evilbob
Explorer
This is a good point, too. "CR 2" seems almost like an average for these creatures; if you get the drop on them and can fight at range, they're like CR 1/8. If you don't, or have to fight in cramped quarters, they're like CR 4.
D&D 5E do CRs seem a bit arbitrary?
Manbearcat
Legend
I think the analogy maps well enough from an engineering perspective.
Speaking of CR in 3.x and 5e, one of the primary culprits is limited use abilities of which access is balanced over the course of the adventuring day (for PCs). When these limited use abilities are then granted to creatures whose totality of existence is measured in rounds (maybe 3, +/- 1) rather than encounters/day, things are bound to go pear-shaped when they are deployed. Further, the embedded considerations of preparing and managing loadout (for an NPC spellcaster) becomes another problem because the need for versatility and preparedness/endurance over the course of an adventuring day (and its potentially myriad variety of challenges) is rendered null when the action economy of your entire existence is 3-4 (standard) actions.
Then, of course, you have the other problems outlined above; creatures of such extremely narrow fields of potency. If they're deployed by the GM under circumstance x, they're deadly....while if they're deployed under circumstance y/the party is capable of implementing Monster Neutering Strategic Protocol 0013, they're curbstomp material.
It doesn't have to work this way. You can have awesome monsters/NPCs, with deep variance in theme and mode of operation, that carry a predictable (GM-side) level of challenge.
Celebrim
Legend
It is a maxim of military science that weapons and terrain determine tactics. If one is pitted against certain weapons or against certain terrain, then one will have a more difficult time in the battle. Conversely, if one dictates the terrain so that it favors the weapons one has, then one will have an easier time in the battle.
The problem with the CR system is that it is trying to base tactics on the weapon only with no consideration of the situation or terrain of the encounter.
A gelatinous cube is either an easy or a lethal encounter, depending on whether or not the gelatinous cube (or more to the point, the DM) dictates the terms of the encounter. If the cube slides into a room with no exits behind the PC's, and achieves surprise, you are looking at a potential TPK. If the cube is discerned sliding down a corridor toward the PC's, and the PC's have room to kite the creature then its a trivial application of missile weapons to wipe it out.
That has always been true. Since the days of 1e, RBDM's have altered the way they threw monsters at PC's as the PC's went up in level to bring the challenge despite the PC's greater prowess.
The problem with the CR system is that it is trying to base tactics on the weapon only with no consideration of the situation or terrain of the encounter.
A gelatinous cube is either an easy or a lethal encounter, depending on whether or not the gelatinous cube (or more to the point, the DM) dictates the terms of the encounter. If the cube slides into a room with no exits behind the PC's, and achieves surprise, you are looking at a potential TPK. If the cube is discerned sliding down a corridor toward the PC's, and the PC's have room to kite the creature then its a trivial application of missile weapons to wipe it out.
That has always been true. Since the days of 1e, RBDM's have altered the way they threw monsters at PC's as the PC's went up in level to bring the challenge despite the PC's greater prowess.
Celebrim
Legend
I beg to differ, and I offer the following as an example:
How dangerous is a double HD minotaur with a battle axe +1
...that is trapped in the bottom of a pit.
How much XP should you award for defeating an adult blue dragon....
that is bound and helpless?
Manbearcat
Legend
It looks like we might be talking about something a wee bit different. I mean, we both know that in AD&D, Gygax expressed that if the PCs have an overwhelming advantage or the "threat" poses no risk (such as you appear to be alluding to in the two situations you have above), the players earn no group xp as they have overcome nothing. If the PC's skilled play actually led to the trapped minotaur or the bound and helpless adult blue dragon, they would earn the full xp.
Further, if the GM has framed the situation thusly (the PCs stumbled upon the encounters as is, thus no skilled play led to the scenario), then combat isn't the point of the encounter. Something else must be going on. As such, any analogue to CR, encounter budget/xp, etc isn't necessary.
Again, CR becomes unwieldy (when combat balance and risk adjudication are of import) in scenarios where "extra-scene" vectors (eg (1) strategic play and/or power plays or (2) the very nature of certain NPC resource scheduling and/or narrow utility and how they interact with the combat resolution mechanics) severely impact intra-scene dynamics. The evaluation of general NPC potency (relative to some basic unit - eg 1 PC) becomes much more reliable when the impact of 1 is (impactful but) comparably muted (eg gain 1d6 asset die to a dice pool that involves 8 dice vs 8 dice) and 2 is relatively bounded and/or NPC resource scheduling is predicated on the encounter as the primary locus of conflict (as the encounter, vs the adventuring day/campaign, is the only relevance they will, usually, have...thus resources will be balanced for it).
Celebrim
Legend
Not really. I offered up an extreme example knowing that the fact that if a threat represented no challenge, it would be well known that no XP is earned.
But I think it's less well appreciated that for any given creature, there is a continuum of challenge which depends on the environment in which the creature is encountered - and this includes situations where sans the creature, the environment itself wouldn't represent a hazard at all.
Consider the case of a dire tiger encountered in a gladiatorial arena. A very large portion of the potential threat of a dire tiger is neutralized, and the encounter is turned into a very predictable slugfest between the PC(s) and a brute low AC monster where you can do a calculation like, "Tiger does average X damage per turn. Party does average Y damager per turn. How many rounds pass before the tiger drops a party member, or the party drops the tiger?"
But consider the case of the same beast encountered in a vast tall grass pampas of thick grass 9-14' tall with a muddy mire and shallow pools beneath it.
Suddenly things like low-light vision, +11 bonus to hide in favored terrain, +11 bonus to move silently, and scent become huge factors in the monster's challenge rating. In particular, a RBDM will have such cats stalk the party, attack at night, with the intention of surprising the party when they are trying to camp and killing the character on watch or as they break camp (while the cleric/wizard is preparing spells, for example). The 100% concealment past 5' completely counters missile weapons and many magic spells. Lone characters could be quickly overwhelmed by the tiger's pounce (perhaps 36 damage on the first round) and decent chance of surprise. The +24 grapple bonuses plus improved grab and enough strength to carry a PC as a light burden, means that a cat can move the grapple and run away with a victim (even one not yet unconscious) forcing the party to try to chase in a situation where the cat's broad paws might incur no movement penalty while the party itself is forced to treat everything as difficult terrain. The cleric and fighter in their heavy armor might be useless while the tiger is 'running away' with another character in its mouth. After all, the cat probably isn't interested in fighting to the death. It's intending to jump one target and go.
Imagine 4 encounters of this sort in quick succession, attacking isolated members of the party. Four encounters per day is fair, right?
But if the same party is flying on magic carpets over that pampas? Now, the encounter if it occurs at all is again trivial.
It seems like this is confusing CR and encounter difficulty. They are two different things. The encounter difficulty guidelines in the DMG talk about how advantages to one side or another because of environmental and other factors skew encounter difficulty. The CR of the monster does not change. The difficulty of the encounter does. Night encounters against specialized monsters are more difficult than day encounters against the same monster. The monster didn't change; the difficulty changed. 4 encounters against isolated party members would need to be looked at in terms of difficulty for the isolated party member, not against the whole group. The magic carpets once again change the encounter, not the monster.
CR is a difficulty indicator, but it is a difficulty indicator taken in isolation. When all of these extra factors come in, that adjusts the difficulty of the encounter, not the monster. This is not a problem of CR. CR is tied to an xp budget building block for encounter difficulty, as well as a rough indicator of deadliness to the party, where going too high above a party's level can result in quick death from massive damage or abilities that the party is not ready to overcome. Adjudicating encounter difficulty is separate from the CR of the monster. It involves adding up those building blocks and then altering the difficulty based on what is going on in the encounter.
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Celebrim
Legend
That is probably true in the intention of the rules, but what I'm saying is that I don't think the designers did divorce monsters from the encounter cleanly. I'm not surprised, because I don't think there is no such thing as how difficult a monster is on its own, because difficulty is always the intersection of monster and environment. Keep clearly in mind what I'm objecting to:
"You can have awesome monsters/NPCs...that carry a predictable (GM-side) level of challenge."
Once you bring the GM into the equation, you no longer can claim the monster presents a predictable challenge.
If you really want to treat the difficulty of the monster as something that is constant irrespective of the encounter situation, then it would be better to make the CR of something like a gelatinous cube taken in isolation ought to be like 3 or 4 in terms of the XP budget, note specifically what environment the monster is specialized to excel in, and then make sure your notes regarding the encounter difficulty indicate that you should lower overall estimated encounter difficulty if monsters are used outside their environment. After all, the gelatinous cube is a classic case of a monster which is likely to cause a quick death from high damage bursts and has abilities low level parties are probably not ready to overcome, but which - if not placed in a particularly advantageous situation - is rendered far more trivial than its stats would indicate.
Putting it another way, the cube is a very dangerous monster with a CR that appears to have been arbitrarily reduced a few steps based on assumptions about the likely environment be disadvantageous to it in some way (normally, the PC's having room to kite a slow moving monster and possess missile weapons). But this apparent change in the CR by the designer indicates that the CR wasn't actually taken in isolation as solely an indication of the deadliness of the monsters. Instead, the designer imagined the monster in some environment and estimated difficulty on that basis. But what is an 'average' environment anyway? Was the same environment used for each monster? What was the imagined environment.
I'm suggesting that part of the apparent range of difficulty attached to the same CR is assumptions made about environment that were factored into CR.
evilbob
Explorer
Yeah, it's almost like we need a "z axis" to determine how difficult a monster could be, given certain external factors. For example, a cave bear is a cave bear. You can generally look at that creature and know what to expect from the stat block, and CR should be fairly accurate given nearly any sort of "typical" circumstance (finding one asleep or at the bottom of a pit notwithstanding). On the other hand, the gelatinous cube is either trivial or deadly-up-to-TPK, depending on the environment. It's almost like you could use a color-coded system on top of CR; something like green for "fairly straightforward," yellow for "can be more dangerous given an ideal setup or if your party lacks a key ability," and red for "given a relatively common setup or without a specific type of counter this monster can be far more deadly than its CR might indicate."
Of course, the more you try to codify this stuff, the more confusing it gets, the more words you have to dedicate to explaining it, and the cost of everything gets higher - possibly without much gain, since most experienced DMs would likely intuit this stuff anyway.
I am not so sure about that. I have reverse engineered several of the MM monsters to better understand how some of the more obscure CR calculations are interpreted (I'm looking at you spellcasting). The Gelatinous Cube seems to come by its CR 2 honestly.
HP of 84 sets it at defensive CR of 1. It expects an AC of 13. AC of 6 lowers the defensive CR 3 steps to 1/8.
Average DPR based on DMG guidelines for creatures that swallow is 1 swallow and 2 rounds acid damage. The pseudopod could be used as well in the second and third round.
Round 1: 10 damage from Engulf
Round 2: 10 damage from psuedopod and 21 from engulf
Round 3: 10 damage from psuedopod and 21 from engulf
Average DPR: 24
DPR of 24 sets it at offensive CR of 3. It expects an attack bonus of +4 and gets that, so there is no change in offensive CR.
Average CR is 1.5625 which rounds up to 2.
I think the CR is really a 2 (and a weak 2 at that), but put it in a set of dark, clean 10 foot wide corridors against a level 2 party and watch out as they bumble into it. My personal favorite was putting it at the bottom of a 30 foot drop 10 feet across that was spanned by boards that had dry rot. It then moves off to enjoy its meal.
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