Iskrets said:
Much appreciated. I may well have been confusing ECL an CR. To be honest, the only experience I have with either is what other players have told me. With any luck, our other party members will make future encounters more manageable. And I'm definitely preparing magic circle against evil from now on(friggin' dominate!).
First off, welcome to the boards!
To resolve the mystery about ELC, LA, EL and CR.
LA/ECL: Level Adjustment and Effective Character Level. This only concerns players. When you play stronger races, these have a level adjustment to balance their superior abilities. If you add this LA to the class levels (and maybe monster hit dice, for those creatures that have racial hit dice), you get the ECL. Say you have a drow fighter 5. Drow have a LA of 2, so said fighter has an ECL of 7. This means that he can take on the same challenges a human fighter 7 could, due to his powerful racial abilities. He has hit dice (and hit points, feats, ability increases, and skill points; also level caps for spells like sleep) like a level 5 character, but gets treated like a level 7 character in regards to character wealth, XP awarded (higher-level characters get less XP for the same monsters) and XP needed to advance a level.
CR: Challenge Rating. This only concerns enemies. This gauges the degree of danger a single monster poses: A group of 4 characters of level X can take on one enemy with CR X using about 20% of their resources (HP, spells, and so on).
EL: Encounter Level. Also just for monsters. You can calculate the EL of an ancounter by combining the CR's of all participants, also adjusting for special circumstances (like when one side has a serious advantage). Note that this isn't as easy as saying "2x CR 5 = CR 10". It can become pretty confusing when a lot of enemies with different CR's are involved. But this is really the DM's job.
The difference between CR and ECL: CR only takes into account what danger the enemy poses in a fight (which usually lasts only a couple of rounds). That enemy is only around for this one fight, so he won't be able to use all of his abilities: It doesn't really matter whether that enemy can use an ability 3/day or at will, for he probably won't get the chance to use it that often. Also, stuff that doesn't affect combat won't really change anything.
ECL, on the other hand, is for player characters, and they will be around for almost every encounter, for the whole campaign (well, more or less). So there is a difference between casting invisibility only once per day or as often as you want, and so on. Therefore, there is a difference between these two (sometimes a big one).
