I had an interesting session recently, and it made me think: What if CR is accurate?

[NOhara24]

Some of you may remember a thread I created recently about a challenge I was creating for my players. My idea was that I would create a tower with 11 floors, and every floor would have an enemy whose CR corresponded to the level of the floor. IE, floor 1, CR 1. Floor 2, CR 2.

Now, hear me out. What really made me think were the two floors in which I was expecting a TPK. Some quick info about my party:

Wizard/Sorc/Ultimate Magus = Metamagic shenanigans. Likes fireballs.
Barbarian = Charger/Shock Trooper build.
Sorc = Utility/Buff spells, occasional fireball.
Ranger = Liability.

Now, like I said. Two floors in particular made me think that maybe CR isn't as willy-nilly as we thought it was.

On the 9th floor I had the infamous Adamantine Clockwork Horror. Pretty terrifying on its own. Disintegrate, Mordekainen's disjunction and another save or death spell that I can't remember because I'm AFB.

At the time, my party was level 11. Now, this battle was certainly tough for them, but the Adamantine Horror didn't kill a single one of them. The one time I got to cast Disintegrate, the barbarian was in its face and still had 40 HP left after it rolled 103 damage. I didn't exactly roll poorly, either. That being said, I took this battle with a grain of salt because everyone knows that battles against a single target can be fairly easy for a 4 person party.

But what really got me thinking was the 11th level. I had an Immoth out of the infamous Monster Manual II, advanced two levels of CR by giving it 2 levels of sorcerer. If you read about it, the thing that will jump out at you is it's Ice Rune ability. For those that don't know, an Immoth can have anywhere between 6 and 14 Ice Runes on its body. Each of those runes can store a spell, and each rune can be activated as a free action.

Have I got your attention?

My Immoth rolled 10 runes, so that was 10 spells that could be activated all at once on its turn. Of course, the wheels started turning. I could very easily drop 10 Chain Lightnings on his first turn and roast my party instantly. But not only would that just not be any fun as well as unreasonably cruel, the more I read about the Immoth the more I learned that he wasn't just a spellcaster.

The MM says that it prefers to cast buff spells on itself, and then wade into physical combat while relying on its poison doled out in physical strikes. Only when it gets weak does it retreat and start blasting.

So while in theory I could have very easily one shot my whole party before my standard action, I didn't.

I picked out 10 buff spells and went to town. +4 AC, 50% miss chance, etc etc. And though it was no easy fight for my party, (I dropped feeblemind on the wizard and ended up petrifying the sorceress) they did win it. If only by the skin of their teeth.

So maybe CR isn't all that bad as long we play the monster how Wizards tell us to, vs. turning the optimizing instincts that we have as players to the monsters that we utilize. I'm going to continue to use monsters that seem to have been assigned the wrong CR as deemed by the community. Hopefully I'll get back to you all with some more interesting stories :smallsmile:

[Kuulvheysoon]

There's still going to be awfully wonky CR'd creatures, even if it is better than the general populace assumes. That Damned Crab, for instance, is just asking for a TPK if they don't know what they're doing.

Non-associated class levels on monsters can also be pretty ridiculous.

[NOhara24]

There's still going to be awfully wonky CR'd creatures, even if it is better than the general populace assumes. That Damned Crab, for instance, is just asking for a TPK if they don't know what they're doing.

Non-associated class levels on monsters can also be pretty ridiculous.

Barring Dat Crab. No one knows what they were thinking when they threw in Dat Crab. I had him on level 3. Party about had a seizure when he dropped 17 damage on the sorceress in one turn after an easy grapple check.

[Karnith]

Templates can also screw with CR. Consider that a half-fiendish greater air elemental is theoretically CR 12, but has an "I win" button against non-evil characters that would be remotely level-appropriate (i.e. most parties) in the form of a CL 21 Blasphemy 1/day.

[Spuddles]

Many of the Core fiends come with all sorts of nasty stuff, but their stat blocks usually have something like "loves to wade into melee combat."


There's still going to be awfully wonky CR'd creatures, even if it is better than the general populace assumes. That Damned Crab, for instance, is just asking for a TPK if they don't know what they're doing.

Non-associated class levels on monsters can also be pretty ridiculous.

That Damned Crab was played wrong- when it grappled a party member with its claws and decided to waddle off, OP forgot to apply the -20 penalty to grappling when a creature with improved grab decides to hold an opponent without counting itself as grappled. If you take that into account, that the crab attacks, initiates a grapple, then ends up with a grapple penalty of -1.

Still a hell of a monster, though. I just pulled up its stats, and Pelor, that thing is brutal.

[Big Fau]

A single data point does not an experiment make. Remember that luck plays a huge role in this game, and that even though your party survived the Adamantine Horror and Immoth it may have only been because of good luck. A single mediocre roll against either of those enemies (saving throws for the former, initiative for the latter) could spell a TPK.

Disintegrate isn't nearly that bad when used as a glorified bow. It's far worse when used to alter terrain or when used with metamagic like Split, Twin, and Empower. The real problems with the Adamantine Horror is the other two SLAs it has (at will no less): MDJ and Implosion (a 9th level party has very poor chance against those spells). The Immoth's recommended "tactic" says that some of the runes are reserved for it's last-ditch effort of blasting, but in your post you said you loaded it up with 10 buff spells out of the 10 runes it had available.

[NOhara24]

A single data point does not an experiment make. Remember that luck plays a huge role in this game, and that even though your party survived the Adamantine Horror and Immoth it may have only been because of good luck. A single mediocre roll against either of those enemies (saving throws for the former, initiative for the latter) could spell a TPK.

Disintegrate isn't nearly that bad when used as a glorified bow. It's far worse when used to alter terrain or when used with metamagic like Split, Twin, and Empower. The real problems with the Adamantine Horror is the other two SLAs it has (at will no less): MDJ and Implosion (a 9th level party has very poor chance against those spells). The Immoth's recommended "tactic" says that some of the runes are reserved for it's last-ditch effort of blasting, but in your post you said you loaded it up with 10 buff spells out of the 10 runes it had available.


All of your points are true, and maybe that's why CR is always going to be bashed for what Wizards was trying to do with it. They can't really assign something as concrete as a number to something as abstract as the human being playing the monster, only the monsters themselves. There's no real way to account for a D20.