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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cheiromancer" data-source="post: 3132941" data-attributes="member: 141">I am out of my league with the upper CR monsters; our groups never seemed to get beyond level 10, so if we met something bigger it was as a boss monster.  I wish I knew how WotC monsters were playtested, and what their theory is on the relation between CR and EL, and what character levels are likely to be.You see, the tables in the DMG assumes that there is an exponential progression in monster power; CR +2 means monster that's twice as strong.  The tables that Upper_Krust has developed implies a quadratic relationship; that doubling CR will quadruple their power.This makes a big difference when you are calculating the CR of a monster.  If you think something is a very difficult encounter for a 16th level encounter (using up all their resources, potentially resulting in a TPK if the dice are unfavorable), then you'd peg it as a CR 20 in the WotC system.  But in the challenge system you'd peg it as a CR 32.  Big difference!And when the party gets to be 20th level; does that mean this challenge is routine, or is it still a CR well above them?  If you go by WotC's theory you might design 9th level powerful enough to handle it.  Which could be a reason why high level spellcasters are so powerful; it's a ripple effect of people trying to make the official CR/EL system work.To reduce the role of randomness, playtesting often uses two of a monster against a party two levels above the estimated CR.  In WotC terms, a CR of 9 means that two of them are a challenging encounter (25% of resources used) against an 11th level party.  But the challenge of an 11th level party is 484, and each monster therefore has a challenge of about 61, and so they are really a CR of about 8.  This could explain why monsters sometimes are much weaker than their CR predicts them to be.Even 1 on 4 challenging encounters are problematic.  A party has 4 times as many actions available as a single monster, and would easily overwhelm them.  Heck, take 5 identical monsters and have four of them gang up on the remaining one; it shouldn't take 25% of their resources to take him down, but each of the five is clearly of equal power.So now I'm all confused about what the CR numbers are supposed to mean, and I strongly suspect they were gathered with different assumptions and probably can't be compared.  So all I have left is playing with numbers.I do want to observe that UK has factors for how spellcasting will affect creature's CR; CR +0.44/level of Integrated Sorcerer or Wizard spellsCR +0.38/level of Integrated Cleric spells (including domain spells)CR +0.28/level of Integrated Druid spellsE.g. If a 30th level wizard wanted to retain his spellcasting ability when he took the ability of a marut, it should be worth about +13.2 CR.I'm kinda wondering about what kind of mischief a wizard could accomplish by gaining all the SLAs of a beholder for 600 minutes.  6000 uses of disintegrate - you could carve a mile long 10 X 10 tunnel through solid stone.</blockquote>

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