Goblyn said:
I say 'general' so big because CR/EL goes with the assumption of 4 PCs - Fighter, cleric, wizard, rogue, with appropriate treasure, and standard spells, skillsets, and abilities(most people forget these last three).
Hussar said:
The thing to remember though, more than anything else, is that CR and EL cannot account for luck. A string of great rolls by the DM WILL kill the PC more often than not, regardless of the CR of the baddie. EL is not a safety net. Fighting an EL less than par is not a guarantee of success. However, it does let you guestimate with some accuracy beforehand.
I am totally in agreement with these two comments.
Its a guideline not the concrete system the naysayers want it to be. Die rolls can make or break some encounters.
Also splatbooks, imho, went a long way to destroy CR/EL rules. As Goblyn stated the CR/EL rules take into account a
balanced 4 PC party with typical abilities (again its a guideline).
Delving into the above a little deepr....
I think most Player's/DM's who are so quick to accept these splatbooks dont realize what balance issues these splat classes can cause. Evidence of this is in just about every forum, and more so in "My party got TPK'ed" threads. Take a look as to what their party was made of before the TPK. Its almost always missing an important core role like "Cleric" (for main healing) or "Rogue" for trapfinding and are replaced by the more hip classes like Warmages, Scouts etc. The other party makeup of the "My party got TPK'ed" crowd does contain the critical classes but multiclassed too early with another class or in some cases multiple classes.
To tie up my point without deviating too much is that the CR/EL rules can seem to be useless when most people these days seem to run non-standard classes (and in some cases highly unbalanced) or an unbalanced group lacking a critical "Core" role like healer, trapfinder etc.
This is why Im against splatbooks in general. Its great to have nice options, but most dont really take into account game balance effects on CR/ELs of monsters.
WotC seems to throw out these half-thought out books for the masses without considering how they seem to screw up their own core rules (in this case... CR/ELs), then they tell us the game is broken and wait for 4th edition.
DragonLancer said:
I've generally stopped using it, and look to the monsters stats themselves to see whether I think it will be a suitable, weak or more powerful challenge for the PC's.
Good Point. This is one way that "experienced" DMs can fix the problem, and definately helpful for the splatbook using crowd.