Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Adso" data-source="post: 331826" data-attributes="member: 6706">Re: Re: Re: Re: The problem isn't the monster, it's the CR systemI don't know if we’d get better accuracy. I think we’d get better consensus. And I think that's really the issue at hand. Currently, there is a system. That system is a loose system. Something Ryan might call a guideline, but I don't thing that's really what it is; guidelines are just potential rules we are uncertain about, either because they lack practical application, or they only work an unacceptable percentage of the time. Anyhow, this system comes with it a couple of key assumptions: the size, the power, and the rule-set shared by a group of fresh D&D characters played by groups of reasonable to game-savvy folk that could take care of the bad guys, not unscathed, but not limping either.When you see a CR 5, that small string of code tells you that the 5th-level versions of Tordek, Jozan, Mialee and Lidda (or whatever four iconics are on plate that day) kicked this challenge's butt. And then asks, “How do you think your party will do?” To a group of four 5th-level characters in a game centered on the delicate court politics in Rel Mord, it might be more of a fight than its Challenge Rating lets on. To the Saturday Night Dungeon Marauders, it might be little more than a road bump. I guess you could create a system that gave more information—something that told you less than the statistics, but more than the CR. But that would be contingent on the same system featuring the reprinting information from the character’s statistics and codified in a way to give it the airs of something more scientific and precise. It’s like printing Cliffs Notes in the front of a book. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" />We could create a totally new system, something that was more precise and scientific. But that suggestion seems hinged on the desire to give the constituents of whole challenges some form of rating. Just how it is derived must be by the judgment of those who create it (or by playtesting to see how a group of characters fares against each single attack, power, or even spell and then assigning it a number properly proportionate to all other things in the system, which is absurd), in the end creating a more abstract system than the one already there. And, you know, if you’re in to that sort of thing, the CR system has it. It was featured in Dragon Magazine a while back, titled “How to Create a Monster.” But even those guidelines (and I think they are guidelines) warn that the system is abstract and that you are going to want to playtest your creation before you do settle on the CR, along with the hidden statement, “best if you use the iconics (see or derive from their statistics in Enemies and Allies).” The call for a “technology” to solve the problem is frustration that the system has number but fails to be mathematically perfect. Well you aren’t going to get mathematically perfect with a system that is making a judgment a specific type about two things—one is a group of adventurer and the other is a challenge—tested in an arena swayed by two (each to its own degree) unpredictable factors: skill and chance. Instead the system is a value statement about a set group of circumstances. Simply, the system is there to make a simple and intelligible value statement based on its predetermined standards. Which, interestingly enough, is exactly what a rating is.</blockquote>

Verification