One of the longest-running complaints about D&D is that "CR is broken." It's clear that certain monsters that might share the same CR are not actually equal challenges to a party. I do think this issue has gotten less acute with the 2024 updates to the game, both with encounter-building guidance that hands the DM a much bigger budget as well as monsters that are designed to be more serious threats (largely by increasing the damage they put out, but also by making them more intuitive to run optimally).
Still, I think there's an interesting question DMs should be asking themselves when building an encounter: is this moderate-CR monster meant to be a singular, boss-level threat to low-level parties, or is it meant to be a rank-and-file minion for some significant boss later on?
My go-to example is the Wraith. Ostensibly, a Wraith (which is CR 5) could make for a reasonable minion for a Lich or other undead (or fiendish) boss monster that a tier 3 or tier 4 party is up against. A closer reading of the stat block, though, shows that it has an ability that can make minions for itself. To me, that clearly points to the ideal use of a Wraith being a major threat to a party that's either at the tail end of tier 1 or early part of tier 2. Its AC of 13 also means that only a low-level party is going to have a significant chance to actually miss it (though to be fair, being easy to hit is an asset for a minion, if you ask me).
Nothing's saying you can't use four of these to back up a Death Knight or Vampire Umbral Lord or whatnot, but I don't think it would play very well. The Wraith itself is going to be a minor threat to a level 16 party, and boy would it be a waste of its turn to create Specters, who will be even more pathetic.
This is why I think Draw Steel's approach is fascinating. Once again, the big caveat to all my Draw Steel stuff is that I haven't actually played or run it yet, so this is all theoretical, but I think the designers recognized this ambiguity and worked very hard to build a system that ensures you're picking the right monsters.
Each monster has essentially three values to describe its difficulty from different angles, so to speak.
Monsters have levels: easy rule of thumb, you should look for monsters of your party's level to throw at them. Now, one thing I'll be examining here is how easy it is to use monsters that aren't quite of your party's level.
Next, monsters have what I think should be called "Ranks" but are simply referred to as their organization. The highest and lowest of these ranks have rules attached to them (though the higher ones have the rules written into their stat blocks). (Monsters also have group roles, but I'm not counting that as a descriptor of difficulty.)
Finally, they have EVs, or encounter values. This, as far as I can tell, is actually just derived from a formula based on their level and their rank.
Player power escalates over the course of the day, but on the Director's side, their power also grows: Directors gain greater malice for every Victory the party has, and they also get a higher budget for their encounters as the party gains Victories (essentially an extra hero's worth for every 2 Victories). I will say, I do wonder how this affects the goal of incentivizing the party to keep pushing forward, but I'll really need to see more of this in action.
At baseline, the Director gets an EV budget based on the party's size, level, and the difficulty of the encounter you're trying to build. If an encounter has some alternate goal, like taking out an individual target or some object the monsters are defending, or protecting some NPC, the difficulty might be adjusted.
Now, there's a chart on Monsters page 11 that tells you the budget per player (and helpfully if slightly redundantly does the math for you based on party size). Each level, an individual player's EV contribution goes up by 2, so from 6 at level 1 to eventually 24 at level 10.
This does do some interesting things:
A level 1 Solo monster (Solo being kind of a combination of rank and monster role, as they're truly meant to be fought on their own) has an EV of 36, meaning that a party of 6 players could face one as the very first encounter of their whole campaign, while a smaller party might want to rack up a couple of victories before they take one on. (The werewolf, which we looked at in the previous post, is one of these, and has 200 Stamina, so it'll likely be a pretty significant fight.)
What's interesting to me is the linear scaling of EV, rather than exponential scaling. A Vampire Lord is a level 7 Leader, designed to have a number of henchmen fighting alongside them against a party that is in the third echelon of play - in other words, pretty seasoned and experienced heroes. Their EV? Also 36.
Could you throw a solo Vampire Lord at a level 1 party? After all, the EV budget would be the same as the werewolf, so shouldn't that be ok?
Well, no.
A standard encounter difficulty for 6 7th-level PCs would be 108, meaning that while this particular monster is meant to be in the spotlight, you're also meant to have 72 EV-more of monsters, such as the horde controller also level 7 standard Vampire, as well as Blood-Starved Vampire minions, or whatever else you might have for your particular story (there's nothing saying that you can't mix monster types: maybe the vampire lord has a group of human cultists).
There are a couple reasons not to throw one of these at a low-level party. The first, I think, is that its attacks hit too damn hard: the least it can do with its signature ability is 13, which is enough to make a lot of 1st-level characters winded right from the get-go.
EV on its own would fail to understand this nuance, but by giving the creature its rank and level, we see what it's actually intended for: higher-level heroes who will fight this along with probably four Vampires and 16 Blood-Starved Vampires (again, or whatever monsters work for that scenario). (As a note, there's also a named vampire boss, Count Rhodar von Glauer, who was in Flee, Mortals!, and is a level 10 solo monster, meaning a reasonable campaign boss).
So: what do we do if we want to use monsters who aren't of the right level? After all, while the Monsters book has a lot of monsters in it, there are gaps: the Undead monsters are only each at the first level of their given Echelons - 1, 4, 7, and 10. If I have a level 6 party, am I SOL if I want them to still be fighting undead monsters?
This is a genuine question that I'm intending to answer by looking it up right as I write this post. On Monsters page 26, there's a section on Adjusting Monster Stats. The general advice is to simply re-skin monsters of the appropriate level: there might not be any 6th level undead monsters, but you could find some other creature and just adjust things like damage immunities and movement speeds to make it work as that kind of monster.
My suspicion is also that you can fudge levels as long as you're not going too far outside of the players' level range: those 1st level undead monsters might be fine to throw against a 2nd or 3rd level party - you just need more of them. For example, if we were building up to a confrontation with a powerful Ghost (a level 1 Leader, worth 12 EV) we might budget it out for 3rd level players - giving us 10 per player instead of 6, so, say, 40 for a party of four at baseline (though if it's a boss, probably adding a bit because it'll be a few Victories before they can get to this leader). By the math, that would leave us 28 EV left to spend on monsters.
I'm honestly impressed that the core rules' monster book has so many stat blocks (some get a little short-changed on lore description, but that's ok, because I don't super need to know the distinction between a Human Rogue (minion) and a Human Scoundrel (platoon,) as they clearly fill same roles just at different numbers.
I also think that because Stamina is the only real way that a character's "toughness" is expressed, that damage can scale more linearly. In D&D, a monster's damage output can be increased either by raising their attack bonus (or saving throw DC) or by increasing the damage of their attacks. This means that there's actually a pretty wide swing on the actual amount of damage the monster does in a turn based on what they're attacking. While PCs often have triggered abilities to reduce incoming damage, you always know that, for example, a Human Death Cultist is going to be doing 6, 9, or 12 damage with their signature ability.
I think this, coupled with the fact that abilities often do flat amounts of damage rather than rolling damage dice, means that the damage output of a monster can actually scale slower. The aforementioned Death Cultist is a level 2 platoon monster. A Shadow Elf Assassin, a level 6 platoon monster, is doing 10, 15, or 18 damage with their highest direct-damage ability, which is less than twice that lowly 2nd level monster. The Assassin has 70 Stamina, while the Death Cultist has 40, again, meaning that despite being intended for players three times higher-level, the scaling here is somewhat gradual.
Again, I still think paying attention to the level of the monster is wise, but I don't think it needs to be an incredibly precise rule: I see no problem throwing more 1st level monsters against a 2nd level party, and even potentially throwing fewer 6th level monsters against a level 5 or even 4 party.
The EV calculations become trivial, though, when using monsters of the appropriate level: 8 minions per player, 2 Horde per player, 1 Platoon per player, and 1 Elite for every two players.
Again, I'm speaking all from a purely theoretical standpoint. I'm really hoping to actually try this game out some time (I've really just got to put my foot down and make a date and invite friends to play - I'm debating on whether to start off with the pregens for the Delian Tomb, which will be a lower barrier to entry but also potentially have them less invested than they would be in characters they've made themselves).
Encounter building is more of an art than a science, because players aren't always going to know what the perfectly optimal play is, and the dice can screw you over, even in a game where your attacks can't miss. But I do appreciate the effort to add more nuance here: that yes, by EV alone, you could have 6 1st level characters face 4 vampires, but you, you know, shouldn't do that.
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