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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 8991367" data-attributes="member: 6777737">This, I think, is a little overstated. <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/onednd/comments/12d243f/jeremy_crawford_at_the_creator_summit_the_cr/jf4eqff/" target="_blank">There was a really good response on reddit about it</a>. (I know! I was shocked, too!)Really, though, what throws people off is that a party of five level 12 PCs can tackle a CR 20, but if you plug that into the actual encounter rules, it's only slightly above the Deadly rating. That jives with my play experience; it's really tough, but you can win pretty consistently without a PC dying. The issue is that low level PCs can only handle CR within 2 or 3 steps of their level, while higher level PCs can handle +8 or more, sometimes without much difficulty. That's expected by the design, but it's not intuitive or obvious when designing an encounter. It kind of makes sense, though. a level 13 Fighter isn't that much more challenging than a level 12 Fighter, but the difference between a level 1, level 2, and level 3 Fighter is quite significant. Levels have diminishing returns, not linear progressions. That's less true if you're a spellcaster, but it still holds roughly through level 10 or 12 (I'm not a fan of level 7+ spells).Maybe CR should be just replaced with or include the tier system. Medusa (CR 6) is meant to be a Tier 2 monster, so it'll be really challenging for Tier 1 PCs and pretty throwaway at Tier 3, and so on. Maybe even include Tier 0 for the really easy monsters. That's kind of how I've looked at CR for awhile. "Oh, this is CR 12? That will imagine the possibility of tier 3 abilities."The system does severely lowball encounter difficulty, however, if you calculate it the way they tell you to. The whole XP multiplier for monster group size can be ignored in my experience until you really outnumber the PCs. So it's not that CR is busted; it's that the encounter-building rules are. It's challenging to run a solo monster encounter at high PC levels, regardless of the NPC's CR.Well, doing a bunch of easy encounters, certainly. It takes more DM time to set up, takes longer to play through, and isn't very satisfying to play in.</blockquote>

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