RobbyPants wrote:FrankTrollman wrote:
Monsters get a lot more hit points than you do. An 11th level Horned Devil has 17 hit dice and a maximized Con bonus. If you "fight fair" you will lose. And you will lose pretty hard. The means of fighting "not fair" are:
Thanks.
So, did they just fuck the numbers up that hard, or is this a case that your chances of success at level X against monster level X are assuming a four-on-one fight?
The
short answer is that they just fucked up the math all to hell and gone. But the long answer is that the designers don't seem to agree amongst themselves what CR is even supposed to mean. The only thing it specifically means is that monsters with a CR higher than the
average level of the party might have abilities, attacks, or defenses that make them unsuitable as opponents for players of that level. So there's no guaranty that monsters with any particular CR
are level appropriate challenges for characters of any particular level, just a specific
lack of guaranty that monsters with a CR above a certain level are level appropriate. What CR actually does is set a bunch of level-like qualities of the monster: they get proficiency bonuses based on CR, and shit like that. But since those level based qualities are not large compared to the total asspulls, it hardly matters.
For example, let's look at our friend the Horned Devil. He's CR 11, and that entitles him to a +4 Proficiency Bonus and his melee attacks at at +10. That's because he has +6 Strength bonus (note: PC strength bonuses only go up to +5 because go fuck yourself). But wait! Doesn't that mean that he rolled 123 on 17 hit dice? Yeah, he has d10s, but his average die roll is a bit north of 11. The CR 11 Remorhazz has a +11 to-hit because its bullshit Strength is +7, the CR 11 Roc has a +13 to-hit because its bullshit Strength is +9, and the CR 11 Gynosphynx has a +9 because its bullshit Strength is +4. That's actually a pretty tight clump. But it's a pretty tight clump because of
bounded accuracy - that is pretty much nothing has really major bonuses to anything. The CR 13 Rakshasa has the same +10 to-hit with its spell attacks that the Horned Devil does with its fork, and so does the CR 8 T. Rex (because he's so strong). All the bonuses are
small, but they are also so weakly tied to level that attack bonuses can literally be the same on monsters 5 levels apart.
Speaking of the CR 13 Rakshasa, he's one of the few monsters that we
do have a window into the madness of why
they got a CR of 13. According to the DMG, it's because they immune to spells of 6th level or lower, so they might not be appropriate challenges for a 12th level or lower party (who of course, only have 6th level and lower spells). But a 13th level Wizard only gets
one 7th level spell. In a
day. It's entirely likely that they'll go into the battle with that one spell slot expended. Or prepared as something other than an attack. And anyway, you aren't going to chew through the Rakshasa's 110 hit points with
one spell. A 13th level Wizard is going to need to rely on minions, buffing allies, and hiding behind meat shields... same as a 12th level Wizard. So who gives a crap?
The way you're actually supposed to design encounters is with XP budgets. Which is really convoluted but basically works out to encounters of varying strengths being incredibly random collections of monsters. Every 11th level character brings the party 2/9ths of the way towards one CR 11 monster being a medium encounter, while every 5th level character in the party brings you 5/18ths of the way towards making a CR 5 monster be a medium encounter. And then you modify those numbers by multiplying shit if the monsters come more than one at a time. So while a CR 5 monster is worth 1/4 as much as a CR 11 monster, it can't come out evenly because 2 CR 5s are worth three times as much as one, and 3 CR 5s are worth 6 times as much.
The multiplier thing means that the XP budget counting is
quadratic as monsters grow in numbers. If you face one monster, one times its XP cost counts against the budget, but if you face 15 monsters then
sixty times the XP budget of 1 pops up. So if you have enough XP budget for one CR 11 critter, then 15 CR 1 critters would be too much. But you could still afford 18 CR 1/2 critters. At 11th level. For reals.
And yeah, there are CR 1/2 critters, even though it is literally impossible for any party's average level to be less than 1, and thus there are no and can be no parties for whom a CR 1 monster is not not appropriate and thus no conceivable need for monsters with a CR of less than that under that formulation. Fuck!
Bottom line: the encounter numbers in 5e are ugly as sin and obviously written by people who had no idea what they were doing and didn't care. There's
no underlying theory to fucking any of this, and it's all gibberish. And it's broken as hell.
-Username17
