In my last post, I mentioned the infamous roper encounter in The Forge of Fury. It’s one of my favourite adventures, but that encounter caused a lot of grief at the time, because it was considered ‘impossible’, ‘unfair’, ‘too deadly’. Justin Alexander has an excellent article on encounter balance, and on how that encounter pushed Wizards of the Coast to change the way they structured adventures going forward, and Richard Baker himself addresses it in his retrospective (he’d forgotten that ropers can grab you, so what was meant to be an avoidable encounter can become one you just can’t escape).
Here’s the thing, though. If Wizards saw the roper as a mistake to be fixed—and I appreciate this is now a debate going back a quarter of a century, but bear with me on this—I think they drew the wrong conclusion. They should have stuck to their guns. Adventures sometimes have little spikes or creases, fun little moments where something is suddenly a lot harder or a lot easier than you expected, and if you try to iron them out, you’re left with a game that’s more predictable, less varied, and, frankly, a bit more boring. The game is poorer for it.
All of this has been on my mind because of a video Mike Mearls made recently (see below). Mearls was one of the lead designers of 5th edition back in 2014, and he’s always worth listening to. He’s been doing a series of videos on YouTube about things 5e got wrong: things that didn’t quite work, or that turned out differently in play from how they were envisioned. One of them is challenge rating.
Herein lies the premise for this article. This may be controversial, but I think challenge rating has been missold. I might even go so far as to call it a dangerous myth. It doesn’t work as intended, and it tells us far less than we think. But more than this, even if it did work (and again, I don’t think it does), chasing balance would still be the wrong goal. It causes us to write adventures that are more boring, less flavourful, and less grounded in the fiction than they could be, and it feeds a video-gamey approach to the game that I think is harmful. A looser approach, one that puts the fiction first, is ultimately more fulfilling. At best, challenge rating is a warning indicator. Beyond that, I question whether it’s helpful at all.
Full disclosure
I should say up front that I’m not writing this from some position of superiority. Challenge rating is something I’ve been interested in for a while, and I’ve used it in my own adventure writing. It’s a key part of The Campaign Handbook, where I organize monsters by terrain and challenge rating and give advice on roughly how many creatures of a given CR to use at various levels of play.
Like many people, I’ve been sucked in by it. It’s a very attractive idea—that there’s a hidden maths behind the game that will help you have fun—but after many years of playing with it and reading what other people have said about it, I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t just fail to work as intended. Not only that, but I worry that it’s actively bad for us, as adventure writers and as game masters. And I think we’d have more fun if we stopped caring about it so much.
1. It doesn’t work
Let’s start with the first half of my argument: challenge rating doesn’t do what it claims to.
First, let’s back up and think about what challenge rating represents. Mike Shea has done some good work on this: Forge of Foes which he co-wrote with Teos Abadia and Scott Fitzgerald Gray, has a really good breakdown of the maths behind it. I highly recommend it. But there are limits to what we can say challenge rating is.
We can fairly confidently say that a creature of a higher challenge rating is probably going to be more challenging, on balance, than one of a lower challenge rating. A CR 3 creature will be slightly more challenging than a CR 2 creature, most of the time (although even that is not a given). And if you’re using experience points for levelling up (and it seems very few tables do anymore), challenge rating determines how much XP a monster awards. That’s about it.
And even there, there are caveats. Challenge rating doesn’t take into account the context in which a monster appears, how it works in a group versus on its own, how its special attacks and features work in a given situation, or what the players and characters might already know about it. If, for example, you don’t know that a troll regenerates unless burned, as will be the case for many new players, you’re going to have a much harder time with it than an experienced group would.
And even within a challenge rating band, there’s a lot of unevenness. Some creatures are glass cannons, dealing far more damage than others of their rating but with very few hit points. Some have a really high armour class for their rating but modest damage. Some have so many resistances and immunities that the encounter becomes almost a puzzle of working out what will hurt them. Some have powerful limited-use abilities and can ‘go nova’. Some are clearly built to last: tanky, soaking up damage round after round. How these different profiles play out will vary enormously depending on the composition of the party, the depletion of their resources, the battlefield environment, and other aspects of the wider scenario.
This isn’t new, by the way. In 3rd edition, I always remember the dire bat. It had a reasonably low challenge rating (CR 2), but it could fly, so most melee characters couldn’t really hit it, and it had a very high armour class for its level (AC 20). It always felt like a surprisingly difficult encounter. Or take the 5e stirge. Its challenge rating is very low (CR ⅛), but stirges usually come in swarms, and their blood drain can kill, so they can turn nasty very quickly. Or the flameskull: a reasonably modest challenge rating (CR 4), but it can cast fireball, a massive area-of-effect spell with high damage for its level. Challenge rating is incredibly uneven, and always has been.
It doesn’t have to be this way, mind you. Other systems arguably do a much better job, probably because their underlying maths is applied more consistently. In 13th Age, monsters are built from the same level-based tables, so a monster’s level tells you something meaningful about how often it will hit and how hard. My understanding is that Pathfinder 2e does something similar: creatures are built against clear benchmarks for their level, and encounters are built against the party’s level. Even there, though, the d20 is still swingy, as we’ll come to in a moment. Maybe the problem with 5e’s challenge rating isn’t that it’s uneven, but that it’s inconsistent. Regardless, the problems don’t stop there.
2. Challenge rating was built for a game that no longer exists
There’s a bigger problem, too: the way the game is played has changed enormously in the last 20 or 25 years.
Anyone familiar with old-school play will know this. Early D&D was focused on exploration, and lots of its mechanics pushed that. Gold for XP rewarded exploration over killing monsters; you were more likely to level up from finding treasure than from combat. Characters were less sturdy, with fewer hit points and fewer ways to improve them. Traps were far more lethal. Light sources and encumbrance really mattered.
What’s interesting is that even in 2014, when the 5th edition Dungeon Master’s Guide came out, the designers were still working on the basis of an ‘adventuring day’. The game was designed to be attritional. Its balance rested on the principle that parties had a large number of encounters and gradually depleted their resources: they couldn’t blow everything in every fight, and they rested and healed relatively infrequently. This matters enormously. The DMG even advised how many encounters a party should face in a day (six to eight), with a short rest about a third of the way through, another two-thirds of the way through, and a long rest to end the day. That was the calibration that made challenge rating work. And in my experience, if you played the game like that, particularly at low levels, CR worked reasonably well.
The problem is, as Mike Mearls notes, that’s just not how most people play D&D anymore. Easy encounters seem to be quite rare. People want big, climactic fights, maybe one a session, two at most, where the players can throw everything they’ve got at the monsters. And the game wasn’t balanced for that. It’s why ‘linear fighters, quadratic wizards’ is a thing. Run the game as intended, slowly depleting resources, and the spellcasters start to come unstuck once they run out of power, and that’s when your more ‘mundane’ martial classes really come into their own. A rogue is good all day long: Uncanny Dodge, Sneak Attack, Cunning Action, none of it limited by uses per day. A fighter is the same; even Action Surge comes back on a short rest. But if the rest of the party never run down their spell slots or special abilities, a rogue and a fighter start to feel more lacklustre.
Essentially: if you’re not playing the traditional ‘attritional’ way, challenge rating doesn’t work. Take a party of four or five 5th-level characters and throw a (CR 6) young white dragon at them. That encounter will be far more challenging at the end of an adventuring day, when they’ve already used up many of their resources. Go in fresh, and they’ll win every time.
To some extent, the 2024 DMG seems to have adapted to this. There’s more power creep, with 1st-level characters now even stronger, and abilities like Weapon Mastery that make characters even more competent. And what the game advises you throw at a party has gone up a category: what used to be a deadly encounter is now closer to a hard one, and what used to be hard is now medium. There’s no space anymore for wearing parties down with lots of relatively easy encounters that build up over time.
3. Balance is a myth anyway
Even if you set all this aside—even with all the underlying maths of attacks, damage and armour class scaling with challenge rating—the game is built on dice rolls, and in particular on the d20, which is really swingy. An encounter that looks really difficult on paper can turn out easy through sheer luck. It’s happened to me so many times. When I ran Dungeon of the Mad Mage, boss fights I thought would be a challenging often turned out to be quite easy. And every now and then, a fairly routine encounter suddenly became very difficult, just because the party rolled badly and I rolled well.
Two rolls matter disproportionately in this regard: initiative and stealth. If a monster rolls well on initiative, that can massively tilt an encounter in its favour; ditto if it succeeds on stealth and gets a surprise attack. One die roll can transform the whole fight. That isn’t a design problem or a mistake in your planning, and you’re not a bad DM when it happens. Unpredictability is baked into the game, so 100-percent ‘balance’ is kind of impossible to achieve.
4. Even if it worked, it has drawbacks
So challenge rating doesn’t really work as intended. But I want to go further than that. I proffer that even if it did work, designing the game around it would still be a bad approach.
First, I want to be clear about what I’m not complaining about. Is challenge rating’s unevenness a bug? On its own, no. A bit of spikiness doesn’t hugely bother me, in the same way that I don’t think it matters that classes of the same level can be of different power. Circle of the Moon druids are very powerful in Tier 1. Paladins are really powerful in tier 2. That unevenness is fine; I’m happy with it. It means that in longer campaigns, everyone gets their own chance to shine.
The problem isn’t that it’s uneven. The problem is that we set too much store by it.
If challenge rating has been overhyped, even missold, and we rely on it in planning and prepping our games, we miss a trick. It becomes an unfortunate distraction. We start to worry too much about it. Otherwise you start to get into 4th edition territory, what others have called ‘my precious encounters’, where the fiction takes a back seat and you’re worrying more balance and tactics. It’s a way to play, but not one I care for, and judging by the interest in the OSR, I’m not alone.
Worse, you can end up with encounters that don’t make much sense in the fiction, or that feel artificial. They might seem numerically ‘balanced’ (though, as we’ve seen, they’re not), but they’re dissatisfying in another way: they don’t make sense.
On a recent podcast, Mike Shea was talking about an encounter in Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall, the new level 11–20 adventure set in Thay, where in the first chapter you can encounter three separate bandit crime lords (CR 11), each backed up by a couple of bandit ‘deceivers’ or similar goons. It just doesn’t make sense. A crime lord is meant to be the very top of the pyramid, somewhere in power level between an aboleth an archmage. Why are there so many of them knocking around the same location? We know why: because the numbers fit the player level. But it doesn’t fit the story. It just feels a bit forced and silly.
And anyway, if you’re always balancing encounters to the party’s level, what’s the point? If that were the ideal, then every session would end up feeling about as challenging as the last. Sure, the characters might have new abilities and the monsters might be different, but it would start to feel like the same fight over and over again. That’s the video-gamey approach I think is harmful: a steady, predictable difficulty curve, where nothing is ever too easy or too hard, and so nothing is ever particularly memorable as a result.
The alternative: fiction first
So what’s the alternative? Increasingly, I’m taking a fiction-first approach to designing encounters and adventures. I start by asking: what is the situation? What’s the location, the environment? Who or what might make a lair there? How do those creatures interact with each other as an ecosystem? And how many of them should there be? Not ‘what’s the right number for the party’s level’, but what makes sense for that creature’s ecology and lore.
In a way, it’s putting the world first. Consider that most cliché of starting quests: clearing out the rats in the cellar. Your party is 4th level, and the cellar is full of dire rats. It’s going to be easy. Should you increase their numbers? Should you bump up their armour class or hit points? No! Make the world feel real by having the challenge make sense within the fiction. If it’s a bit easy for the party, so be it; it will teach them to seek out greater challenges!
Likewise, if that same party decides to infiltrate a fire giant stronghold, they should not be able to take on a fire giant. It should, in the fiction, be completely beyond them. And if they die doing something stupid, so be it. It’s a much more old-school approach, but it’s also more satisfying. It makes characters feel more heroic sometimes, and more fragile at others. It makes the world feel bigger and more real, and that’s more fun and more fantastical.
Having some wildly easy encounters and some wildly hard ones is fun in its own right, and it leads to memorable moments. I try to do this in my campaigns fairly often. In my last campaign, the party picked a fight with a death knight while they were still in Tier 1. I think they had one round to see how much damage it could do, quickly realized they’d bitten off more than they could chew, and ran away. There’s a similar moment in Curse of Strahd at Yester Hill, where Strahd can turn up and start throwing fireballs, and there’s every chance the party will be far too low-level to take him on. These are the sessions people remember, and if all you care about is ‘balanced encounters’, you’re missing out.
A warning indicator
I’m not saying challenge rating is completely useless. It does still tell you something: that one creature is probably more challenging than another. And it matters most at lower levels, where characters are fragile and can go down very easily. Mike Shea’s advice, for example, is that anything above CR ¼ is more deadly for 1st-level characters than you might think. Does that mean you shouldn’t use them? No. Treat it as a warning indicator on your dashboard. Go in with your eyes open—just don’t design around it.
As for my own adventure writing, I’m not really writing for 5e much anymore: I’m using Old-School Essentials, which already takes this approach. But from now on, I’m very much trying to take a world-first, fiction-first approach: designing dungeons that make sense from first principles, with their own ecosystems, where things are held in stasis against one another, and where there are moments of real danger.
There’s that Chris Perkins idea (he says, paraphrasing, no source to hand—please help me if you can): your job as the DM is to put the toys down on the table and say, go on, smash them up, have fun. How the players interact with them is up to them.
Which brings me back to that roper. Is it too hard? Probably. Does it make sense, lurking in the dark of a ruined dwarven stronghold? Absolutely. And I’d rather my players met that roper, and ran, than fought another perfectly balanced encounter they’ll have forgotten by next week.
But what do you think? Do you still lean on challenge rating, or have you given up on it too? And if you’ve got a roper story of your own, let me know in the comments below.
To subscribe, click here. If you like what I do, please support me on Patreon or buy my products on DriveThruRPG. You can follow me on Bluesky @scrollforinit and Instagram @scrollforinitiative. And if you want to make my day, you can buy me a coffee here.