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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Luke" data-source="post: 160804" data-attributes="member: 602">I think it's a great idea, and have thought through it before, with respect to RPM, where I already have an infrastructure for this. The starting point I have is:- An adventure compromised of maps, locations and groups of creatures.- The key is the groups of creatures, which have a CR derived from their race and classes characteristics.- Since the creatures belong to a group, I have an easily derivable EL.The plan- Simply scale each EL by a multiplying factor, so that each group becomes harder or easier to be appropriate for a particular party.The issues without easy answers (for automation)- You can scale either individual creatures, or numbers of creatures to raise or lower a group's EL. They're 2 very different approaches, leading to very different flavours of encounter. - Sometimes scaling types are "forced". Certain races don't really have classes, and you can only change numbers, or add racial HD. Others (like Dragons with age categories) actually change their "SubType".- You can't automatically go anywhere when you need to scale down a single high CR creature. Extreme example: How do you scale down a tarrasque for a 3rd level party (remembering that a "story crippling" of the creature isn't really for a computer program).- The whole concept of working directly off CRs and ELs as a good measure of toughness doesn't necessarily apply. For me, the situations encompassed within an adventure mostly make or break an EL. Scaling CR doesn't necessarily give the result you need. Example: An adventure situation where you get to creep up on a tribe of sleeping Hobgoblins has a wildly different EL to being encountered by the same tribe as you attempt to cross open fields whilst pursued.- Smallish point. Not everyone in an adventure is a baddie that needs to be scaled. You need to know which is which. Extreme example: The blacksmith of strange town may turn out to be friend or foe. What would a program do to scale a blacksmith?- Part of what makes higher CR creatures tougher, is their extraordinary equipment. Extreme example: If you scale up a 2nd level paladin to 15th, you want your program to possibly swap that masterwork longsword for a Holy Vorpal longsword. - Changing the items owned by the creatures could wildly change, or even void the story behind the adventure. Extreme example: The story behind the original adventure was to retrieve the "Blessed Mace of St Cluthbert". It actually turned out that, in the scaled up adventure, the weapons held by most of the guards were better!- The magical equipment owned by creatures can have a far more significant effect on EL than the racial HD and class levels that are used as a guideline. Extreme example: A 3rd level fighter with wings of flying and a +4 longbow faces off against a 7th level fighter with a +2 longsword in an open field. Who would you rather be? As a DM, I like to build adventures with "tough looking" encounters that are fatally flawed if the characters can spot a way to secure a strategic adventage. In extreme cases the EL can be irrelevant (eg. if an extremely tough beast can be caught in a pit trap without chance to escape, and perhaps burning oil can be poured in until the job is done. It might not make a difference what EL the beast was.Personal Conclusions- I personally prefer to hand-craft a story in an adventure with a style that wouldn't scale via an automated algorithm very well.- In the case of RPM, I'm currently putting the finishing touches into displaying the ELs for created groups. Amongst my current priorities, I'll leave it this way for a long time. It'll be up to the DM to examine group ELs him/herself, and bump up, or lower, the right classes, or even change the races, along with the equipment.- On the other hand - if you build it, they will come!! <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=":)" />Hope that's decent food for thought. Perhaps you can get inventive where I got a bit stuck. Perhaps you were thinking of something quite different altogether...Regards (and good luck!),</blockquote>

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