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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kalendraf" data-source="post: 218658" data-attributes="member: 3433">Dragon CR'sAccording to an article by Sean Reynolds, the Dragon CR's are intentionally messed up. They are listed as well below their actual CR value.  The reason given was that dragons are only supposed to be encountered by groups actively hunting them (hogwash, I say), and the group is supposed to be expecting them.  Why they neglected to inform anyone of this is beyond me.  Here's the article link:<a href="http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/misc/handlinglargeparties.html" target="_blank">http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/misc/handlinglargeparties.html</a>Overall, that article has a lot of good suggestions for dealing with party's and not overwhelming them.  One group I DM for has 5 characters (currently 7th level) and most of them are multiclassed.  I'm finding that CR and EL numbers are very reliable for this group, especially humanoid, vermin and animals.  The more unique a creature is, the more difficult it is to judge, since in some cases the unique abilities may be hard to deal with, while other abilities may be very easy to deal with, and it really depends on the party's composition.  But humanoids, animals and vermin which are all very straight-forward in function, seem to line up very well on the EL/CR tables for the challenge they pose for this group.Another thing that many DM's aren't aware of it how important the equipment is in the CR rating.  The DMG lists expected equipment/character wealth at each level, and the CR numbers take that into account.  If the DM decides to wimpify the treasure he dishes out, it suddenly makes the CR ratings go up.  And many newbie DM's (at least new to 3E) make this mistake at some point and figure that an Xth level party should be able to handle an encounter of EL X, without stopping to consider their mistake.  Some are obvious - magic weapons required vs. non-corporeal creatures, but others aren't as obvious (improved Armor rating w/ magic armor vs. the monster's insanely high BAB, etc).  And the innevitable result is a PC death or more before the DM realizes his mistake.Personally, I'm finding that tossing more though weaker encounters at the group is far better than trying to toss stuff that is more than 1 EL above them, since it is just so easy for those encounters to backfire and decimate the group.  And where's the fun in having a bunch of dead PC's?</blockquote>

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