Level Up (A5E) Encounter Building: Minimum Monster CR

[Reynard]

I am a big fan of the Monstrous Menagerie and especially its encounter building rules. As I prep some high level encounters for a series of convention adventures I am running in April, it occurs to me that I don't know what the "minimum CR" should be for monsters relative to the Party Level, and the builder does not mention it.

What do you think? How low a CR is viable as mooks and minions, but not a waste of time, compared to the PCs' level?

 

[Reynard]

Just a bump before this falls off the front page and disappears into the aether.

 

[aco175]

I would think that anything you can one-shot hit and kill is not worth it. Not sure where that crosses with CR but if you are level 7 and can deal 20 damage, then 1/2 CR or less is easy to kill, and throw in a fireball killing on a save is worse. Now sometimes you want a cake fight where you wade into 100 goblins, but a convention I would stick with things that need 3 attacks, or more.

 

[lichmaster]

I am a big fan of the Monstrous Menagerie and especially its encounter building rules. As I prep some high level encounters for a series of convention adventures I am running in April, it occurs to me that I don't know what the "minimum CR" should be for monsters relative to the Party Level, and the builder does not mention it.

What do you think? How low a CR is viable as mooks and minions, but not a waste of time, compared to the PCs' level?

IDK if this is useful, but the encounter building guidelines suggest that an encounter CR approx equal to 1/6th of total party level is an easy match. So on a 1 vs 1 basis you can simply take character level/6.
For example a 12th level character would find a cave bear (CR2) an easy encounter. The cave bear has 42hp, so it's unlikely to be oneshotted without a nova attack, but otherwise will pose very little threat (+7 on attacks, 10-15 dpr).
If you want a bit more threat you can go up to 1/3rd of character level (at which point it would be a medium 1vs1 encounter), so maybe the sweet spot is around 1/4th