Hi folks,
I am putting together a pretty epic campaign that features a number of different large armies, and I am trying to balance them out. I am roughing it out with XP levels based on CR, but some of the armies include things like Cannons and Alchemical Dragons and other Siege Weapons/Vehicles. How much should they be worth, comparatively? Has anyone around here done this before?
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I'm not sure you'd want to put a CR to the armaments themselves. I'd base the CR on who is firing them and their character / class levels. If they are led by people with the siege gunner, siege engineer, or master siege engineer feats, the CR would likely increase from the base CR of the team operating the engine.
I hope that helps.
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I'm not sure you'd want to put a CR to the armaments themselves. I'd base the CR on who is firing them and their character / class levels. If they are led by people with the siege gunner, siege engineer, or master siege engineer feats, the CR would likely increase from the base CR of the team operating the engine.
I hope that helps.
Yep, vehicles and siege engines are equipment, so they don't have a CR, the creatures operating them do.
If you're kind of doing it classic Shining Force style and having them act as autonomous units, what you should probably do is look uo what feats / how many people are required to make the siege engine do what you want it to do in the timeframe you want it to happen, then take the CR of that group composition and use it as the vehicle CR.
Third opinion in agreement; use the CR of the creatures and not the equipment. The only case I would count a siege weapon towards the CR of an encounter is if it was outside of the combined wealth budget of the NPC's operating it, and that would explicitly be on an ad hoc basis.
You have to treat the vehicle/siege weapon and its crew as an encounter and then treat the troop as a single unit with a CR equal to the encounter's CR in a macromanaged war scenario. The best way to figure out the CR is to take the hit points and damage output of the troop as a unit and compare them to the big table under the monster creation guidelines.
Determining the CR of objects can be tough, but you could treat them like traps that occasionally go off and attack the players until the players disable them, destroying them, defeating the operating crew, or get too close for them effectively attack the players.
I checked the 3.5 book Heroes of Battles and it doesn't have a solution to your predicament. Sorry.
How does this sound:
Because each Siege Weapon and Vehicle has a GP cost, compare the cost of the unit to the PC wealth chart, figuring the CR of a character that level.
Would that be balanced? It doesn't need to be perfect or anything, I just want it not broken