This is the baseline, yes. But then again, if you're DMing and you realize you don't have SGT50(TM) Certified characters in the party, then you don't challenge them with enemies of that CR. There, problem solved.Lord Mistborn wrote:Listen nineball if your party dies to all the monsters than you're going to have a hard time playing a game largely about killing monsters. So when you're rolling up a character it may be a good idea to make sure that you can solo at least half the monsters in your CR bracket (i.e. actually make a CR X PC).
I'm starting to wonder if my gaming group was actually uncommon. Once we had a campaign more or less "by the book". Everybody made valid (3.0) characters and the DM more or less threw the monsters at us. So dice fell, people died, got brought back to life and everybody had a generally good time. Then that campaign ended and for the one starting next we decided that the characters would be descendants of the former PC party. So right from the start the new party consisted of:
- Princess, because of course one of the PCs got to conquer a country.
- Half-golem, because another PC was a wizard with strange ideas.
- Half-god, becase yet another PC... well, you got the idea already.
- Goddamn regular, no-frills PC (and a human, and a Fighter, to boot) because some people actually can only play one kind of character. Call him Fighter Fightersen.
With the fact that playing lose with the rules is fun and awesome out of the way, lets talk about two important caveats:
1) You require mutual trust to do that. I can't imagine coming with a character sheet that has written "God of War's son" on it to a strangers table. In the rare circumstances I couldn't trust the DM and the other PCs to go along with the insanity du jour, I went with something nice and safe like "Cleric". So knowing how to make characters that play at a certain baseline competence is actually a good skill to have, while obsessing at milking the best possible competence from each build enters the "missing the point" territory.
2) You still need a consistent system that's, uh... shenanigans agnostic. You'll notice we had the MTP heavy campaign after the more or less by the book one. It's important that everybody have a good feel for the system, on the things that are common, uncommon, rare or plain fucking impossible, so that people can react properly when you start to fuck with the rules. You can't have a "...he did WHAT to that dragon?" moment without shared common expectations of exactly how badass dragons are (well, you can, using narrative, but in my experience the response is even better with people whose characters already fought dragons before).