jmartkdr2
Hero
A lot of people find CR basically useless, for a number of reasons. And there's a lot of space between "useless" and "perfect." It should be in there somewhere.
D&D (2024) What do you want in the revised DMG?
Lyxen
Great Old One
That's the way I'm reading this as well, and not only do they want the computations precise, but they want to walk the fine line between "as challenging as possible" and "TPK possible", and somehow be able to shift the responsibility to the system instead of assuming it themselves.
Lyxen
Great Old One
It's certainly in there for me, I use ballpack CR and it works fine.
Oofta
Legend
You have to adjust for every group and oftentimes by environment and scenario but I find CR works about as well as anything. I really enjoy my current group but they generally have awful tactics. Occasionally I forget that.
Heh... well like I said above... if you're running a table for 4 PCs of the Basic Rules Core 4 the encounter building rules work pretty well. But granted that's not said specifically anywhere, so it's only by playing the game with all manner of tables and characters away from that baseline do we notice just how much the rules fall away.
But because there is no way to make a balanced set of encounter building rules that could be 'plug and play' for every number of player count, every combination of classes from the PHB, every level of magical item ownership, and every variant rule inclusion... the game doesn't bother trying. It just requires every DM to basically learn how to create their own encounter building rules for their own tables.
Which does ask the question that if these rules they do include only really work as precisely as some players think they should for that one specific Core Four 4 PC table... should they even have bothered to include any rules whatsoever? Which I think is a legitimate question we could ask. If the rules won't necessarily work for 99.9% of all the tables out there, are they actually worth including them at all and probably misrepresenting themselves to almost everyone who reads them?
For me, my impulse is to say 'Yeah... I think?... if only for the completely new D&D and RPG player who has no concept of building encounters at all in the first place and it gives them an idea and examples of what encounters could actually look like.' But even then, I suspect even completely new players who weren't using the Starter Set and were creating their own fights are probably owners and users of the PHB, which means their table won't be a Core Four 4 PC one either. So again, the rules end up being relatively useless for them if they are trying to follow them to the word. Which can be unfortunate.
jmartkdr2
Hero
I find it generally useful for comparing monsters - aside form a few special abilities that break things1, I can be pretty confident that two CR 5 monsters are about as rough to fight as the other. Whether CR 5 is right for the party is another, more difficult question, and one that requires some experimenting to determine.
1 For example, the shadow's ability to attack strength means it ignores hp, which can be very nasty. Shadows punch way above their weight class. But that's kinda specific to them, not a problem with CR in general.
A big part of the trouble is that wotc designed for an astoundingly grindy number of encounters rather than one that could be reasonably pushed in normal gameplay and put a console command level recovery option
A great many of those sidebars better prepare a 5e dm for running 5e yet are from two editions ago. Yes the decision to go into detail or not in ways that are needed for the DM to go into their game well equipped with an understanding of any given topic or not is a choice and choosing not to do so on a given section says a lot. In aggregate though there are so few efforts in the dmg to present system knowledge as anything but an opaque wall that the system winds up being rather unfriendly to the GM in need of system knowledge needed to confidently rule on areas of the rules that needs changes & rulings. Paired with decisions like "feats and magic items are
The choice not to equip the gm with system understanding goes beyond a GM actively looking to better understand things to include a GM who doesn't know the mistakes they are making because a more experienced GM can not point them to the sidebar on xxx that would help them better realize things they are struggling with. in the case of 5e itself, an experienced GM who goes through the effort of understanding things followed by trial and error of correcting one off edge case rules intended to stop mythical killer GMs & similar newbieGM mistakes that choice from wotc shows the unstructured mess under the hood.
Lyxen
Great Old One
Well, the number of players of 5e compared to any other edition should just show you that it's not GM Hostile in general, the hostility is only generated by GM from previous editions expecting the same thing as previous editions. But I've discussed with at least 10 different DMs from 5e (usually children of friends or friends of my children) who absolutely have zero problem operating directly under the new paradigms and don't spend their time trying to recreate the past from the new.
So no, the DMs don't need more "equipment", unless you think that they are inferior DMs because of that, which would be arrogant in the extreme.
So no, the DMs don't need more "equipment", unless you think that they are inferior DMs because of that, which would be arrogant in the extreme.
Lakesidefantasy
Hero
I don't think so. The lists are in an appendix by themselves. Volo's and Mordenkainen's guides have the lists for the monsters in the guide itself.
It's annoying when designing encounters to have to flip through both books.
Lyxen
Great Old One
That's normal, they couldn't update the DMG because of these new publications, could they ?
I don't do it that way at all, there are myriads of tools available today which are way more efficient than using books at least for that.
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