freyar said:
My question is whether or not you have generally found the 3.X system of CR and EL to be broken in general or if it usually works fine. If it normally works well, when does it break? In my experience, it's been fine, but I haven't run any encounters higher than EL5 if memory serves. Just curious. Thanks for the insight!
As long as one accepts CR for what it is, that is a measure of what level at which a party of four with standard gear will consume 20-25% of its resources in the defeat thereof, I think CR and EL are two of the best things in 3e. They're right up with no more racial level limits. CR and EL are especially useful for me in getting a quick eyeball of how hard a battle ought to be. If I want to give the PCs a speed bump, I use a EL right about their average level. If I know it's going to be the only fight in the day, or world circumstances dictate otherwise (This one gets some of my players pretty angry sometimes.), then I can select an EL of party level +4 and get a hard fight.
I've run parties of up to eight. For them, a CR=level encounter was fairly easy. I currently prefer much smaller parties, which have a harder time of it. It's still not normally awful for them, but every now and then rolls are bad or someone took an extra stupid pill in the morning. Don't tell my players, but sometimes that guy is me. Monsters are always going to sometimes have strengths that hit at the party weaknesses and sometimes weaknesses that hit at party strengths. It's often good to hit the party where you know its weak from time to time, just as its good to let them feel powerful sometimes. Players will always have varying levels of luck with the dice. They will always have different levels of positive synergy in their builds. No system can account for all of this.
Knowing all of that, there are a couple of obvious breakpoints that can't be excused by being honest about what CR and EL actually measure.
1) When modifying monsters, whether its with templates, added hit dice, class levels, or all three, the numbers do not always turn up accurate. It's been my experience that it's easier to create a glass cannon than it is to create the tarrasque's angrier cousin. Large amounts of HD advancement sometimes create a monster that seems to fit its new CR, but often if you really crank it you end up just adding a round or two to the fight. The chief benefit is more hit points. Aside hit points, a few points to saves and BAB, a monster's defenses don't really scale with it. A really tough amount of DR on a CR10 monster could be trivial on a CR15 advanced version.
2) When dealing with larger groups of foes, the EL often inflates faster than the difficulty. A large number of lesser foes are probably not as strong as their EL suggests, especially not when numbers approach ten. However, large groups of inferior foes can induce extremely random and thus unpredictable shifts in the direction of battle. I had a pair of unholy blights (from a 7th level and a 6th level caster) almost wipe a party in the first round of combat. They were 11th level at the time. A simple web (caster level 5) took the cleric cohort and the wizard out of the battle entirely. Over the course of the fight, it probably evens out to about what a single CR14 creature could do to the party. But that said, the wild swings either way at the open of combat can create the appearance otherwise.
, I started noticing a lot of people talking about how bad the CR/EL system has been in 3e.* Now, maybe it's the threads I've read or my memory, but I don't recall much besides a few examples of monsters that have been over- or under-CRed. That's not really my point, either.
