D&D General How you think CR should work

[Lojaan]

CR will never work as anything other than a loose guide until it takes into consideration PC power level, not level.

How else do you balance between a rested 5th level wizard and a 20th level one with no spell slots left and half hit points?

Or an optimised hexblade/paladin vs a same level monk/wizard built for RP?

And then you need to take into consideration player and DM tactics.

Like, seriously. What do people expect?

 

[Lanefan]

CR will never work as anything other than a loose guide until it takes into consideration PC power level, not level.

How else do you balance between a rested 5th level wizard and a 20th level one with no spell slots left and half hit points?

Or an optimised hexblade/paladin vs a same level monk/wizard built for RP?

And then you need to take into consideration player and DM tactics.

Along with the biggest variable: the number of characters in the party.

A four-character party is going to have considerable trouble beating an encounter designed for a seven-character party while the group of seven will flatten an encounter intended to challenge the four; and this is true in any edition and with pretty much any party compositions in each group.

Today's game is designed around four players each running one character, but that doesn't mean it's always - or even often - played that way in the wild.

The only way a DM can get a reasonable-if-still-far-from-perfect handle on how to decently challenge a party without wiping it out is by trial and error.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

CR should, with reasonable accuracy, tell you how strong a creature is, such that most of the time if you use one or more of them, you can be reasonably confident as to the resulting fight.

Should one desire a more dangerous situation, either there should be standard tools to enable such things (e.g. 13th Age's "Nastier Specials"), or the monster itself (or the text surrounding it) should make mention of ways to alter it beyond the baseline design. Creatures fundamentally built around a concept or gimmick that resists such classification should say something to that effect, so DMs are fore-armed against unexpected nasty surprises.

 

[AnotherGuy]

I've run multiple groups at the same time. Same levels, options, similar encounters. One group? I could throw a half dozen deadly encounters, the others were lucky to get through as many medium encounters. Different groups are just more effective, there's no way one system can account for that. But once I get a group dialed in, my estimates are pretty spot on.

Pretty much this.
Once a DM knows his/her group they know how to adjust the standardised table within the DMG to make it work for their group of players.

 

[Leatherhead]

CR as a singular number can't work. But there is no need to account for every variable possible, because that's impractical if not impossible, and most importantly not useful.

CR should function as:
An indicator of DPR.
And an indicator of resilience.
They already calculate for this, so there is no reason to not just use both numbers. However, DPR isn't a true function of how deadly something is, DPR is just a "You must be this tall to fight this monster" indicator.

In order to indicate how deadly something is, you need to list out:
An indicator of control. The Action economy is how you actually win a fight in 5e, being able to prevent actions or generate new ones is what swings battles.
An indicator of attacks that bypass DPR entirely, such as stat drain or instant kill effects.

These indicators don't even have to be numbers. You could just make a symbol that indicates "soft control" effects (things like web or knockback, which just eats up a turn or two, or poison and other debuffs), "hard control" effects (such as stun), and then put a skull next to things that don't need to deal hp damage to kill you.

 

[Shiroiken]

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.

This is pretty much my view. Encounter design is tricky, and while guidelines are helpful, they need to stay as guidelines. Each DM will figure out the power level of their group, then design encounters based on what they can handle and how many. As someone said: it's more art than science.

 

[M_Natas]

The baseline assumption of 4e with 1 vs 1 CR Ratings would be best. To get the same I made an utterly complex table based of I think it was Xanathars, wo showed which CR is for what at which Character Level at 1 on 1.
The 4e System is more forgiving than 5e, because the 1 Monster vs a Group Baseline multiplies power imbalances.
In a 1 vs 4 system the monster needs to be 4 times stronger, so any imbalance is multiplied by 4. So it can happen very easily to have the monster too strong or too easy if you go with a cr 3 or 5 instead of a cr 4. And in D&D the default is too easy. So you have to adjust upwards, which than can easily kill the party.
In a 4 vs 4 you can adjust more gradually to compensate power imbalances.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I think the CR system should be 1 monster vs 1 PC instead of the CR. So, 4 CR1 monsters against a party of 4 at level 1 would be a deadly encounter.
Then a CR 1/2 would take 8 of them to give a level 1 party of 4 a run for their money or 16 against a level 2 party of 4.
Bascially add up the CR of the monster and if it equals the total party level you have a deadly encounter or some kind of baseline to work off of.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

CR will never work as anything other than a loose guide until it takes into consideration PC power level, not level.

How else do you balance between a rested 5th level wizard and a 20th level one with no spell slots left and half hit points?

Or an optimised hexblade/paladin vs a same level monk/wizard built for RP?

And then you need to take into consideration player and DM tactics.

Like, seriously. What do people expect?

i want the term level to be used to be an approximate power level (It doesn't have to be exact) so a level 3/2 fighter/sorcerer has the same amount of power out put survivability and narrative control as a level 5 hexblade and that is the same as a 1/1/1/2 fighere/bard/monk/warlock

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Along with the biggest variable: the number of characters in the party.

A four-character party is going to have considerable trouble beating an encounter designed for a seven-character party while the group of seven will flatten an encounter intended to challenge the four; and this is true in any edition and with pretty much any party compositions in each group.

Today's game is designed around four players each running one character, but that doesn't mean it's always - or even often - played that way in the wild.

The only way a DM can get a reasonable-if-still-far-from-perfect handle on how to decently challenge a party without wiping it out is by trial and error.

again 4e had the answer... 1 reg, 4 minion 1/2 eliet or 1/5 a solo was per character...