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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AaronOfBarbaria" data-source="post: 6878661" data-attributes="member: 6701872">That is very true. What I mean by "useful" is whether it can be relied upon by a DM to successfully do the thing it claims to be attempting to do for the DM.So while the goal of "this monster will be a challenging fight for your party" or "this monster, in equal number to the party members, will be a challenging fight for your party" are very useful goals, the fact that dice, character building, and tactics can combine to make a challenge seem like it wasn't a challenge at all made it unlikely that the designers picking the CR or Level of the monster in question got the number right for any given group.But the goal of CR in 5th edition being "this monster probably won't kill anyone in the party if it is faced alone by a rested and well equipped party" is a goal that is much easier for the designers to actually get correct, making it reliable at doing what it says it does for the DM - though I admit that what 5th edition CR aims to do isn't something most are going to consider useful, since the majority of encounters happen outside the narrow band of conditions in which CR claims to be accurate, unless the party only ever faces a single encounter between each of their long rests and is never not well equipped when doing so.</blockquote>