How to Fix the D&D 5e Challenge Rating System

Written by Luke Hart

Don’t you just love the Challenge Rating system in D&D 5e (2014 version)? Isn’t it just great how it allows a dungeon master to perfectly design an encounter of the desired difficulty – easy, medium, hard, or deadly – for their group of characters? I mean, it is awesome to never have to worry about an encounter being too easy or too deadly or leading to a TPK that should never have happened.

[Insert crazy maniacal laughing here.]

Yeah right! The challenge rating system we have is probably one of dungeon masters’ primary complaints in the game. It would indeed be great if the CR system worked better. So, today we’re going to go over SIX pointers on how to FIX the challenge rating system for your games so that it works a tad bit better…and hopefully maybe makes your life a little bit easier.

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Watch or listen to this article by clicking the video below.

#1 At low levels, make encounters easier.

At the lower levels, characters are squishy and the challenge rating system just doesn’t account for that. You can take a CR 2 ogre and put it against a group of five level 1 characters, and according to the challenge rating calculations, it’s only a hard encounter. However, let me tell you a think or two…that ogre is likely to MURDERIZE one PC every single turn. If the battle lasts three rounds, which is likely once PCs start dropping, you’re going to have three dead characters on your hands. So why doesn’t the CR system pop that as a deadly encounter?

So, what you want to do is at the lower levels, we’ll say tier 1, levels 1 through 4, BE CAREFUL. Only throw medium encounters at your players, especially at levels 1 and 2. You gotta let them get some MEAT on their bones before you throw hard and deadly encounters at them. And keep an eye on how much damage a monster can do when considering using it. If a monster can do enough damage to one-shot kill a PC, even if you only intend to use ONE of them, it’s probably a bit too much.

Also, when you’re doing your adventuring day calculations – you know the often overlooked mechanic on page 84 of the dungeon master guide that tells you HOW MANY encounters of WHAT DIFFICULTY a group should be able to take on before they need a long rest – bear in mind that at levels 1 to 4, characters might need to take long rests more often. AND THAT’S OKAY. Be merciful, fellow dungeon masters. Withhold your heavy hand of doom for just a bit. They will soon be level 5, and then you can unleash the inferno of hellfire upon your players’ precious characters.

#2 At levels 5 through 10 …things actually kind of work.

Yeah, at levels 5 through 10, you should be able to mostly use the challenge rating system and adventuring day calculations as written from the dungeon master guide. It almost feels like the game designers ignored balance for early levels and then assumed that no one would make it past level 10, so they ignored it there, too. And that’s kind of fair because many groups do dissolve and crumble apart before they ever reach the one year mark of the campaign. But we’re still not going to forgive them! No, never!!!

#3 At levels 11 through 16, it’s touch and go…play things by ear.

This is where things get more challenging for you, dear dungeon master. It’s hard to give you a standard rule of thumb for tier 3 play because it really depends on the strength of your players characters – did they use classes and feats from the Players Handbook, or did they use the increasingly overpowered character options from books like Tasha’s?

If the characters aren’t THAT powerful, the CR system and adventuring day calculations might come fairly close to working. However, if your players are going hog wild with new character options from the new books – or they as players are just really good at tactical combat – they are going to be fairly powerful, and the CR system should only be used as a guideline.

You should use the challenge rating math to get you in the BALLPARK but then adjust things based on your EXPERIENCE with your group and how easy or hard past encounters have been. Use your gut. If they constantly are cleaning up, maybe it’s time to start throwing more hard and deadly encounters their way. If they are STRUGGLING, ratchet things down.

I personally had this struggle with one of my groups for a while. I was accustomed to throwing fairly challenging encounters at other groups I ran games for, but this particular groups was just struggling. I think it was a combination of sub-optimal character builds – which isn’t a bad thing; it’s just a RP choice – and new players who weren’t that good at tactical combat. So things were touch and go for a while and I had to experiment a bit to bring the challenge of encounters and adventures to a point that it felt about right.

#4 At the highest levels of play, throw the CR System out the door!

Once characters reach levels 17 and behind, they are practically all powerful demi-gods and they can overcome deadly encounter after deadly encounter without batting an eye. They have access to the most powerful abilities, the most powerful spells, and – presumably – they’ve been playing the game long enough to reach these levels that they’ve learned a thing or two about tactical combat and working together as a team.

So, throw hard stuff at high-level characters! I have thrown encounters at high-level characters that are FIVE TIMES the deadly threshold, and they defeated their foes in just a few rounds and barely broke a sweat. It’s time to get nasty, dungeon masters. It’ time to pull out the big guns. Don’t hold back.

My suggestion is to throw crazy stuff at your players, slowly ratcheting up the difficulty until you find the sweet spot. You won’t know exactly where it lies without experimenting because it depends heavily on the specific classes and builds your players are running. For instance, if you have a high-level paladin or cleric in the group, you would be AMAZED at the challenges a party can overcome with ease. Things just depend, so you need to experiment a bit.

#5 Consider Action Economy

When we say “action economy” we are really just talking about the number of things a PC or monsters can do on its turn. And in the context of combat, we’re talking about how many attacks they can do. So, if you have four characters who can make one attack per round, and they are fighting two monsters who can each make two attacks per round – well, each side has four attacks per round, and we would say that the action economy is even.

And here’s the thing: when the action economy is close to being even, the challenge rating system works a whole lot better. However, when action economy is lopsided, the CR system breaks down, and the tides of war will shift to the side with greater action economy. Now, someone might object and say that the CR system has built into it math that accounts for this, and you’re kind of right. However, in my experience, it doesn’t work that well, and DMs still need to pay attention to it.

So, here’s what you do. If action economy favors the bad guys, consider the challenge to be a bit higher than the CR system would suggest. And if the action economy favors the good guys – as in the case of having a large group, such as 8 players, or taking on a solitary creature, such as in a boss fight – consider the challenge to be LOWER than the CR system would suggest.

#6 Stop worrying about balance!!!

And now is the point in the article where I contradict everything I’ve just said…kind of. Here’s the thing: D&D games are not always about balance. In fact, I would argue that you don’t want every single encounter and every single adventure to be perfectly balanced for the PCs’ level. Having a variety of encounter difficulties – easy fights, medium fights, deadly fights, etc. – is a good thing. It allows your players to feel like heroes on the one hand but also challenged from time to time on the other hand.

An easy fight is a reward for the work they’ve put in to gain their current level of power. A challenging fight won through blood, sweat, and tears, is also a reward: it gives them pride in a current, hard-won achievement, not just past ones. And this holds true for all tiers of play: have a variety of difficulties your players confront. It will make the game far better than if everything were just perfectly balanced to be neither too easy nor too hard.

So, every so often in my games, I do a thing: a present a monster that is so incredibly powerful that the characters have no possible way they could defeat it in a battle. This reinforces the reality of the game world: there are nasty things out there you MIGHT run into that are WAY ABOVE your pay grade. And, when you run into them, you had better have something else in your pocket besides a longsword or a firebell spell – because those solutions might just get you killed. You see, doing this from time to time gives the players an opportunity to – or rather forces them to – resolve an encounter through means OTHER than combat.

And the converse is true, too. Sometimes characters in my games run into creatures so pitifully weak compared to them, there is no sense in even rolling initiative. It’s a given that IF the characters want to murder the creatures, they can. If combat does come about, we simply resolve things narratively, and I ask my players to collectively describe how that combat goes – no dice needed.

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