How do levels of wealth for NPCs/Monsters affect CRs?

[Olive]

Now I know the CR system has some issues, but I was wondering how it would effect CR if I lowered or increased levels of wealth from the stated norms?

Is there any rules for this? Does the Monster's Handbook have any?

 

[dcollins]

I've never seen any rules for that, and am doubtful they exist.

 

[Simplicity]

I'm pretty sure that there are no rules for this, but they sure would
be useful. Clearly, a level 1 kobold sorcerer with a staff of power should
be a higher CR than a simple kobold sorcerer.

I would say that one way to do this is to find out what the EL the
treasure guideline would fall into. That the maximum of (the treasure EL
minus 2) and (the creature's CR).

 

[Olive]

What prompted the question was the Warduke write up in Dungeon which was a Ftr18, CR20 due to his minor artifact and general super cool stuff.

I was wondering how they decided on that.

 

[tmaaas]

It would have been nice if they provided guidelines in the DMG regarding not only the effects of wealth on effective party strength, but also abilities scores (using point cost equivalent) and party size/composition.

Of course, the true value of the CR/EL system is that if it is properly balanced to a single reference point (iconic four character party, standard wealth, etc.), once the DM gets a feel for how his group differs, it isn’t too hard to modify encounters accordingly.

 

[Matrix Sorcica]

check out Upper Krust's CR Calculation system on in the House Rules Forum. Good stuff!

Later,

 

[Garnfellow]

Now I know the CR system has some issues, but I was wondering how it would effect CR if I lowered or increased levels of wealth from the stated norms?

Is there any rules for this? Does the Monster's Handbook have any?

This is a great question, and as far as I know it has never been tackled properly in any published supplement. The impact of equipment on CRs is vitally important not only in balancing individual encounters, but also if you're designing a campaign that has significantly less or greater levels of magic than the baseline Greyhawk setting.

The most useful guidelines I have ever found on this subject popped up in this Usenet discussion:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...selm=b4iiql%24sce%241%40panther.uwo.ca&rnum=1

Doug Lampert offered a pretty handy rule of thumb: assume 1/3 of an NPC's CR value is due to gear. After fiddling around his formula for a while, I developed a simple Javascript calculator that guestimates the impact of gear on CR:

http://home.gwi.net/~rdorman/frilond/rul/dm/equip.htm

Let me know if you find this useful.

 

[Olive]

Cool sire Garn, I'll check out those links and tell you what I think, but at first glance it's exactly what I was looking for!

 

[Altalazar]

A very interesting question - one that is probably hard to abstract an answer to. For instance, a kobold with a staff of power that can't use the staff has a great deal of wealth, but that just increases the loot, not the difficulty of the encounter. And even if it COULD use it, with crappy init, it could be taken down with one sleep spell, or one arrow, meaning that the wealth didn't amount to much. I think this is something a DM will likely just have to ballpark. But then one probably needs to do that anyway, from time to time, when it comes to EXP.