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View Full Version : Too-high CRs and too-low CRs



Saph
2007-01-30, 10:38 AM
Something that I've noticed recently . . .

I'm playing in a couple of campaigns at the moment. In one of them, I'm part of a 6th-level party which just ran into an advanced assassin vine (see here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33107) for details) which was, theoretically, EL 8ish. The fight was incredibly tough and one of the party members was killed.

The other campaign is 4th level and we've just had two fights against a pair of winter wolves (EL 7) and a pair of trolls (EL 7). Both times the monsters got slaughtered in three rounds or less, barely doing us any damage at all.

So which kinds of monsters do you think are tougher than their CR suggests in practise, and which kinds are weaker? Obviously the party makeup will have a big effect, and how good a tactician the GM is has an even bigger one, but do you think some types are just tougher than others? What's harder to deal with, one big monster, a pair of medium monsters, or a pack of little ones?

- Saph

MandibleBones
2007-01-30, 10:48 AM
Well, for starters, your first example seems just about right. A couple CRs above your level SHOULD be challenging and difficult, and should cause lasting harm to your people. Sucks that one of your characters got killed, but... *shrugs*

And the second one... you're right, that does seem pretty easy for its CR - unless it's just right, and you happened to be pretty prepared for it (lots of fire, in that case).

But I agree that some monsters (dragons, the Tarrasque) are much more difficult than their CR would indicate - and others are often too easy.

Koji
2007-01-30, 10:53 AM
Individual monsters assume in their CR that the players have the resources and party makeup available to face the monster on even footing (Fire attacks for trolls, being somewhat close to each other for an assassin vine, etc).

In my experience, the DM can actually play off the monster grouping to change the nature of the fight.

1) One large monster with a few special attacks is likely to kill off some of the party, but will probably not cause a TPK.
2) A few tough monsters will either be utterly defeated, or completely wipe the party out.
3) A fight with a mass of small monsters is going to take forever, but pose little danger.

In my experience, some of the greatest fights have been with a squad of enemies with class levels comparable to the PCs' in type and number. These fights feel desperate, they take a good while to complete, and so long as the enemy doesn't have a particularly effective healer, they will probably not wipe out the PCs.

My preference, however, will always be for the one single monster (perhaps a dragon or something) that poses a great threat.

Saph
2007-01-30, 10:58 AM
Well, for starters, your first example seems just about right. A couple CRs above your level SHOULD be challenging and difficult, and should cause lasting harm to your people. Sucks that one of your characters got killed, but... *shrugs*

And the second one... you're right, that does seem pretty easy for its CR - unless it's just right, and you happened to be pretty prepared for it (lots of fire, in that case).

Yeah, I guess the first one was right.

But the trolls seemed incredibly easy. As soon as they got into melee range they were hit with spells, arrows, and swords from everyone at once. Their regeneration didn't do them any good since they were taking 40-ish damage a round. After both had been knocked down well into the negatives we searched them for loot, stabbed them again whenever they looked like getting up, and finally threw them on the campfire and went back to bed. We took about 13 damage between us.

Admittedly there are 6 characters in our party, each 4th-level, but I would still have thought an EL 7 encounter would be harder than that.

- Saph

PinkysBrain
2007-01-30, 11:05 AM
Monsters have CR, encounters have EL.

I'd say you got extremely lucky against the winter wolves or your DM didn't play them very intelligently. In their natural terrain odds are they will track you rather than random encounter you, and when they do they will likely wait till nightfall to take you down. At that point you can expect for one or more characters to get hit with 2 breath weapon attacks, which is a life threatening situation.

In general in a melee encounter a few strong opponents are more dangerous for their CR, in a ranged encounter multiple weaker opponents are more dangerous.

And dragons are painful ...

its_all_ogre
2007-01-30, 01:23 PM
also in your examples look at the strengths.
high ac for the plant and immune to criticals(hence SA etc) and SR

the others all have low AC's and will lose hps a lot quicker because of that.
also party composition makes a huge difference, three rogues would make quick work of a winter wolf for example cause of its appalling AC but would be almost useless against the assassin vine.

clericwithnogod
2007-01-30, 01:46 PM
I always find that one big bad thing encounters fall pretty easily, at least when everyone can get to them quickly. If you have a caster at range that's hard to get to, that tends to be the worst for the groups I've been in, particularly if you have to deal with something else at the same time.

Trolls are pretty common, so responses to them tend to be well-organized. Winter wolves less so, but generally speaking, anything that takes half-again damage from fire is in for a long (well...short) day. The vines are uncommon in addition to the previously mentioned defenses. Response could be disordered while people tried to figure out what to do, and you could waste spells and actions on useless things.

shaka gl
2007-01-30, 02:06 PM
Depends in the party members. A CR 6 Undead may be quite lower if there are 2 Clerics in the party or higher if there are none. CR is relative. Get used to it.

Dairun Cates
2007-01-30, 02:13 PM
In my experience, some of the greatest fights have been with a squad of enemies with class levels comparable to the PCs' in type and number. These fights feel desperate, they take a good while to complete, and so long as the enemy doesn't have a particularly effective healer, they will probably not wipe out the PCs.

That's actually my favorite strategy for keeping suspense in the game without moping the players out when they get bad luck. It's not just limited to the old "almost clone party" or even the "squad of well-trained super spy gnolls". It's actually quite fun if you're the kind of person to occassionally homebrew monsters to make a monster with abilities that seem incredibly threatening but pose no reasonable threat to the party. For the final session in a sci-fi campaign. The players went against a character that had essentially gained near Godhood by tricking the players into activating the right switches for him (Sounds cliche out of context). The guy was level 20 with an INSANE bevy of powers and ridiculous HP. He could really only do maybe a 3d8 area effect on the entire room as his worst attack though. The PC's loved it, thought it was a tough fight and felt like bad asses even though there was about no way they could've lost that battle.

Back on the topic, I do find that a lot of CR's seem to be a bit... off. They're a few that are supposed to be mildly difficult for a party of a certain level but seem to be assumed to be used as packs against a higher level party.

A great example is the Giant Bat. Don't have the monster manual on hand, but this thing is a CR 2 with like 10-15 hp, does like 1d8+3-5 bite damage. The big kicker is it has a pretty good to hit and thanks to dex, it's AC is like 22. Now this is all good and well, except when the 2nd level mage gets knocked out in one hit and the bat can half to 2/3rds kill any other party every round. Our fighter is the only one that DOESN'T hit on a nat 20 and he only hits like 1/4th of the time. By the time almost our entire party is unconscious and the healer is frantically heal. We managed to grab the unconscious bodies and leave. Our fighter got like A hit on it in 4 rounds. A full party of level twos almost got TPK'ed by a CR 2. Seems a bit off. However, if a party at level 6 or so fought four of these things. The CR would be about right it seems. People would get injured, but no one would fall down. Still, for a level 2 party, that's a REALLY difficult encounter. There's also the CR 3 monster that instant killed a bard by doing 30 damage with one set of attacks, but those things weren't nearly as unbalanced. They were just the ultimate low-level glass cannons.

I think the CR for a single monster encounter is always going to be a bit weird. A level 15 melee fighter and a level 15 cheap combo wizard are both CR 15 theorhetically, but most parties could mope the fighter 90% of the time while the party that loses initiative to the wizard probably has a HELL of a time.

GolemsVoice
2007-01-30, 03:13 PM
I think the chain golem is pretty tough for it's CR. Though I don't know the CR at the moment, he can swing his chains around, by this creating a shield of chains that do damage to everyone who fails his reflex save. It is low level encounter (probably Cr 6 or so), and can hit any melee combatant quite hart.

Thomas
2007-01-30, 03:43 PM
1) One large monster with a few special attacks is likely to kill off some of the party, but will probably not cause a TPK.
2) A few tough monsters will either be utterly defeated, or completely wipe the party out.
3) A fight with a mass of small monsters is going to take forever, but pose little danger.

Gotta disagree.

I rarely see single monster encounters even 2-3 EL above the party level last longer than 1-2 rounds. When the party can concentrate firepower on one target, and actually inflict damage, the fight's going to be short and brutal.


Anyway, it's all about tactics. Two trolls at an encounter distance greater than 60 feet, when the party has a fire-specialist sorcerer... yeah, bad idea. The trolls were wiped out.

If those two trolls had attacked from hiding, in favorable conditions (darkness, etc.), and had immediately closed in (effectively preventing the use of area-effect fire spells), there'd have been mayhem.

For six 4th-level characters, EL 7 sounds pretty standard; it's pretty much EL 5-6 for a party of four. Besides that, trolls aren't very impressive melee-fighters. Their power is regeneration, and taking advantage of that requires forcing the enemy to attack many trolls at once, and retreating occasionally to heal up, then returning to harry the party again and again. If they just charge in and let themselves be hacked into unconsciousness... of course they're going to lose, and not do any real damage to the party.

Scrags are almost always more dangerous than regular trolls, simply because they have the terrain advantage - they can disengage at will, and once they're submerged, there's not much the party can do to them. They'll return to attack again once they're healed.


Winter wolves just charging in and attacking are equally toast. They should do hit-and-run (well, breathe-and-run) attacks. Superior speed has to be used to an advantage. The enemy should be split up, tripped up, and ganged up on at every opportunity. (I've used fully advanced winter wolves to amazing effect against a 15th-level druid and his Gargantuan dire bear, in 3.0...)

JoeFredBob
2007-01-30, 03:54 PM
My favorite example of a too-low CR is the adamantine horror from monster manual 2. AC 28, 50 ft. move speed, SR 22, and DISINTIGRATE AND MORDENKAINEN'S DISJUNCTION AT WILL (as a 14th level caster). The CR? 9.

barawn
2007-01-30, 04:24 PM
I always thought black puddings were too low CR (CR 7) for how strong they were. In 3.0, that was a given, considering the only way to deal damage to it was with magic. I still think they're a bit too strong, though, considering if it grapples the mage first, the party's in a whole metric ton of trouble. Or if the mage runs out of spells before it's dead.

I mean, it's not too hard to hit the thing, but with the number of hit points it has, some weapon's going to dissolve.

Jerthanis
2007-01-30, 05:26 PM
Well, there are situations where the wrong list of spells memorized can make a situation unwinnable. Imagine a group of 4 characters, all level 3, none with a magic weapon, the mage with web, mirror image, sleep, grease and so on, and the healer not being a cleric, or a cleric with very low charisma, fighting a single shadow? CR 3 and there's a good chance for TPK. Touch attack to deal strength damage, incorporeal undead makes it immune to web, grease, mind affects, and nonmagic-weapons. Only chance to beat it is a cleric's turn, the Mage having damage spells, or someone having Magic Weapon memorized, but if the party has a Druid or Bard for healing, no chance there, if the Mage subscribes to memorizing the more effective save-or-lose spells there's little chance there (and even if they've got all magic missiles and shocking grasps, Shadows have enough HP to shrug off one or two hits, which might be enough time to drop a mage anyway!), and the chance of memorizing a minute duration single person buff isn't exactly a sure thing. Shadows move 40, so running isn't even an option.

I've been in highish level parties where a small group of Shadows have kicked the hell out of us, made us retreat from the dungeon to sit on our haunches while we recover from their strength damage for several days before going back in. Greater shadows and Spectres are even more ludicrous, although by that level it is possible to make yourself safe with preparation, at level 3 it's pretty much "Pretty please, DM, don't use shadows?"

Deathcow
2007-01-30, 10:44 PM
And there are loopholes that allow vastly under-CR'd monsters. My party's been fighting Incarnate half-dragon warforged with warrior and Swordsage levels, and they've killed party members both times we fought them. The party is level 18, with cohorts, and the warforged are CR 12.

Or so my DM claims.