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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7013778" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't know if that is the case.  Consider the White Dragon's Ice Walk ability: "Ice Walk: The dragon can move across and climb icy surfaces without needing to make an ability check. Additionally, difficult terrain composed of ice or snow doesn’t cost it extra moment."  How difficult a White Dragon is to fight depends then on part on whether or not it is encountered in icy terrain, since only in icy terrain would the White Dragon be able to make use of that ability.  I would never assume that fighting the White Dragon on an ice covered slope inside a glacial fissure in hip deep freezing water cascading down and a nearby precipice one might be washed over was figured in to the base CR.  I wouldn't even assume fighting the creature in 2' of snow during a windstorm was figured in.  Both situations add difficulty, but especially add difficulty to the extent that the monster has an ability that overcomes this difficult.Now consider that examining other monsters we decide that making them 'interesting' involves adding more 'fiddly' abilities like the White Dragon's ice walking ability in addition to whatever rebalancing we want to make to make their calculated CR more correct.  Let's imagine for example that we are creating the new Yeti entry for an upcoming Monster Manual.  And we decide to add Ice Walk, and also an ability like, "The Yeti never suffers disadvantage on perception checks as a result of snow or icy weather, but can see, hear, and smell clearly even in a blizzard."  This potentially boosts both challenge and interest, but I think it would be a mistake to figure in to the CR that all Yeti's are encountered in blizzards unless one of the powers of our new Yeti was 'Blizzard Aura' and the area around a Yeti was also a snow storm.The point is that CR is always based on certain assumptions, and in a game as free form as D&D, it's always more of an art form than something that can be directly calculated as anything more than a ballpark figure.  The fiddly things eventually add up and in practice increase both challenge and interest.Yes, but D&D has almost never been that specific, and I certainly would not expect it to start in an era when the designers are promoting 'rulings not rules'.   D&D has never spent a lot of time detailing how noticeable an ability is.  For example, in the fireball description it mentions that it makes a 'low roar'.  How easy is it to hear the 'low roar'?  Are we meant to infer, since the lightning bolt description mentions no peals of thunder, that it makes no sound?  If it makes a sound, is it more or less than the sound of the fireball?  How loud is Poison Spray?  Is the noxious gas visible?   This has always been an area subject to common sense rulings that vary from table to table.  It makes common sense to me that a psychic evil eye attack has no readily visible or audible component.  Another DM might rule differently.It better well be the concern of designers.  It's a massive mistake to make too many assumptions regarding how a monster will be used by other DMs.</blockquote>

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