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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 3699405" data-attributes="member: 18280">I can break down the factors that make monsters dangerous regardless of whether or not they have a high CR.  In fact, when I create new monsters, I must do this to assign them a CR.Hence, I can say that while it is true that high-CR monsters are dangerous (if CR is applied correctly  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" /> ), and that dangerous monsters are assigned a high CR (in general; goblins can sometimes be dangerous), I can also point to the factors that lead any particular monster to have a high CR independently of that CR rating itself.  More importantly, I can make a prediction about what CR a monster that lacks one should have.Conversely, while one might claim that "fitness is a quality that all creatures have, independent of the observer" and "they merely demonstrate this quality by surviving", any attempt to determine exactly what is meant by "fitness" breaks down almost immediately.  Moreover, while I can use the measured wavelength of light to predict what colour you are likely to see, and the attributes of a designed monster to determine what CR it should have, I am unable to use "survival of the fittest" to make any sort of meaningful prediction.Something will survive for some amount of time.  That thing is fittest because it survived.  I can seldom predict what would survive ahead of time, although I can determine why something died retroactively.The problem with "survival of the fittest" is that there is no "fittest".  "Fittest" is in fact a multitude of traits which may, or may not, contribute to overall success in both the short term and the long term, either individually or in totality.  Sometimes "fittest" means "luckiest".  Sometimes "most intelligent".  Sometimes "strongest".  Sometimes "most adaptable".  Prior to actual testing, (i.e., who survives and why) there is no way to determine what "fittest" means in any particular context.It is a mental placemarker for an idea that is itself so nebulously defined as to make it difficult to grasp when presented, and it is a placeholder without any real meaning of its own.  This, in turn, can cause people problems when the idea it is placeholding is presented.The idea can be presented as:  "If some creatures live, and some creatures die, there must be some reason that the creatures that lived survived, and the creatures that died did not, although that reason is not always the same from case to case, nor can we draw any but the most general predictions from it.  For example, we can draw the conclusion that a comet striking the Earth is probably not going to make anyone happy, nor is the advent of a nuclear war."The problem with "ineffectual" monster use is the same.  The CR system is presented under a set of assumptions, and those assumptions are actually pretty well codified in the core ruleset.  Excepting, perhaps, exactly how the designers imagine that the creature in question is to be used (and if our WotC articles about changing Ogre Magi, Beholders, and Rust Monsters are indicative of things to come, this will change).  If you follow those assumptions, then the CR system works very much as advertised.However, those assumptions include the makeup of the ideal party, and as more materials for the game are devised, it becomes easier and easier for players to stray from the assumptive baseline (for higher or lower power levels).It has always been true that one must take the characters into account when determining how dangerous an encounter is.  CR is intended as a system to make this easier, but it can become a mental shorthand for a complex idea, and as shorthand alone it doesn't work.  You might discover, for example, that you need to use higher-CR monsters than normal not because you are less effective than average at designing tactical challenges, but because your players are more effective than normal at responding to those challenges.  Thinking of CR in terms of its recursive shorthand placeholder doesn't help the DM determine where the problem is coming from, or how to resolve it.This is no different, IMHO, to kids not understanding evolution because they are taught a placeholder that is easy to dismiss instead of (rather than in addition to) the more complex and robust ideas that "survival of the fittest" stands in for.YMMV.RC</blockquote>

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