Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 9168295" data-attributes="member: 996">So, just, philosophically, if a monster summons other monsters, you shouldn't get exp for defeating the extra monster that was summoned, and they shouldn't count towards the difficulty of the encounter, as the summoning is already accounted for in the value of the original monster. If the summoning is a spell, ideally, all you should need is the level of the spell to understand what it adds to CR, because spells of the same level should have comparable value, each in the situation it's most useful. Otherwise, the spell is over or under powered. Of course, neither spells nor monsters are that precisely designed, and the other&nbsp; side of the encounter equation, the party, is equally borked because class balance in non existent. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🤷‍♂️" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f937-2642.png" title="Man shrugging&nbsp; &nbsp; :man_shrugging:" data-shortname=":man_shrugging:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />Sorry to go over that only to be defeatist &amp; pessimistic, but the point is you're worrying over a degree of CR accuracy that doesn't exist in the game, and would be useless even if it did.DMing is not a plug in the numbers exercise, it's an art. You can do it by feel. You can color as far outside the guidelines as you want and you can erase some of it if you go too far.By all means, use CR like every other element of D&amp;D, as a convenient starting point. Them adjust as you go.Thanks for putting up with the Grognard rambling, as a bonus:If you're creating a monster and want it to summon things, dont give it a summon spell and try to recalculate it's CR, add the summoned monsters to the encounter.&nbsp; Treat it like any other wave encounter.What?&nbsp; That's exactly the opposite of what I said at the start? Yes, yes it is.Such is the way of the DM.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Tony Vargas, post: 9168295, member: 996"] So, just, philosophically, if a monster summons other monsters, you shouldn't get exp for defeating the extra monster that was summoned, and they shouldn't count towards the difficulty of the encounter, as the summoning is already accounted for in the value of the original monster. If the summoning is a spell, ideally, all you should need is the level of the spell to understand what it adds to CR, because spells of the same level should have comparable value, each in the situation it's most useful. Otherwise, the spell is over or under powered. Of course, neither spells nor monsters are that precisely designed, and the other side of the encounter equation, the party, is equally borked because class balance in non existent. 🤷‍♂️ Sorry to go over that only to be defeatist & pessimistic, but the point is you're worrying over a degree of CR accuracy that doesn't exist in the game, and would be useless even if it did. DMing is not a plug in the numbers exercise, it's an art. You can do it by feel. You can color as far outside the guidelines as you want and you can erase some of it if you go too far. By all means, use CR like every other element of D&D, as a convenient starting point. Them adjust as you go. Thanks for putting up with the Grognard rambling, as a bonus: If you're creating a monster and want it to summon things, dont give it a summon spell and try to recalculate it's CR, add the summoned monsters to the encounter. Treat it like any other wave encounter. What? That's exactly the opposite of what I said at the start? Yes, yes it is. Such is the way of the DM. [/QUOTE]

Verification