CR for me is a warning flag. Monsters with a higher CR than the players -may- be capable of one shotting PCs or -may- have abilities which could be impossible for players to deal with. But I then follow that up with actually checking the damage the monsters are capable of and look at what special abilities the monsters have. If there are no problems then I use them, if there are problems I consider the situation carefully. The deadliest fights I've seen are ones where the monsters have abilities the players weren't aware of. And ones where there were lots of monsters. Since 4th ed I never expect solos to actually be threatening.
D&D 5E Who wrote these CRs?
FormerlyHemlock
Hero
Welcome to Enworld, Mr. Lynch.
Well, no one complained about it during the playtest.
All the playtest adventures were a bunch of fights with few safe zones until you cleared the area.
Enter the dungeon/care/wilderness, deal with 1-10 encounters, long rest.
But hey. If D&D5 didn't work for dungeon crawling, that would have been stupid.
My 8th level three-PC group suffered a crushing defeat last night in my online Wilderlands game. They had defeated a CR 5 earth elemental (the Umber Dwarf) accompanied by 4 CR 1/2 apes, when attacked by four supposedly CR 1/2 shadows. Shadows won init. The Rogue fled with Cunning Action - Dash, the Warlock started the fight on 5 hp and went down immediately, the Barbarian was drained to STR 8, too weak to carry the Warlock, but escaped. End result was two PCs escaped, one PC lost - a PC who'd been played for 38 sessions since early this year.
There was a lot of bad luck in the dice rolling, but no one is saying 5e is too easy. My group hardly ever fight foes of equal CR, and attrition is definitely the killer - if they had taken a short rest at the first opportunity earlier the Warlock would have started the Umber Dwarf fight with another 25 hp, and probably survived.
There was a lot of bad luck in the dice rolling, but no one is saying 5e is too easy. My group hardly ever fight foes of equal CR, and attrition is definitely the killer - if they had taken a short rest at the first opportunity earlier the Warlock would have started the Umber Dwarf fight with another 25 hp, and probably survived.
AaronOfBarbaria
Adventurer
That entirely depends on what "this way" that you describe specifically means to you.
If it is predicated on using dungeons which require multiple adventuring days spent exploring and clearing them out, I use those only rarely - namely when it seems appropriate, which is not in most of my campaigns, but I am running an occasionally gathering group through Rappan Athuk, and I have a regularly occurring campaign entitled Escape from Dungeonland where the end-goal is to finally be able to leave the dungeon for once.
If it is a more lenient interpretation in which a dungeon only large enough to present a single full adventuring day of exploration/combat, I use those pretty much all the time outside of the aforementioned dungeon-centric campaigns. There is always some travel, exploration, social interaction, and all the non-dungeon aspects of the game between each, but dungeons (a tomb here, a bit of sewer there, a castle or manor, etc.) are constant inclusions.
