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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BOZ" data-source="post: 2856719" data-attributes="member: 1241">Thanks!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />While I'm not a big fan of appealing to the lowest common denominator, I can at least see part of the wisdom in making the demon lords at the absolute minimum level needed to make them more powerful than a balor, and providing the option to make them tougher.  (Can we reasonably assume that a CR19 Juiblex will always lose to a CR20 balor in a fight?  We haven't actually even seen the stat blocks yet, you know...)  Challenge Rating is, and always has been, an estimate of relative power of a creature, not any kind of an absolute.  In fact, they are often estimated poorly!  In fact, many designers do not agree on how to assign a CR!  You may build what you think is a well-designed, very tough CR10 creature that will lose to a certain CR7 creature nearly every time!When it comes to the demon lords, people will make them as powerful as they want, anyway.  Some will be satisfied to keep them at the suggested levels in FC1.  Some like them a bit tougher and take the BoVD/Demonomicon stats.  Some like them tougher than that, and would take something from say Tome of Horrors I or what we have on the Creature Catalog site.  Some like them even tougher than that, and take from Dicefreaks or homebrew their own freakishly powerful demon lord stat blocks.  Some like them even tougher than that, and say they are beyond stats as we know them.  Any one set of stat blocks in a book is not an absolute that all people will use.  The stat blocks in FC1 are not, and will not be the final word for these uber-beings, anyway.  Somewhere, someone, sometime along the line, in 5-10-15 years, there will be another edition of D&D, or just another book, and a totally different stat block will be printed.  Ideas are and will be re-hashed all the time.  Why are people getting so damned upset about what one book says about one little aspect of one little thing?  Good god, Mona and Jacobs are out to destroy your lives, and all the whining about it isn't going to save you, so just calm down and take it.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  If you don't like the book, don't buy it.  If you don't like that aspect of the book, don't use it.  Like a number of other folks around here, I don't run epic games, so demon lords are only interesting to me academically, and it's not the end of my life if they don't reach a certain powerful level, and it shouldn't be the end of yours either.[/rant]  sorry.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />QFT, seriously.This theoretical 60-HD balor sure is causing some trouble!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  If you have 60-HD balors running around, and the most powerful of demon lords is a mere CR 23, then your campaign has some serious issues.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  As others have stated, if you would allow a balor to get that powerful, then as the DM you owe it to the internal consistency of your own campaign to make sure the Abyssal lords are much, much tougher, if not simply beyond stat blocks.Another argument would be, why would a wise demon lord even allow a balor to get that tough?  A non-lord demon that tough represents a serious threat to any and all demon lords.  Let's say you use the BoVD stats.  A CR 32 Demogorgon would get worried about any balor that got tougher than, say, 30-HD.  He would watch that balor, and destroy him at any sign of him getting too tough, I'd think.  The complacency of allowing a balor to get to 60-HD, regardless of the power level of the demon lords respectively, is grossly incompetent, and the lords deserve whatever fate this uber-balor metes out to them.</blockquote>

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