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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pming" data-source="post: 6773968" data-attributes="member: 45197">Hiya!  CR30 is extremely tough for 20th level PC's, IMHO. I have no actual experience with that level in 5e yet, but maybe one day. My 1e experience had our group of 20'ish level PC's get their donkeys handed to them when we ran a "lets see what would happen" battle. I can see 5e going down the same route (oh, and yeah, I was DM'ing the Terrasque; the MM2 had just came out and nobody knew anything about it).  If my current players had ever "fought" (or, basically, listed off all the stats of the Terrasque), I would gleefully change out many of the Terrasques 'special stuff' for different ones. Like, for example, how to finally kill it. Maybe give it a chameleon like tongue so that when the wizard is flying above it, the Terrasque leaps at said wizard...and then shoots out it's tongue, grasping the wizard like a fly and pulling said wizard into it's waiting maw. *evilgrin* Stuff like that. One of my pet peeves is players that make the assumption that because they read something about a spell, monster, class, race, or whatever, that their PCs would "naturally" know that. So when/if the PC uses that Wish spell after beating on the corpse of the Terrasque for a few rounds...and then a few rounds after that it gets back up... I smile and just tell the player that "obviously your PC's information was incorrect". But that's me, and I'm a pretty brutal DM (fair...but brutal).Anyway, back to the CR30 thing... I've never put any stock in the whole CR concept (from 3.x when it started onward). D&D is a RPG, and in RPG's there are almost limitless things that can affect CR's "usablilty". As others have pointed out, some creature with major Fire powers is deadly to a group that has nothing to really defend against Fire, but can be a push-over to the same PC's who do have a lot of Fire protection defenses. That CR8 becomes CR12 or CR15 in the first instance, and CR 4 or CR2 in the later. I ignore CR for everything other than a base guideline of likely HD/HP/AC when "looking for a monster". So if my group of 4th level PC's are in need of a random encounter in a forest, I will first look at the monsters for Forest at around CR 3 to 5. That said, I am not above tossing in a CR 6, 7, 8 or even higher creature if it makes sense for the area. Other than that initial CR "perusal", I generally don't even think of the PC's 'capabilities'; if some monster makes sense for some area, or it shows up on my Random Encounter roll (I use them almost religiously), then so be it. A group of low level PC's who decide to go traipsing around in the Swamp of the Dragonmen and randomly encounter a large black dragon...well...that's what blank character sheets are for. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />^_^Paul L. Ming</blockquote>

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