MonsterEnvy
Legend
This topic about Challenge Rating was starting to annoy in the Dragonlance Thread so here is it’s own thread.
D&D General How you think CR should work
Scribe
Legend
Ideal: As a way to quickly throw together an encounter, that extrapolates from a PC vs NPC to N vs N, with a matching table to indicate the expected difficulty if CR > X, Y, or Z.
And as a mathematically consistent way to design monsters of our own, that can fit within the same framework.
And, open, clear, and documented fully in the DMG. No black box.
MonsterEnvy
Legend
Funny enough Soth the monster that started this conversation has multiple abilities that counter this. His basic attack prevents healing, and his two special attacks have one that instantly kill anyone brought to Zero and the other raises any bodies or those killed by it as Skeletons.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Yes and I like his construction quite a bit. Most monsters are not built like that, though. It would also feel fairly contrived if too many are. You shouldn't build the game to work one way and then build another part of the game to negate the first part. The game shouldn't fight itself.
I think the 4E system hit the sweet spot. For each PC of level X, the "baseline challenge" is one standard monster of that level; four minions of that level; one-half an elite monster; or one-fifth of a solo monster.
If your players are expert optimizers and strategists, or you want this encounter to be harder than normal, you can go up from the baseline challenge by N levels, and you'll increase the difficulty by a consistent amount -- so, if you find that your PCs require a 6th-level encounter at level 4, you can safely assume they will require a 10th-level encounter at level 8.
Assembling a challenge in 4E was a snap. Unfortunately, the second half (calibrating difficulty) relies on PCs having a smooth power curve, where each PC level is X% more powerful than the previous level. That is not the case in 5E, where there are big power spikes at certain levels, most notably 5th.
If your players are expert optimizers and strategists, or you want this encounter to be harder than normal, you can go up from the baseline challenge by N levels, and you'll increase the difficulty by a consistent amount -- so, if you find that your PCs require a 6th-level encounter at level 4, you can safely assume they will require a 10th-level encounter at level 8.
Assembling a challenge in 4E was a snap. Unfortunately, the second half (calibrating difficulty) relies on PCs having a smooth power curve, where each PC level is X% more powerful than the previous level. That is not the case in 5E, where there are big power spikes at certain levels, most notably 5th.
phuong
Explorer
I feel CR is pointless, except as a rough indicator of power.
A difference between a group of 6 power gamers with a generous DM, who have optimized their damage is a world of difference to another group of 5 actors who are just out having fun in a low magic setting.
The first group could destroy triple the number of monsters of the second group.
So any CR calculator is always wrong.
A difference between a group of 6 power gamers with a generous DM, who have optimized their damage is a world of difference to another group of 5 actors who are just out having fun in a low magic setting.
The first group could destroy triple the number of monsters of the second group.
So any CR calculator is always wrong.
Scribe
Legend
This is exactly what I mean.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
It doesn't even have to be that drastic. Any given combination of 4 classes and subclasses is going to have different strengths and weaknesses than other combinations. Monsters just can't be built to take all of those differences into consideration.
A well-designed CR system provides tools to compensate for this.
In 4E, I pretty quickly got a sense of how much my players outperformed the "standard PC." From then on, I knew that (party level + 1) was the minimum for an encounter to be interesting, (party level + 3) would push them hard, and (party level + 4) would beat them within an inch of their lives. That was all I required to design suitable encounters.
Furthermore, if there was a 5th-level monster and I needed to put it in a 6th-level slot, the system made it very easy to "level up" the monster with a few tweaks to its stats. You couldn't go too far out of band--trying to "level up" a monster from 5th to 15th wasn't going to go smoothly--but for modest adjustments, it worked a treat.
In 5E, none of this works. PC combat power varies by class, doesn't scale smoothly by level, and is heavily dependent on time of day (how many spells do the casters have left?), so you can't just determine that "my players fight at level + 1" and be done with it. On top of that, CR is loose and sloppy; the DMG guidelines allow a ton of variation, and the Monster Manual doesn't follow them anyway.
Celebrim
Legend
CR is not really a new concept. It shows up in 1st ed. AD&D as monster level, and was there a rating of I, II, III, IV... X and roughly corresponded to the level of the dungeon the monster would most common appear on and thus the level of the party that would be expected to be able to handle multiple encounters of that sort.
All I really want CR to do is give me a rough but reasonably accurate comparison of how powerful a monster is and when it should start showing up as a foe to a PC party.
Aside from some mistakes in the system and a few oversights, I've generally gotten good use out of CR over the years.
All I really want CR to do is give me a rough but reasonably accurate comparison of how powerful a monster is and when it should start showing up as a foe to a PC party.
Aside from some mistakes in the system and a few oversights, I've generally gotten good use out of CR over the years.
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