CR reassignment thread?

[Raishoiken]

I'm sure most of us are aware of the magnificence that has been the series of la reassignment threads. I was wondering if anyone has thought of trying to do the same for monster challenge ratings as well? I feel like it'd be just as helpful to be able to have a more appropriate idea of which monsters to use at what levels

[StevenC21]

Well, somebody has to fix the Linnorms and Hellfire Wyrm.

[Mike Miller]

This idea was floated recently. Most responses were something along the lines of CR isn't as borked in general as LA and finding a baseline for a group of PCs to compare CR against is harder than the baseline for LA.

[zlefin]

people have thought of it, and the topic has been discussed considerably in the past. noone has decided to engage in it. this is in part because such a project is considerably less useful than the LA one, for a variety of reasons.

[Karl Aegis]

Somebody tried finding a good way to calculate CR. They were the same person who tried publishing the Immortals Handbook series, so the document is only mostly finished and needs adjustment because they ended up calculating ECL instead of CR and additional math needs to be done to calculate real CR and then you had to compare it to Encounter Level because CR at most levels is actually bunk.

[Cosi]

CR is too generally accurate for this to be worthwhile. There are places it's wrong, but anyone whose going to know this thread exists already knows what those are, and the discrepancies are generally small.

[magic9mushroom]

I'm sure most of us are aware of the magnificence that has been the series of la reassignment threads. I was wondering if anyone has thought of trying to do the same for monster challenge ratings as well? I feel like it'd be just as helpful to be able to have a more appropriate idea of which monsters to use at what levels

Me, a month ago (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?578363-Thread-for-re-CR-ing-monsters). Two reasons I haven't done it yet:

1) I'd need community support due to my own limited experience (I've played, and I've DMed, but not a great deal of either),
2) I don't want to do it in a place I don't feel comfortable, and I don't feel comfortable here. I'd be rather annoyed if I got six months into it and then got banned.

Now, that aside:

There are a few issues with the CR system, and some of them have to be addressed in a systemic rather than individual fashion.

1) There are some monsters whose CRs are just bad, in an individual way.
2) There is the "brute" problem. A Devastation Beetle is CR 50 because lots of its stats are high. However, against a party with casters it can be felled pre-epic, and it would not be any more worthy of CR 50 were its stats ten times as high, because those stats do not include the tools it would need to combat casters (or non-casters with appropriate magic items). There's basically a list of "necessary capabilities to pose a threat at level X", and that has to be integrated somehow if CRs are to remain meaningful in the teen levels and beyond.
3) The rules for improving monsters. There's a notorious problem with nonassociated class levels, but that's easily fixed by changing the cutoff (less easy to fix is the gulf between caster levels and non-caster levels, but that's kinda baked into 3.5 and not quite as big an issue for monsters until you're adding loads of them). A trickier issue is HD advancement, because it depends on a bunch of different things. It depends on how many of the monster's important abilities are improved (e.g. (Sp) abilities don't scale DCs while (Su) abilities do; spellcasting can be fixed or tied to HD), as well as whether scaling these abilities actually matters (e.g. adding damage and difficulty to a grappler's grapple suite is irrelevant if everyone's likely to have freedom of movement; notably, advancing such a grappler may push it from the region where grappling matters to the region where it does not). Advancing a triceratops to maximum HD by the existent rules turns it into a complete joke (because it's a straight melee brute and being a straight melee brute is much less relevant at CR 19-20 than at CR 9), while advancing a spellweaver gives it three caster levels for every CR (reaching 9ths at CR 12 and capping out at CR 16-17 as an epic sorcerer with CL 32 and four epic feats).
4) You have to pick a level of player op to balance against (this is pretty easy, though).

[Telonius]

Just for reference, Vorpal Tribble's calculator is described in this thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?192329-CR). (Not sure if the original has been lost).


1. Divide its average HP by 4.5 to 6,
4.5 for 5 HD or lower, 5 for 6-10 HD, 5.5 for 11-15 HD, 6 for 16-20 HD.
2. Add 1 for each five points above 10 its AC is, minusing 1 for every 5 below.
3. Add 1 for each special attack (+2 to +5 or more if its got a decent number of spells in its spell-like abilities).
4. Add 1 for each quality unless you deem it worthy of more. Add 1 for each resistance and 10 points of DR it has, and 2 for each immunity.
5. Add 1 for every two bonus feats it has.
6. Divide by 3.

It's much more accurate on the low end of CR than on the high end. (I think it kind of acknowledges that, in dividing HP by a higher number, the more the HD goes up). Certain things do kind of stop mattering when you get to extra-high levels.

[magic9mushroom]

Just for reference, Vorpal Tribble's calculator is described in this thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?192329-CR). (Not sure if the original has been lost).



It's much more accurate on the low end of CR than on the high end. (I think it kind of acknowledges that, in dividing HP by a higher number, the more the HD goes up). Certain things do kind of stop mattering when you get to extra-high levels.
Here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?43009-3-5-Monster-Making-For-the-Feebleminded) is the original.