Pyramid's Combat Effectiveness Rating for Foes

[beaushinkle]

Again, I thought so too, but it's not helpful. I had ranges from as low as 70 for four characters to as high as I think 320(ish). It was too wide a band and in the end, there was no way I could present a concrete enough example that would be both useful and accurate to the reader. It's why I ditched it.

I think there's some internal inconsistency here.

If we assume:

1) That CER is a decent estimator of an player/enemy/group's power

2) That adventure authors have been able to successfully suggest encounters, both in random encounters and dungeon rooms while only knowing the rough point-value of the players

3) That CER is unable to suggest iconic party levels or iconic encounter levels because of the massive party strength variance

Then something is up.

If there was massive party strength variance to the degree that easy fights for one group are near impossible for another (and this is a common occurrence), then pre-made adventures would be next to useless as well.

Yet, pre-made adventures exist. The N system in mirror of the fire demon works well enough. It seems pretty reasonable to me to build a bog-standard knight, wizard, thief, cleric straight from DFRPG totally rules as written, gear purchased from wealth rules-as-written. Is there actually that much variance there? I'm more than willing to spin up some bog-standard parties and have folks point out where they think I deviated from bog-standard.

If your party deviates from bog-standard to be better at fighting, you're going to be better at defeating monsters, and your GM should probably use more/harder baddies. Same deal in reverse. Notably, this is also how encounters in pre-made adventures are still useful, despite being prescriptive.