D&D 5E The Challenge Rating Goldilocks Thread- Too Hot, Too Cold, or Just Right?

[UngeheuerLich]

Only peoblem I really see is using the average of offensive and defensive CR. Also some monsters are dangerous becaue of mind games, not combat strength.
If you use this monster in a straight up fight you don't use it well.
Strahd is borderline deady for an average 10th level party, as long as he fights when he wants. Its only his doom if he gets jumped on. Hence the structure of the adventure.

 

[Harzel]

I think the effective XP multipliers for multiple monsters is a little excessive. It should take into account the number of characters in a party. Large parties decimate solo creatures—there should probably be a reduction in effective XP for solo creatures versus parties of 5 or more.

There is an adjustment given; it's just not in tabular form.

Party Size

The preceding guidelines assume that you have a party consisting of three to five adventurers.

If the party contains fewer than three characters, apply the next highest multiplier on the Encounter Multipliers table. For example, apply a multiplier of 1.5 when the characters fight a single monster, and a multiplier of 5 for groups of fifteen or more monsters.

If the party contains six or more characters, use the next lowest multiplier on the table. Use a multiplier of 0.5 for a single monster.

 

[Urriak Uruk]

I have a party of 6 people, so CR is almost entirely useless... I still use it to measure "oh this thing is tough," but use Kobold Fight Club, or D&D Beyond's encounter builder.

 

[Tony Vargas]

DMing is a skill, it takes time. In addition, some DMs are either better at adjusting on the fly or don't want to do so. I probably would have just adjusted on the fly if I thought the group would enjoy the challenge.

There's hard-won skill & innate talent.
A really good CR guide lowers the bar so that you can make a viable combat that's about as difficult as intended earlier in your player-to-DM-to-grognard arc.

But there's also an art to DMing, which speaks to deciding how hard an encounter needs to be in the first place - and, even then, a good DM can take an encounter that turned out much harder or easier than intended and still make it a good session and a meaningful part of his story.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I have a party of 6 people, so CR is almost entirely useless... I still use it to measure "oh this thing is tough," but use Kobold Fight Club, or D&D Beyond's encounter builder.

Um, that's what CR does, so not sure how you're not using it? Also, KFC is the DMG CR encounter building rules neat, no ice.

 

[Charlaquin]

I have used CR for most of my time DMing 5e, but found it clunky and not especially reliable. Recently, I tossed it out in favor of a more 4e-style encounter building system that assumes groups of monsters as the default.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I have used CR for most of my time DMing 5e, but found it clunky and not especially reliable. Recently, I tossed it out in favor of a more 4e-style encounter building system that assumes groups of monsters as the default.

I'm not following you... you easily do groups with CR.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm not following you... you easily do groups with CR.

Yes, but the system is built around the baseline of one CR X monster being a Medium difficultly encounter for a party of 4 level X adventurers, and you have to mess around with functional XP multipliers when building encounters with groups of monsters. It works, but it’s a lot of extra busywork when more encounters than not feature multiple monsters, 4e had the right idea designing its encounter level system around the baseline of a party of monsters vs a party of adventures m, with certain special monsters counting for multiple slots in the monster party. So, I have started building my 5e encounters that way.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Yes, but the system is built around the baseline of one CR X monster being a Medium difficultly encounter for a party of 4 level X adventurers, and you have to mess around with functional XP multipliers when building encounters with groups of monsters. It works, but it’s a lot of extra busywork when more encounters than not feature multiple monsters, 4e had the right idea designing its encounter level system around the baseline of a party of monsters vs a party of adventures m, with certain special monsters counting for multiple slots in the monster party. So, I have started building my 5e encounters that way.

I don't know it's built around that concept rather than that's a generally true statement. Depending on level, a critter within 1 CR of the 4 person party is also a medium encounter. Had it been actually built on that framework, you'd expect that the medium encounter thresholds would be closer to the xp value of the same CR critters -- but they aren't, they're just close.

And, sure, I suppose if you don't want to bother with the extra step of the multipliers you might find the system clunky. Again, I use Kobold Fight Club, which does the multipliers for me and adds the math so it's much less of a problem. I almost never use solo encounters, or even encounters of a single monster block, so I found your statement odd as I still use the CR system. I get you using a different metric, though.

 

[Oofta]

Yes, but the system is built around the baseline of one CR X monster being a Medium difficultly encounter for a party of 4 level X adventurers, and you have to mess around with functional XP multipliers when building encounters with groups of monsters. It works, but it’s a lot of extra busywork when more encounters than not feature multiple monsters, 4e had the right idea designing its encounter level system around the baseline of a party of monsters vs a party of adventures m, with certain special monsters counting for multiple slots in the monster party. So, I have started building my 5e encounters that way.

I know a bunch of people use KFC, personally I use a spreadsheet (see attached) which uses a slightly modified formula. All I do is punch in a few numbers and I get a prediction of encounter difficulty that works the vast majority of time. It works as well or better than what I had in 4E.