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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5858457" data-attributes="member: 54877">If some method of gauging monster challenge and of getting a ballpark on appropriate treasure aren't in a game--then at least one or two such methods will be gradually developed and posted on the internet. Because people need that information, and not everyone wants to learn it the hard way. Better to include at least a stab at it in the core rules than ignore it. Personally, I prefer guidelines that aren't down to a single number per creature or item--not least because such guidelines are more likely to be treated as guidelines instead of rules. It's the exact number of a CR rating or monster level that makes people treat it as more precise than it really is. People treat it like a high tech tempature reading instead of someone saying, "that pretty darn hot!" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> We probably can't get away from numbers entirely, as the labels that would be needed would become nonsensical, or the bands would be too broad. But at least we could use a range. 3E CR ratings would be immensely better if they were a range. "How tough is that monster?" "Oh, it's around CR 3 to 5. Depends on your group, and how they handle area cold damage and slow effects." I suppose a lot of them would collapse down into an average, with a little note saying to vary by 1 or 2 up or down. But an explicit range on every creature would reinforce that the designers don't really know exactly how tough this creature is in every situation. Another way to do it would be a single number for the average rating, then another number for the expected variance.  Instead of a range of 3 to 5, you'd list CR 4, V 1.  Something more extreme (not a lot of hit points for its level, but tough attacks, for example) might be CR 10, V 3.  Same thing would apply to 4E levels.  In effect, the bigger the variance number, the less confidence the author has that the monster will stick close to the average.   Just get rid of the false illusion of precision, and guidelines are fine.</blockquote>

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