In the PDF age all adventures should be compatible with all editions

[Hussar]

I'm not entirely convinced that they knew. There are enough CRs that seem so totally out of whack, that it looks to me like they were eyeballing it.

Yeah, well, there is that. And I believe that the designers have talked about that in the past. The CR's were a lot of eyeballing and, with so many monsters, I can see mistakes being made. Hello Mr. Ogre -

But, that still doesn't mean that they couldn't have done some analysis after the fact. Maybe in the DMG 2 or a web goodie. CR is a great idea and a serious boon to DM's (IMO). It just needs some polishing.

 

[BenBrown]

Yeah, well, there is that. And I believe that the designers have talked about that in the past. The CR's were a lot of eyeballing and, with so many monsters, I can see mistakes being made. Hello Mr. Ogre -

But, that still doesn't mean that they couldn't have done some analysis after the fact. Maybe in the DMG 2 or a web goodie. CR is a great idea and a serious boon to DM's (IMO). It just needs some polishing.

I'm not sure it's entirely possible, not with the variety of monsters that 3E had. Look at the 4E equivalent (monster level). The only way they've been able to do this is by effectively cutting out all non-combat monster stuff.

Although, to be fair, that's probably the starting point if there is a way. Work up the CRs for monsters with just straightforward fighty stuff, then start adding in the weirdities.

 

[MerricB]

Challenge Rating has one basic flaw - and it's why it didn't make it into 4E. And that's the problem that it takes no account of number of monsters.

This is a huge problem when you look at how the scaling of power worked in 3E. 4E pretty much works at a +1 per level to AC and Attack. 3E is about +1.5 per level to AC and Attack - the most of any version of D&D.

The way CRs worked, you'd get one monster worth CR3, two monsters worth EL5 and four monsters worth EL7.

Between the single monster and the four monsters, the party that was taking them on differed by +6 to attack and defense... a massive difference in capabilities. Add even more and the numbers got worse and worse.

CR was an extremely useful tool, but it ended up not being as useful as it could be. Thus, the 4E system which has monsters equating to both player numbers and level, rather than level alone.

Cheers!