Presumably you also have the equivalent of Warriors and Adepts that allow you to slot in Goblins as generic encounters. Obviously you aren't going to want the 1st level encounters to be "One 1st level Goblin Shaman" because that's terrible.nockermensch wrote: But D&D isn't simply monster stabbing. Usually the PCs are also expected to face-off against enemy knights, assassins or wizards. Are these supposed to be weak "like a lurker of the same level" by the lack of PC-appropriate treasure?
This is dumb and also fails to understand the core principle of tiering in the first place. The Wraith is a level 4 enemy because you have the tools to fight it at 4th level. It's not a tossup at 1st level, it will fucking wreck you.Schleiermacher wrote:It's not actually necessary for CR to be equal to level for these benefits to be preserved, but it needs to have a fixed and formulaic relationship to level, such as e.g CR=Level+4 (which would make a group of 4 CR N monsters a standard encounter for a level N party of four). I think the best such relationship (the easiest to design and balance, and most tractable for encounter building) is simply '='.
Same Game Tests can work by having a number of level appropriate monsters that roughly equal a player character. So you'd Same Game Test with like 3 or 4 equal level monsters. You wouldn't use singular over-leveled monsters because they have abilities and numbers that players aren't expected to be able to counter.
Fundamentally, 3e came closer to having its encounter math work out than 4e did. Like, a lot closer. So obviously it's tempting to continue the encounter math in the 3e tradition. But that's actually just empty cargo cult thinking. 4e's targets were better targets to have, and if you're going to go through all the trouble of making new math you should try to hit the better targets instead of trying to hit the worse targets. Because obviously.
-Username17