Default monster stats, encounters & balance

[Legacy_HipMaestro]

               I am interested in understanding how creatures spawned via encounter are customized to match the level of the party which triggers it.  Up to this point, all we have done is make/modify any default creature to a CR suitable for an anticipated PC level at a specific point in an adventure.  It works okay, usually, but is a lot of manual work (each creature must be customized one-at-a-time), guessing (at the likely PC level) and worst of all... predictable.

When encounters are selected to draw from the default palette, are the stats & CR of each creature static?  For all the creatures I've checked so far, there is no default auto-leveling prescribed so that would seem to infer that default encounters would need to select from creature categories with more advanced stats and CR rather than level up the versions on the palette if they were to keep pace with the party level.

Is this how it normally works or is there some scripting that must be added to get the challenge to increase automatically with the advancement of the party members?

If you guys have a link to a tutorial that answers these questions, that's fine and would save some typing, eh?

TIA
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Shadooow]

               i dont know the exact behavior but from what i know:
- encounter difficulty is taken into account somehow, probably when easy is set nothing is spawned to a high lvl PC etc.
- creatures in encounter are taken by their CR - if you have a two creatures with different CR, either you get X creatures A with CR 10 or X creatures B with CR 11
- if CR is the same, creatures are chosen randomly
- if the unique flag is checked, the chosen creature will be chosen without taking CR into account
- it seems that player lvl is determined from all creatures in party in certain distance like 10M from PC triggering encounter
               
               

               

                     Modifié par ShaDoOoW, 19 février 2012 - 05:26 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_eeriegeek]

               Also look at encdifficulty.2da. It has a weighting factor for the various encounter levels that you an use to adjust the overall difficulty of spawns. But all the attribute adjusters I've heard of were handled by custom code in the OnSpawn event.