Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Change Monster levels to their CR from the books?

Some of the Dragon's in the game are listed as "Level 4" or some such. This might give the wrong impression that if you're level 4 you'll be able to fight it and win.

Which is not the case.

Maybe make monster levels the same as the CR in the books?

Two Minotaurs and a Bulette would be a CR 9 fight, but you can win that fight without barrel cheese with your level 3/4 party. Also I’m gonna kill that dragon.

Yes, please... innovating a bit around the CR with monster abilities is fine, but D&D5 is much less freeform then say, 3.5 was with monster class levels and stuff, and you really shouldn't go willy nilly with the basic rules like that, especially when you have less experience with and feel for the power levels.

100% agree. They need to stick with the 5e core rules as much as possible. I don't mind them homebrewing here and there, but the core ruleset should be there.

Well, I found the bulette (or rather it found my characters) - listed as level 5 ......which absolutely tore apart my level 3 party. It's entrance alone killed 2, and each attack after killed another.
Stats and hit points were nothing to sneeze at either. Caereful combat (which has served me pretty well so far) completely nullified by being flattened and stomped upon from the get-go !!

Personally I don't mind shuffling stats around, especially taking into consideration the table in DMG (page 274), which I imagine Larian follows.
Besides Bulette is "level 5" in MM. As for the Bulette + 2 Minotaurs that's roughly triple the deadly treshold for the party. From my experience double the treshold is totally doable, even somewhat easy. With surprise, having high ground, and preparation it should be a challenging, but winable fight even on tabletop.

Retried, got run over again but this time the Bulette didn't stop to slaughter. I got further and did find the minotaurs too. That is a HUGE leap ability....
3rd time's a charm - dodged the Bulette, snuck past the minotaurs and found the village. Le phew.

A CR and a lvl are not the same though.

A CR3 creature alone would be a challenge for a lvl 3 party. Mind you circumstances like high ground or suprise can play a very big role in succes or failure.

My first/best example for how loosely Larian handles CR, and monsters in general, is the first possible battle after the crash. An intellect devourer is a CR7(!) creature, with 71 hit points and boat load of innate psionic abilities, that should shred a full 1st level party in one round, yet we can easy dispatch 3 of them without getting hit once, by employing a bit of stealth and high ground advantage... if that's the level of adherence to D&D rules we can expect for this game, than they could have stuck to der Divinity system. I mean, sure, you can always say those are new born creatures, a lesser variant or they are weakened from the crash... but what I smell here is distinct air of:

"Damn the rules, it's cool so we do it!" followed by a slight breeze of: "...only because we market something as the sequel to a beloved gaming series, doesn't mean we can't do whatever we want with it."

They need to adjust experience to match the CR from the books too. I killed a phase spider and got 5 experience, not the 700/4 for 175 I should have gotten from the 5e rules.

I ran into an Ogre that was labeled as level 1 with over 50 hit points.

Please, use the written rules as much as you can.

I'm not sure what class your main character was, but mine was a pathetic wizard who stupidly thought I might get away with picking more situational cantrips so when I went up against 3 intellect devourers with just a wizard on low ground and a trickery cleric it took me a couple of tries to get lucky and not have my shit pushed in, so I had the alternative situation in feeling like CR was skewed in such a way that it generally screwed me over, and when I got to the underdark the minotaurs and dwarves forced me to swap out gale who I liked more, because wizards were just not effective enough in combat to even begin to handle shit that really shoulda been higher than "level 4" according to CR

Dont know where you are getting your info from but an intellect devourer is most defenitly NOT a CR7 challenge. A quick google search gave me this: https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Intellect_devourer

Which shows a CR of 2. And the monster isent using its abilites. Which can be explained by the presence of the tadpols. Maybe they are just trying to disable us rather then kill us to prevent us from getting away.

Drow ranger - one shot, one kill per round from a hidden position on the ledge... they didn't even reach Shadowheart, who was standing on the ground floor as bait. Still, they each took about 10-15 or so damage to take down and awarded 10XP. Hardly a CR7 creature.



From the official 5e SRD... but I could get my books real quick, if you prefer.
https://www.5esrd.com/gamemastering...type/aberrations/intellect-devourer-3pp/

Can take a look.at the MM that ive got at home as well but fairly sure this is a dated version of its stats.

There is a fundamental mistake in how larian is handling level, HD and CR.

Ops, got me there, you are right... still, 3x CR2 monsters against 2 level 1 characters can be harsh.

I was wondering about this too.

The weakest goblins seem to be "level 2" with 10+ HP. Where's the horde of regular fodder gobbos that will reflect my progression through levels 1 to 4?

Wizards' "crowd control" seems to be about putting one enemy to sleep at a time. I would love to be able to drop 4 goblin archers with Sleep to make that spell slot feel useful. The dynamics are disappearing.

No worries it happens

Dident they die at that fight the first time they ttied to show it off? 🤣

To be completly fair though. Dying at lvl 1 in dnd can happen very easily. Once took a single crit on my dwarf pala in the first session. Only survived it becahse I was playing a dwarf and tbey take half of poison damage 🤣

Oh, yea, that happens... I stopped counting the 1st level wizards and sorcerers that died to a lucky goblin/kobold arrow or spear on the first night, looong ago.

Yeah you should look in your book because in the MM it is CR2.

You are so dead set in see in this game as an unfaithful sequel that you automatically see everything in the worse light and you WILL switch your position to maintain your belief that this game is not "really" BG3. So much so that when shown your position is wrong instead of going to the source you'd rather take some non official source because it agrees with you.