But the point isn’t to “mess” with the players, it’s to give them as enjoyable an experience as possible. And part of that experience is making the encounters an appropriate challenge for the party. Ideally you do this before the game starts, by tuning the power level of the bad guys in relation to the power level of the party. If the group is all around tenth level, you don’t make the climactic fight against a bunch of first level goblins. But its not always easy to get that balance correct. Sometimes you miscalculate and that monster that was supposed to be an epic end boss is getting curb stomped. Or it goes in the other direction, and the encounter that was just meant to be an early warm up starts heading to TPK territory. I don’t see a significant difference between tweaking an enemies toughness a week before the session, and tweaking it on the fly when you realize that the encounter’s going to ruin the over all flow of the campaign, unless you approach the game as a contest between the GM and the players, rather than a collaboration. A bad GM cheats because he wants to win versus his players. A good GM cheats because he wants his players to have as much fun as possible.
I can’t believe I’m actually getting pushback on “A good GM should manage his players’ expectations.”
No, that’s not what you’re getting pushback on. You’re getting pushback on the idea that it’s SOLELY the GMs responsibility. GMs put up with a ton of crap, and are usually the person who has to schedule the game, heckle everyone so they remember when the game is and hopefully show up, create content for the game, adjudicate all their players’ crazy hac… ideas(see: This entire thread), and are the ones who inevitably get looked to and/or blamed when there’s a problem player at the table. While most players seem to think that if they show up, and maybe remember their character sheet, that’s all that’s asked of them. Nuts to that.
A good player’s job (among other things, honestly) is to communicate his expectations to the GM. That character that you had “already generated the goddamn character and fully filled out the character sheet”? He didn’t spring fully formed from your brain like some sort of elven Athena or something. You -could- have circled back with your GM and said “I’m thinking about <race>,<class> from <background> who does <thing>. How does that sound?” If he says “sounds great!” and THEN springs stuff on you that makes your character not work, THEN it’s all his fault. Up until that point, you and he BOTH had assumptions and BOTH of you dropped the ball by not communicating them to the other person.
That said, WTF kind of decent GM lets players generate characters on their own? That’s like ASKING your players to generate an Orc Priest of Dwarf Hating, a Dwarvish Warrior whose parents were killed by Orcs, an evil drow assassin, a high elf paladin, and a F-ing Kender who only exists to piss off everyone else. Chargen. It should be a TEAM undertaking.
I’d say, rather, that a lot of early developers sucked at math. Or rather, often didn’t really think about math at all. But I’m not sure how ECL factors in. But then, I had to look it up on Wikipedia, figure out that you PROBABLY weren’t talking about Enhanced Chemoluminescence, then google “Effective Character level” read THAT wiki entry, and then conclude that it doesn’t sound like it has a lot to do with probability, so I might not be the best judge there. 
Anyway, there are lots of games that ARE good at probability, so once again, I’m going to go back to “Maybe use a game system that doesn’t suck” as my party line for people who aren’t happy with their game system. Controversial, I know.
We are talking about D&D here, so yeah, that ECL. Why it pops to mind…well here’s an example:
You have a level 10 fighter fighting a CR 10 ogre with figher levels.
Q) Which one do you expect to win?
A) It’s roughly 50/50. That’s what CR is designed for.
You have two CR10 ogres with fighter levels fighting against each other.
Q) Which one do you bet on winning?
A) The one that isn’t the player character…a CR10 ogre fighter will have 7 levels of fighter (base CR3 + 7 levels,) a CR10 PC ogre fighter will have 4 (4 monster hd + ECL 2 + 4 levels.)
But that’s “balanced.” According to the devs.
And that’s why I prefer the “fistful-o-dice” games: because they actually use a probability curve that isn’t a freaking straight line.
Clearly, I have no idea how this works, because you’re right, it makes no sense. But it still doesn’t really seem like “probability”, per se.
Right there with you. Especially when you’re talking about “The difference between the best possible roll and the worst possible roll is 19 points, but the difference between the best possible character and the worst possible character is like… 8 points, which means the die roll is about 2.5x more important than your character. And distributed on a flat probability curve.”
Granted, that was poorly stated as a motivation, but that is how it can be viewed. Especially if the players have made their opinions on the matter clear.
A good GM will listen to his players if they say ‘we don’t want you to cheat at all,’ even if that means that sometimes an encounter will turn out anticlimactic, and other times it will turn out overtuned to the point where they are required to retreat, or perhaps even die to it. Because that is exactly what some players want. It’s a lot better for the DM to either give them what they want, or tell them that he won’t enjoy playing that way himself.
And it’s not about a contest between the DM and the PC’s, there’s a lot of possible reasons for it, but none of them are all that significant since all that matters is that DM and players listen to each other and treat each other honestly, respecting each other’s wishes.
That’s not how Challenge Rating works. PCs don’t have challenge ratings at all - it’s purely a GM stat. A 10 CR creature is meant to be a roughly even match for a party of four 10th level characters, not a single 10th level character. In both your examples, the PC is about to get his ass kicked by a significantly stronger opponent.
I’m curious about those reasons, because this is really an alien approach to role playing to me. Like I said earlier, I don’t see the difference between balancing an encounter a week before the game session, and balancing it on the fly during the game session.
How do you feel about GMs whose style is largely improvisational?
No, a party of 4 characters of level x are supposed to be able to deal with 4-5 encounters of CR x per day. So roughly 20-25% of their resources. i.e. a single character. Thus 50/50 chance of winning.
i.e. a human fighter has an ECL of 0, a single racial hd (which gets dropped) and a character class (assuming it’s not one of the npc-only classes (commoner, expert, warrior, etc.) therefore has a CR equal to his character level.
Your “i.e.” is wrong, given the importance of action economy. A creature with CR equal to average party level should be defeatable by 4 PC using 4 actions per round, using about 25% of their daily resources. It should mop the floor with a lone PC.
Imagine a totally simplified scenario: a party of 4 PCs who deal 1 point of damage each round, have 20 hit points each, and are facing an enemy that deals 5 hit points of damage per round and has 16 hit points. Each round the enemy attacks a random PC.
You’d expect the combat to go for 4 rounds: each round the PCs deal 4 points of damage total and take 5 points of damage total. By the end of the combat, the PCs have taken about 20 points of damage, or 25% of their total resources. The monster dies in the fourth round.
Now pair that same monster against a single PC. You’d still expect the combat to go four rounds, except that at the end of the combat, the monster has lost 25% of its resources (1 hp per round for 4 hp total), and at the end of the four rounds, the PC is down. The situation is completely reversed; it’s nowhere near an even fight.
Of course, everything complicates it: healing magic, magic items, special daily powers, etc. But at the system’s heart, an equal-CR creature presents a 25% of daily resources challenge to a party of four, and destroys an individual PC.
FFS, why do people love to bitch when I’m right?
pg. 37 3.5 DMG:
Challenge Ratings for NPCs
“An NPC with a PC class has a Challenge Rating equal to the NPC’s level. Thus, an 8th level sorcerer is an 8th-level encounter.”
or the bottom table on pg. 38
Dwarf fighter - Class Level 1 - CR 1 / Class Level 2 - CR 2 / Class Level 10 - CR 10
Mathematically, you’re right - that falls under the “game devs suck at math” complaint I made.
Tell me when that “bitching” when you’re right happens, and I’ll try to answer your question :).
The problem here is that leveled characters don’t match CRs well at all. That was a fudge that doesn’t work. You try designing a CR 8 melee fighter that can stand effectively vs. a Dire Tiger, or a spellcaster that can stand against an Ogre Mage, or any single PC that can stand against a Dark Naga (who is a 7th-level sorcerer, minus the familiar, plus a poison sting, a d8 hit die, continuous detect thoughts, 10’ reach, and a few others goodies).
Level 8 characters don’t stand up effectively to CR 8 monsters one on one. The glitch you’ve found is considering level 8 characters as CR 8 monsters.
Sigh. What fudge? That’s the official rules.
I friggin quoted, part of the DMG. Shitty math is on their hands.
Does it work? Not well, no.
Does the 3.5 introduction of ECL help? God, no, it makes it significantly worse. Again, official.
CR isn’t an exact formula. It can’t be, because so many of the variables are non-numeric. It’s a guideline, not an mathematical function, and probably arrived at more through playtesting than number crunching. I’ve found it to be generally pretty effective, at least at low-to-mid levels.
ECL was a pain in the ass, but it was never (IIRC) a part of the core rules. It was a supplemental addition to allow Munchkins to do things like play drow and ogres and other monster races. Fundamentally, the game wasn’t designed to allow that, and ECL was a pretty ugly hack to fit them in, but I don’t think there was a prettier fix out there, short of throwing the whole system out and starting from scratch.
Except, you know, when it is. As I quoted. It may be unbalanced, it may be stupid, but it is most certainly exact. :rolleyes:
You misunderstand what I’m saying. The fudge I’m talking about is Monte Cook’s fudge, not yours. I’m depressingly familiar with the text you’re quoting and can go into much greater detail about the relationships between ECL and CR and all that other nonsense than you’d ever want to hear; this discussion is not new to me. I was simply correcting your misapprehension that a normal equal-CR encounter would be a fair fight for a PC.
Once more, in case it’s not clear, Mr. Cook et al were WRONG to treat leveled NPCs as CR monsters equal to their level.
So if I’ve got the rules right, why repeatedly tell me I’m wrong?
They’re shit rules - once again, the devs suck at math…but they *are *the rules.
What exactly do you think I’m telling you you’re wrong about? I think you’re being terribly defensive here; if you reread what I’ve said, you’ll see you’re defending yourself against entirely the wrong charge, a charge I’m not making, and ignoring the actual thing I’m saying.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by exact in this context. The rule you quoted isn’t exact by any means. It’s a rough approximation. A first level wizard isn’t exactly as powerful as a first level fighter, who isn’t exactly as powerful as three orcs. It can’t be exact, because most of the values involved are inherently fuzzy, and often context specific. What’s the numerical value of darkvision? Is it worth less if the encounter takes place in broad light? The CR rules don’t attempt to abstract things to that level. By design, it’s very much a “back of the envelope” kind of calculation.
I wouldn’t call it stupid, either. It’s generally a pretty effective way to roughly approximate difficulty levels. And I don’t think the concept of balance really applies here at all. Balance, in an RPG, only really matters when comparing PCs to PCs. Challenge rating is meant to compare the PCs to the GM, and there isn’t meant to be a balance between the GM and the players, because the GM and the players aren’t meant to be in competition.
Well, first I figure he took the Leadership feat, to get a spellcaster cohort…