 10 Con 12 Mean number of wails 1.203343 (1.811870) Survival rate 0.473660 (0.350690)
Dex 10 Con 14 Mean number of wails 1.203343 (1.811870) Survival rate 0.510311 (0.385692)
Dex 10 Con 16 Mean number of wails 1.203343 (1.811870) Survival rate 0.549201 (0.424659)
Dex 12 Con 10 Mean number of wails 1.104835 (1.661136) Survival rate 0.479432 (0.363342)
Dex 12 Con 12 Mean number of wails 1.104835 (1.661136) Survival rate 0.511940 (0.393717)
Dex 12 Con 14 Mean number of wails 1.104835 (1.661136) Survival rate 0.546425 (0.427419)
Dex 12 Con 16 Mean number of wails 1.104835 (1.661136) Survival rate 0.582887 (0.464686)
Dex 14 Con 10 Mean number of wails 1.000000 (1.500000) Survival rate 0.523158 (0.412632)
Dex 14 Con 12 Mean number of wails 1.000000 (1.500000) Survival rate 0.553487 (0.441678)
Dex 14 Con 14 Mean number of wails 1.000000 (1.500000) Survival rate 0.585526 (0.473684)
Dex 14 Con 16 Mean number of wails 1.000000 (1.500000) Survival rate 0.619276 (0.508849)
Dex 16 Con 10 Mean number of wails 0.895165 (1.338864) Survival rate 0.567494 (0.463891)
Dex 16 Con 12 Mean number of wails 0.895165 (1.338864) Survival rate 0.595547 (0.491352)
Dex 16 Con 14 Mean number of wails 0.895165 (1.338864) Survival rate 0.625052 (0.521415)
Dex 16 Con 16 Mean number of wails 0.895165 (1.338864) Survival rate 0.656009 (0.554238)

I was surprised to find that increasing the number of banshees only increase the deadliness by a small fraction, 15 to 30%-ish, as long as the cleric casts Silence immediately. In any case, if you have a middling cleric with Dx 12 and Con 14, adding a third Banshee increases the odds of immediate disaster (dead cleric) by 26%. In order to claim parity, the party needs offsetting advantages at 8th level which decrease the risk of disaster by a corresponding percentage (21%).

Edit: By the way, this table is a nice illustration of bounded accuracy and illustrate the "robust system" principle mentioned earlier. You can see that boosted stats are nice on the margins, but an extra +4 points of stats doesn't fundamentally alter the difficulty of an encounter. A 47% chance of TPK and a 55% chance of TPK aren't all that dissimilar from a experiential perspective: the banshee encounter will "feel like" about the same difficulty to this party whether the cleric is Dex 16 Con 16 or Dex 14 Con 14. Clearly 16 is objectively better, but if you need to use math to detect the advantage, you can probably still have lots of fun at 14.

Nice table, but I must be reading it wrong. Is the Survival rate a percentage? If so, I only read the difference between 2 and 3 banshees as 10-12% depending on stats (i.e. .656 to .554 for the Dex 16, Con 16). Or were you talking about the %difference in survivability from 2 to 3 banshees (i.e. the difference of .102 is 15% of .656 on the last line of the table)?

The banshees didn't find anyone because they were looking in a specific direction and failed DC 10 Intelligence Investigation rolls for 1 round. The wizard was found just before the cleric brought back the party, but the banshee missed its attack roll.

Banshees may be the meanest monster in the MM. A single one has a small chance of TPK a level 20 party. Even Intellect Devourers only target 1 creature at a time.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Nice table, but I must be reading it wrong. Is the Survival rate a percentage? If so, I only read the difference between 2 and 3 banshees as 10-12% depending on stats (i.e. .656 to .554 for the Dex 16, Con 16). Or were you talking about the %difference in survivability from 2 to 3 banshees (i.e. the difference of .102 is 15% of .656 on the last line of the table)?

The banshees didn't find anyone because they were looking in a specific direction and failed DC 10 Intelligence Investigation rolls for 1 round. The wizard was found just before the cleric brought back the party, but the banshee missed its attack roll.

Banshees may be the meanest monster in the MM. A single one has a small chance of TPK a level 20 party. Even Intellect Devourers only target 1 creature at a time.

Survival rate is a percentage expressed as a decimal, yes. And yes, I was referring to the ratio between two rates of non-TPK, not the raw difference. It's the only sensible way to talk about percentage deltas.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I haven't found that to be the case. I like the section on Giants, but other than that, this MM is pretty meh when it comes to habits/ecology/motivations.

Pop quiz: ghouls are lurking in the sewers. What spoor can the PCs find to clue them in to the nature of the threat, and what weaknesses can the PCs exploit once they do?

I can make something up here, but the MM doesn't actually have anything useful for me. It doesn't even tell me what the organizational structure of ghouls is, in the absence of a ghast.

Ignoring the latest MM, and just going by what the Ghoul has generally been like, they have no organizational structure. They're evil undead horrors driven by an overwhelming, insatiable, supernatural hunger. They sense something alive, they swarm it and devour it.

Spoor - stripped, cracked, and gnawed bones, both fresh and ancient, yet no other evidence of a natural carnivore.

Weaknesses - that unnatural hunger means ghouls can always be baited, and, you can throw in anything you care to from game lore or myth. From vulnerability to holy damage to being unable to cross a circle of powdered iron or enter hallowed ground, etc (though, really, many of those seem like they're bundled into Turn Undead and/or cleric/paladin spells).

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Weaknesses - that unnatural hunger means ghouls can always be baited.

I really like this one and am stealing it! May steal some of the others too but this one is fantastic. I can just see the wise old druid now: "the secret to fighting ghouls is to give them what they want. A ghoul can scarcely ignore a dead corpse for so much as a few seconds unless it's actively under attack, and they like pigs almost as much as human flesh, so bring a herd of pigs with you while ghoul hunting, kill a few when the ghouls get close, and then pick the ghouls off one at a time while the others are eating."