It is essentially impossible to account for every single nuance of a monster. For example, a lich may seem like the perfect final boss, but look closely: it has only one spell that doesn't have a verbal component, which is counterspell. Counterspell only works when a creature within 60 feet of the lich casts a spell, but the range of the spell silence is 120 feet. Have your bard cast silence on the lich while they're 100 feet away or something, and then let the wizard snipe it with fire bolt at 120 feet, and have the fighter and rogue proceed to maul it. If these are level five characters with 16s in their prime requisites, the fighter could do an average of 8 or 9 damage to the lich with a longsword, attacking twice per turn and hitting around 40% of the time, for a damage per round of 6.8 damage. The rogue could use sneak attack to do 3d6 + 1d8 + 3 damage per round with a rapier, averaging 18 damage, or 33 with a critical hit. Even though that only averages 7.2 damage when the lich's armor class is accounted for, it would only take the in-game equivalent of about a minute to kill the lich, even without the 11 damage that the wizard does every single round (unless it misses). All together, this accounts for 18.4 damage per round, and it would take only eight rounds for the fifth-level party to kill the challenge rating 21 lich.
This is correct, but not in the way you intended it. That's a DM playing a monster badly. Ignoring the fact the facts that a fifth level party probably doesn't have multiple magic weapons, the silence is only non-counterspellable if the party as at least 65 feet of space(And the descriptions says they prefer closed spaces, so that's unlikely), the lich being able to cast globe of invulnerability if it wins initiative(Which is likely, given that a fifth level caster will likely have less than a 16 Dex) or has time to prepare, and that the lich will be paralyzing a character on each of its turns and once with its LAs(It's very unlikely for fith level characters to make the DC 18 save for Paralyzing Touch), this requires it to stand inside of the silence. Thatis why CR is a bad system.
Exactly. Again, as I said, good DMing requires actual thought and competence on the part of the DM. Anybody complaining about how they think CR should be a one step, no brains required replacement to actually reading the manuals and learning how the game works is not qualified to complain because they clearly do not know what they are talking about.
Exactly. Again, as I said, good DMing requires actual thought and competence on the part of the DM. Anybody complaining about how they think CR should be a one step, no brains required replacement to actually reading the manuals and learning how the game works is not qualified to complain because they clearly do not know what they are talking about.
Little harsh there, Flushmaster...
As has already been said here many times by numerous people (including Jeremy Crawford if you watch that video somebody posted), D&D is a complex game, very much so at higher levels, and CR is not a mystically, universally accurate system that unerringly guarantees a perfectly balanced encounter for any party of that level regardless of how the DM plays it. You don't expect a third grader to do your taxes with reliable results and you shouldn't expect somebody who neither knows nor cares how the various game mechanics work to run a balanced encounter for a level 15 party regardless of what numbers are in the monster's stat block. If you want good results from part of the game's design (such as CR) then you have to actually put forth a serious effort to actually learn the game as it is designed to be played, and that means reading the books that are published for that explicit purpose.
Exactly. Again, as I said, good DMing requires actual thought and competence on the part of the DM. Anybody complaining about how they think CR should be a one step, no brains required replacement to actually reading the manuals and learning how the game works is not qualified to complain because they clearly do not know what they are talking about.
Little harsh there, Flushmaster...
As has already been said here many times by numerous people (including Jeremy Crawford if you watch that video somebody posted), D&D is a complex game, very much so at higher levels, and CR is not a mystically, universally accurate system that unerringly guarantees a perfectly balanced encounter for any party of that level regardless of how the DM plays it. You don't expect a third grader to do your taxes with reliable results and you shouldn't expect somebody who neither knows nor cares how the various game mechanics work to run a balanced encounter for a level 15 party regardless of what numbers are in the monster's stat block. If you want good results from part of the game's design (such as CR) then you have to actually put forth a serious effort to actually learn the game as it is designed to be played, and that means reading the books that are published for that explicit purpose.
Eeeehhh... No amount of reading the PHB, MM or DMG is really going to allow you to competently run a 15th level encounter, never mind a 15th level adventure. For high tier D&D there's really no substitute for experience. And looking at the DMG in particular, even at low level that probably still applies - it's just that it's a lot easier to think yourself out of a bad situation as the DM than it is at higher levels. The PHB teaches the rules, and even if that's not quite the same as teaching how to play it does an ok, if by necessity basic, job at the latter too. The DMG is supposed to teach you how to run games, but does that in a singularly poor manner. Neither is really able to teach anything other than a somewhat stale normative version of the game to begin with - can't account for the specifics of a given group, after all.
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Exactly. Again, as I said, good DMing requires actual thought and competence on the part of the DM. Anybody complaining about how they think CR should be a one step, no brains required replacement to actually reading the manuals and learning how the game works is not qualified to complain because they clearly do not know what they are talking about.
Little harsh there, Flushmaster...
Putting aside whether posting simply a judgmental observation on tone is a constructive contribution to a thread aside ... "Harsh?" Maybe. But in context, the conversation was engaged with an abstract complaint about CR, a complaint that many DMs on the thread didn't think "CR, man, am I right?" necessarily applied and asked the complainant to elaborate. Complainant balked at the lack of universal sympathy to their complain, doubled down on the complaint's abstraction and offered a design principle (CR 19 poses a challenge to 4 level 19 PCs) that, while it's possible to derive that principle, isn't actually in any of the guidance regarding CR based encounter discussion. The complaint was suspect in its abstraction and continues to be.
Encounter design simply is not just consulting the CR table. The CR table provides great indexical guidance, but anyone designing an encounter for a tier 3 or 4 group has to take a more literally studied approach. To single out Flushmaster's post in comparison to the traffic on this and the rest of the board seems catty, especially since there was no substantive contribution to the discussion beyond the judgment.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
you had MULTIPLE PCs against ONE boss. The group with more people has more actions and has better chances of winning.
Do you have variant rules or house rules turned on for your game? The base/core game of 5e is built around NOT having feats and NOT having multiclassing. If you have these on, then you've already made CR irrelevant, as CR is built around the PCs not having these things. These variant rules, along with flanking and many others, are known for "breaking" the game. That's why they are variants, because they just end up making PCs more powerful. If you have house rules for combat stuff then you can ******* forget about CR my friend.
Did they have magic items? 5e is built around the idea that magic items are rare, and like fine art, and monsters are built with the assumption that you won't find any magic items. Adding magic items complicates things and gives the PCs a strong edge.
Did they have any of the new subclasses/races/backgrounds/feats/etc? WotC has been doing nothing except feeding the rising power creep of 5e. Twilight Cleric, Peace Cleric, Scribes Wizard, Clockwork Sorc, etc. are known for being greatly OP and objectively better than older content. Therefore they have a much easier time in combat.
Likely it wasn't CR's fault, it was the circumstances of the battle.
Perhaps we can turn the thread in a more constructive direction.
Run me through how to build an encounter that is of an appropriate challenge for a party. This is partly selfish (I'm about to build an adventure for our current party that just turned L13), but will also hopefully serve those coming to this thread with concerns about CR to understand how it works. Let's assume that I have access to the DMG, if required.
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If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Perhaps we can turn the thread in a more constructive direction.
Run me through how to build an encounter that is of an appropriate challenge for a party. This is partly selfish (I'm about to build an adventure for our current party that just turned L13), but will also hopefully serve those coming to this thread with concerns about CR to understand how it works. Let's assume that I have access to the DMG, if required.
can't be objectively done without more data on the party than just their levels. How many in the party? Any followers/hirelings? How many of those? Class make up of the party? What feats (if any)? What magic items do they have? What spells do they have? Etc... Lots of variables go into building encounters.
Perhaps we can turn the thread in a more constructive direction.
Run me through how to build an encounter that is of an appropriate challenge for a party. This is partly selfish (I'm about to build an adventure for our current party that just turned L13), but will also hopefully serve those coming to this thread with concerns about CR to understand how it works. Let's assume that I have access to the DMG, if required.
can't be objectively done without more data on the party than just their levels. How many in the party? Any followers/hirelings? How many of those? Class make up of the party? What feats (if any)? What magic items do they have? What spells do they have? Etc... Lots of variables go into building encounters.
I think it was pretty clear that Linklight was just getting the conversation started. Like I said CR 19 v. 4 x 15th level party doesn't tell me much of anything as to how things could have gotten down. To understand or validate the OP's claim of a broken encounter, a lot more context is needed than the CR. For all I know it was a three round fight, party got a little bloodied but prevailed, after burning a bunch of features off their sheets. Like "boss battle" but right after a long rest boss battle. I appreciate Linklight's effort at redirecting the conversation, but these details were already asked.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Perhaps we can turn the thread in a more constructive direction.
Run me through how to build an encounter that is of an appropriate challenge for a party. This is partly selfish (I'm about to build an adventure for our current party that just turned L13), but will also hopefully serve those coming to this thread with concerns about CR to understand how it works. Let's assume that I have access to the DMG, if required.
This is actually one of the things the DMG explains in detail, and it even touches on some of the pitfalls. The process as described arguably needs to put more emphasis on evaluating the party's relevant strengths and weaknesses, but it's about 95% there. You probably don't need to follow every step to the letter either - with a bit of practice you'll just pick a bunch of monsters that are suitable for the encounter and skip the encounter level math altogether - but the framework is there. Still, it's not an exact science and due to the way the game works it can't really be. An appropriately built encounter can still tilt towards too easy or too hard quickly: dice results are random and players come up with weird surprises.
If we can assume you have access to the DMG, can we assume you'll take a look at it? If you can describe your party and the type of encounter you'd like to create, I (and many others here as well, I expect) would be happy to use that as an example to illustrate the process.
People want Challenge Rating to be absolute and infallible - input Party X, perform mathematical operation Y, get result Z, your Perfectly Balanced Encounter. People - rightly - naysay that idea because it's hogwash. At low levels, one single crit can throw off an entire encounter. At high levels, players have enough options that encounter calculus becomes more trouble than it's worth. Rigorous, exacting mechanical balance, tuned to within an inch of its life and predictable down to the last die roll, is not only difficult but also unnecessary, especially when the system doesn't work as much due to DMs being as bad at combat as many of their players are. Not every DM is a tactical mastermind; the whole monster statblock shifts coming in M3 to emphasize a monster's primary actions is a measure to help DMs stop self-sabotaging themselves with more complex monsters.
Ultimately that's why people keep carping on CR. It's like the infinite *****ing about matchmaking algorithms in PvP video games - people want the system to do all the work of making matches/encounters for them and they refuse to tolerate "machine code can't account for the human factor in your game" as an answer.
... its not exactly a news flash that the designers utterly failed at making a blanaced consistent game. But hey, good news is there is 25 pages detailing that stupid town and what the motivations of each inhabitant is......sigh........
Pendulums swing - its what they do. Suck it up till it swings back to D and D's miniature fantasy combat origins. Then we can scoff at all the role players complaining about how hard 7e is ROFLOL
*snort*
If you remember TSR's D&D being balanced and consistent, you may be seeing the past through rose-tinted glasses. None of this is anything new.
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Perhaps we can turn the thread in a more constructive direction.
Run me through how to build an encounter that is of an appropriate challenge for a party. This is partly selfish (I'm about to build an adventure for our current party that just turned L13), but will also hopefully serve those coming to this thread with concerns about CR to understand how it works. Let's assume that I have access to the DMG, if required.
Ok, so I'm going to assume:
The party consists of 4 members.
They are all level 13
They don't have hirelings
They all have access to at least a +1 magical weapon and a +1 magical armour
They do not have access to any game-breaking, reusable magical items such as a cube of force
The party have had a long rest before the combat
The party are not likely to face any other encounters today, and are aware of that
Here's how I'd approach it:
1) The encounter should be several times beyond Deadly, but without extreme single turn damage output
2) There should be a range of threats
3) The enemies should have equal action economy to the PCs, but their actions should generally be lower damage
4) Choose the Principle Monster. Since the party are high level, they should be up against something with a very high CR. In this case I will keep things simple and choose adult red dragon. However, since this is a high level party and hit points are crazy low in the MM, I want each PC to have to deal at least an additional 50 hit points damage to it so that the single-day fight goes a bit longer. The dragon therefore has its hp buffed to 456.
5) Choose Environmental Factors, or gimmicks. To keep things simple this fight takes place in a large cavern, where the dragon is free to fly, but without unlimited space to fly into. The cave ceiling is 100ft high and the cave is 200 feet radius.
6) Provide hindrance mobs. These should be pretty simple to run, and whilst not deadly for the PCs they will cause threats to the back line, cause issues with Concentration checks and so on. They shouldn't be too hard to clear. I'd stick in 4 Fire Elementals.
7) We now have a dragon that poses a serious threat, and some really annoying elementals that provide small but consistent damage turn after turn unless resources are spent on them.
The PCs will still win this encounter. The dragon's damage output just isn't high enough to stop them, while the breath weapon can give a scary threat on its second or third use. Until then, Evasion, Absorb Elements and 140hp will keep the heroes up and fighting. Eventually the fight will come down to slogging against the dragon's last 100hp while they've burned all their biggest cooldowns already.
lol I love how any time someone asks this question, everyone throws up their hands and jumps on the "there's no way the CR system can know everything and work for everyone !!!!"
OK - but shouldn't it at least be consistent between monsters, using the defined 8pp or so of CR parameters ? Its well-known they crapped out on calculating the CRs, so please don't argue the point.
And news flash to the question askers - D + D 5e is super easy ! Yup. I know. You can kill a Balrog at L1 lol. 5e is made for role players who don't care about combat / numbers and noobs. Veteran min maxer combat oriented players aren't going to be challenged. Ratchet up the monster levels by 3-4 and you should hit a sweet spot. Except of course for the creatures that were assigned incorrect CRs based on the written parameters supposedly used for assessing them. But its not exactly a news flash that the designers utterly failed at making a blanaced consistent game. But hey, good news is there is 25 pages detailing that stupid town and what the motivations of each inhabitant is......sigh........
Pendulums swing - its what they do. Suck it up till it swings back to D and D's miniature fantasy combat origins. Then we can scoff at all the role players complaining about how hard 7e is ROFLOL
Sorry, what? I legitimately have to ask if you've played Dungeons and Dragons before. You appear to have no interest in playing 5e and your statements about it are obviously incorrect(Only three races in the game have a chance of surviving a balor's death burst if they're members of one of 4 classes, assuming average damage). Then, when it comes to older editions, it doesn't sound like you've played that, either. THAC0 was balanced and made sense? Chainmail was a good system? Gold being worth XP was a great idea?
Perhaps we can turn the thread in a more constructive direction.
Run me through how to build an encounter that is of an appropriate challenge for a party. This is partly selfish (I'm about to build an adventure for our current party that just turned L13), but will also hopefully serve those coming to this thread with concerns about CR to understand how it works. Let's assume that I have access to the DMG, if required.
As mentioned, we'd need to know the makeup of your party and their general builds as well as the kind of tactics they tend to use to make any good suggestions. For broad advice, start with looking at a few CR 13 monsters and think about how your party would fare against them. Also be aware of what ball park range this is for your party by the standard encounter difficulty; a single CR 13 monster is worth 10,000 XP so it's just below the hard threshold for 3 level 13 PCs and just below medium for 5 of them and right about at the deadly mark for only 2 while 6 should have a cakewalk.
For an example I'll talk about a storm giant.
A 13th character with D10 hit dice and a +3 Con mod is going to have an average of 111 HP. A Wizard or Sorcerer with a zero Con mod will average 41. D8 classes with a +1/+2 come in around 85-98. For this example I'll use a notional party of the standard archetypical party and some magical gear and vague estimates of their abilities, so a Fighter with 110 HP, AC 19, and three attacks per round averaging about 10 damage each, a Rogue with 85 HP, AC 18, and about 25 damage with sneak attack on a successful hit, a Cleric at 85 HP, AC 18, and about 8 points of weapon damage but let's also assume they have a spiritual weapon cast at 4th level to bump that up by 14 and they'll also be possibly using spells that can do more, and a Wizard with 45 HP, AC 15, and wildly spell damage ranging from a ~16 point firebolt to a 60 point finger of death. Various subclasses, feats, and other choices can increase that damage but we're looking at a very general average expected base damage of about 100-120 per round if they all hit with possible spikes up to 200 or more with crits, high level spells, and favorable rolls. This is information you should already know before planning any encounter because all encounters are going to involve your party as the one constant element.
A storm giant has 230 HP and AC 16; with +4 mods in their primary abilities they're going to be at a base +9 on their attack rolls giving them roughly a 2/3 chance to hit without factoring in things like advantage or if they somehow manage to immobilize the giant. They're going to have save DCs around 17-18 for their spells and other abilities, so the giant has slightly better than a 50% chance of passing Con, Wis, and CHA saves, about 75% for strength, but 25% or less for Dex and Int. So if that wizard is hucking fireballs this big boy is pretty much screwed. Considering that the giant only gets a +2 to initiative you can expect about half the party to go before he does and the party should be able to take him down in no more than four rounds if they're all attacking, quite possibly three or even two so you should only count on him getting in two or three attacks.
Definitely plan on opening with the giant's lightning strike ability to hit as many of them as possible with the 10' radius 12d8(~54) damage against a DC 17 Dex save for half. This could very possibly drop the Wizard and maybe others if they're coming into the fight low on health, but even if he does drop one they ought to be able to bring them back up with a healing spell from the Cleric or somebody with a potion (or your party might have other characters able to heal, like a Bard, Druid, Ranger, or Paladin) but that will mean they're doing less damage on their turn. In melee (with 10' reach) the giant is going to have about a 2/3 chance to hit anybody but the wizard (who's almost definitely screwed if they're in melee with the giant) for about 30 damage a pop and it swings twice per turn. Barring any special terrain that's probably all the giant's going to get beyond possibly a second set of melee swings and maybe a third if your party is rolling low. If they hit a 5-6 to recharge that lightning strike they should go for it immediately against anybody grouped together in range, but don't even bother counting the rogue who's at least as likely as not to save for no damage from evasion.
Looking at all this, the party should be reasonably expected to overcome this foe rather easily if they're fresh with full health and even a few high level spells from the casters and similar class/subclass based abilities for others (like a Battle Master's maneuvers, a monk's ki points, etc). At the most they might get a bit banged up and at worst they have one or maybe two go down from bad saves against the lightning strike or high rolls and maybe a crit from the giant's greatsword but they should still have resources to heal, such as Cleric spells to heal, any potions they might have, and they should also be able to recover most if not all damage in a short rest if they have all their hit dice available. This is most likely not going to be a scary encounter for the party by itself. But if they're coming in injured already, out of high level spells and other expendable resources then it very well could scare them. If you're planning to hit them with three or four more encounters of comparable threat in the same day as well as something else to drain resources (traps, stealth situations, terrain challenges, etc, particularly anything that makes the casters use a couple extra spells and might knock off some hit points from the tougher characters) before they can take a long rest, then this is an appropriate "medium" challenge. Furthermore, you could give the giant a starting point higher up a hillside full of rocks, underbrush, mud, or other "rough terrain" to give it an extra round or two to chuck rocks and maybe have that lightning strike refresh before the melee combatants can get to it, so it'll likely bang them up a little more.
If you are only planning to make this one encounter tougher in and of itself you're going to have to add to it. A second Giant cranks up the by-the-book threat level from low medium to the higher end of the hard range but not quite deadly. Storm giants are fairly intelligent so they should know to stand apart to avoid getting caught in the same fireball and with even average rolls they will likely do enough damage to put a serious dent in the party's total health pool. Still very survivable but now the players should definitely know they've been in a fight.
For a little less escalation you could add a lower CR enemy, like a pet Tyrannosaurus Rex. The T-Rex only has 136 HP and AC13 so it's roughly half as durable even before factoring in it's much lower saving throws, but it still attacks twice per round at +10 so it ought to consistently average at least 25 damage per round against this party while drawing away a couple rounds' worth of damage away from the harder hitting giant (especially if the giant sends it after the wizard in the back while it engages others in melee). By the book this encounter falls in the lower "hard" range, so it should still be survivable in most situations but it'll hurt more than the single giant.
Even if the party "breezes through" the tougher versions of this encounter they'll have to expend significant resources to do so, specifically high level spell slots, and probablystill lose a decent amount of hit points that convert to spell slots or hit dice to heal. If they run into this giant (especially with a friend or pet dinosaur) on their way to a time sensitive goal, or this happens in dangerous territory where it isn't wise to take a short rest afterwards, then whatever they're heading to just got that much more difficult without those spell slots and extra hit points.
And if they've already been in a couple comparable fights (or just one "deadly" encounter) and don't have any high level spells and they're all at half health coming into the encounter then even the single giant is going to be scary when a pair of hits from that greatsword can potentially down their tank in a single round and the lightning strike might take out any of them.
It's all about context. Which is why DMing in general requires thought and preparation.
No, WotC isn't going to "fix" CR. There are problems with CR, to be sure, but it isn't inherently broken. We keep reading about these kinds of breakdowns because WotC isn't doing their job at effectively communicating designer intent.
Challenge Ratings are, first and foremost, a mean derived from their respective offensive and defensive capabilities. But this mean comes with two caveats. First, it assumes "white room" conditions where their every attack lands, every enemy fails saving throws against their abilities, and any weaknesses are not exploited. Second, their relative offense is rooted in, as Jeremy Crawford stated in a recent interview, an "optimal path" for dealing damage.
Take the orc, for example. It's CR is 1/2, but only because the assumption is to use it's Aggressive trait to circle its target and throw a javelin each turn. As soon as it attacks with a [Tooltip Not Found], it jumps to CR 1. The mage doesn't have just one optimal path, but that's the nature of spellcasting giving it more options.
Monsters of the Multiverse is attempting to rectify this with many monsters being redesigned so they never really stray from an optimal path.
I think the primary problem is that the encounter building guidelines make people think that a fight that consumes 1/4 of your daily resources is Hard. If they just doubled all the encounter xp budgets (while keeping the daily budget the same) the names would be more appropriate. CR 19 against a CR 15 party would then be properly classified as an Easy encounter.
"All we're asking is for CR to be consistent, constant, and utterly perfect without any exceptions."
That's the root of the issue.
What's the CR adjustment for a Dullahan's ability to instantly slay any PC on a natural 20? How do you rigorously, mathemagically, and consistently account for the swing factor of a five percent chance to instagib any target regardless of HP, AC, defenses, or anything else?
What's the CR adjustment for a Bodytaker Plant's whole body-taking thing? How do you rigorously, mathemagically, and consistently account for the swing factor of the bodytaker's ability to turn regular people into pod people?
Hell, what's the CR adjustment for a basic-ass werewolf's immunity to mundane weapon damage? A factor which is either a completely nonissue for a party or a flat-out showstopper? There is no in between - either the party doesn't even realize the werewolf is immune to mundane weapon damage or the party cannot defeat the werewolf at all.
This idea that all creatures of CR 5, as a random example, provide exactly the same level of difficulty is hogwash. All CR 5 creatures are not created equal and they never will be. Demanding that a system provide perfect results, that any algorithm provides an absolutely even curve of difficulty without any exceptions is not only unrealistic, it's boring. I don't want combat to be that predictable, and I'm not sure why anyone else does. "CR 5" is a region, not a specific single point, and any DM will have to figure out the right spot in the region for their CR 5-ish party. It can't be any other way.
Yes yes, I get it. "Monsters in the MM should all follow the DMG formula for determining their CR!" Perhaps they should. Also perhaps that formula is meant specifically for homebrewing critters and serves as a guesstimate framework rather than a complete thing. One of my favorite homebrewed monsters is a Moss Hydra, with the following ability granted to it by its iridescent, prismatic scale coloration:
What's the CR adjustment for this ability? What is the perfectly consistent, absolutely rigorously, mathemagically correct Challenge Rating adjustment to give my Moss Hydra for its ability to bamboozle low-Wisdom enemies based on the number of heads it happens to have at any given time? Please, Shoak. Tell me what the algorithm says. I'd love to know.
Challenge Rating cannot and will never be as precise as math wonks want it to be, because all the game's most interesting abilities have little if anything to do with raw damage numbers. And raw damage numbers - offensively with damage output, defensively with AC and HP - are the only thing CR can account for.
Zero, of course :). The DMG doesn't count status effects towards CR at all. Which is why a pixie is CR 1/4; despite a vast number of obnoxious abilities, its only ability to actually do damage is Phantasmal Force.
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This is correct, but not in the way you intended it. That's a DM playing a monster badly. Ignoring the fact the facts that a fifth level party probably doesn't have multiple magic weapons, the silence is only non-counterspellable if the party as at least 65 feet of space(And the descriptions says they prefer closed spaces, so that's unlikely), the lich being able to cast globe of invulnerability if it wins initiative(Which is likely, given that a fifth level caster will likely have less than a 16 Dex) or has time to prepare, and that the lich will be paralyzing a character on each of its turns and once with its LAs(It's very unlikely for fith level characters to make the DC 18 save for Paralyzing Touch), this requires it to stand inside of the silence. That is why CR is a bad system.
I have a weird sense of humor.
I also make maps.(That's a link)
Little harsh there, Flushmaster...
As has already been said here many times by numerous people (including Jeremy Crawford if you watch that video somebody posted), D&D is a complex game, very much so at higher levels, and CR is not a mystically, universally accurate system that unerringly guarantees a perfectly balanced encounter for any party of that level regardless of how the DM plays it. You don't expect a third grader to do your taxes with reliable results and you shouldn't expect somebody who neither knows nor cares how the various game mechanics work to run a balanced encounter for a level 15 party regardless of what numbers are in the monster's stat block. If you want good results from part of the game's design (such as CR) then you have to actually put forth a serious effort to actually learn the game as it is designed to be played, and that means reading the books that are published for that explicit purpose.
Eeeehhh... No amount of reading the PHB, MM or DMG is really going to allow you to competently run a 15th level encounter, never mind a 15th level adventure. For high tier D&D there's really no substitute for experience. And looking at the DMG in particular, even at low level that probably still applies - it's just that it's a lot easier to think yourself out of a bad situation as the DM than it is at higher levels. The PHB teaches the rules, and even if that's not quite the same as teaching how to play it does an ok, if by necessity basic, job at the latter too. The DMG is supposed to teach you how to run games, but does that in a singularly poor manner. Neither is really able to teach anything other than a somewhat stale normative version of the game to begin with - can't account for the specifics of a given group, after all.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
Putting aside whether posting simply a judgmental observation on tone is a constructive contribution to a thread aside ... "Harsh?" Maybe. But in context, the conversation was engaged with an abstract complaint about CR, a complaint that many DMs on the thread didn't think "CR, man, am I right?" necessarily applied and asked the complainant to elaborate. Complainant balked at the lack of universal sympathy to their complain, doubled down on the complaint's abstraction and offered a design principle (CR 19 poses a challenge to 4 level 19 PCs) that, while it's possible to derive that principle, isn't actually in any of the guidance regarding CR based encounter discussion. The complaint was suspect in its abstraction and continues to be.
Encounter design simply is not just consulting the CR table. The CR table provides great indexical guidance, but anyone designing an encounter for a tier 3 or 4 group has to take a more literally studied approach. To single out Flushmaster's post in comparison to the traffic on this and the rest of the board seems catty, especially since there was no substantive contribution to the discussion beyond the judgment.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Likely it wasn't CR's fault, it was the circumstances of the battle.
Er ek geng, þat er í þeim skóm er ek valda.
UwU
Perhaps we can turn the thread in a more constructive direction.
Run me through how to build an encounter that is of an appropriate challenge for a party. This is partly selfish (I'm about to build an adventure for our current party that just turned L13), but will also hopefully serve those coming to this thread with concerns about CR to understand how it works. Let's assume that I have access to the DMG, if required.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
can't be objectively done without more data on the party than just their levels. How many in the party? Any followers/hirelings? How many of those? Class make up of the party? What feats (if any)? What magic items do they have? What spells do they have? Etc... Lots of variables go into building encounters.
I think it was pretty clear that Linklight was just getting the conversation started. Like I said CR 19 v. 4 x 15th level party doesn't tell me much of anything as to how things could have gotten down. To understand or validate the OP's claim of a broken encounter, a lot more context is needed than the CR. For all I know it was a three round fight, party got a little bloodied but prevailed, after burning a bunch of features off their sheets. Like "boss battle" but right after a long rest boss battle. I appreciate Linklight's effort at redirecting the conversation, but these details were already asked.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
This is actually one of the things the DMG explains in detail, and it even touches on some of the pitfalls. The process as described arguably needs to put more emphasis on evaluating the party's relevant strengths and weaknesses, but it's about 95% there. You probably don't need to follow every step to the letter either - with a bit of practice you'll just pick a bunch of monsters that are suitable for the encounter and skip the encounter level math altogether - but the framework is there. Still, it's not an exact science and due to the way the game works it can't really be. An appropriately built encounter can still tilt towards too easy or too hard quickly: dice results are random and players come up with weird surprises.
If we can assume you have access to the DMG, can we assume you'll take a look at it? If you can describe your party and the type of encounter you'd like to create, I (and many others here as well, I expect) would be happy to use that as an example to illustrate the process.
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People want Challenge Rating to be absolute and infallible - input Party X, perform mathematical operation Y, get result Z, your Perfectly Balanced Encounter. People - rightly - naysay that idea because it's hogwash. At low levels, one single crit can throw off an entire encounter. At high levels, players have enough options that encounter calculus becomes more trouble than it's worth. Rigorous, exacting mechanical balance, tuned to within an inch of its life and predictable down to the last die roll, is not only difficult but also unnecessary, especially when the system doesn't work as much due to DMs being as bad at combat as many of their players are. Not every DM is a tactical mastermind; the whole monster statblock shifts coming in M3 to emphasize a monster's primary actions is a measure to help DMs stop self-sabotaging themselves with more complex monsters.
Ultimately that's why people keep carping on CR. It's like the infinite *****ing about matchmaking algorithms in PvP video games - people want the system to do all the work of making matches/encounters for them and they refuse to tolerate "machine code can't account for the human factor in your game" as an answer.
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*snort*
If you remember TSR's D&D being balanced and consistent, you may be seeing the past through rose-tinted glasses. None of this is anything new.
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Here's how I'd approach it:
1) The encounter should be several times beyond Deadly, but without extreme single turn damage output
2) There should be a range of threats
3) The enemies should have equal action economy to the PCs, but their actions should generally be lower damage
4) Choose the Principle Monster. Since the party are high level, they should be up against something with a very high CR. In this case I will keep things simple and choose adult red dragon. However, since this is a high level party and hit points are crazy low in the MM, I want each PC to have to deal at least an additional 50 hit points damage to it so that the single-day fight goes a bit longer. The dragon therefore has its hp buffed to 456.
5) Choose Environmental Factors, or gimmicks. To keep things simple this fight takes place in a large cavern, where the dragon is free to fly, but without unlimited space to fly into. The cave ceiling is 100ft high and the cave is 200 feet radius.
6) Provide hindrance mobs. These should be pretty simple to run, and whilst not deadly for the PCs they will cause threats to the back line, cause issues with Concentration checks and so on. They shouldn't be too hard to clear. I'd stick in 4 Fire Elementals.
7) We now have a dragon that poses a serious threat, and some really annoying elementals that provide small but consistent damage turn after turn unless resources are spent on them.
The PCs will still win this encounter. The dragon's damage output just isn't high enough to stop them, while the breath weapon can give a scary threat on its second or third use. Until then, Evasion, Absorb Elements and 140hp will keep the heroes up and fighting. Eventually the fight will come down to slogging against the dragon's last 100hp while they've burned all their biggest cooldowns already.
Sorry, what? I legitimately have to ask if you've played Dungeons and Dragons before. You appear to have no interest in playing 5e and your statements about it are obviously incorrect(Only three races in the game have a chance of surviving a balor's death burst if they're members of one of 4 classes, assuming average damage). Then, when it comes to older editions, it doesn't sound like you've played that, either. THAC0 was balanced and made sense? Chainmail was a good system? Gold being worth XP was a great idea?
I have a weird sense of humor.
I also make maps.(That's a link)
As mentioned, we'd need to know the makeup of your party and their general builds as well as the kind of tactics they tend to use to make any good suggestions. For broad advice, start with looking at a few CR 13 monsters and think about how your party would fare against them. Also be aware of what ball park range this is for your party by the standard encounter difficulty; a single CR 13 monster is worth 10,000 XP so it's just below the hard threshold for 3 level 13 PCs and just below medium for 5 of them and right about at the deadly mark for only 2 while 6 should have a cakewalk.
For an example I'll talk about a storm giant.
A 13th character with D10 hit dice and a +3 Con mod is going to have an average of 111 HP. A Wizard or Sorcerer with a zero Con mod will average 41. D8 classes with a +1/+2 come in around 85-98. For this example I'll use a notional party of the standard archetypical party and some magical gear and vague estimates of their abilities, so a Fighter with 110 HP, AC 19, and three attacks per round averaging about 10 damage each, a Rogue with 85 HP, AC 18, and about 25 damage with sneak attack on a successful hit, a Cleric at 85 HP, AC 18, and about 8 points of weapon damage but let's also assume they have a spiritual weapon cast at 4th level to bump that up by 14 and they'll also be possibly using spells that can do more, and a Wizard with 45 HP, AC 15, and wildly spell damage ranging from a ~16 point firebolt to a 60 point finger of death. Various subclasses, feats, and other choices can increase that damage but we're looking at a very general average expected base damage of about 100-120 per round if they all hit with possible spikes up to 200 or more with crits, high level spells, and favorable rolls. This is information you should already know before planning any encounter because all encounters are going to involve your party as the one constant element.
A storm giant has 230 HP and AC 16; with +4 mods in their primary abilities they're going to be at a base +9 on their attack rolls giving them roughly a 2/3 chance to hit without factoring in things like advantage or if they somehow manage to immobilize the giant. They're going to have save DCs around 17-18 for their spells and other abilities, so the giant has slightly better than a 50% chance of passing Con, Wis, and CHA saves, about 75% for strength, but 25% or less for Dex and Int. So if that wizard is hucking fireballs this big boy is pretty much screwed. Considering that the giant only gets a +2 to initiative you can expect about half the party to go before he does and the party should be able to take him down in no more than four rounds if they're all attacking, quite possibly three or even two so you should only count on him getting in two or three attacks.
Definitely plan on opening with the giant's lightning strike ability to hit as many of them as possible with the 10' radius 12d8(~54) damage against a DC 17 Dex save for half. This could very possibly drop the Wizard and maybe others if they're coming into the fight low on health, but even if he does drop one they ought to be able to bring them back up with a healing spell from the Cleric or somebody with a potion (or your party might have other characters able to heal, like a Bard, Druid, Ranger, or Paladin) but that will mean they're doing less damage on their turn. In melee (with 10' reach) the giant is going to have about a 2/3 chance to hit anybody but the wizard (who's almost definitely screwed if they're in melee with the giant) for about 30 damage a pop and it swings twice per turn. Barring any special terrain that's probably all the giant's going to get beyond possibly a second set of melee swings and maybe a third if your party is rolling low. If they hit a 5-6 to recharge that lightning strike they should go for it immediately against anybody grouped together in range, but don't even bother counting the rogue who's at least as likely as not to save for no damage from evasion.
Looking at all this, the party should be reasonably expected to overcome this foe rather easily if they're fresh with full health and even a few high level spells from the casters and similar class/subclass based abilities for others (like a Battle Master's maneuvers, a monk's ki points, etc). At the most they might get a bit banged up and at worst they have one or maybe two go down from bad saves against the lightning strike or high rolls and maybe a crit from the giant's greatsword but they should still have resources to heal, such as Cleric spells to heal, any potions they might have, and they should also be able to recover most if not all damage in a short rest if they have all their hit dice available. This is most likely not going to be a scary encounter for the party by itself. But if they're coming in injured already, out of high level spells and other expendable resources then it very well could scare them. If you're planning to hit them with three or four more encounters of comparable threat in the same day as well as something else to drain resources (traps, stealth situations, terrain challenges, etc, particularly anything that makes the casters use a couple extra spells and might knock off some hit points from the tougher characters) before they can take a long rest, then this is an appropriate "medium" challenge. Furthermore, you could give the giant a starting point higher up a hillside full of rocks, underbrush, mud, or other "rough terrain" to give it an extra round or two to chuck rocks and maybe have that lightning strike refresh before the melee combatants can get to it, so it'll likely bang them up a little more.
If you are only planning to make this one encounter tougher in and of itself you're going to have to add to it. A second Giant cranks up the by-the-book threat level from low medium to the higher end of the hard range but not quite deadly. Storm giants are fairly intelligent so they should know to stand apart to avoid getting caught in the same fireball and with even average rolls they will likely do enough damage to put a serious dent in the party's total health pool. Still very survivable but now the players should definitely know they've been in a fight.
For a little less escalation you could add a lower CR enemy, like a pet Tyrannosaurus Rex. The T-Rex only has 136 HP and AC13 so it's roughly half as durable even before factoring in it's much lower saving throws, but it still attacks twice per round at +10 so it ought to consistently average at least 25 damage per round against this party while drawing away a couple rounds' worth of damage away from the harder hitting giant (especially if the giant sends it after the wizard in the back while it engages others in melee). By the book this encounter falls in the lower "hard" range, so it should still be survivable in most situations but it'll hurt more than the single giant.
Even if the party "breezes through" the tougher versions of this encounter they'll have to expend significant resources to do so, specifically high level spell slots, and probablystill lose a decent amount of hit points that convert to spell slots or hit dice to heal. If they run into this giant (especially with a friend or pet dinosaur) on their way to a time sensitive goal, or this happens in dangerous territory where it isn't wise to take a short rest afterwards, then whatever they're heading to just got that much more difficult without those spell slots and extra hit points.
And if they've already been in a couple comparable fights (or just one "deadly" encounter) and don't have any high level spells and they're all at half health coming into the encounter then even the single giant is going to be scary when a pair of hits from that greatsword can potentially down their tank in a single round and the lightning strike might take out any of them.
It's all about context. Which is why DMing in general requires thought and preparation.
No, WotC isn't going to "fix" CR. There are problems with CR, to be sure, but it isn't inherently broken. We keep reading about these kinds of breakdowns because WotC isn't doing their job at effectively communicating designer intent.
Challenge Ratings are, first and foremost, a mean derived from their respective offensive and defensive capabilities. But this mean comes with two caveats. First, it assumes "white room" conditions where their every attack lands, every enemy fails saving throws against their abilities, and any weaknesses are not exploited. Second, their relative offense is rooted in, as Jeremy Crawford stated in a recent interview, an "optimal path" for dealing damage.
Take the orc, for example. It's CR is 1/2, but only because the assumption is to use it's Aggressive trait to circle its target and throw a javelin each turn. As soon as it attacks with a [Tooltip Not Found], it jumps to CR 1. The mage doesn't have just one optimal path, but that's the nature of spellcasting giving it more options.
Monsters of the Multiverse is attempting to rectify this with many monsters being redesigned so they never really stray from an optimal path.
I'm sure they use their own system consistently. The issue is that that's not the system they put in the books.
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I think the primary problem is that the encounter building guidelines make people think that a fight that consumes 1/4 of your daily resources is Hard. If they just doubled all the encounter xp budgets (while keeping the daily budget the same) the names would be more appropriate. CR 19 against a CR 15 party would then be properly classified as an Easy encounter.
Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.
"All we're asking is for CR to be consistent, constant, and utterly perfect without any exceptions."
That's the root of the issue.
What's the CR adjustment for a Dullahan's ability to instantly slay any PC on a natural 20? How do you rigorously, mathemagically, and consistently account for the swing factor of a five percent chance to instagib any target regardless of HP, AC, defenses, or anything else?
What's the CR adjustment for a Bodytaker Plant's whole body-taking thing? How do you rigorously, mathemagically, and consistently account for the swing factor of the bodytaker's ability to turn regular people into pod people?
Hell, what's the CR adjustment for a basic-ass werewolf's immunity to mundane weapon damage? A factor which is either a completely nonissue for a party or a flat-out showstopper? There is no in between - either the party doesn't even realize the werewolf is immune to mundane weapon damage or the party cannot defeat the werewolf at all.
This idea that all creatures of CR 5, as a random example, provide exactly the same level of difficulty is hogwash. All CR 5 creatures are not created equal and they never will be. Demanding that a system provide perfect results, that any algorithm provides an absolutely even curve of difficulty without any exceptions is not only unrealistic, it's boring. I don't want combat to be that predictable, and I'm not sure why anyone else does. "CR 5" is a region, not a specific single point, and any DM will have to figure out the right spot in the region for their CR 5-ish party. It can't be any other way.
Yes yes, I get it. "Monsters in the MM should all follow the DMG formula for determining their CR!" Perhaps they should. Also perhaps that formula is meant specifically for homebrewing critters and serves as a guesstimate framework rather than a complete thing. One of my favorite homebrewed monsters is a Moss Hydra, with the following ability granted to it by its iridescent, prismatic scale coloration:
What's the CR adjustment for this ability? What is the perfectly consistent, absolutely rigorously, mathemagically correct Challenge Rating adjustment to give my Moss Hydra for its ability to bamboozle low-Wisdom enemies based on the number of heads it happens to have at any given time? Please, Shoak. Tell me what the algorithm says. I'd love to know.
Challenge Rating cannot and will never be as precise as math wonks want it to be, because all the game's most interesting abilities have little if anything to do with raw damage numbers. And raw damage numbers - offensively with damage output, defensively with AC and HP - are the only thing CR can account for.
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Zero, of course :). The DMG doesn't count status effects towards CR at all. Which is why a pixie is CR 1/4; despite a vast number of obnoxious abilities, its only ability to actually do damage is Phantasmal Force.