Where does the CR system break down to the point of uselessness?

[atemu1234]

I know it's subjective (some level one groups can encounter level three enemies depending on optimization, etc.) but what's a general consensus on when the system becomes so subjective for anything? My DM says CR 40, but I think it can be lower than that, somewhere between 20-30. Also, please note that just because some people can handle high level encounters at low levels doesn't make them the norm, just like not everyone is Pun-Pun.

[Renen]

It can start breaking down as early as single digits. Partly because some monsters have CR thats wayy too low, or because calculating CR for many small monsters just sucks (being swarmed can really F*** you up)

[DeAnno]

There are really two "breakdowns" to watch for. There is the one where your party starts rapidly understripping or overstripping their CR, and there is the one where CR is no longer a consistent means for comparing monsters even to each other.

[Threadnaught]

I say as early as level 1.

Pun-Pun is a CR1 encounter, with his +10000 to everything.

There are also Templates that can reduce CR.


A Revived Fossil Dire Rat (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/direRat.htm) loses it's Disease, Low-light vision and Scent, Skills, Feats, it's Constitution and Intelligence Scores, most of it's Charisma and 2 Dexterity and Wisdom.
Gaining +10 HP, +9 Natural Armour, 1d8 damage for attacks, Combat Reflexes, Immunity to Cold and Damage Reduction 10/Adamantine.

Dire Rat, Revived Fossil Dire Rat and Awakened Revived Fossil Dire Rat (regains lost Feats) are all CR1 creatures.

[Kazyan]

Ignoring "this one exception invalidates the generalization" logic, CR stopped working in general for my playground-OP game at approximate party level 19.

[atemu1234]

Pun-Pun is a CR1 encounter, with his +10000 to everything.

This is a bad example. See the bit on overoptimization in the original post.

[Raven777]

At any CR level, there might be some encounters that are problematic. For low CR examples, That Damn Crab or a Shadow or Tucker's Kobolds are going to murder an appropriate level party not ready to deal with them.

[Threadnaught]

This is a bad example. See the bit on overoptimization in the original post.

Pun-Pun is a bad example, the unbeatable Undead Dire Rat is not. I just flicked through my favourite Monster source book and found one of my favourite Templates, slapped it on a Dire Rat and said "good day."

[Karnith]

I don't know about breaking down completely, but monsters are under- or over-CRed at pretty much every point in the game - from that damned crab (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/fw/20040221a) to epic monsters that can't deal with ranged or flying enemies (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/prismasaurus.htm). And CR being independent of party composition and optimization level means that it really just can't be that useful to start with.

[9mm]

level 1

yep.

[atemu1234]

epic monsters that can't deal with ranged or flying enemies (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/prismasaurus.htm).

I'd argue nothing stops it from charging at ranged enemies on the ground, and with +11 on all strength-based checks, jumping up and prismatic-spraying a flying opponent. (Why my PCs hate me)

[Eldariel]

CR depends so very heavily on which PCs we're talking about. Cleric/Artificer/Druid/Wizard's CRs look so-very-different from Ninja/Healer/Warmage/Samurai's. This is especially true in cases where you are dealing with a mobile flying/burrowing/whatever enemy or enemy that's hard to damage since the latter party simply has far fewer options on how to go about it. A dragon is much easier for a high tier party than a low tier one simply because high tier party has the tools to catch it and impose effects on it while the low tier party is probably limited to trying to trade ranged attack damage with the breath strafes.

If you happen to have a party with a charger or some such, all enemies who lack means to keep their distance or useful damage immunities are suddenly more or less trivial. These kinds of characters create huge polarity in what kinds of enemies deserve high and low CRs for party equipped with such, but of course the CRs can't be global since parties without a strong damage dealer might have huge problems with an extremely durable moderately dangerous enemy that a charger-party could deal with effortlessly post-6 pretty much at any point.


For CR to function, each party composition should be evaluated into a type and each monster should have separate CRs for each types of party with specific notes for higher/lower CR based on the presence or absence of certain abilities (this is somewhat already written on the system with e.g. many Undead being considered easier for parties with Clerics). Then you'd have to properly assess CR for the various options the monsters have available, and the intensity of said options, and how the options match up to parties of certain levels of certain types. This kind of a challenge matrix could provide a fairly accurate assessment for various monsters and when you can reasonably expect to be able to use them. Alas, just a single number is never, ever going to be useful in a game like D&D where type matters more than level and wealth more than either (except where levels provide you with wealth, or if the game allows effective infinite wealth with certain spells).


I'd argue nothing stops it from charging at ranged enemies on the ground, and with +11 on all strength-based checks, jumping up and prismatic-spraying a flying opponent. (Why my PCs hate me)

Its charge distance is 60' (+30' attack range so effectively 90'), which is...not very scary. The range increment of a no-frills composite longbow is 110'. It's trivial to keep so far away from it there's no risk of charge. Same applies to flight; it can't jump very high. +11 strength; it can jump maybe 10' with a running start if it gets really lucky so it can attack 40' + 32' (its vertical reach) reach high; staying 80'+ up is, again, trivial.

[heavyfuel]

At any CR level, there might be some encounters that are problematic. For low CR examples, That Damn Crab or a Shadow or Tucker's Kobolds are going to murder an appropriate level party not ready to deal with them.

Couldn't agree more. Just because a few creatures of a particular CR are over/under powered it doesn't mean that the CR system has broken down to the point of uselessness as the OP asked.

That said, the CR system can be broken at very early levels, even without TO. After the party reaches lv6+, any enemy that can't hit (decently) a flying opponent will be a walk in the park, unless its CR is so much greater than the party's level (say, a 5th level party vs the Tarrasque), in which case the party can just run away.

But this still doesn't break it "to the point of uselessness". I think this is about party level 17+.

[Karnith]

I'd argue nothing stops it from charging at ranged enemies on the ground, and with +11 on all strength-based checks, jumping up and prismatic-spraying a flying opponent. (Why my PCs hate me)
Its prismatic rays have a range of 30 ft. With a Jump bonus of +11, it isn't reaching anything flying at a sensible height. And with a movement speed of 30 ft (max charge distance: 60 ft), it's really easy to outrun.

The only thing it has going for it are numbers, but it has basically no way to apply those numbers to even a mildly-competent epic character. Or even a mildly-competent high-level character, for that matter.

[atemu1234]

5th level party vs the Tarrasque

Once I had a group of level ten PCs, who got uppity and said they could handle anything I could throw at them. In a flight of pique, I threw a tarrasque at them. One (a bard) went to a bard college (I made one in this world) and convinced the populace (some 500 bards and jesters) to fight it with them. Basically between them all the tarrasque lasted a single round. Then I simply nuked them from orbit and rebooted the universe.

[gooddragon1]

In response to the tuckers kobolds there's a passage on page 39 of the DMG as follows:

An orc warband that attacks the PCs by flying over them on primitive hang gliders and dropping large rocks is not the same encounter as one in which the orcs just charge in with spears. Sometimes, the circumstances give the characters' opponents a distinct advantage. Other times, the PCs have the advantage.

Tuckers kobolds are not CR 1 if they have an advantage that large. Ad-Hoc CRs are encouraged in this case.

Similarly a party of low level rogues that just charge in against an undead with damage reduction effective against their attacks is going to have a hard time without sneak attacks. Tailor encounters to suit your party as much as possible and fudge the monster entry +HP -DR and Sneak Attack immunity (partial resistance maybe).

[Forrestfire]

½ (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/orc.htm)

Depending on the party makeup, an Orc or two have a decent chance of one-shotting many level 1 characters, and if you have more than one in, say, a small dungeon room, getting into melee is inevitable.

[137beth]

There are a couple different things that break, and they don't all break at the same time.

The first is using flat CR-adjustments to gauge how powerful a templated creature is, or a monster with class levels. This breaks at level 1, or earlier if you can find appropriate CR-reducing templates.

Then, there is the issue that many monsters are printed with inappropriate CRs. This starts happening right from the beginning, too. Some examples are on this thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?315230-The-most-unbalanced-monsters-for-each-CR-up-to-20-%28or-so%29), but at high levels there are a lot more monsters which are over-CRed. It can be fixed by changing the CR on those monsters (but only if the DM is aware of how powerful they really are, and there are a lot of monsters that need adjusting past the early levels).

Finally, there comes a point in the game beyond which no CR is appropriate. There are monsters for which 20 is too low in some ways, but 10 is too high in other ways. Such a monster lacks any "correct" CR. Once you reach that point, the entire CR system needs to be thrown out.
For my group, the complete breaking of CR happens around level eight in a tier two game, or around levels 10-12 in a tier three game. I would hazard a guess that in Tippyverse, CR completely breaks much earlier.

[Chaosvii7]

Taking a cue from E6, I'd say that encounters absolutely definitely start falling down around the CR 13+ area. And E6 is pretty smart so I tend to not argue with what it suggests. I'm also super gullible but that's neither here nor there.

[atemu1234]

Its prismatic rays have a range of 30 ft. With a Jump bonus of +11, it isn't reaching anything flying at a sensible height. And with a movement speed of 30 ft (max charge distance: 60 ft), it's really easy to outrun.

The only thing it has going for it are numbers, but it has basically no way to apply those numbers to even a mildly-competent epic character. Or even a mildly-competent high-level character, for that matter.

If it's flying at a sensible height, then it would only hit him on a nat 20. With its size and a DC 10 jump check, it can jump high enough to hit something at 1.5 times its original height.

[the_other_gm]

½ (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/orc.htm)

Depending on the party makeup, an Orc or two have a decent chance of one-shotting many level 1 characters, and if you have more than one in, say, a small dungeon room, getting into melee is inevitable.

Now imagine that orc with a greataxe. Welcome to 3.0.

Speaking of 3's CR3 shadow (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/shadow.htm).

Because nothing says "I love you" like a highly mobile, incorporeal monster that drains your strength by ignoring your armor.

[Karnith]

If it's flying at a sensible height, then it would only hit him on a nat 20. With its size and a DC 10 jump check, it can jump high enough to hit something at 1.5 times its original height.
With a maximum result on its Jump check (20 + 11 = 31), it could attain a jump height of 7 feet in the air (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/skills/jump.htm). Let's be generous an give it the vertical reach of a bipedal Huge creature (32 feet), even though as a Huge quadraped it would have a vertical reach of 16 feet. With a range of 30 feet on its Prismatic Emanation (which is only for the blinding effect, mind), it could therefore affect a creature at a max height of 7+32+30=69 feet in the air. If you give it the vertical reach of a Huge quadraped, it would be able to affect a creature at a max height of 7+16+30=53 feet in the air. Again, it's going to have a lot of trouble doing anything to a flying enemy.

Incidentally, a longbow has a range increment of 100 feet, and a close-range spell cast at, say, CL 20 (the minimum for a full-caster at 20th level, which is CR - 8) will reach 75 feet.

[awa]

The cr system breaks as soon as any player gets access to at will flight and a ranged attack becuase so many monsters have no counter. So by second level a pc can get a scroll of animate dead for a flying zombie and a substantial portion of low level enemies either cant touch them or are vastly inferior at it.

Other monsters are really situational take an assassin vine if it gets the drop on someone it can fairly reliably deal 2d6+14 dam in a single rnd. But if you spot it at range its speed of 5 and low ac means its super easy to avoid

[Forrestfire]

Now imagine that orc with a greataxe. Welcome to 3.0.

Oh yeah, I remember those. If I'm remembering correctly, the orange starter box for 3.0 had a group of greataxe orcs. I lost my cleric to one of those.

[Jack_Simth]

Now imagine that orc with a greataxe. Welcome to 3.0.Looking at 3.5, at least... the Falchion's already a two-hander, and the average damage difference between the two is only 1.5 points (5 vs. 6.5). The Falchion has an 18-20/x2 crit range, vs. the Greataxe's 20/x3. While the Falchion's crits are slightly less impressive, there's three times as many of them. And... really, 4d4+8 is very likely to kill a rather lot of 1st level characters anyway.

[JusticeZero]

Aaaand that's why I never use orcs. Never throw enemies with massive spike damage at flimsy low levels.
CR can break down everywhere, but it's really one of those things you have to take with a grain of salt as a guideline. It keeps people from going off the rails on accident with horrific TPKs from eyeballing encounters without experience in doing so.

[the_other_gm]

Looking at 3.5, at least... the Falchion's already a two-hander, and the average damage difference between the two is only 1.5 points (5 vs. 6.5). The Falchion has an 18-20/x2 crit range, vs. the Greataxe's 20/x3. While the Falchion's crits are slightly less impressive, there's three times as many of them. And... really, 4d4+8 is very likely to kill a rather lot of 1st level characters anyway.

the crit damage itself are of no importance at level 1. a solid hit from either weapon will kill most any d6 PC or a d8 PC with slightly above average con. 4d4+8 or 3d12+9 is effectively the same damage: enough to kill.

the falchion is more frequent with it's 9ish damage then the greataxe, but the latter also spikes up to 15 damage over the falchion's 12, which is where the main issue comes from: while both are dealing stupid amounts of damage on average for a low level PC, the 3.0 one just has a chance of one-hitting the highest HP class in the game without a crit.

plus it's not like the 3.5 orc doesn't know how to use a greataxe, the devs just "went easy" on the players with the lower damage capped weapon for default.

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

A Venerable Dragonwrought Kobold Dracolich Warrior 1 with two flaws for Epic Toughness twice is a CR 1.

A Dragonkin Sorcerer 8 is a CR 7 with 15 HD and +11 BAB. Just a Dragonkin by itself is only CR 3, and it can hover out of reach of non-reach weapons and make four attacks/round.

[prufock]

Welcome to D&D, where the challenge ratings are made up, and the experience points don't matter!

Seriously, though, CR is broken because D&D is, at its core, an un-capped system. While you could calculate average or expected stats by level, there is actually no hard limit, and because some abilities aren't numerically based.

Take Mutants and Masterminds, for example. At power level 10, you can have attack bonus +10 and effect rank 10 (DC 20). You can trade those off, so for example attack +15, effect rank 5 (DC 15). A character is expected to have a 50/50 chance of defeating another character of the same PL.

I'm not saying that system is a perfect indicator of effectiveness, or that D&D should use the same. Anyone familiar with M&M knows that there are exploits to break that game as well, but I think it's a better measure of challenge. However I think a limited attack, save, damage, skill, HP, and AC per CR would make for a more standardized and useful system. Of course, then it wouldn't be D&D (3.5, anyway).

[Gemini476]

A Venerable Dragonwrought Kobold Dracolich Warrior 1 with two flaws for Epic Toughness twice is a CR 1.

A Dragonkin Sorcerer 8 is a CR 7 with 15 HD and +11 BAB. Just a Dragonkin by itself is only CR 3, and it can hover out of reach of non-reach weapons and make four attacks/round.

OBJECTION!
Dracoliches are Undead, and that kobold therefore no longer qualifies for the Epic Toughness feat!

You'll need to be happy with a regular old Great Wyrm Dragonwrought Kobold Warrior 1 with Toughness*2.

[sideswipe]

no group i have been in have defeated a CR equivalent hydra.

[Threadnaught]

OBJECTION!
Dracoliches are Undead, and that kobold therefore no longer qualifies for the Epic Toughness feat!

You'll need to be happy with a regular old Great Wyrm Dragonwrought Kobold Warrior 1 with Toughness*2.

I don't see a Constitution Score anywhere as a prerequisite for Epic Toughness. The Kobold would qualify for the Feat by being old enough, even if they do become Undead, they're basically becoming a Lich, not some Skeleton that loses all Feats because they lose their Intelligence Score.

[TypoNinja]

In my experience CR is pretty good up to early to mid teens. Aside from a few monsters that just have plain bad CR's, but those are edge cases. Big T for example is notoriously over CR'd. Certain other cases pop up.

Around the teens though your party starts having magical options other than dealing HP damage that start to get truly interesting. An encounter could be an uphill struggle, or they could effortlessly mop the floor with it depending on what extra options they brought. You have to start keeping party capability in mind when looking at an encounter, because depending on what your party started specializing in some encounters are going to be much more difficult than others. Will o' Wisps are a spectacular example. Those things are scary if you don't happen to have anything to deal with them, but become trivial with a single casting of Black Tentacles.

Large mobs of weak creatures also stop scaling properly really fast, 60 goblins strictly speaking work out to a fairly high EL. On the other hand your wizard could probably end (or at least severely diminish) the fight with one good AoE spell.

This of course assumes your group plays at some level of optimization that is in shouting distance of the base game, the play testers were notoriously bad optimizers, so if your group plays at high level, or even medium-high CR's will break down faster.

Edit: over not under. derp.

[Karnith]

Big T for example is notoriously under CR'd.
Surely you mean that it's over-CR'd, friend.

[TypoNinja]

Surely you mean that it's over-CR'd, friend.

Oh dear. Yes. Did I say under? Whoops. I'll go fix that.

[Zancloufer]

CR system breaks down with high CR creatures with limited options, or low CR creatures with very versatile options.

It also breaks down when building/advancing some monster types. Undead, Constructs and some Giant types can be obscenely OP bruiser types for their CR as they get +1 CR pre 4 HD.

You think Orcs where bad? Try skeleton orcs. A level 9 one is like CR 2.5. Sure it's got no real skills/feats but by shear numbers a few of those would WRECK level 3 parties.

[TypoNinja]

CR system breaks down with high CR creatures with limited options, or low CR creatures with very versatile options.

It also breaks down when building/advancing some monster types. Undead, Constructs and some Giant types can be obscenely OP bruiser types for their CR as they get +1 CR pre 4 HD.

You think Orcs where bad? Try skeleton orcs. A level 9 one is like CR 2.5. Sure it's got no real skills/feats but by shear numbers a few of those would WRECK level 3 parties.

Right I'd forgotten about the advancing HD rules. DM once hit us with an advanced HD assassin vine, despite being technically under the party's CR we still lost 3 outta 4 PC's. That's when I started learning about optimizing.

Undead you have to be careful of, if you happen to have somebody who actually likes turning undead, undead encounters have the potential to end in one action and a puff of smoke, also thanks to no con they tend to have terrible fort saves compared to most bruiser types. I once had a 19HD named undead miniboss killed on me in a round. One Disintegrate later the 'epic' encounter was over. A quick check of the SRD shows the 20HD render zombie has a fort save of a whole +6. He's not making the save on a Disintegrate. Skeletons are no better off.

[atemu1234]

Right I'd forgotten about the advancing HD rules. DM once hit us with an advanced HD assassin vine, despite being technically under the party's CR we still lost 3 outta 4 PC's. That's when I started learning about optimizing.

Undead you have to be careful of, if you happen to have somebody who actually likes turning undead, undead encounters have the potential to end in one action and a puff of smoke, also thanks to no con they tend to have terrible fort saves compared to most bruiser types. I once had a 19HD named undead miniboss killed on me in a round. One Disintegrate later the 'epic' encounter was over. A quick check of the SRD shows the 20HD render zombie has a fort save of a whole +6. He's not making the save on a Disintegrate. Skeletons are no better off.

I once pitted the PCs against a mob of half-giant half-dragons. That did not end well.

[TypoNinja]

I once pitted the PCs against a mob of half-giant half-dragons. That did not end well.

Fiendish Trolls are shockingly hard to put down too, while we didn't actually lose anybody on that encounter, we got roughed up so hard it felt like somebody had died. Everybody was low on HP, the two spell casters had completely burned through their daily spells.

[Telok]

A Half-Fiend Adult White Dragon is a CR 13 encounter.

It has Blasphemy (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/blasphemy.htm) and 18 Hit Dice.

Assume that any non-evil PC within 40' of it of 13th level or less is paralyzed for 1d10 minutes. On the next round I can summon a CR 10 or 11 demon to help it kill anyone left over.

[Karnith]

A Half-Fiend Adult White Dragon is a CR 13 encounter.

It has Blasphemy (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/blasphemy.htm) and 18 Hit Dice.

Assume that any non-evil PC within 40' of it of 13th level or less is paralyzed for 1d10 minutes. On the next round I can summon a CR 10 or 11 demon to help it kill anyone left over.
Funnily enough, that's not even the worst; a Half-Fiend Greater Air Elemental is CR 12 with 21 HD, meaning that it can quite likely fly in and no-save kill the entire party if you try to throw it out as a "moderate challenge."

This actually came up in one of my games once.

[Sith_Happens]

Right I'd forgotten about the advancing HD rules. DM once hit us with an advanced HD assassin vine, despite being technically under the party's CR we still lost 3 outta 4 PC's. That's when I started learning about optimizing.


A Half-Fiend Adult White Dragon is a CR 13 encounter.

It has Blasphemy (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/blasphemy.htm) and 18 Hit Dice.

I think it's safe to just say that the entire "Advanced Monster Challenge Rating" section is by far the biggest offender when it comes to assigning improper CR values. I spent some time screwing around with those rules once and actually couldn't get an accurate result no matter what I tried.

[Doug Lampert]

I think it's safe to just say that the entire "Advanced Monster Challenge Rating" section is by far the biggest offender when it comes to assigning improper CR values. I spent some time screwing around with those rules once and actually couldn't get an accurate result no matter what I tried.

What? You think upgrading a monster to having NPC gear for its new CR, +2 levels of a "non-associated class" like cleric (non-associated for the vast majority of monsters), elite abilities rather than the monster array, and re-choosing feats might possibly be worth more than +1 CR?

Note that JUST upgrading the abilities to elite is ALSO +1 CR.

At least one of these things is insanely wrong.

[atemu1234]

Fiendish Trolls are shockingly hard to put down too, while we didn't actually lose anybody on that encounter, we got roughed up so hard it felt like somebody had died. Everybody was low on HP, the two spell casters had completely burned through their daily spells.

More my problem is with the Mob rules in DMGII.

[aleucard]

For the most part, CR isn't that bad for most games with appropriate WBL. However, once words like Flying, Greater Invisibility, Darkstalker, Mindsight, and Incorporeal get thrown around, CR snaps like a twig, one way or another. There are way too many ways to make a given encounter either impossible to win or impossible to lose depending on either side's access to certain things. For instance, without a way to make the party's weapons magic at bare minimum, fights with anything Ghost-related are just not going to bloody work. Comparably, a party with flight and ranged offense in an open playfield can make any grounded melee type target practice. There are a LOT of these kinds of things floating around in 3.5 and PF.

[Bronk]

The CR vs power level of the monster also varies between books... MM2 is the most egregious example. For example, the adamantine clockwork horror is listed as only CR9...