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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6968197" data-attributes="member: 5834">Giant owls are animals and weak compared to a dragon.You use the math to defend the ability of a 10,000 orc army to make lvl 20 PCs run, but throw the math out when the same can be said of an ancient dragon? This is the kind of hypocrisy I have trouble debating. You seem to want to use the math to support a point about 5E allowing higher level characters to be challenged by an orc army, but when that same math makes the six player characters the equivalent of a small army against solo creature like a dragon you toss it out?That's what we're talking about here. At high level group such as six lvl 15 PCs against a dragon is mathematically advantageous to the PCs in a huge way. That's part of what makes 5E so ludicrously easy is the way a certain CR creature becomes cannon fodder against a group of PCs focus firing. The entire reason a 300 orc army has the ability to challenge a group of PCs is because of Bounded Accuracy and sheer numbers. This same Bounded Accuracy and number advantage makes high CR solo creatures weak against a PC group. You can take care of some of the mechanical inconsistencies with narration. It's not a big deal to describe a fearsome dragon. If you use the MM version against PCs with levels, that dragon is going down fast and is going to be a real disappointment compared to its billing. It's up to the DM to make that creature far, far stronger so it lives up to its billing.A DM like Flamestrike does that with the six to eight encounter day with terrain and environment manipulation. Good for him. I'm not going to fault his method if it works the majority of the time. I'm not going to use that method myself. I want a creature so fearsome you could fight him in a white room and it would be a ridiculously tough fight. I want balors and dragons to be able to shrug off the PCs attacks and make them feel fear when it plows into the middle of a group and starts thrashing around. And 5E monsters as written do not make PC groups feel this fear meaning they don't live up to the billing, not even against regular PCs. I'm using a different method to reach a level of creature power that fits what I believe they should be capable of. Whereas you want to narrate the ancient dragon decimating the orc army, I want to narrate this as backstory and have a dragon mechanically capable of wiping out an orc army. I want the mechanics and the narrative to match rather than one being necessary to cover to up the other's shortcomings. Now the CR math failing is not just a product of 5E as nearly every previous edition exhibited the same problems including 3E. I am having a harder time finding the sweet spot for the math and narrative to fit. One of the big methods of countering PCs in older editions was spellcasting, in 5E it's very hard to have a solo creature as a powerful spellcaster with the concentration mechanic eliminating buff stacking. A 3E dragon, lich, or demon might be able to stack some buffs to power himself or his minions up, now he can't. It takes a bit more work to come up with a way to create a challenging balor or dragon that the PCs don't find some easy way to counter without giving him a horde of minions he likely would not have. I think it will take some creative monster design rules to get done what I want done. Once I figure them out, I'll start posting them.</blockquote>

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