L
lowkey13
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[MENTION=3586]MerricB[/MENTION], that sounds familiar... Like I've heard it before, from a story around the year 2000 or so...![]()
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.![]()
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.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.
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.