Experiences with CR

[Rallicus]

To the DMs out there (or to the players who know what they're fighting): what has your experience been with CR this edition?

Frankly, I'm astounded how wonky the CR is. And yes... before I go any further, I know you're not supposed to base encounters off CR; yet encounter building guidelines are just as wonky, from what I've encountered.

My group has no dedicated healer. The Warlock has the Healer feat, and there's a Ranger who shows up 50% of the time and who -- to my knowledge -- has never actually used Cure Wounds. Yet time and again they tear up encounter after encounter, despite everything RAW pointing to "this should be very difficult."

The barbarian solo'd a wereboar at level three. They killed a werewolf at level 2 without taking so much a scratch. Last session the Barbarian/Fighter (level 3/3), fighter (level 6), and Warlock (level 7) took down a CR 8 Green Slaad and were never in any real danger. I even gave them warning, like, "This might be a tough fight!"... because everything pointed at the fact that it should have been, but it wasn't.

Of course there's variables to this: Bear Totem's resistance is awesome, action economy can turn the tides of fights like no joke, Warlock can crowd control and all that... but still.

What are your thoughts?

[GWJ_DanyBoy]

For my experience, I find that the difficulty guide in the DMG needs be adjusted (The one on page 82 describing Easy, Medium, Hard and Deadly encounters). It's mostly accurate for low levels, like 1 to 3, but after that things almost need to be moved a step. In my opinion, it's more like:
Easy: No resource expenditure needed. Cakewalk.
Medium: Mild resource expenditure may be needed.
Hard: Some resource expenditure needed. If party is mostly already spent, very unlucky or goofing around, one party member might be incapacitated temporarily.
Deadly: Strong/steady resource expenditure needed. Despite the best efforts of the party, one party member might be incapacitated temporarily during the encounter. Very bad luck or notably poor tactics may lead to the need for a retreat, or the incapacitation/capture/death of one or more party members.

So for your example of the Green Slaad, that's in the hard category of encounters, but the party had a strong action economy advantage since it's a 3 on 1 fight. So as long as they were willing to cast a spell and spend an ability or two like rage, I'm not surprised at all that they were able to steamroll it.

[pwykersotz]

My experiences with CR have been level 7 and under.

I find that CR is a useful metric for not killing the players. It guarantees a certain cap on abilities, as evidenced by the monster creation guidelines in the DMG. I also find that past level 3, CR is not, by itself, a useful metric anymore. What becomes more useful is xp.

I think the xp system they have is fairly robust. You calculate the adjusted xp and set it against the party, and it will generally be just as challenging as you would expect based on the words "Easy, Medium, Hard, or Deadly". But the xp system has a few unavoidable bugs. Primarily, let's say you want to send 12 Kobolds and a Fire Elemental against a party. The Kobolds aren't trivial, so you can't wipe their xp from the calculation. But that Fire Elemental does not deserve to have his xp multiplied by 3 to judge the overall difficulty(The Kobolds aren't THAT threatening). So I make it additive. Multiply the xp of the Kobolds by the amount based on their number and leave the xp of the Fire Elemental untouched.

So basically, I love both of them as useful and viable metrics to judge encounters, but I would not slavishly adhere to either. CR is good in gauging what the top end offence/defense balance will be. XP is a good indicator of threat to the party overall. If you use both, you have excellent metrics to balance the rest.

If you adhere to it rigidly, you'll notice the game getting easier over time. Which isn't inherently a problem, but it might be for some.

[Rallicus]

snip

Yeah, I'll probably be less hesitant to use "Deadly" encounters in the future, based on my experiences thus far. I think you're right about "incapacitated" being more likely than "dead" (especially thanks to the new negative HP rules), provided tactics are at least decent.

[Asyrin]

A few tips on CR from a DM:

-More weaker enemies is always a greater challenge by a good bit.

-Monster tactics are determined by the DM. When my party faces humanoid monsters who are moderately intelligent those monsters don't just move and swing. They use blocking strategies, help actions, the environment, and improvised actions the same as a player group would.

For example, my level 6 party came across two ogres and a spy, the ogre bodyguards created a blocking wall for the spy who ducked in and out to crossbow the party. When the PC halfling rogue tried and failed to get past one of the ogres picked her up (grapple) and threw her at the party barbarian. It proned both of them and the spy got a sneak attack on the already hurt halfling while the other ogre closed in, preventing cure wounds. If I had just swung and moved with them the fight would have been easy and boring, instead it was dangerous and exciting.

[Demonic Spoon]

The barbarian solo'd a wereboar at level three. They killed a werewolf at level 2 without taking so much a scratch. Last session the Barbarian/Fighter (level 3/3), fighter (level 6), and Warlock (level 7) took down a CR 8 Green Slaad and were never in any real danger. I even gave them warning, like, "This might be a tough fight!"... because everything pointed at the fact that it should have been, but it wasn't.


The green slaad by itself would have been halfway into a Hard encounter, so the guidelines say that there was only a very minimal chance that a character would die or that the party would fail. So yeah, "never in any real danger" sounds about right. Also, there's this important factor:



Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day.

If your party is able to go into every fight blowing all their resources, the encounter is naturally going to be way easier. Finally, if your party has any magic items (and it sounds like they do, based on the barbarian being able to defeat a wereboar 3 levels earlier), the fight is obviously going to be even easier.


With regards to the wereboar: the wereboar has a seriously powerful damage immunity which is factored into its CR. If you don't account for its immunity, per the DMG guidelines, it's sitting at a defensive CR of 1/2 and an offensive CR of 3, so its "overall CR" would be a 2 not accounting for its lycanthropy or its immunity.

Furthermore, there are two things that the wereboar does:

1. Inflict strength/CON saving throws
2. Do a bunch of physical damage.

Given that this particular monster really, really strongly plays into the strengths of the barbarian, if he had a magic/silvered weapon, it makes perfect sense that he would win.

[Smorgonoffz]

I hope i'm not hijacking this tread, but i've read the Cr rules and i din't understand them fully.

The cr doesn't work like in 3.5 where A 5 CR is a fight for 4 adventurers of fitht level?, do i need to make all the calculations for the exp(from the involved monsters) then divide it among th e pc?

[pwykersotz]

I hope i'm not hijacking this tread, but i've read the Cr rules and i din't understand them fully.

The cr doesn't work like in 3.5 where A 5 CR is a fight for 4 adventurers of fitht level?, do i need to make all the calculations for the exp(from the involved monsters) then divide it among th e pc?

You make the calculations to determine the difficulty of the fight, and then once the fight is done you take the actual listed exp of all the monsters, add it together, and divide it by the PC's. Some people have expressed a preference for using the adjusted exp total to allocate rewards too.

CR just indicates the top tier of power that the PC's should generally come across.

[Smorgonoffz]

Thanks a lot

[mephnick]

CR has always been fairly useless if you don't factor in terrain, distance, party makeup, party optimization, enemy party make up, enemy party synergy, cover, spells available.....did I miss anything?

It's a guideline but it will never be accurate, you can only estimate it by really knowing the system/enemies/party.

Might be awhile before that happens in a new system.

[pwykersotz]

CR has always been fairly useless if you don't factor in terrain, distance, party makeup, party optimization, enemy party make up, enemy party synergy, cover, spells available.....did I miss anything?

It's a guideline but it will never be accurate, you can only estimate it by really knowing the system/enemies/party.

Might be awhile before that happens in a new system.

I think you meant XP there. CR in this one tells you the average of the raw offensive/defensive capabilities of the creature.

[mephnick]

I think you meant XP there. CR in this one tells you the average of the raw offensive/defensive capabilities of the creature.

I guess so. I mean, it's both.

Your 1/2 CR scout is a lot more mechanically dangerous than your 2 CR grick if you have 100 feet of difficult terrain between the two of you. The fact that the grick can grapple and do twice as much damage is meaningless.

[pwykersotz]

I guess so. I mean, it's both.

Your 1/2 CR scout is a lot more mechanically dangerous than your 2 CR grick if you have 100 feet of difficult terrain between the two of you. The fact that the grick can grapple and do twice as much damage is meaningless.

Which is why you adjust the exp value for those factors. The adjusted xp calculation takes that into account. The CR just describes raw ability.

[mephnick]

But CR determines XP allotment..

[pwykersotz]

But CR determines XP allotment..

Yes, but not adjusted allotment. XP is increased or decreased based on environmental factors. So you start with the basic capabilities of the creature and establish a CR for it so base raw power is known. The DM now has a tool to know how deadly the creature is if it can use its abilities. Then you reduce it to xp and put it through calculations based on party size, enemy amount, terrain, weather, and others, and determine how difficult the encounter is overall with the extra information. Then you pit it against the party, and award actual exp based on the raw values of offense and defense capability.

So to your original point, yes, CR is useless overall if you're adding additional factors because it is the challenge specifically devoid of those factors. But the overall encounter includes them, and yes it's an art rather than science. There are always advantageous/disadvantageous situations that can skew things.

[Mr.Moron]

It's been pretty useful as a "This thing won't crush your party under normal circumstances" kind of guide, but doesn't really provide much of consistent measure of overall challenge. Of course I tend to play monsters dumb and typically put combats in relatively open/simple areas.

[mephnick]

Yeah so the CR ceases to be accurate once you've adjusted the XP based on the encounter, like I said.

I mean we're not really disagreeing.

Edit: basically your edit.

[pwykersotz]

Yeah so the CR ceases to be accurate once you've adjusted the XP based on the encounter, like I said.

I mean we're not really disagreeing.

Edit: basically your edit.

Ah, cool. My original post was just a clarification that I thought might be relevant. Carry on. :smallsmile:

[Mandragola]

It's quite fun playing hotdq and looking at the CRs of monsters it puts against the party. We recently came up to an encounter that, as written, puts 4 level 4 PCs agaisnt 4 CR8(!) enemies - and it's just meant as a pretty incidental encounter on the road. Actually we had 3 level 6 characters by this point, as we'd done the starter set before starting hotdq - which our DM is levelling up to make appropriate. Except that often she's actually putting in less than was originally there in order to make it level-appropriate for our higher-level characters. I honestly have no idea how you could survive the adventure as written.

Some monsters are difficult to judge. We had three level 6 characters (a valour bard, warlock and sorceror). The really nasty thing about the slaadi was that both of them could do a fireball, which would have been pretty terminal for the party if my sorceror hadn't counterspelled one of them. You do have to be careful about putting in stuff like that which could just wipe the party if they lose initiative. It didn't help that all our control spells bounced right off the Slaadi's resistance, so we had to just beat them to death. I ended up putting haste on myself and the bard (twin spell) and then we gradually took them down with heavy focussed fire.

On the face of it that was an encounter we shouldn't have been able to win - and we very nearly didn't. It helped once we got the bard's (hasted) AC up to 21 so he could tank them pretty effectively.

[Rallicus]

I honestly have no idea how you could survive the adventure as written.

Yeah, I think it's nigh-impossible as well. I remember discussing this somewhat here and never having any players/DMs admit they ran/played the AP completely RAW.

Kobold Press has the benefit of releasing their product before encounter building rules were made, but some of their design decisions are just terrible.

Doesn't stop people from enjoying it though, so that's the part that counts.


Some monsters are difficult to judge. We had three level 6 characters (a valour bard, warlock and sorceror). The really nasty thing about the slaadi was that both of them could do a fireball, which would have been pretty terminal for the party if my sorceror hadn't counterspelled one of them.

I thought it was somewhat impressive that my three person group of roughly the same level took down one Green Slaadi. But two?

Anyway, just did a one-on-one session with the sorcerer who solo'd a Manticore. CR3, he was level 6 so it should have been a "hard" encounter. It turned out deadly cause the damn thing KOed him with only two HP left, and he would have been beaten even worse had he not used Mirror Image which took out like 3 attacks at once.

I realize all these things you have to take into consideration; party makeup, enemy tactics, terrain, blah blah blah. But I still feel like CR is so wrong in so many ways. Just the inaccuracy of it in so many cases... it makes my head hurt.

[Envyus]

It's quite fun playing hotdq and looking at the CRs of monsters it puts against the party. We recently came up to an encounter that, as written, puts 4 level 4 PCs agaisnt 4 CR8(!) enemies - and it's just meant as a pretty incidental encounter on the road. Actually we had 3 level 6 characters by this point, as we'd done the starter set before starting hotdq - which our DM is levelling up to make appropriate. Except that often she's actually putting in less than was originally there in order to make it level-appropriate for our higher-level

The Assassins were originally Young Green Slaadi. However Young Green Slaadi were removed from the game and the Assassin statblock was made much stronger. Steve Winter said the encounter should have been removed as it lost it's cool thing with the Slaadi showing up randomly. If you play it he said the Assassins should be replaced with Spies.

[Demonic Spoon]

Anyway, just did a one-on-one session with the sorcerer who solo'd a Manticore. CR3, he was level 6 so it should have been a "hard" encounter. It turned out deadly cause the damn thing KOed him with only two HP left, and he would have been beaten even worse had he not used Mirror Image which took out like 3 attacks at once.

I realize all these things you have to take into consideration; party makeup, enemy tactics, terrain, blah blah blah. But I still feel like CR is so wrong in so many ways. Just the inaccuracy of it in so many cases... it makes my head hurt.


There's nothing wrong about it, you're just using it in silly ways. CR/XP budgets are an abstraction, and that abstraction works great if used in the average case. However, you're using it in ways that it's not meant to handle.

1v1 scenarios are going to be far more swingy than party scenarios. In a 1v1 scenario, a single missed attack roll can be the difference between victory and defeat. In a 1v1 scenario, your sorcerer's spell selection is going to make a huge difference - there are spells that your sorcerer might have had that would've ensured an easy victory against a single manticore, but he didn't.

If you're doing solo campaigns, you're going to need to:

-Take a much closer look at the enemy's relative strengths and weaknesses vs your player, and
-Be ready to fudge things if someone gets a lucky crit.

[Mandragola]

I thought it was somewhat impressive that my three person group of roughly the same level took down one Green Slaadi. But two?

Well to be fair the second one eventually turned invisible and ran away, but only after we'd killed the other one and badly hurt it. I actually forgot to counterspell one of the fireballs, which was a pretty major error! Also blew fear on them before I realised what they were (they were disguised), which of course did nothing.

It helped that our bard is actually kind of a badass mountain dwarf, with gauntlets of ogre power. With haste added he does pretty respectable damage now. Plus warlocks do damage. My sorceror's ray of frost does a respectable 2D8+4 damage now and I was following it up with a crossbow bolt thanks to being hasted.

Shame about the inn though. Our GM ruled, not unreasonably, that having a fireball go off inside it caused the place to burn to the ground!

[Rallicus]

Shame about the inn though. Our GM ruled, not unreasonably, that having a fireball go off inside it caused the place to burn to the ground!

I miss the days when fireball would hit and then vanish into thin air... now it seems like every fire based spell ignites everything that can be ignited (besides what players have on their person, which makes no sense fluff wise but from a gameplay standpoint it's a safe move).

In the aforementioned Manticore fight the sorcerer avoided using his most powerful spell, lightning bolt, so as not to burn the homestead down. This is another variable I should have considered when making the encounter, sure, but I hadn't looked at the character's spellbook.

Herein lies my problem with CR: all these variables, even down to the simplest thing, can totally change the difficulty of the battle. Am I just remembering wrong? I can't seem to recall 3.5 being anywhere near this dramatic.

Is bounded accuracy to blame as well?

[Mandragola]

Honestly I think you just need to get the hang of it as a DM. You will begin to understand what a party can realistically achieve. It took my group a while and we had a period with 3 tpks in 4 weeks at one point, as DMs kept putting in too many monsters.

Personally I find this much harder to do with casters than other stuff - both caster PCs and monsters. They are just way more swingy, especially when crowd control happens - or fails to happen.

[Rallicus]

Honestly I think you just need to get the hang of it as a DM. You will begin to understand what a party can realistically achieve.

Saying what amounts to "git gud" doesn't add much to this discussion. I've yet to kill a single party member in the 20+ sessions we've had, and I never once nerfed creatures or fudged rolls. I have a fairly good understanding of how to build encounters, but that doesn't negate the fact that there's something inherently wrong with CR and Encounter Building.

Or... rather, I see it as such.

[pwykersotz]

Saying what amounts to "git gud" doesn't add much to this discussion. I've yet to kill a single party member in the 20+ sessions we've had, and I never once nerfed creatures or fudged rolls. I have a fairly good understanding of how to build encounters, but that doesn't negate the fact that there's something inherently wrong with CR and Encounter Building.

Or... rather, I see it as such.

I think we might not have enough detail to give advice then. A party of three overcoming a single Green Slaad isn't overly impressive depending on how many of their resources they used. If the Barbarian Fighter raged, the Wizard used his top slots, and the Warlock used any slots, I would expect them to deal with such a challenge handily. On the other hand, if the Barbarian Fighter just swung his sword and the Wizard and Warlock used cantrips, that should have been a little harder.

In my experience, the difference between Hard and Deadly is a character dropping to 0. I've had it happen with Hard encounters a couple times, but it's rare. The party was just unlucky or caught with their pants down. Try pitting the same characters against 6 Allosauruses a few times and see how they fare. If they have an easy time with that, then something else is wrong.

[Ralanr]

My group has had some pretty tough encounters, but the tougher ones are when the enemies outnumber us and are technically working together. I think at one point at level 4 with a paladin (ancients), wizard (Necromancer), Druid (land:Forest), and Barbarian (Totem:Bear, me) ended up fighting up about 8 or more Merrows and two water weirds under two seperate boats (It was our session to get our respective groups together. Barbarian and wizard on one boat, Paladin and druid on the other).

We. Almost. Died. The wizard got pulled under early and could only get out of the water with the barbarian's help (We didn't know about the water weirds until later) and the druid had to go into blink dog form to stay alive (she shape shifts a lot, but it's not something her character likes to do). At one point the weirds started sinking one of the boats. Hell the only reason we won (It didn't really feel like a victory, but we survived) was the hopeful use that whatever I had in my iron flask (We got some random but powerful magic items) would be useful (or suck a merrow in and get it to fight for us).

Out pops a bone devil. A bone devil. My DM legitimately rolled for that. Needless to say it took care of the rest of our opponents (I think I only killed one or two...I'm changing my weapons to increase my damage output. Sword and board wasn't working) and we escaped with our lives.

Numbers and tactics of the enemies matter. If they work together then you might be doomed, you are doomed if you're not in a group that really works as a team/unit. We just got stupid lucky.

[Rallicus]

I think we might not have enough detail to give advice then.

I'm not sure I ever asked for advice. My first post could have been misconstrued as such ("what are your thoughts?" referring to CR in this edition, not my example) but that wasn't the intention when I made this thread.

I basically wanted to see what everyone's experience with CR in this edition was. The thing I'm most interested in is comparing it to previous editions; through my own experience I've concluded that this is possibly the worst edition since 3e in terms of CR/encounter building guidelines.

Granted, they wanted to hearken back to 2e (which, far as I can remember, had no real "CR" and a whole lot of guesswork based on XP alloted)... but... I don't know. I feel like they should have thought it through more thoroughly.

Unfortunately how you'd manage to do that with something like bounded accuracy is difficult.

[Mandragola]

Saying what amounts to "git gud" doesn't add much to this discussion. I've yet to kill a single party member in the 20+ sessions we've had, and I never once nerfed creatures or fudged rolls. I have a fairly good understanding of how to build encounters, but that doesn't negate the fact that there's something inherently wrong with CR and Encounter Building.

Or... rather, I see it as such.

I didn't really mean it in that way, but I do see what you mean. It could come across that I was just saying "L2P". What I really mean though is that you should use your own brain to design encounters based on what you think will work, not based on some abstract table or other. You know what the party can do and what the monsters can do.

My opinion is that no perfect encounter balancing system can exist. It's a fact that different parties are going to cope more or less well with different types of enemies. Not all players even try particularly hard to build a balanced group. So as a DM you should think about the characters you've actually got, and other stuff like any equipment they might have or interesting terrain you could use, and work from there to design something fun.

Note that I'm not saying you should design encounters to beat your players - obviously. Try not to put in too many things that just prevent PC abilities from working. Instead, based on your knowledge of the PCs, build encounters where they need to use their tricks to survive.

One of my groups had the opposite problem. We kept getting TPKs because the DMs were putting in too much stuff. We literally had 3 TPKs in 4 sessions. So we've scaled things way back and are enjoying things more. That said, the guy responsible for two of the TPKs is back in charge and kicked things off last week with a pretty worrying encounter, which we were relatively fortunate to survive.

[Submortimer]

To the DMs out there (or to the players who know what they're fighting): what has your experience been with CR this edition?

Frankly, I'm astounded how wonky the CR is. And yes... before I go any further, I know you're not supposed to base encounters off CR; yet encounter building guidelines are just as wonky, from what I've encountered.

My group has no dedicated healer. The Warlock has the Healer feat, and there's a Ranger who shows up 50% of the time and who -- to my knowledge -- has never actually used Cure Wounds. Yet time and again they tear up encounter after encounter, despite everything RAW pointing to "this should be very difficult."

The barbarian solo'd a wereboar at level three. They killed a werewolf at level 2 without taking so much a scratch. Last session the Barbarian/Fighter (level 3/3), fighter (level 6), and Warlock (level 7) took down a CR 8 Green Slaad and were never in any real danger. I even gave them warning, like, "This might be a tough fight!"... because everything pointed at the fact that it should have been, but it wasn't.

Of course there's variables to this: Bear Totem's resistance is awesome, action economy can turn the tides of fights like no joke, Warlock can crowd control and all that... but still.

What are your thoughts?


Monsters tend to fit into a few different camps.

A) Big bags of meat that hit you really hard
B) Minions
C) Monsters with tricks
D) Monsters that you are actually afraid to fight.

Let me give you some examples:

A) Is the Death Knight. CR 18, total badass, tons of powers.

with a party of about 6 Level 6 players, we essentially walked over him in a couple rounds. Granted, we got a surprise round (Which factored in greatly), but the simple fact was that he was a big bag of HP waiting to get slapped around.

B) Kobolds, Orcs, Goblins, what have you. Weak in small to moderate numbers, potentially devastating in larger groups. They pretty much lose their leathality when you get a few people with AoE abilities going, but until then you can harass a party quite effectively with a horde.

C) Ropers. Wolves. Basilisks. Anything that can inflict a significantly debilitating condition on one of your party members without much effort are always much, much more dangerous. The party barbarian isn't so happy when he gets swallowed and takes a butt ton of acid damage.

D) Beholders. Powerful Dragons. Intellect Devourers. Most of the time, these are one of the above with the added inclusion of legendary and/or lair actions. The Death knight hits hard and can take a beating, but the beholder can kill you pretty much outright. Dragons can fly, have a ton of HP, and are generally the biggest badasses around. ID's on the other hand, are a stupidly significant threat at almost any level, and they can outright kill characters with relative ease for a CR 2. This is the type of monster that you'll throw at the party and, if they win, they'll be thanking whatever gods they prey to.

[jkat718]

One thing that I've seen many DMs forget about is that the number of PCs also alters the adjusted XP amount, not just the number of monsters. Fewer than 3 PCs use a modifier one step higher, and more than 6 PCs use a modifier one step lower. It makes a huge difference in the long run.