something i noticed with Bigby, in fifth edition, a CR2 creature is roughly equivelant to a 5th-level player character.
generally when im making something with stats i don’t assign a challenge rating because i dont really trust challenge ratings to indicate anything, but i’ve had this rare glimpse where im like, oh CR2 isnt like level 3, it’s like level 5, which is maybe going to play into my own mythology about how things are from now on
something i’d like to believe is that the character levels indicate rank in some military structure (so that level 3 characters are suitable to lead level 2 characters and level 1 characters are suitable to lead level 0 characters and so on), call that the rule of governance or whatever, i dont neccessarily simulate the tree of guys that your guy is standing on, but they’re there in potentia
i think in the past ive been too excited for doing all the population math to no end, like having the dice tell you there’s 3 cobblers in a town im not totally sure what adventure hook that is (its a classic three cobblers situation)
but supposing the rule of governance is true and meaningful and also that the adventure tops out at like level 8 (as adventures im familiar with tend to do)
then a CR2 creature is like, the king of most adventure sites (the king is like level 5, hes the guy who leads the guy who leads the guy who leads the guy who leads the guy who leads the guy)
im not sure what that does for my simulation, i mostly don’t imagine a CR2 creature as strong enough personage for that kinda leadership, in my other reckoning a CR2 guy is sort of a mid level mook, leader of a warband (12 guys or something)
so i think either thing could be true and it bothers me because it interferes with my delusion about a unified theory of the game
lol yeah 5e is just a mess like that. it's essentially a theme park ride-- monsters have inflated hit point totals and lowered attack abilities relative to PCs, so you can create the illusion of long, sustained combats where the PCs deal BIG NUMBERS of damage but are never really in any danger. that's the reason the game doesn't recommend actually giving PC class levels to enemies, it fucks with the default assumption of the game that the PCs and NPCs are working with entirely different sets of math.
ReplyDeletea CR2 enemy supposedly poses a "fair challenge" to a party of lvl2 PCs, that's how those numbers work. which, given the Baudrillardian hyperreality disneyland ontology of 5e, means that there should be some illusion of a struggle and some expenditure of resources but then the PCs are guaranteed to overcome it. that's what that's designed to mean.
I'm curious about what you prefer, like what's a good bestiary, whats a good numbers for monsters versus pcs, for what kind of play experience?
ReplyDeletethe truth is i rarely run the game so i just only have a feeling about how powerful something is or should be, and i'm often proven wrong in practice
i have various things i can refer to, i have the ad&d monster manual (and monster manual 2 and fiend folio even) as books, but i have trouble using these as game references, often the information you need is deep in a column of text, or you have to cross reference or roll to determine some number that ends up being wildly different than you would assume (like for treasure types or something)
and then i have various osr bestiaries, but i dont think these are terribly consistent and i think the idea is you adjust it yourself, but i don't really have a baseline, it's all by ear
for 5e i refer to http://www.5e.tools/
which is a pretty comprehensive reference and (i just figured out) has a feature where you can adjust the challenge ratings for its monster statblocks and it does some crunching behind the scenes and generates new stats for that. Which is cool even if I don't know how reliable.
When I say a 5e's CR2 is like a 5th level guy i mean, probably has multiattack and if it has spells probably has spells like a 5th level guy, but its a bit wild, like 5e also has CR 1/2 monsters that have access to third level spells. I also think a CR2 monster has hit points like a 5th level guy but this can be off by like, 2x or more.
5th does have a system for putting simplified class levels on monsters - its sidekick system - but these are more or less intended as allies rather than monsters, and it doesn't tell you how that affects the CR i don't think.
i also wrote my own osr bestiary a couple years back:
ReplyDeletehttps://evilbaboons.blogspot.com/2014/07/chimericon-first-edition.html
but that one is more or less agnostic about challenge
re: the rule of governance
ReplyDeletewhen i read over this post im like "shit i should have called it the chain of command shit"
but i guess the chain of command should be an item, a spiked chain that you hit guys with