All,
How do you use CR in a situation where you have a large flexible encounter area? I mean, in fact, I am still sort of confused about how you use CR even in a small/medium area such as a "dungeon" or "temple" too because, having one or two encounters of, say, CR 5 in the temple is different than a temple with 50 rooms and enemies or encounters possibly in each room.
But I am even more confused about how to use CR in a big open area where the party may sneak past and hit only a few encounters, or they may cause an alert and gets tons of response, and there may also be some side things that are more difficult. I want the fights, if they try to get through without setting alarms, to not be total push-overs, but I also want either result to be fun. If an alarm is set and they have to fight their way past or through hordes of baddies, that should be fun. Of course, there should be a chance they fail in the latter situation. Also, they could retreat.
But I guess I am struggling a bit with how to balance, say, a large defended open area underground or in a valley where there are a lot of dynamic things that could happen.
Any tips?
Thanks!
The CR stays the same. You get XP for overcoming encounters. You don't have to kill something to overcome it. If they can't complete the dungeon without being detected I still give them the XP.
CR basically equals potential difficulty. The skill of your players and the party makeup will determine actual difficulty.
If you want to improve the chances of certain fights I would say you should improve the enemy's perception, change the temple layout, and or change the enemy completely. If the party is built for stealth they might just be able to sneak by a lot of bad guys though.
So if there are 50 encounters in an area and the party avoids 45 of them but completes the objective (gets past the area to the region beyond for example) then you reward them for 50 defeats of CR 5? Or just 5?
Or do you use that thing in the mechanic of the CR (which I havent looked closely at) where you scale up the CR based on total hit dice or levels or numbers?
Tho I allowed myself to be sidetracked, really. We dont actually give out XP based on encounter anyway. We just level everyone up at story-appropriate or time-appropriate points.
But other than XP, the CR system also lets you shape/control difficulty. And its the difficulty that I want to keep from spiraling out of control. I have a bad habit of stretching my players to the limit sometimes, because I have a tendency to design an area with what makes sense in the area, rather than whether or not the party could handle it.
But I am trying to not keep them totally gasping for survival at all times. It hasnt been too much yet, but I teeter on the brink.
I give them the reward for all of them. Otherwise players metagame more and build for combat instead of other things, just to get XP. Personally I don't see why a stealth based group should get less XP than the group that is built to kill things. All they did was choose a different path.
As a GM I look at what makes sense. Then I look at the party and adjust up or down for difficulty.
Right, but I got distracted with the XP aspect, since we dont use it.
I am hoping to use CR to help me balance difficulty, but I am having a hard time knowing whether to build, for a level 5 party, around CR 3 stuff, or CR 5 stuff, etc, especially for big areas that, depending on how things go, could end up being minimal interaction or could be a free for all.
Can CR be used in this way? Or do I just need experience and feel for this?
I use CR instead of XP also now.
I don't worry about the size of the area. Just worry about how many enemies are in one room. Most GM's don't expect the party to clear the temple in one run.
If a fight is supposed to be easy the CR should be APL or APL-1.
Actually APL is supposed to be an average fight.
In the tougher fights I use APL+2 at the lower levels.
Depending on how good the party is I might go up to APL+3 or 4 for a boss fight.
At levels 16+ I might go to APL+5
Those are general guidelines though. Another thing is that the monster itself, not just the monster's CR can be a factor. As an example if a monster has an area of affect sleep spell, and the entire party has low will saves it might cause a TPK, even though for a mixed party it would not be as much of an issue.
Another factor is player skill and party makeup. If your players have a high degree of system mastery they may be able to take on APL+2 encounters without much of an issue. Houserules also come into play.
You will need experience and feel for it to answer your question, but the CR does.
OK, thanks for the info.
As for our party and game, I would say our group is generally low skill in terms of system mastery. Me and the other GM (shared game, long story) have medium system mastery.
We usually have entirely non-optimal party makeup and builds, simply because people kinda just take what they like. We do a 25 point buy for this reason, because sometimes the players do stuff like "you know what, I just want a level of Bard" and nobody has any long term build they shoot for other than me (when I play) and the other GM (when he plays).
Our current characters consist of:
A) Wizard 1 / Inquisitor 4 (Elf)
B) Bard 1 / Rogue 4 (Halfling)
C) EITHER Barbarian 5 (Dwarf) OR ELSE Sorcerer 5 (Goblin)
D) INFREQUENT Ranger 5 (Human)
So basically, its either Inquisitor, Rogue and Barbarian when I run the game, or when the other GM is running, its Inquisitor, Rogue and Sorcerer. We have a friend who can only make it about 25% of the time and when he shows, we have a Ranger also.
Also, in our game, we dont have magic shops or easy magic item availability. You either loot it, craft it, commission it, or else once a week in any community there will be new items from the random program someone made online that generates magic items based on a population size. Cure Light potions are about the only thing guaranteed to be available in communities otherwise. We like it that way.
So you can see why we run a 25 point buy game. Adventure paths can be rough for us since we mostly have 3 players. But we also mostly just do home-brew stuff, and the GMs make sure to put some items that the party needs into the hands of the bad guys.
Anyway, just rambling. :) Thanks for the advice!
So there are only 3 PC's?
You should account for that also.
I would drop the normal CR you would use by 1.
25 point buy does not make up for action economy. It just makes it less painful.
Dotting for when I have more time.
Yeah just 3 typically, with an occasional 4th.
If you have large amounts of rooms and don't want to create individual encounters for each simply use the Squad Method. Make groups of varying CRs and have them come in as needed/wanted.
I use CR as the guide and use the XP amounts to build the encounter and then use a simple XP system from a Blog I read.