Dungeons and Dragons Challenge Ratings
Nov. 19th, 2007 01:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackIn DnD, monsters are assigned a challenge rating, and approximate measure of how hard they are for an average party of adventurers to defeat.
The challenge ratings are obviously ordered[1], but the question remains, what scale? There are two obvious candidates.
(a) Linear. A CR10 monster is as difficult to defeat as two CR5 monsters[2]. This has the obvious advantage of being easy to add.
(b) Logarithmic. A CR10 monster is as difficult to defeat as two CR9 monsters. (In actual fact, there's an arbitrary scaling factor, it supposedly equals two CR8 monsters.) This has the advantage that it matches character progression by level, and notionally monster progression by hit dice (related to character level). This means a CR10 monster is appropriate for Level 10 adventurer characters, and might well have 10 hit dice, or at least hit dice proportional to 10.
Go on, guess which method they used. I'll give you a clue, it seems the worst possible.
That's right, they used both. (a) for CR<=1 and (b) for CR>=1. (In actual fact, this makes some sense -- you often would use CR<1 monsters only with each other. But it still seems very arbitrary. Not that I care, but it amused me :))
Footnotes
[1] Is it obvious? Well, in actual fact, you might easily have rock-paper-scissors monsters, but because they're defined in terms of the average party, the challenge ratings *are* transitive. Also anti-symmetric.
Is it a well-order? Well, the monsters listed anywhere, there are only finitely many of them, so yes. And if you consider typical attributes of monsters, eg. health, strength, damage output, these are defined by positive integers, and lower is weaker, so of any such set, there'll always be a weakest.
However, it is conceivable to have a set of unboundedly weak monsters. Let there be a monster, a proto-nth-orc[3]. This has, on encountering adventurers, a 1/n chance of morphing into an orc, and an (n-1)/n chance of disintegrating entirely. This obviously has a challenge rating of approximately 1/n that of an orc -- so the set of all such meta-nth-orcs is ordered, but has no least member.
[2] The "two together" is an approximation, it's incredibly situational, but it's the standard to start working from.
[3] I so want to throw this at some players now :)
The challenge ratings are obviously ordered[1], but the question remains, what scale? There are two obvious candidates.
(a) Linear. A CR10 monster is as difficult to defeat as two CR5 monsters[2]. This has the obvious advantage of being easy to add.
(b) Logarithmic. A CR10 monster is as difficult to defeat as two CR9 monsters. (In actual fact, there's an arbitrary scaling factor, it supposedly equals two CR8 monsters.) This has the advantage that it matches character progression by level, and notionally monster progression by hit dice (related to character level). This means a CR10 monster is appropriate for Level 10 adventurer characters, and might well have 10 hit dice, or at least hit dice proportional to 10.
Go on, guess which method they used. I'll give you a clue, it seems the worst possible.
That's right, they used both. (a) for CR<=1 and (b) for CR>=1. (In actual fact, this makes some sense -- you often would use CR<1 monsters only with each other. But it still seems very arbitrary. Not that I care, but it amused me :))
Footnotes
[1] Is it obvious? Well, in actual fact, you might easily have rock-paper-scissors monsters, but because they're defined in terms of the average party, the challenge ratings *are* transitive. Also anti-symmetric.
Is it a well-order? Well, the monsters listed anywhere, there are only finitely many of them, so yes. And if you consider typical attributes of monsters, eg. health, strength, damage output, these are defined by positive integers, and lower is weaker, so of any such set, there'll always be a weakest.
However, it is conceivable to have a set of unboundedly weak monsters. Let there be a monster, a proto-nth-orc[3]. This has, on encountering adventurers, a 1/n chance of morphing into an orc, and an (n-1)/n chance of disintegrating entirely. This obviously has a challenge rating of approximately 1/n that of an orc -- so the set of all such meta-nth-orcs is ordered, but has no least member.
[2] The "two together" is an approximation, it's incredibly situational, but it's the standard to start working from.
[3] I so want to throw this at some players now :)
no subject
Date: 2007-11-19 11:45 pm (UTC)Ah, this severely puzzled me, and then realised what I'd said. I meant, in terms of resources expended in an encounter. I haven't actually played much dnd at all, just enough to get an idea of the rules.
I think I can think of three different metrics: reliance on uses per day; dependency on acquiring new equipment; and dependency on having equipment.
For the first, I would have put the fighter approximately least, I think almost everything he does he can do all day long, except have hitpoints? And the wizard probably most, having a limited number of most powerful spells.
For the third, I'd guess the monk least -- afaik a monk wins the "dropped naked into a dungeon" contest hands down :) And the wizard again most -- assume we waive spell components, requirements, even preparation, a wizard still has to have a spellbook or be stuck, everyone else can at least hit something.
For the second, does that correspond with your list? Or have a just got a very skewed view? I've not played in a high-level campaign.