D&D 5E (2014) Serious gamers and new CR formula

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[MerricB]

Creating a CR system is hard. Really hard. Creating a system that estimates the CR of a monster based on stats you plug into a formula? That's even harder.

If I were to create a replacement CR system I would do the following:

* Create a standard set of four characters (cleric, rogue, wizard, fighter) for every level (1-20).
* Select a monster
* Run that standard set of characters against a *lot* of fights against the monster in different scenarios. Lots? Hundreds. With different groups.
* Look at the feedback from those tests and assign a CR for the monster.
* Repeat.

Once you have assigned a CR to every monster, look at the main stats of the monsters and attempt to create a formula based on those CRs.

This is, as you can see, quite a bit of effort. However, it's quite achievable if you get a lot of people helping. Think a monster is really inaccurate as a CR? Test it! Find a good CR for it. And repeat until the entire Monster Manual have a new CR assigned. Then analyse the trends.

Cheers!

 

[Henry]

[MENTION=3586]MerricB[/MENTION], that sounds familiar... Like I've heard it before, from a story around the year 2000 or so...

 

[MerricB]

[MENTION=3586]MerricB[/MENTION], that sounds familiar... Like I've heard it before, from a story around the year 2000 or so...

Strange coincidence, huh?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

That's a really good question! I think that, for planning purposes, a "real challenge" is meant to mean that the difficulty scales. I don't know that any DM wants a TPK. At least, no good DM wants that. There might be an encounter where, with sufficient warning, the players know that *if they were to engage, they might risk a TPK*.

I want a TPK like I want Panda Express. It's a guilty pleasure which is fun at the time but makes me feel bad afterward.

(I also have mechanics set up at the metagame level so that TPKs don't necessarily destroy the fun of the campaign. Character trees provide alternate characters, and karma points allow the players to intervene directly a fashion analogous to "reloading" a computer game, at the cost of bad guys getting to do the same thing.)

 

[Uller]

I want a TPK like I want Panda Express. It's a guilty pleasure which is fun at the time but makes me feel bad afterward.

Panda Express...always seems like a good idea until ypu actually eat it.

 

[Minigiant]

Really, the only way to make a CR system for "serious gamers" is to figure out what the most common looks and operations for a party of serious PCs.

For example during the playtest, I made sample level 5 PCs and ran them through a 8 room dungeon. The wizard and cleric would "blow up" 3 rooms each with their spells and let the fighter and rogue clean up the fight. The fighter would carve through the remaining 2 rooms with Action Surge.

I figured out that full casters were designed to be able to blow up 3-4 encounters a day with 2 spells and been done by nightfall. So with 2 casters on a normal 8 encounter day, each encounter had to be about worthy of 2 spells and keep ticking at level 5. Well... 2 spells, a handful of lvl 5 cantrips, a couple lvl 5 Sneak attacks, and about a fistful unbuffed warrior weapon attacks. Easily 75-125 damage.

 

[Rya.Reisender]

It is nice to be able to look at a CR and know the corresponding XP value when totaling up XP for a session or encounter. I'd find it a headache to have to track those numbers separately.

Also, with all the challenges in creating a more precise CR, I don't know how you could make the XP even more granular. I think, if we wanted something more granular, we'd have to break out the subsystems of a monsters CR. Give them a Defensive Rating, an Offensive Rating and maybe a Special Rating. (The Special Rating just indicating extenuating circumstances that adjusted the CR, like immunities and resistances.)

I guess I'm a "nihilist," though, in that I consider the whole exercise to be a little futile. A sufficiently rigorous algorithm for mathematically calculating encounter difficulty would be far too much work. What we have is already more than I'm interested in using very frequently. I have a spreadsheet that I use for creating NPCs, and that's about it.

Well, it's WotC that should develop and use a balanced algorithm to calculate the XP, then just write the XP on each monster. The DM shouldn't even need to bother with it, he just reads 950 XP and knows how much XP to award.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

I always wonder what people consider a "real challenge" in Pen&Paper. I mean, does it require the DM to try his best to get the party killed? Or should the monsters be so hard that no matter how dumb the DM plays them, he can't prevent a TPK unless the PCs play smart?

That's a really good question, and an answer needs to it needs to be nailed down before you can meaningfully think about CR. To me, a serious challenge is an encounter where the players have to consistently make very good decisions to overcome the challenge.

 

[Imaculata]

That's a really good question, and an answer needs to it needs to be nailed down before you can meaningfully think about CR. To me, a serious challenge is an encounter where the players have to consistently make very good decisions to overcome the challenge.

And to me, a reasonable challenge is one where all the players survive, but not without injuries. Preferably, one player should at least be seriously injured.

(And for the record, I'm only talking about combat difficulty here, and not about challenges in general)