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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 5322051" data-attributes="member: 5143">Yeah, in practice it never resembled how the rules described it at all.  Which was my main beef with the EL system.  An encounter with EL=APL+2 could very in range from extremely easy to impossibly hard.  It was simply a matter of whether there was only 1 monster or many monsters, WHICH monsters you used, did the monsters have templates or levels, or were they just NPCs with levels.The rules told us that it didn't matter.  If you used 8 level 3 fighters, it was an EL 9 encounter.  Which was just as easy to defeat as that Level 9 Fighter, that CR 9 monster, or that CR 7 monster with 3 levels of sorcerer, a level of monk, a level of warrior, a template that didn't increase CR, terrain that favored it(terrain doesn't factor into CR or EL, although the books say to reward more xp for especially hard terrain), and a large number of useful magic items or effects(Magic items don't factor into CR or EL).In practice, a APL 7 party would defeat 8 level 3 fighters without taking any real damage, they'd beat the level 9 fighter almost as easily, any individual CR 9 monster could vary from super easy to a TPK, and they'd come near TPK with the multiclass templated creature of death.The practice of abusing this system in LG came to a head the day we played an adventure where all of the monsters were buffed with a list of 12 different spells cast by a 20th level caster before the beginning of the combat.  The spells came from 3 different classes.  They weren't factored into the EL of the encounter because spells cast by creatures don't increase or decrease EL.When I asked the author how they could have gotten that many buffs from 3 different classes right before the battle started(some of which had a personal area of effect), he said "There's ways to do it, some Ioun stones and other items let you store spells and cast them on yourself even if you aren't the appropriate class".When I pointed out that none of the creatures in question were carrying any of those items and there were no indications that anyone else in the entire building had them, he told me that "They were demons about to go to war with devils, they just plane shifted in the round before the PCs get there.  They have powerful demons willing to cast buffing spells on them before they go."</blockquote>

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