CR of encounters

[msouthward]

In your games, how do you guys determine what the overall challenge rating an encounter is. I don't mean how challenging the encounter will necessarily be for your adventuring party when you're building the encounter. Just when you finish building your encounter and you start writing it up in FG do you bother with filling out the CR box in the encounter window, or do you just add up the CR of all the monsters?

michael

[Griogre]

I don't bother filling in the CR in the encounter's popup - it doesn't do anything for me since I build the encounters based on the XP Threshold by Character Level. The actual field is just for information. Its the XP one you need to fill out if you are going to use the party sheet to distribute XP.

[Zeus]

I've recently pushed a tweak for the 5E Encounter sheet which adds 'refresh CR/XP' functionality. Essentially, its intended to auto total the encounter NPC XP and then look up the CR value based upon the table on page 9 of the MM. Its currently in moon's queue so will hopefully be released under test soon.

[Griogre]

Are you assuming a standard sized party or are you looking at the number of character's on the party sheet for the CR calculation?

[Zeus]

Are you assuming a standard sized party or are you looking at the number of character's on the party sheet for the CR calculation?

No, its a simple total of the encounters npc xp value and then a lookup of the CR value from the table on page 9 of the MM. Assuming I were to use the PartySheet to reference the party size, what were you envisaging, a simple warning if the CR exceeds the party level threshold? Or more?

[grapper]

Like Griogre, I assumed you were talking about the combat encounter difficulty (pages 82-83 of the DMG). The table on page 9 of the monster manual is the xp for a monster of a given CR, but I suppose you could use it as a gauge for overall difficulty. Still, it wouldn't account for the adjustment factor for relative group sizes.

[Baron28]

I've been using an encounter builder that weighs the number of characters and each character's level in the party with the creatures and each creature type's xp to come up with the XP to award, a CR and overall encounter difficulty (easy, med, hard, deadly). If its a standard encounter, I use the CR of each particular creature type to determine which individual treasure table (found in the DMG) a party member rolls the dice. If its a "boss" encounter in their lair, in addition to the individual treasure they find on the creatures I also use the CR of the lead boss to determine which treasure hoard table (found in the DMG) a party member rolls the dice (if they find where the booty is stashed!). The party likes the randomness of what is collected plus it gets me off the hook if the party rolls poorly on the tables. Case in point, my group of 7-5th level characters yesterday ran into 2 gelatinous cubes! After the cubes were destroyed, I had them roll on the treasure horde tables. The rolls were such that 1 cube was full of goodies and the other cube was empty!

[msouthward]

I havnt been filling in the CR box on the encounter window, the XP box on the right is the important one. I was just asking because my OCD told me too and it sparked my curiosity. If you have two CR 1 monsters would you consider the encounter itself to be CR 1? or would you add the CR of all the monsters together and divide by pi?

[Trenloe]

If you have two CR 1 monsters would you consider the encounter itself to be CR 1? or would you add the CR of all the monsters together and divide by pi?
Have a look at the table on page 9 of the MM (or Reference Manual -> Statistics in the FG MM module) - in this table CR is calculated based off the total XP of all of the nasties in the encounter. It's not a linear progression - i.e. 2 x 1 CR don't equal a 2 CR encounter (400xp vs 450 in this example) and the difference gets larger for higher CR encounters.

[Zeus]

Like Griogre, I assumed you were talking about the combat encounter difficulty (pages 82-83 of the DMG). The table on page 9 of the monster manual is the xp for a monster of a given CR, but I suppose you could use it as a gauge for overall difficulty. Still, it wouldn't account for the adjustment factor for relative group sizes.

Agreed. The forthcoming mods for the Encounter CR/XP were not intended to support full blown encounter builder functionality at this stage which would need to factor thresholds and the like. Having said that we will look at possibly updating the functionality even further once we are ready to release the DMG.