Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7546832" data-attributes="member: 4937">I believe the CR's on elementals are wrong, which is a big part of the problem with what you describe.   Huge Air Elementals are listed at CR 7, but they have perfect fly speed, DR 5/-, 16 HD, 136 hit points, and two +19 to hit attacks.   They don't hit that hard, but they are definitely still relevant against 15th level characters because 16HD, etc. They are probably closer to CR 9 IMO.  The ultimate problem with most of the XP in 3.5 is poorly assigned CR.   There are no guidelines for assigning CR and many of the numbers are very much just ballparked.   In a lot of ways, 1e AD&D assigned XP in a far more reasonable manner because it required you to count the positive factors that influenced its difficulty.  It wasn't perfect, there probably should have been negative factors as well in some cases, but it was better than some of the '*shrug* let's go with this' numbers in 3.5 to say nothing of the 'we know this number is wrong but we have metagame reasons for misassigning it'.  In short, you have carefully chosen some of the few CR 7 monsters that stay relevant for a relatively long time in a relatively large number of situations because they have very high to hit bonuses, flight, good defenses and a lot of hit points.  I agree with @[Immortal Sun] that a good solution to this problem would be to have the presence of low level but still relevant minions count as a circumstance bonus with respect to the encounter and adjust upward the amount of XP received.   I probably play a lot more attention to circumstances than Immortal Sun is even suggesting, as I like to set up the encounter in ways that highly favor the monster (a 'lair' as it were) and which greatly complicate the fight for the PC's.  I've been known to award not just 10% or 20% bonuses, but 100% or 200% bonuses to the XP earned for a fight on terrain that was highly unfavorable to the party.However, in this case I don't think the two CR 7 (probably closer to CR 9) monsters warrant that large of an adjustment.  They add complication, but not a ton.  A 10% or 20% bonus to XP is probably sufficient.</blockquote>

Verification