NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 4708062" data-attributes="member: 18280">This is the sort of thing that I thought you meant.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />CR and EL are tools to give the DM some ability to predict the outcome of a particular encounter or series of encounters, and thus to achieve a desired outcome.  Perforce, the CR guidelines are not perfect, and make assumptions about how encounters are handled, and perforce, the CR guidelines will sometimes fail because the encounter is handled in a way not foreseen by the creator of the guidelines (thus seemingly "too easy" or "too hard").However, "too easy" and "too hard" both strongly imply (I would go so far as to say have no intrinsic meaning without the existance of) a desired outcome.  The entire CR system, as well as things like wish lists, etc., are a move to encourage desired outcome play.  Because random elements exist within the game, though, this desired outcome does not always occur.It is the random elements, not the rules, that are adjusted when the CR 5 creature outperforms (or underperforms) your expectations.  Random elements like encounter design, player choices, and die rolls.Fudging eliminates these random elements, thus reinforcing the desired (predicted by CR guidlelines) outcome.  It is, after all, meaningless to say that you intentionally chose a CR 5 creature without also agreeing that you chose that CR because it seemed to support the encounter outcome you wanted.RC</blockquote>

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