Kraydak said:
Throughout 3e's existence, there have been innumerable threads by DMs complaining about players being overconfident because the CR system meant they could walk over every "fair" encounter. DMs that thought that the CR system was a cap on what you could through at the PCs. That was, of course, a gross misreading of the CR system. It is also *precisely* what it takes to cause "suicidal lemming" style action. People will play like suicidal lemmings only if it won't get them killed. It won't get them killed only if there is an agreement with the DM that all encounters will be relatively easy, and very *very* few will be actually resource draining (and those will come with enough warning that you can avoid them if the situation warrants).
If 4e is designed for suicidal lemming action, the CR misreading that plagued 3e is becomes official rules for 4e. As for whether that is a good thing or not, I'll let you reflect on the tone of the CR based player entitlement threads...
This reminds me of a thing I noticed in regards to "adversial" use of the CR system.
I remember that several modules my group played through contained custom-made monsters and NPCs whose CR just didn't make sense - they were noteably stronger (rarely weaker, but one tends to forget cakewalks monsters) then the CR indicated, and some NPCs were designed abusing the system.
For example, there was one adventure with Gargoyle like creatures. The monsters were pretty similar, except that they dealt more damage, had more hit points and a lower CR. This might just have been plain incompetence (never attribute to malice what could equally well be attributed to incompetence, right?), and since it was an earlier module, it probably was.
And then there was the adventure with the "Mogel Barbaren" (Cheater Barbarians), which were Barbarian1/Warrior1 with a CR of 1. Why? Because NPC level CR was level -1, so the Warrior level (by RAW) didn't count. Off course, these NPCs were intentionally designed to give them this single edge.
In the first case I will give the benefit of doubt, but in the second (and some others) I think the CR abuse/wrongness was intentional? But why do this?
I think the reason was an underlying problem with the CR system - the CR system is both used to determine the difficulty and "appropriateness" of an encounter, and to calculate gp and XP rewards. Both are useful tools. But the module designers in question probably didn't want to hand out too much XP and rewards, but still make challenging encounters. So they "cheated", and this one example of the failures of the underlying CR system.
I think both the 3.x CR system and the 4E equivalent of it are good ideas. Many other games suffer from the fact that you can only eyeball the "challenge" of any encounter, which makes it to likely to create unintentional cakewalks or TPKs. But combining this with the "advancement" reward also has pitfalls. Players might decide that since the DM is supposed to use "fair" encounters, that there are no risks for them. Module writers and DMs might decide to "cheat" in calculating their challenges to not give out more rewards then they want.
The solution against "module cheating" is to decoupling reward and challenge. In many cases, it's okay to have them coupled, but sometimes, it's not so.
The solution against metagaming players is to give them encounters that are actually too tough, BUT they still have a chance to escape. (And that's something save or die mechanics and the massive damage high level NPCs/Monsters - and their speeds relative to the PCs - makes difficult). And if players know that XP are not strongly linked with the #monsters they fight, they might stop seeing everything as a combat encounter they have to beat, too.
The only thing neither of this changes is that playing combat encounters can be more fun then the non-combat activities of the game, simply because the mechanics are more engaging in combat then elsewhere. (Hope that improves, but don't mind that much if it does not...)
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