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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 7885284" data-attributes="member: 32740">That makes me smile because 3E's CR was still just a made up number.  And yes, it did work rather better than a silly wild-ass guess, but it wasn't nearly as infallible as it is often made out to be.  That was just a bill of goods sold to you to convince you that 3E was superior to sliced bread and you didn't need to look very carefully behind the curtain.IME 3E's precious methodology of building encounters with mathematical formulas was a breath of fresh air compared to 1E/2E, but it was nonetheless easily bent and even broken because it cannot incorporate so many other vital factors - including actual terrain, the actual classes of the PC's (there's a reason people blather ON AND ON about class tiers), more or fewer than the average number of expected PC's, skill of manipulating rules by either the DM or the players, the actual condition of the PC's when beginning the encounter rather than the assumed condition at the time of creating the encounter, the absolute unpredictability of dice rolls by either DM or players, the ruthlessness with which monsters are run by the DM, the ACTUAL equipment possessed by the PC's rather than the expected equipment, and of course assigning a monster a given CR in the first place IS just a guess AT BEST.  It may be an educated guess rather than a silly wild-ass one, but that doesn't make it a brick in the wall of the universe.  It must obviously overlook ALL those other impossible-to-define factors that go into creating an encounter.  You might be able to overlook one, or even several such factors, but when you start to combine them together, the idea that in 3E "there are rules for it all" is, IMO, absurd.  While you have more tools to help you, building encounters is still as much art rather than science as it ever was in 1E - especially when you're talking about a DM against players who are all working the system for every optimization because 3E was designed to give players a disproportionate amount of ammo for that.The encounter creation rules in 3E are a useful tool, but it functions by Occams Razor:  They must assume everything is average and otherwise equal in order to work as advertised - but it so seldom actually is.  They aren't the unshakable foundation of bedrock that the rules had (and still do have) people believing them to be.</blockquote>

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