Troops and studied spell metamagic?

[Mottzilla]

So, recently I hit this in a campaign I cast studied meta magic fireball vs a troop to overcome its fire resistance. GM said based off of troop's CR I say based CR off of base creatures that make up the troop. It is not like it is a different creature from the base. (I know gm word is law but I'm trying to get a consensus or see what others have said)

Also for knowledge to identify am I going off base creature or the troop?

[Claxon]

You should base it off the troops CR, effectively the troop is a single creature. It just has special rules to make it pretend to be a group of creatures rather than an individual creatures.

For identification purposes, I do agree that it leads to a weird thing where a troop of soldiers is technically harder to identify than a single one.

But that's also true for identifying a juvenile red dragon vs an adult red dragon.

Honestly, the identification rules are just kind of weird and bad.

The best way to handle it would have honestly been to assign an identification DC to each creature, but it's just extra work no one wants to do.

[ShadowcatX]

You'd do it off the troop's CR like the DM said.