CR is basically meaningless at this point of 5e's lifecycle. Not only has a vast majority of the content in 5e just kind of outbalanced DMG/MM monsters in power creep for both player characters and creatures, it has always been applied very inconsistently, partly because certain things are valued very highly. For example, a creature with fire resistance would, at CR 6, be *supposed* to (according to the DMG advice for CR and homebrewing) have an effective HP of approximately 1.5x its standard HP... allegedly. Now, the paragraph before that talks about including that in consideration if the party can't bypass the resistance/immunity, and for some resistances/immunities that could be a problem. However, the official creatures seem to take this way too far, ending up with a pitiful pool of hitpoints sometimes just because they might be immune to poison - which, while common, is not going to be the majority of a party's damage output, even if one character loves to use poisons.
I think the biggest problem with CR is that weights and balances are difficult, and some features are extremely broken, especially in combination. For example, let's look at the Quickling. A Quickling is a CR 1 creature with 16 AC, which is quite a bit, but well within the recommendations for CR given that it has minimal HP (10 on average). In fact, a CR 1 creature according to the DMG guide on at a glance HP is somewhere in the mid to high 70s, which is absurdly high (as are most of the other HP calculations in that table) in my opinion and compared to most CR 1 creatures. However, the quickling probably overperforms other official first level monsters because of its abilities, namely evasion (as the monk/rogue feature) and blurred movement, which imposes disadvantage on attackers as long as the quickling's is not incapacitated and its speed is not 0. With an AC of 16 (well above the recommended 13, which gives it effectively about 30% more hit points compared to the average "Hit on a 10" balance of 5e) with disadvantage its effective HP is much higher, especially since a party of the appropriate level to face CR1's likely has limited options to reduce its movement or incapacitate it and its absurdly high (120ft) movement speed makes it a terror in the hands of a DM utilizing it to the fullest potential. It also, for no reason, has three attacks with an average of 8 damage (since its damage scales with dexterity) and an absolutely demolishing +8 to hit, which almost certainly hits any party member with RAW starting gear at least once per turn, possibly dealing three hits for 3d4+18 which is definitely more than I'm comfortable with for a CR 1 creature.
There are other problematic features that are usually a red alert that CR balance is going to be scuffed on a creature (pack tactics is a good example) but in general CR is next to meaningless in my opinion. I almost always have to adjust creatures, either because they're very powerful or because they're almost entirely worthless, and CR is not a good indicator for finding monsters during session prep, unfortunately. In order to fix this problem, WotC would have to have made balance a core consideration early in 5e's life cycle, and unfortunately the trend lately seems to be the opposite (such as the intentionally more powerful backgrounds in the M:tG books) which will continue to make creature and party balance more and more frustrating for DMs.
No, a creature with fire resistance alone would not get more effective hit points. The monster would need three or more resistances or immunities (that are decidedly a hinderance) for them to start having an impact on the monster's effective hit points. And yes, the quickling has an offensive CR of 5, and that's dumb. So dumb that it looks like someone added Multiattack by accident in VGtM and it went unnoticed even in MotM. But that's reason to correct the monster, not dismiss the entire CR system out of hand. I get that CR alone is not all the information the DM needs to make a fun encounter, but it's still an important indicator of how powerful the monster generally is.
No, I'm not talking about random encounters or procrastinating DMs. Sometimes the players do something so unexpected that the encounters the DM wrote are actually impossible and must be replaced with unrelated ones on the fly, otherwise the session would end immediately. In such a scenario, the DM needs to be able to count on the CR to help build the encounter.
The point I'm making is that if the writers make the CR too low, purposely or otherwise, it can easily throw the DM into a situation where they battle they build is more difficult than they want it to be. At what point is it the writers' fault rather than the DM's?
Then the session can end, or the DM can ask for a quick break. You're arguing hypotheticals. We could do that until Armageddon. It isn't productive.
The CR system isn't perfect because it assumes specific tactics. Jeremy Crawford has previously referred to this as an "optimal path" towards their intended CR. Some creatures have multiple paths to their intended CR and basically cannot be poorly run. But others can be easily played above or below their intended difficulty. Case in point, the orc is only CR 1/2 if it uses its Aggressive trait and throws a javelin every turn. As soon as it makes a single greataxe attack, it becomes CR 1. In other words, it's a low-level monster that can easily punch above its weight. Ditto for the goblin, if played intelligently and has proper terrain. That's part of why people say CR is broken, and they're not entirely wrong. The math in the DMG makes a lot of assumptions, not all of which the DM is guaranteed to follow or even perceive.
I'm not going to point fingers at the writing staff because, ultimately, they're not responsible for running encounters. That's the DM's responsibility, and they should know how to best utilize each monster or NPC they run. And it doesn't bother me too much if some enemies can punch above their weight because so can a lot of intelligent players.
P.S.
Let's look at the quickling. You need three in order to build a Medium encounter for a party of four 4th-level characters. But that's just the math. How do you run them?
By having them dart about and use their Multiattack against three potential targets. Yes, that means 2.25 attacks against everyone there. And with an above-average chance to hit, they're probably going to deal that damage. But they're also being the target of opportunity attacks, and you want to make sure everyone in the party can get one in. So, this probably calls for only two; which would make it an Easy encounter.
And that's assuming you use them for actually dealing damage and not as the tricksters they're written up to be.
I feel like a lot of these CR mishaps if the devs just showed their work for the CR calculation or otherwise explained their reasoning for the CR in the monster description.
No, a creature with fire resistance alone would not get more effective hit points. The monster would need three or more resistances or immunities (that are decidedly a hinderance) for them to start having an impact on the monster's effective hit points. And yes, the quickling has an offensive CR of 5, and that's dumb. So dumb that it looks like someone added Multiattack by accident in VGtM and it went unnoticed even in MotM. But that's reason to correct the monster, not dismiss the entire CR system out of hand. I get that CR alone is not all the information the DM needs to make a fun encounter, but it's still an important indicator of how powerful the monster generally is.
Fair, I saw someone once say that about fire resistance and regurgitated it without double checking, that's my bad. However, I think my point about the invalidity of CR (at least for official monsters) still stands because, while quicklings are a particularly egregious example, that same argument could be made about tons of monsters. Even just at CR 1, you have creatures like Animated Armor (18 AC and 33 HP with +4 to hit and average of 10 damage on two hits, so well below on damage but above on survivability) in the same category as a fire snake (22 HP, 14 AC, physical resistances from non-magical weapons, immunity to fire, vulnerability to cold, two attacks with an average of 12 damage and +3 to hit, and does 1d6 damage when hit in melee). As an experienced DM, I know that these two creatures are very different in threat to different parties. Even just down to what spells and cantrips the party's casters (if any) use, the fire snake can be an extremely trivial or somewhat dangerous encounter (especially if the party leans heavily into melee fighters without magical weapons), and the animated armor has the same problem. Now, you could argue that of course different creatures are easier and more difficult in different environments, and that's fair- a skilled DM who knows how to run monsters well can make mediocre creatures perform very well, while an inexperienced DM might just use them as dots on a map without any tactical consideration, so there will always be some difficulty fluctuations at play when using monsters.
However, that's a problem for inexperienced DMs (who tend to rely on CR more than veteran DMs), even before there are plenty of examples of creatures and features that newer DMs might not understand the effectiveness of, such as any creature with pack tactics. For example, let's look at CR 1/4 beasts *only* from the basic rules (so power creep isn't even an issue). Let's prepare an encounter in a forest and look at some of our options. Let's say that the party is attacked by a pack (of an appropriate size according to their CR, so the number stays the same) of beasts of the following types: Boar: 11 HP, 11 AC, +3 to hit, 4 damage per turn (7 and a DC 11 STR save vs. prone if charging) Giant Badger: 13 HP, 10 AC, +3 to hit, 10 damage per turn (two attacks) Giant Wolf Spider: 11 HP, 13 AC, +3 to hit, 4 damage plus 7 poison (half on a DC 11 CON save for 3) Panther: 13 HP, 12 AC, +4 to hit, 9 damage per turn (two attacks, plus a DC 12 STR save vs. prone if pouncing) Wolf: 11 HP, 13 AC, +4 to hit, 7 damage and a DC 11 STR save vs. prone On paper just looking at all of their basic stats, all of these are pretty close to each other, with the damage leaders being the badger/panther (depending on AC and hit rates) and the most threatening for control is the panther. Some pull ahead a bit- the wolf and wolf spider pull ahead in durability slightly, and the panther and wolf hit more often, but everything except the boar, the clear loser, is within a roughly equal range on damage and durability. Then, however, you factor in the wolf's pack tactics ability (which none of the other creatures have) and its effectiveness goes up dramatically. Advantage has a sliding value based on the number you need to roll for a success, but against lightly armored casters, for example, who might only have 15 AC if optimized, wolves would only need to roll at most an 11, which has an effective advantage modifier of +5 (not my math, and I don't really know if that's 100% accurate, but it checks out in my smooth brain) and have twice the chance to crit. Two or more wolves are dramatically more effective, if used optimally, than two or more of any other creatures of the same CR at the same level. I am fully confident that a party of 4 level 2 characters could handle six boars consistently, even though that's rated as a "hard" encounter. Perhaps, if they were newbies or built poorly, it might be a threat (hence hard difficulty), but most of my groups wouldn't blink twice at it and would be celebrating victory before you could say "CR is an effective balancing tool". If I threw six wolves against that same party (which, again, is the same CR) I am fairly confident that unless they used some real tactical insight to prevent pack tactics from coming into play, I would almost always kill a player or two, or maybe the whole party, just off of the increased rate of landing hits, the possibility of prone making maneuvering harder, and advantage being extremely effective against low level characters without upgraded gear (since even starting heavy armor sword and board builds only get to about 18 AC without upgrading to plate). Party composition and abilities does come into play here, but on balance I think it would be a much more lethal encounter.
Now, WotC *has* options for this. They could step wolves up to CR 1/2, or reduce their damage from 2d4 to 1d6, or any number of little tweaks to compensate for their possibility of having advantage, but that's not what they did; they just left them at CR 1/4 and assumed that DMs would read and understand what that means in practice, while in reality most DMs start in that level range, may end up using wolves as area appropriate minor enemies, and end up causing a TPK or killing a character because they don't know how to adapt on the fly, resulting in a bad experience. I've seen plenty of DMs screw up balance with pack tactics, even experienced DMs. I know I've done it a few times before. However, it's readily available on several creatures in low CR which inexperienced DMs are likely to use.
There are many more examples, but unfortunately I've rambled too long and don't have a lot of time to go through and look them all up again (since I've forgotten many off the top of my head) of creatures that are clearly outliers at specific CRs, but I think it's enough to state that CR is used so inconsistently in official sources that it no longer serves as a useful metric, between intentional bending and fudging, trading defensive CR for offensive CR and taking the average (which results in glass cannons and bags of hit points), poorly valued features that impact balance too much or too little, and simply not playing by the rules for some creatures.
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CR is basically meaningless at this point of 5e's lifecycle. Not only has a vast majority of the content in 5e just kind of outbalanced DMG/MM monsters in power creep for both player characters and creatures, it has always been applied very inconsistently, partly because certain things are valued very highly. For example, a creature with fire resistance would, at CR 6, be *supposed* to (according to the DMG advice for CR and homebrewing) have an effective HP of approximately 1.5x its standard HP... allegedly. Now, the paragraph before that talks about including that in consideration if the party can't bypass the resistance/immunity, and for some resistances/immunities that could be a problem. However, the official creatures seem to take this way too far, ending up with a pitiful pool of hitpoints sometimes just because they might be immune to poison - which, while common, is not going to be the majority of a party's damage output, even if one character loves to use poisons.
I think the biggest problem with CR is that weights and balances are difficult, and some features are extremely broken, especially in combination. For example, let's look at the Quickling. A Quickling is a CR 1 creature with 16 AC, which is quite a bit, but well within the recommendations for CR given that it has minimal HP (10 on average). In fact, a CR 1 creature according to the DMG guide on at a glance HP is somewhere in the mid to high 70s, which is absurdly high (as are most of the other HP calculations in that table) in my opinion and compared to most CR 1 creatures. However, the quickling probably overperforms other official first level monsters because of its abilities, namely evasion (as the monk/rogue feature) and blurred movement, which imposes disadvantage on attackers as long as the quickling's is not incapacitated and its speed is not 0. With an AC of 16 (well above the recommended 13, which gives it effectively about 30% more hit points compared to the average "Hit on a 10" balance of 5e) with disadvantage its effective HP is much higher, especially since a party of the appropriate level to face CR1's likely has limited options to reduce its movement or incapacitate it and its absurdly high (120ft) movement speed makes it a terror in the hands of a DM utilizing it to the fullest potential. It also, for no reason, has three attacks with an average of 8 damage (since its damage scales with dexterity) and an absolutely demolishing +8 to hit, which almost certainly hits any party member with RAW starting gear at least once per turn, possibly dealing three hits for 3d4+18 which is definitely more than I'm comfortable with for a CR 1 creature.
There are other problematic features that are usually a red alert that CR balance is going to be scuffed on a creature (pack tactics is a good example) but in general CR is next to meaningless in my opinion. I almost always have to adjust creatures, either because they're very powerful or because they're almost entirely worthless, and CR is not a good indicator for finding monsters during session prep, unfortunately. In order to fix this problem, WotC would have to have made balance a core consideration early in 5e's life cycle, and unfortunately the trend lately seems to be the opposite (such as the intentionally more powerful backgrounds in the M:tG books) which will continue to make creature and party balance more and more frustrating for DMs.
No, a creature with fire resistance alone would not get more effective hit points. The monster would need three or more resistances or immunities (that are decidedly a hinderance) for them to start having an impact on the monster's effective hit points. And yes, the quickling has an offensive CR of 5, and that's dumb. So dumb that it looks like someone added Multiattack by accident in VGtM and it went unnoticed even in MotM. But that's reason to correct the monster, not dismiss the entire CR system out of hand. I get that CR alone is not all the information the DM needs to make a fun encounter, but it's still an important indicator of how powerful the monster generally is.
Then the session can end, or the DM can ask for a quick break. You're arguing hypotheticals. We could do that until Armageddon. It isn't productive.
The CR system isn't perfect because it assumes specific tactics. Jeremy Crawford has previously referred to this as an "optimal path" towards their intended CR. Some creatures have multiple paths to their intended CR and basically cannot be poorly run. But others can be easily played above or below their intended difficulty. Case in point, the orc is only CR 1/2 if it uses its Aggressive trait and throws a javelin every turn. As soon as it makes a single greataxe attack, it becomes CR 1. In other words, it's a low-level monster that can easily punch above its weight. Ditto for the goblin, if played intelligently and has proper terrain. That's part of why people say CR is broken, and they're not entirely wrong. The math in the DMG makes a lot of assumptions, not all of which the DM is guaranteed to follow or even perceive.
I'm not going to point fingers at the writing staff because, ultimately, they're not responsible for running encounters. That's the DM's responsibility, and they should know how to best utilize each monster or NPC they run. And it doesn't bother me too much if some enemies can punch above their weight because so can a lot of intelligent players.
P.S.
Let's look at the quickling. You need three in order to build a Medium encounter for a party of four 4th-level characters. But that's just the math. How do you run them?
By having them dart about and use their Multiattack against three potential targets. Yes, that means 2.25 attacks against everyone there. And with an above-average chance to hit, they're probably going to deal that damage. But they're also being the target of opportunity attacks, and you want to make sure everyone in the party can get one in. So, this probably calls for only two; which would make it an Easy encounter.
And that's assuming you use them for actually dealing damage and not as the tricksters they're written up to be.
I feel like a lot of these CR mishaps if the devs just showed their work for the CR calculation or otherwise explained their reasoning for the CR in the monster description.
Fair, I saw someone once say that about fire resistance and regurgitated it without double checking, that's my bad. However, I think my point about the invalidity of CR (at least for official monsters) still stands because, while quicklings are a particularly egregious example, that same argument could be made about tons of monsters. Even just at CR 1, you have creatures like Animated Armor (18 AC and 33 HP with +4 to hit and average of 10 damage on two hits, so well below on damage but above on survivability) in the same category as a fire snake (22 HP, 14 AC, physical resistances from non-magical weapons, immunity to fire, vulnerability to cold, two attacks with an average of 12 damage and +3 to hit, and does 1d6 damage when hit in melee). As an experienced DM, I know that these two creatures are very different in threat to different parties. Even just down to what spells and cantrips the party's casters (if any) use, the fire snake can be an extremely trivial or somewhat dangerous encounter (especially if the party leans heavily into melee fighters without magical weapons), and the animated armor has the same problem. Now, you could argue that of course different creatures are easier and more difficult in different environments, and that's fair- a skilled DM who knows how to run monsters well can make mediocre creatures perform very well, while an inexperienced DM might just use them as dots on a map without any tactical consideration, so there will always be some difficulty fluctuations at play when using monsters.
However, that's a problem for inexperienced DMs (who tend to rely on CR more than veteran DMs), even before there are plenty of examples of creatures and features that newer DMs might not understand the effectiveness of, such as any creature with pack tactics. For example, let's look at CR 1/4 beasts *only* from the basic rules (so power creep isn't even an issue). Let's prepare an encounter in a forest and look at some of our options. Let's say that the party is attacked by a pack (of an appropriate size according to their CR, so the number stays the same) of beasts of the following types:
Boar: 11 HP, 11 AC, +3 to hit, 4 damage per turn (7 and a DC 11 STR save vs. prone if charging)
Giant Badger: 13 HP, 10 AC, +3 to hit, 10 damage per turn (two attacks)
Giant Wolf Spider: 11 HP, 13 AC, +3 to hit, 4 damage plus 7 poison (half on a DC 11 CON save for 3)
Panther: 13 HP, 12 AC, +4 to hit, 9 damage per turn (two attacks, plus a DC 12 STR save vs. prone if pouncing)
Wolf: 11 HP, 13 AC, +4 to hit, 7 damage and a DC 11 STR save vs. prone
On paper just looking at all of their basic stats, all of these are pretty close to each other, with the damage leaders being the badger/panther (depending on AC and hit rates) and the most threatening for control is the panther. Some pull ahead a bit- the wolf and wolf spider pull ahead in durability slightly, and the panther and wolf hit more often, but everything except the boar, the clear loser, is within a roughly equal range on damage and durability. Then, however, you factor in the wolf's pack tactics ability (which none of the other creatures have) and its effectiveness goes up dramatically. Advantage has a sliding value based on the number you need to roll for a success, but against lightly armored casters, for example, who might only have 15 AC if optimized, wolves would only need to roll at most an 11, which has an effective advantage modifier of +5 (not my math, and I don't really know if that's 100% accurate, but it checks out in my smooth brain) and have twice the chance to crit. Two or more wolves are dramatically more effective, if used optimally, than two or more of any other creatures of the same CR at the same level. I am fully confident that a party of 4 level 2 characters could handle six boars consistently, even though that's rated as a "hard" encounter. Perhaps, if they were newbies or built poorly, it might be a threat (hence hard difficulty), but most of my groups wouldn't blink twice at it and would be celebrating victory before you could say "CR is an effective balancing tool". If I threw six wolves against that same party (which, again, is the same CR) I am fairly confident that unless they used some real tactical insight to prevent pack tactics from coming into play, I would almost always kill a player or two, or maybe the whole party, just off of the increased rate of landing hits, the possibility of prone making maneuvering harder, and advantage being extremely effective against low level characters without upgraded gear (since even starting heavy armor sword and board builds only get to about 18 AC without upgrading to plate). Party composition and abilities does come into play here, but on balance I think it would be a much more lethal encounter.
Now, WotC *has* options for this. They could step wolves up to CR 1/2, or reduce their damage from 2d4 to 1d6, or any number of little tweaks to compensate for their possibility of having advantage, but that's not what they did; they just left them at CR 1/4 and assumed that DMs would read and understand what that means in practice, while in reality most DMs start in that level range, may end up using wolves as area appropriate minor enemies, and end up causing a TPK or killing a character because they don't know how to adapt on the fly, resulting in a bad experience. I've seen plenty of DMs screw up balance with pack tactics, even experienced DMs. I know I've done it a few times before. However, it's readily available on several creatures in low CR which inexperienced DMs are likely to use.
There are many more examples, but unfortunately I've rambled too long and don't have a lot of time to go through and look them all up again (since I've forgotten many off the top of my head) of creatures that are clearly outliers at specific CRs, but I think it's enough to state that CR is used so inconsistently in official sources that it no longer serves as a useful metric, between intentional bending and fudging, trading defensive CR for offensive CR and taking the average (which results in glass cannons and bags of hit points), poorly valued features that impact balance too much or too little, and simply not playing by the rules for some creatures.