At this point it may be wise to admit that the CR guidelines get incoherent if you apply them the way you doing. They say ECL+4 encounters have a 50% chance of killing the party and that you face around one of them every level. The CR system assumes that the party can face 4 CR=ECL encounters a day with no one dying and for ECL 1-3 encounters they can prevail by burning more resources than normal.Mr. GC wrote: You forgot to say translated. You also forgot to accurately translate. You also forgot to stop failing at life, and taking cock A into slots B-Z.
But let's ignore your herpaderp fest and look at the actual rules and the actual things being said.
You are playing standard D&D, aka adhering to the lowest possible standards you can while still playing D&D. Here is your encounter distribution, according to those rules you hate so much because they fuck your ass over harder than your mom does.
10%: Level -1.
50%: Level +0.
8.75%: Level +1.
8.75%: Level +2.
8.75%: Level +3.
8.75%: Level +4.
5%: Level +5.
And this is using the most generous assumptions. Now you average that out. I know, math is hard, and you'll babble some bullshit in a furtive, desperate attempt to dodge, or falsely claim this averages 0, but you will be entirely wrong on both counts just as you always are and always will.
The actual average is level +1.05. Now stuff two levels higher is twice as strong, so stuff only one level higher is somewhere in between 100-200% strength. Point is you can pass a SGT and totally fail actual D&D because actual D&D is significantly harder than the SGT that supposedly models actual D&D, even by default.
There's also the small factor that while the average is level +1 (because let's just round that off) there is a non zero chance of encountering things up to four times more difficult than average. At least.
So if you can only deal with average, you get rofflestomped on a regular basis anyways. Even when using the most lax definition of standard D&D.
And we're still just discussing standard D&D, we haven't even gotten into chain raping minotaurs and invisible flying Sorcerers spamming multiple save or loses per round or any of the stuff that happens when you assume the opposition is actually competent.
SGT 50 is more of a minimum standard to not be dragging down the party in general most parties I've played in have at least one person at SGT 70+ who can keep that party alive through tougher encounters by burning more spells and at least one gimp who contributes less than a cohort.