Understanding devil CR

[winter92]

Having just fought a Bearded Devil, I'm a bit confused by their CR in light of the summoning ability. A Bearded Devil is CR 5, which presumably takes all of his abilities into account.

By the standard calculators, however, 10 Lemures weigh in at EL 7. 20 weigh in at EL 9, and a pair of bearded devils are EL 7. I don't really understand how the CR system can cope with a creature that may or may not succeed at summoning a secondary EL 7 combat. If he makes the summon Lemure check he wipes parties, if he doesn't it's a reasonable combat, all on a 1d2 roll.

How do people handle various devils in their campaigns, either in terms of appropriate EL or making the summon ability less random?

[holywhippet]

Well, summoned creatures only stay around for a limited amount of time. For regular summon spells it's 1 round per level so I think that means only 6 rounds for these creatures since the bearded devil has 6 hit dice.

Mainly though the CR system is faulty in many instances.

[Zweisteine]

The CR system is known to have a few issues.

One of these is stacking low-levil CRs. A party facing a CR 7 encounter should be about level 7. At that point, they can one-shot any Lemure they meet. The Lemures also shouldn't be able to hit very often. So the summoning ability of a bearded devil will produce one of three effects:
1. Distracting the melee combatants for a few rounds.
2. Taking up a fireball, if the party for some reason has a blaster.
3. Providing a flanking bonus for the bearded devils, and the occasional critical hit, with some luck, for an additional, *gasp*, 2d4 whole damage!

[Keneth]

I find most devils are actually quite appropriately CR'd. And that's assuming CR is worth squat as a statistic, which it isn't. It's just a far too abstracted rating which belongs in the "rules you should (mostly) ignore" pile.

20 lemures may be the CR equivalent of an EL 9 encounter, but they're not much more than a buffer zone for the bearded devil, even with a 5th level party.


2. Taking up a fireball, if the party for some reason has a blaster.

Lemures have fire immunity. :smallbiggrin:

[winter92]

Thanks, this helped me understand somewhat better. I think I was particularly thrown because we were taking on the bearded devil with 4 level 3 players in an open space. At level three the DR on a lemure is still meaningful and they can still land attacks fairly often. Just another demonstration that CR breaks down with large numbers I guess - the lemures just stop being meaningful as the encounter becomes on-level.