NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Machiavelli24" data-source="post: 9245337" data-attributes="member: 7044491">Hey Mike, as someone who tried reverse engineering an encounter building point system, I can warn you away from a pitfall I fell into.Essentially, increasing a monster by 1 CR makes a monster ~50% more dangerous at low levels but only ~10% more dangerous at high levels (those number values are purely for example purposes). If you cost +1 CR at the same amount every level (like your current system) it tends to result in low level encounters causing TPKs and high level encounters being push overs.Except it's only noticeable when people build encounters with monsters that are uniformly strong (above the middle point). Which makes it hard to identify this shortcoming in all the noise of people who mix strong and weak monsters together.The impact of +1 CR is pretty consistent within a tier, so having one price per tier is sufficient. I <a href="https://www.dmsguild.com/product/414122/True-Peer-Encounter-Building" target="_blank">ultimately </a>(dm me and I'll send you a copy of the two pages) went with one price per level because it let me use memoization to reduce the amount of calculations the end user had to do.Ultimately, I think one of the most direct ways to improve the experience of CR is to explicitly communicate its assumptions to the end users. For example, CR assumes a giant scorpion will always be making a powerful melee attack, even though an all flying party will effortlessly defeat it. But lowering the monster's CR for not having a ranged attack would result in surprise TPKs against non-flying parties.</blockquote>

Verification