The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
Challenge Rating Deep Dive – Lazy RPG Talk Show
Mon, 03 Mar 2025
D&D and RPG news and commentary by Mike Shea of https://slyflourish.com Contents 00:00 Show Start 01:11 Sly Flourish News: City of Arches in Markdown and EPUB 17:55 D&D & RPG News: Blog of Holding Monster Manual 2024 Stats in the Creative Commons 22:34 DM Tip: Challenge Rating Deep Dive 54:19 Patreon Question: Fantastic Locations in Contemporary Worlds Links Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books: City of Arches Blog of Holding 2025 Monster Manual on a Business Card What Does Challenge Rating Mean in D&D 5e? The Lazy Encounter Benchmark
Chapter 1: What updates are available for the City of Arches?
So a couple of months ago, we released the PDF for the City of Arches and we let it stay out there for a while to get any kind of typos or any problems that people saw or anything like that. We let it go out for, I think, about six weeks, maybe even longer than six weeks. And it's even been up for sale. The PDF has been up for sale on the Sly Flourish bookstore.
So you can actually buy it if you did not get it through the Kickstarter. The PDF is now available on it. And we have since updated it based on all the feedback we got. We have a new version, version 1.3.4, which is going to be released to patrons, I think probably Monday, but actually there's a bunch of things happening Monday. So we're going to talk all about it.
Mostly it was tiny, tiny little typos. content wise, there was no real change in the City of Arches book. So I don't even know if we have a change log of the specifics, but it was really like very, very minor typo-y kind of things, except in one circumstance. And that was taking a look at the three stat blocks. It's actually only the two stat blocks that we have in this book.
So I didn't want to put a giant pile of monster stat blocks in this book. We have three stat blocks in it. I didn't want to have a giant monster book in here. I really feel like we have lots of monster books and we should be using those other monster books for this kind of stuff. So but there was one area that we had tried an idea. I tried an idea and and and then changed my mind on it.
And that was with legendary monsters on whether they should use reactions or legendary actions. And given that Wizards of the Coast started with legendary actions, then tried reactions and then seemed to go back again. I said, you know what? I don't want to be the only one out there publishing a book that has reactions for legendary monsters.
So we're going to change them back to legendary actions. So the two stat blocks for the Nameless King and Abraxas of Chul now use legendary actions instead of reactions. And I think, and we went through the whole stat blocks again, tweaked a lot of stuff about it. Nameless King has more hit points. We wanted the stat blocks to be easy to use, but still really powerful.
We talked a lot about it on the Sly Flourish Discord server. I got some fantastic feedback from it. And then we updated those two stat blocks. So the two stat blocks for the Nameless King and Abraxas of Chul are Two very high CR stat blocks. One of them is a CR, Nameless King is CR 26, and Abraxas of Chul is a CR 30. And I think they're going to kick people's asses.
These guys are really, really tough. So anyway, that is probably the only major content change. We had some fun stuff. We had some fun stuff. Like one of the things we have in here is a recognition that there are many versions of 5e and that there are different monsters from 5e. But the D&D 2024 Monster Manual wasn't out when we originally published this.
But since it was only digital, we had the option of like tweaking it. So we have things that say the D&D 2024 Monster Manual includes a conversion guide for creatures whose names changed from D&D 2014 Monster Manual. That way we didn't have to change all the monsters from like thug to tough and remove the drow stat block and stuff like that.
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Chapter 2: How is the City of Arches being distributed to backers?
We are almost certain not to charge anybody more than what we told them we would charge. And I think Michelle and I have said that this is the case. We are not going to charge any more than we said we would charge on the Kickstarter, no matter what. We will take the loss if it turns out that shipping costs more. And for some people, it will. For some people, it'll be less.
And the nice one is because it might be less, we can charge you exactly what the shipping rate is. And then we can do that. So then, yeah, so there's going to be a process. There's a big process that's coming out. Kickstarter update's going to come out and talk all about this. Then you're going to get a verification of address. Then you're going to get an email that says your address is locked.
And then you're getting an email saying, hey, warning, we're going to charge you for shipping. Then you get charged for shipping. And then we have all the stuff that we need in order to start delivery on the books. That's for all the physical books. One of the things.
So this is more exciting than talking about tariffs are the other versions of City of Arches, which I expected would take some time. And I buckled down and I worked real hard on Friday and a little bit yesterday and even a little bit today, putting together the e-book and Markdown versions of it. So we have an e-pub version of the book.
And here is the version of EPUB that is in the Books app on my Mac, which I'm showing. And you can see it has all the artwork. It has the poem. It's got a table of contents up in the beginning that's clickable. So you can go to the Deadlands if you want to see the Deadlands. And why EPUB matters... Where's the cool map? It's got the cool maps in here.
EPUB matters because an EPUB version can be read on pretty much any device that has an e-book reader. So your phone, your tablet, your computer, it scales because it's HTML underneath the hood. It scales to whatever device you are reading it on. You can bump the font size up, you can change the view, but it's all self-contained in a compressed yet
no DRM unencrypted version of the book that you can move to various devices and view on various devices. And that way you have a version of, I don't have my phone around here, but you have a version, a version of city of arches that you can put on your phone and read directly off, read directly off of your phone and scales to your phone. I create EPUB versions of pretty, pretty much every book.
I haven't done it for the companion. Because The Companion has so many tables that it was going to take too much work. But I've done it for every other book. I have an EPUB version of it so that we have a version that's more accessible for people who have trouble seeing or are blind. These work really well with e-book readers so that you can have them read aloud as well.
So that is the EPUB version of the book. And that will be coming out this week as well. But that's not all. I also have it in Markdown. So right here, I have Obsidian.
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Chapter 3: What are the new formats for the City of Arches?
So this world has now been alive for a while now, and it's really great to see it come together. And I can't wait till I've got a hardcover physical version of this book in my hand. But I also think that being able to deliver both the physical version and all of these digital versions mean a lot to me. So that's the City of Arches. Current update on the City of Arches.
Paul Hughes updated his Monster Manual 2024 in a business card. He found a little error in his Excel spreadsheet, which happens from time to time. And good on Paul. He updated it. And he's got a new sort of the new math of what he says is the benchmark. for monsters.
Like if you notice, many people have, that the D&D 2024 books do not include a monster stat by challenge rating list like the D&D 2014 Dungeon Masters guy did. So Paul said, well, I'm going to make one. Not only did he, he also released All of this under Creative Commons attribution license, which means that you can use this in published works.
All you have to do is attribute it as a Creative Commons license to Paul Hughes, which is great. So he now has released this updated list of monster stats by challenge rating. So you can pick a challenge rating 10. You know what their AC is. You know what hit points they might have. You know how many attacks they have or their attack bonus damage and so on. And you can you can fill that out.
So really cool analysis that he did. Paul's analysis on monster math is always something I'm very excited about. One thing that he learned, and there was the other update, I forget who wrote the other one, is that legendary monsters, their damage is starting to scale up much higher.
Some folks in our Sly Flourish Discord server noticed that that mostly seems to be that the math still follows the math of the original D&D 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide monster building rules. Only legendary resistances no longer affects the challenge rating of the monster.
In other words, if a monster has legendary resistance, it doesn't increase their challenge rating by those resistances, which means those monsters typically can do more damage at their challenge rating, which is why you've seen Tom Dunn was the one who did the... Thank you, Scipio.
Tom Dunn did the other the other one that really noticed that legendary monsters seem to have a spike in damage over normal monsters. And that tends to be because they no longer count legendary resistances as something that should affect challenge rating, which I think is smart because boss monsters, in my opinion, need help.
So Paul has his math here and he has like on a business card so you can do the equations. He also has a table that you can view and both of those are released under a Creative Commons license so you can use those and work.
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Chapter 4: What changes did Paul Hughes make to the Monster Manual 2024?
right challenge rating and the more linear bounded accuracy of fifth edition means you don't necessarily need to have that many because creatures now can fulfill different roles with the same stat block we will look at my favorite the cult fanatic i think we'll look at a veteran Warrior veteran. So we're going to look at the warrior veteran. The warrior veteran is a, is a CR three.
I really love CR two and three monsters. And I like them in particular because they can serve so many different roles. A single warrior veteran can be the equivalent of a solo monster against level two and level three characters. If you have like five level two characters or three level three characters, a single veteran is actually a pretty good dangerous threat. Right. It hits hard.
It's got the parry attacks. It's got kind of things that can make it stand on its own. So you could actually throw a veteran up against a group of level two characters and it can hold its own against a whole group of level two characters. But also at roughly, it can act as sort of the elite role when the characters are roughly fourth level, right?
Two veterans is actually a pretty good threat against fourth level characters or even fifth level characters. You know, you can have basically one veteran for every two characters at like fourth and fifth level. Then once the characters are like sixth or seventh level, now you can have one veteran per character and it's a really good threat.
That roughly equivalent, like a CR3 is roughly equivalent to a sixth level character. So that means that you can have one veteran per character, and that's a really tough fight. And then later on, when you get to 12th, 13th, 14th level, well, now you can have multiple veterans per character, and they're still a threat because they still hit pretty hard. They still do a fair bit of damage.
They still have enough hit points to withstand a couple of blasts. So what it means, one of the things that challenge rating does is it means you really only need one stat block and it can fulfill a whole lot of different roles across the entire level spread. So that's one of the things that challenge rating does, that even though it's this really abstract concept, still has a big advantage.
The other stat block I love, although I don't really love the D&D 2024 version as much, is the cult fanatic. The cultist fanatic is a CR2. So again, one of the reasons I like cultist fanatics is that they do a lot of interesting things, which means as a boss, I've run cult fanatics as bosses for first level characters, and they are really dangerous boss for first level characters.
They're a decent boss, a decent single solo monster for second level characters. At fourth level, you can run basically two cult fanatics against a group of fourth level characters, and that's a pretty good fight. Against sixth and seventh level, you can run multiple cultist fanatics, usually one per character, and that works about right. And then they can turn into minions later.
You can run dozens of cult fanatics. One thing I wish the stat block for the cult fanatic did, though, was make it easier to run multiple cult fanatics at the same time. Unfortunately, the way they work here, they are too bound around using things like spirit weapon, and then if you have to track spirit weapon on... If you have 12 cult fanatics, tracking 12 spirit weapons is kind of a pain.
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Chapter 5: How does the challenge rating system work in D&D?
But you want to have that benchmark in mind. And in this case, like the bandits are CR4 or CR1 quarters, I think. So you add a bunch of bandits. Are they CR1 8? I think bandits might be CR1 8. Let's take a look. Bandits are CR 1.8. So that means I can have six bandits and it's not even one challenge rating. We round that up to one. So all the six bandits are challenge rating one.
The veterans we saw are CR 3. So if I have two veterans, that's six CRs for the veterans and then we'll add one CR for the bandits. So that's seven total challenge ratings. Is that going to be hard for my characters? I don't know. Right. So I need to figure out that that amount. Now, I could have done it through the budget stuff, through the experience points they get and all that.
Or I could just measure the challenge rating. So what the encounter lazy encounter benchmark lets me do is it tells me, hey, if I add up all of the total challenge ratings of the monsters. that are gonna be in this battle, is that in the red? Is that gonna be dangerous? Could that be a real threat to the characters? Or is it gonna be okay? Or is it gonna be really easy?
And I don't really have to change it based on that. It's just giving me information. It's just letting me know. So how do you calculate the lazy encounter benchmark? I have a single sentence that you can memorize that will help you understand that threat. And the sentence is, an encounter may be deadly
If the sum total of monster challenge ratings is greater than one fourth of the total of character levels or one half of those character levels, if they're fifth level or above. That's the lazy encounter benchmark. Some people say, however, what about as a single monster? So there's a little augment that we have to add to this if they're fighting a really big monster.
And the big monster one is a single monster might be deadly if its challenge rating is greater than the average level of the characters or greater than one fifth of the average character levels if the characters are fifth level or above.
That gets into that, like, if the characters are fifth, then even a single CR5 monster is not going to be much of a threat because of the extra action economy they get. But here's an easier way to calculate the encounter benchmark. Like, those sentences all work. I have to change this part. Oh, I can't change it because it's on the web. It's not equals to the character level.
It's greater than the character levels. So there's an easier way to handle this because that sentence can get a little complicated, right? I have to kind of think about it a lot. So here's an easier way to do it. And an easier way to do it is when you're doing your prep, you write down the total of all character levels. So if you have five fifth level characters, you write 25 down.
You add them all together, add all the character levels together, and you get 25. If you have four sixth level characters, that's 24, right? 6, 12, 18, 24, yeah, 24. So you write that number down. Then if they're fourth level or below, you divide that number by four. right? So if I have, again, we'll go with third level, I have five third level characters, right? So that's three times five is 15.
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Chapter 6: Why is challenge rating considered problematic?
If it's like, oh, if you just want to know whether or not a battle is going to be dangerous or not, the benchmark is there to tell you that. The encounter building system for D&D 2024 isn't really there to tell you, hey, a battle may be difficult. It's really there to help you build a difficult battle. And that, I think, is a different approach that it takes.
So that's really the whole deep dive of challenge rating. In the end, I would say keep in mind that challenge rating is an abstract measure that compares one monster to another and can help you define custom monsters by looking at what other monsters exist at a given challenge rating.
I think the best value of challenge rating is using them to create a lazy encounter benchmark to give you a rough gauge of whether or not an encounter is going to be deadly by measuring all the sum total of character levels to the sum total of monster challenge ratings, recognizing you divide it by four.
If the character you divide the sum total character levels by four, if their first or fourth level or by two, if their fifth level and above. And that generally speaking, no monster, a single monster may be difficult to deadly for a group if its challenge rating is higher than the character levels from first to four or higher than one and a half times character levels from fifth level and above.
You can find a link to a detailed description of the Lazy Encounter Benchmark in the show notes. And I still, even now, after seeing everything that's come out, I think the Lazy Encounter Benchmark is a good, solid, easy way to keep track of your monster difficulty and your combat encounters. Over on the Sly Flourish Patreon, we have the Sly Flourish Patreon Q&A.
Patrons can ask any RPG-related question one time per month. I answer those questions over there every Friday. Some of those questions I bring here so that we can talk about them here on the show. Fergus E. says, I recently bought your book, Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, and I'm through the first section detailing the steps. Sorry, I read slowly and I don't have much free time.
Remember, you can skim read that book. Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master is intended to be skim read. So you can go there. If you read the intro, the intro tells you how to read this book in like five minutes. It's really designed to be read very quickly. I love it so far, but I'm running into a problem.
I'm starting a campaign set in a modern day earth, much like our own, and I'm having trouble having a hard time coming up with fantasy locations. Sure, there are great landmarks, both natural and man-made, but they aren't exactly the most widely spread things in the wide world because otherwise they wouldn't be fantastic.
And the PCs aren't always going to be at the summit of Mount Everest or the Great Coliseum. How do I integrate fantastic locations into a real-world type setting without constantly making up fictional places that might ruin the immersion? Am I thinking too big here? You might be thinking too big. A fantastic location, you could also kind of just call that a unique location.
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