User:Kydo/PC-Built NPC CR

You may wish to present the players with a unique challenge by having them fight other adventurers, or even evil copies of themselves. However, there is no system in the core rules for estimating the CR of a PC for the purposes of balancing an encounter! This page is just me trying to calculate PC CR.

First, the CR of a single creature is compared to a party of 4-5 adventurers. Let's call that a party of 4.5 adventurers for math's purposes. The CR itself represents what level the party would need to be in order for that monster to be a challenge to them. Monsters with a CR below 1 need to be in groups in order to make up the difference. Since that is the case, a single adventurer should have approximately 2/9ths (22.2%) the power of a "full" party. So, for a rough estimate, we can just divide their level by 4.5. Now, obviously that'll get us some weird decimals, and it doesn't account for build optimization or class differences, but it should at least ballpark us.

1 = 0.222
2 = 0.444
3 = 0.667
4 = 0.889
5 = 1.111
6 = 1.333
7 = 1.556
8 = 1.778
9 = 2
10 = 2.222
11 = 2.444
12 = 2.667
13 = 2.889
14 = 3.111
15 = 3.333
16 = 3.556
17 = 3.778
18 = 4
19 = 4.222
20 = 4.444

There. So, according to that, a level 14 PC should present a medium challenge to 4-5 level 3 heroes.