I've come to terms with the fact that 5e's CR is absolutely fucking worthless and not at all representative of a monster's actual threat level - or at least it does not take in account power levels above or besides the one you'd expect from an empirical balanced party.
Is there anything from official (or unofficial) sources that would help me readjust or pick monsters more efficiently against my particular group? Or rather, what do you recommend when your players mop the floor with any mooks you have without bullshitting them to make combat last longer and be more engaging overall?
Yeah dude, its been like that since they added CR as a thing, use it VERY roughly, and just adjust on the fly. It's really the best you can do because all parties are so different
Christian Torres
>Yeah dude, its been like that since they added CR as a thing Well
Welcome to 2002, which is about when people figured out that CR is useless the first time. There's no guide to understanding CR. Your best bet is to really learn and understand your PCs and their capabilities and judge each monster by those capabilities manually. It's the only way you'll get balanced fights.
Jason Carter
The dmg has some shit about calculating the exp thresholds of players and the exp of monsters
Lucas Gray
Well shit, at least I now know that I'm not just being contrarian and/or retarded. Has Wizards addressed this in the past 16 years?
I guess that's a start.
Jaxson White
>Forever DM, group wants to move to DnD 5e >learn the shit, do modules, eventually end up making own campaign once we're all comfortable with our overall knowledge of the system >throughout this 6 year, and still on-going, campaign a party of a consistent 5 player group has wiped to a group of 6 bullywugs at level 2 and slain an ancient dragon (traps, minions, environment, and all) at level 14
My advice? Have any and all possible enemies on hand for the environment they are in (urban, grassland, etc) and just throw whatever seems reasonable at them based on their task, the overall lay of the land, and their actions to that point. Fuck CR, just put whatever should be there at their location regardless of actual difficulty scaling, put extra/optional shit that can help turn the tide if it's over their current level but don't handhold them towards it, and hope they put their fucking heads together or die like idiots. With how easy 5e is unless you get a monster equivalent of "rocks fall on you" like get an ancient dragon at level 5, or have an assassin kill them for no reason when things fade to black when they all go to sleep, theres no excuse for death as long as you give them the necessary information to their surroundings.
Adrian Nguyen
>what do you recommend when your players mop the floor with any mooks you have
Use more traps for intelligent creatures. I assume your players keep watch or use alarm when they sleep, why wouldnt they? Even less intelligent creatures have to survive off of eating other lifeforms usually and they didnt get to where they are by waiting in the middle of a room plain for all to see, tapping their toes for initiative to be rolled. They'd be hiding/hunting for prey if they're predators, or quick/stealthy/in large numbers if prey. Most creatures have wiki pages or older bestiary information on them for a better understanding of how they live or would react to something else entering their view.
If that fails then modify currently existing creatures. Give humanoids access to consumables or equipment outside their bestiary list, read older bestiaries or those of completely different games to use and morph to fit into 5e rules so you dont have That Guy whos memorized the entirety of 5e's monster stats from knowing what to do. For example, one time a player was making his cheating way to obvious so I threw a "Cerberus" beast at them. Had a frightening presence, HP of a large CR 7 creature, 4 multiattack (one for each head and a claw attack), and a few other things. Got their asses humbled really fucking quick when the ever-knowing bard, who was apparently behind the shoulder of every god in the universe when the material realm was under construction and knew the exact hit points, weaknesses, resistances, spells, etc. of every creature they'd ever came across, didn't have a plan of attack and almost wiped.
And if THAT fails, then fuck it. Just have an innumerable amount of minions as well to add to the initiative roll to soak damage. Sucks, but what are you gonna do?
Wyatt Reyes
saved for the sake of posterity, all of this is some great advice, thank you
Has any system ever had a challenge rating system that worked reliably ?
Or does every CR system in existance make too many assumptions about the PCs and enemies that are wrong most of the time ?
Tyler Wood
4e
Jaxson Kelly
I don things like change the HP of the enemies on the fly, fudge some rolls, have enemies call for reinforcements if they start losing too bad, have enemies run away if they are doing too well but one of them gets pasted by a crit, add another encounter with more/bigger enemies right behind the first one, remove the next encounter if things were turning to crap, give enemies something that they aren't supposed to have (like a spell scroll, buff potion, magic grenade, etc). You can fiddle with how hard something is like that. The one that I really like is the fact that in the rules it states that not all monsters have to have the same HP. There's a reason that monsters have hit dice, so theoretically a 1/2 CR orc could have 8HP or he could have 22HP.
Robert Anderson
>If that fails then modify currently existing creatures. Or just grab an existing creature and skin it differently. In my last session we fought against some kind of hellspawn nightmare that acted like The Thing and was pretending to be an archaeopteryx. I have no clue what monster the gm was using for this thing, but we were decently scared because we had no clue what it could do.
Sebastian Clark
>Has Wizards addressed this in the past 16 years? In 3e at least, wotc openly states that cr applied to parties of one fighter, cleric, rogue, and wizard and was a set of guidelines and should never be taken as fact. Most people didn’t read that but of the monster manual and so took cr as gospel which is where a lot of the issue comes in. Always use your best judgment when designing encounters, never trust the book because it wasn’t written with your specific game in mind.
Ethan Bennett
>Always use your best judgment when designing encounters, never trust the book because it wasn’t written with your specific game in mind.
I asked someone in 5eg once if an adult dragon would wipe my party and he coincided me it was far too strong. So i changed it to a young dragon with adult dragon hp and they killed it in no time. I shouldn't have listened to 5eg
David Baker
Don’t trust other people to balance your game. Only you can make the best judgement since only you know all the details of your group. This is a practice and experience thing for gming.
Jason Brooks
Same experience. Action economy is a bitch, one of the strongest redpills about D&D is realizing how much shit you need to give a single monster to stand up against a full party.
Ian Lee
4e didn't use CR, it used xp calculations
Brayden Butler
It used the monster's level as CR as a guideline from what I remember. So a "balanced" encounter would be monsters of equal level and number to the PCs (modified by using minions/solos/elites/traps/etc.).
Joshua Lewis
>Is there anything from official (or unofficial) sources that would help me readjust or pick monsters more efficiently against my particular group?
Besides the DMG chart of attack/damage and AC/health per CR, the only thing that will really help is you knowing your party and knowing how strong they are
Logan Adams
They have. It was called 4th Edition.
Colton Diaz
I have never seen a system that has a perfect encounter balance system, except for those that don't really have encounters in the traditional sense. You will always need to adjust things according to what your players are capable of at and what sort of state they're in. I stick to the CR but reveal something that makes the weaker enemies stronger (One of them pulls out a scroll, potion, activates their magical item - or a new enemy stirs things up). Still, players should have some easy encounters. For encounters that are too hard, maybe the enemies dies sooner than expected - it is revealed upon examination of their corpses that they were diseased - are you infected? Or a new (weaker) opportunist enemy show up to attack the strong enemies and hopefully mop up the players (this is a good opportunity for smart players to avoid death). Maybe the environment changes to give the players an advantage (The fireball misses but lights the hay on fire. Smart players can now shove the soldiers into the flames, or animals panic).
Cameron Harris
Your players should ideally be hitting an average monster 60% of the time, and it likewise should be able to hit them 60% of the time. HP and damage should be calculated with these expectations, but nova damage and buffs/debuffs should also be taken into account for things you don't want to explode in one round. Advantage for example can drastically increase accuracy, and a decent party will be aiming for getting it constantly while avoiding giving it at all costs, so something that may seem tough on paper turns into a pushover as soon as someone literally pushes them over. Saving throws are a complete bitch and don't make any sense so just fudge the shit out of those. Maybe roll percentage or some shit if you didn't purposefully design in a weak stat.
Joshua Evans
Like the other anons already said, CR has never been a real representative of an enemy's prowess. Instead, you have to run some mental exercises simulating combat against your party. It's pretty easy to know what will be easily curbstomped, what will be a decent challenge and what will absolutely destroy them. Always strive for "decent challenge". And award exp based on your whim.
Oliver Gutierrez
>being this much of an autist that you require official material to change monster stats on the fly It's not that hard; use a GM screen, hide your rolls, increase/decrease damage when applicable. Hell, use the OSR method of rolling for the monster's health if you need to.
Jace Cooper
>i have no reading comprehension hurr
Lincoln Moore
So much this
Gabriel Lopez
I agree with you that CR is not an effective way to gauge a monster's actual power or threat level, but >There's no guide to understanding CR is just plain wrong. There is an explanation for how CR is calculated in the Dungeon Master's Guide, page 274.
