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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6561276" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>

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