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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6156453" data-attributes="member: 17106">I'm going to stop you right there. Let's look at the book:"If you decide to use only status quo encounters, you should probably let your players know about this. Some of the encounters you place in your setting will be an appropriate challenge for the PCs, but others might not be" (p. 48)"In general...[stuff about ELs]" (p. 48)"In general...[another paragraph about ELs" (p. 49)"Remember that when the EL is higher than the party level, the chance for PC fatality rises dramatically" (p. 49)You'll note that this last one does not say all the PCs will die, it makes a much more qualified statement. If you do actually read the section, it's clear that it is general advice, not rules.I doubt that WotC thought this, but if they did, they were wildly misguided. As has been covered several times, only a minority of players on ENW use that system. It certainly is not intrinsic. You can throw out the whole thing quite easily.For example, CoC d20 uses the same basic mechanics, and even gives its monsters CRs. However, the CR is basically described once as "this is a rough guess of how powerful a monster is" and there is no information about standard encounter difficulty, encounter building using CRs, modifying CRs, or XP. Because that is the point of a CR; it's someone's guess of how powerful a monster is, not a mechanical representation of anything.Okay, sure, there are different contexts. An "official" game has strict rules, those rules may be modified for certain situations (but remain rules) and people may play loose with the rules in an "unofficial" game. Have you read Unearthed Arcana? Besides the variant rules, there's also a boatload of sidebars that say, in effect "this is how I do things in my game, signed [D&D writer]". Their games often run very differently than the published rules. And they wrote the rules. So no, there is no "pure D&D" in the rulebooks that we then alter; if anything, the "purest" form of D&D comes straight from the DM of your home game.There may have been thought put into it (and I do think that a lot more thought was put into the 3.0 core rulebooks than anything that came before or after them), but just because they thought about it doesn't mean they were right.Unless they are well executed. Which is, to be fair, really a matter of taste.True, that's a dramatic conceit. A better way might be to have the opponent call of the fight if there is no reason to continue, or to introduce a third legitimate combatant that heard the first two fighting.Skills. In 3e, there is a use for Sense Motive to do this, and it is largely the point of Knowledge skills as well. If your characters are clueless about the monsters you're fighting (never mind the players' metagame knowledge), then they should be in trouble. If they, conversely, are smart, they should be able to make better decisions and be more likely to survive.Its HD and special abilities. Assuming you have even a basic understanding of what all the numbers on its stat block mean, it should be pretty clear.In some cases yes, in others not. The point is that the players have a lot of knowledge; they hear the attack rolls of the monter/NPC, they know what their save results are and whether they succeeded, they know how many hp they have left. If they ask, they likely have some ides of how many hp their opponents have. And that's on top of whatever foreknowledge they acquired in the game, and whatever knowledge their skills give them. It is largely the players' responsibility to decide what level of challenge they can handle and what tactics are most likely to ensure their survival.They didn't fight 13.3 encounters per level either. If you're trying to model an epic fantasy book, the assumptions of the CR/EL system will fail you pretty badly.D&D characters are not usually commoners! And those hobbits were repeatedly faced with challenges that the CR/EL system would frown on, and survived anyway.Except, the stats never say that. You can always call of the fight. You can always overrule the results of the dice. Or you can play with them and see what happens. In any case, it is the DM's choice.And yes, the DM does have authorial responsibility. To say that CRs are pointless is not to say that the DM shouldn't pick a level of challenge that is appropriate for his style of play. I'm merely saying that CRs are not helpful in doing that.</blockquote>

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