Challenge Ratings for Deities [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

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Someonelse

2014-05-06, 11:21 PM

So here's the situation. We were playing this campaign (for over a year) and it ended with us PCs questing to find a collection of epic weapons which we then used to slay a mad god. After we killed this mad god we all ascended and received divine rank 1. Then the DM was done, he wasn't out of ideas for the campaign but he wasn't willing to do the homework necessary for an epic game. but we players were like "F*** that, we want to keep playing!" so we all agreed to write and DM an adventure and trade off on the DMing duties. and we go from playing every other week to playing once a month so we have time to prepare everything.

Anyhoo...
the coming epic campaign will be mostly focused on us establishing a new pantheon and hunting down and slaying all the evil gods of the old and new pantheon.
So, I have taken on the task of DMing the first adventure and running my character as a DMPC. I'm statting out a character who was an old villain from another PC's backstory who the original DM never found a way to integrate into the game. I'm giving him some divine ranks (he's a demon lord in a home brew campaign world) but I don't know how that will affect his challenge rating.
I'm using the Infernal from the epic level handbook and adding 20 levels of cleric and DR3. What should his challenge rating be?
More importantly though, how do you calculate the CR of a character with divine rank? This villain won't be the only bad guy we fight with divine rank so we need some kind of basis for calculating CR.
I've looked around online and it seems that there is no official ruling on this from WotC, so I was hoping maybe someone else ran into this problem and came up with a solution I could use. In a forum on another website someone pointed out text from deities and demigods that said that it is pointless to calculate CRs for gods. Then they suggest adding the deity's divine rank to their hit dice for CR but that seems absurd. That means that DR1 is only worth +1 CR? I don't think so.

Talothorn

2014-05-07, 12:19 AM

At this point, your game is ridiculous, but ridiculous isn't necessarily bad. If it is still fun, ridiculous can be great. What you need is a resource for ridiculous. Enter the broken world of "The Immortals Handbook: Ascension". Never use this book in a normal game. This game has transcended "normal" and requires something that cannot be called normal. Check it out.

Flickerdart

2014-05-07, 12:34 AM

CR is a really bad measure for regular monsters; once you get into Epic it goes way off. There is a system the community has come up with for calculating less ridonkulous CR; I recommend you try to find it and run the numbers on any creature you design.

Brookshw

2014-05-07, 05:35 AM

The oddities of cr aside the best you'll do for rules is probably going to come from advancing a monster (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/improvingMonsters.htm#advancedMonsterChallengeRati ng). Given the bevy of sla's available to an infernal I'd say they're associated so +20 cr for 20 cleric levels, or +10 if you feel they're non-associated. On top of that divine ranks add some special abilities, some of which are better than others. Let's call it +6 then for the sda's unless you pick some subpar. Given that many divine rank properties already apply to an abomination let's ignore them for them most part and call it a +3. That's a rough approximation by the book answer that would give you a cr 55 critter which is probably kinda high to go with, but as mentioned the cr system is pretty wonky. As you go higher on the spectrum the abilities of divine rank get stronger, especially the portfolio sense and knowing the threat well in advance. I'd suggest treating divine rank as a sliding scale.

Someonelse

2014-05-08, 08:47 PM

Anxe

2014-05-08, 08:57 PM

This thread.

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?187046-That-s-ONLY-CR-9-Let-s-Read-The-Monster-Manual-II