Pathfinder how does cr work

From reddit. Furthermore, How does CR work Pathfinder? Follow edited Feb 25 '15 at Those variable names are probably going to be column references in most programs. Follow edited … From rpg. Fellow GMs: am I the only one who feels like Pathfinder's bestiary thinks that their monsters are more dangerous than they really are?

Especially … Press J to jump to the feed. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. Log In Sign Up. User account menu. Bestiary Monsters Suck? Posted by 12 months ago. Hey guys! So last time I had a question about something I came here, and y'all were really helpful with it.

So I have another question, does it state anywhere in any book of how much certain monsters cost, spesifically the body of monsters? Hopefully in spesification to CR? CR CR 30 — 3pp. CR 35 — 3pp. CR 37 — 3pp. CR 39 — 3pp. Listed below are all monsters grouped alphabetically by Challenge Rating CR. Creatures sometimes include a superscript abbreviation indication its source. Clicking the abbreviation … From d20pfsrd.

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Baked Apple Pecan Maple Pancakes. Trish's Tuna Casserole. Pork With Sugar Snap Peas. You might want to wait and see how this ends before you decide this article is worth leaving a tip. Trust me. It actually affects how the monsters are designed. At least, it should. Take hobgoblins for example. They have this ability that allows them to deal extra damage to a target if they have an ally nearby.

And their Challenge Rating is computed based on them being able to do that extra damage. And kobolds have that pack tactics thing that lets them also benefit from having allies in the fight. No allies, no benefit. Beyond that, though, look at dragons. Look at how complicated their stat blocks are. They have lots of options, they have multiple attacks, and they have ways to attack multiple targets at once. The best ones also have different mobility options to keep them from getting pinned down.

On top of that, imagine trying to run a fight with twenty dragons. Imagine tracking the three uses of legendary resistance times twenty and the three legendary actions between each turn times twenty and the use and recharge of twenty breath weapons. The point is that the number of creatures that appear in an encounter is important.

And that is undeniably a property of the creature. That is to say, I want to consider their level. What level should the party be when they encounter this creature? As their levels rise, PCs can take more damage and they can dish out more damage. And the monsters have to keep up. And this is something else that is built into the fabric of monster design. At least, in 5E it is. The same is true for the damage output. Either directly or indirectly via attack bonus or AC.

And this makes perfect sense. On average. In all caps. I mean, yes, they get excited when they unlock that second attack at 5th level and their cantrips do more damage and all that stuff.

They feel like the same amount of slog. Just like the imp did. They sweat the same amount no matter what. The second flaw is that PCs level up a lot faster than they used to. Back in the day. And so, every monster has a pretty narrow window of opportunity in which it can be used to build good combats.

At least it does if you do the encounter math. So, most GMs tend to use each monster only a couple of times and then that monster is forgotten. That is to say, all else being equal, a group of PCs can generally handle a broader CR range of encounters than is implied in the rules. Which brings me to something else.

So, the DMG tells you that, to build an encounter for a given party, the first thing you do is figure out the XP thresholds for an easy, medium, hard, and deadly encounter. For example, if I have four 4th level PCs, an easy encounter has XP worth of monsters in it, a medium encounter has 1, XP worth of monsters, a hard encounter has 1, XP worth of monsters, and a deadly encounter has 2, XP worth of monsters. They totally are. And second, what the hell are you even supposed to do with that anyway?

Do you use that to vary your difficulty through the course of the adventure to develop a difficulty curve?

I mean, I used to do that. It worked okay. Or are you supposed to use it to adjust the difficulty of the game to your party? If they struggle with mostly medium and hard encounters, do you scale the encounters down to mostly easy and medium?

All else being equal, every encounter is harder than the last because the party has to get through each successive encounter with fewer resources. Not today. You know me by now. I want a simple way to build an encounter without having to do a bunch of math and without a whole lot of precision. A looser, fuzzier, more practical way.

That one came down to the wire. I'm mostly judging this off the one group, though I've run a few other, low-level games that have been similar. My Jade Regent group is fairly balanced, but a little melee heavy. They're running a group that consists of barbarian, ranger, druid, oracle and white-haired witch. Okay they're a LOT melee heavy, but it's been working pretty well for them. So far they've had some close calls, but no character death in the AP.

What's your experience been? Challenge ratings are, and have always been, entirely inaccurate and misleading to the greatest degree. They measure only a few components of an enemy, most usually hit points, saves and attack bonuses and even those vary, depending on what you're looking at.

A monster in a CR might have far more or less hit die than another, making it unreliable in that regard too. In most cases, the difficulty of an encounter doesn't come from the hit die of the enemy, it comes from their abilities and tactics. A level 15 wizard will always be more difficult than a level 15 fighter, despite being the same CR. Then there's tactics, as Tucker's Kobolds so wonderfully proves.

CR takes into account neither of those things, making it a poor estimate of challenge at best. The problem is, of course, that abilities and tactics are extremely hard to quantify into a simple number like CR. Can't really say I have any sort of solution to offer to it that would work with the way 3. Sep 17 '15, pm. I often ramp up the CR to keep things interesting for my players too, but I also try to make things harder by making the enemies smarter.

Ambushes, targeted attacks on the weakest-looking members, sneaky spells, cooperative flanking and tactics, that sort of thing. I try to play each enemy as though it were my own character, fighting for its life with everything it has available. I agree though, that the CRs in the published adventures are frequently too low for a fully outfitted, competent group.

Published adventurers as often said by Paizo are made under the assumption that they are dealing with new players using the rules intended: 4 players, 15 point buy. So they usually don't make it too hard. If your group is competent, you can increase the difficulty of the encounters, usually adding one or two more minions is more than enough without becoming overwhelming. Just like, I killed some pc level 2 with an unlucky crit from a greataxe 3 times the damage, on enemies wielding greataxe, at level 2, they don't have enough hp to survive this.

In general, the enemy of the pcs and npcs for that matter is the action economy. Mostly why it is always more useful to use a lot of creatures than one single boss npc. As long as your pcs have to divide their actions, every fights should last a decent amount of time and offer some challenge. Mythic helps them, stand their ground against assault of PCs and use abilities which help them with the action of economy. Best part, you can even make your own ability or cherry pick abilities.

There's a massive caveat that CRs are only so useful - even when they're reasonably accurate, there's enough variance in monsters and PCs that the "rock-paper-scissors" effect can throw them off.

However, they're not entirely useless. First things first, understand how they're meant to work, and then just bear in mind where they deviate. Now, look at a level X classed NPC.

Their challenge rating is also X. In other words, four-on-one is "appropriate" not quite - NPCs get different gear and so on, but roughly speaking.