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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lonely Tylenol" data-source="post: 3874896" data-attributes="member: 18549">Well, if by "concrete, empirical qualities" you mean "things that were designed and playtested to determine the appropriate level," then it applies to both, really.  If you don't mean that, I'm not sure what you do mean.  In either case, we're relying on the designer to determine whether a particular special power is appropriate for a group of, say, 12th level PCs.  In either case, while it's easy enough to balance the monster's to-hit and damage, it's harder to figure out how things like flight, battlefield control, mental control, stunning, or other special attacks will work out, alone or in synergy with other powers.  That falls to educated guesses and playtesting.  I don't see how the ML system will provide a better ground for that.What makes you say that?  Also, I never found this argument against CR particularly convincing.  I often run games for non-standard parties, and they do just fine if they make sure to pack some healing gear.Don't 4E monsters have special abilities?  If they do, and they have definite Monster Levels, then the ML rules attempt to account for those abilities in determining the level of a monster.In any case, to address what you said here:I don't see how the CR system is to blame for SoD effects not interfacing well with it, because I don't see them interfacing well with a ML system either.  They're just not the sort of thing that is "too hard" or "too weak" at any level.  They either kill you or they don't, and the exact odds of that happening are kind of irrelevant to their balance.As you've pointed out, the key to SoD is knowing when they're going to happen and undermining the effect.  But what level is it appropriate to do that at?  It's not really a question of level, but of level-independent factors.  SoD simply doesn't interact well with level-dependant factors.  The only thing you can do is alter DCs to keep them consistently deadly as levels go up.So whatever other faults the CR system has, they're irrelevant to this discussion.  We're talking about SoD.  The problem isn't whether the CR system is broken.  The problem is that save-or-die, specifically, does not interface well with the CR system, and it wouldn't interface well with the ML system either, if they were to leave SoD in the game.</blockquote>

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