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<blockquote data-quote="Delta" data-source="post: 3746101" data-attributes="member: 40269">I think the CR/EL system is a very good one, one of the best things instituted in 3E. The only problem is that it's hard to actually gauge the CR of a monster correctly; it takes quite a bit of playtesting to do it correctly, and that takes time. It's so time consuming there's no way that 3E, when first published, had enough time to cover all the bases; what we got were best-attempt estimations.(Example: Check FrankTheDM's monster thread. He's got all these cool monsters statted out, and the one thing he repeatedly asks for help with is someone to playtest them to tell him what the proper CR is. I know, I've been in the same boat.)So if 4E throws out the whole system, I think that's a shame, because the best chance to get it right was to build on the years of playing and refine those numbers to something more accurate. Every time someone had a complaint about a given monster was an opportunity to help fix it, but I don't see that happening now.A while back I wrote a computerized combat simulator to run a few thousand fights between brutes and gauge their overall toughness, as a starting point for CR derivations ( <a href="http://www.superdan.net/softwin.html" target="_blank">http://www.superdan.net/softwin.html</a> ). One thing I was amazed at is how well the x2 numbers --&gt; +2 EL rule generally works, it's really much closer than I first expected. In summary: It's a good sytem -- the hard part is all the playtesting necessary to properly set those monster CR's. There's never been enough time or a feedback process created to really refine them.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Delta, post: 3746101, member: 40269"] I think the CR/EL system is a very good one, one of the best things instituted in 3E. The only problem is that it's [i]hard[/i] to actually gauge the CR of a monster correctly; it takes quite a bit of playtesting to do it correctly, and that takes time. It's so time consuming there's no way that 3E, when first published, had enough time to cover all the bases; what we got were best-attempt estimations. (Example: Check FrankTheDM's monster thread. He's got all these cool monsters statted out, and the one thing he repeatedly asks for help with is someone to playtest them to tell him what the proper CR is. I know, I've been in the same boat.) So if 4E throws out the whole system, I think that's a shame, because the best chance to get it right was to build on the years of playing and refine those numbers to something more accurate. Every time someone had a complaint about a given monster was an opportunity to help fix it, but I don't see that happening now. A while back I wrote a computerized combat simulator to run a few thousand fights between brutes and gauge their overall toughness, as a starting point for CR derivations ( [url]http://www.superdan.net/softwin.html[/url] ). One thing I was [i]amazed[/i] at is how well the x2 numbers --> +2 EL rule generally works, it's really much closer than I first expected. In summary: It's a good sytem -- the hard part is all the playtesting necessary to properly set those monster CR's. There's never been enough time or a feedback process created to really refine them. [/QUOTE]

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