6
\$\begingroup\$

This is coming out of this question asking for a check on the CR calculation of a pair of homebrew monsters and the subsequent encounter with them. I retagged it from to , but was met with some disagreement.

The bulk of questions are of the kind "is this (sub)class/race/feat/etc balanced?". However, there are a number of others which are "is the CR/price/rarity of my monster/magic item/etc. correct?". From my point of view these are also a kind of review of magic items and requires the same expertise, ie. evaluating the power of a presented piece of content within the system.

So, are (or should) questions asking for (a check on) CR calculations of homebrew monsters (or equivalents) be tagged as ?

(If not this should perhaps be reflected is the already quite long tag description of )


Related reading: Do we want a [homebrew-review] tag separate from the [homebrew] tag?

\$\endgroup\$

1 Answer 1

7
\$\begingroup\$

Yes, questions about CR calculations should be questions; asking whether something is balanced is sufficiently similar to asking when something would be balanced

The current description of the homebrew-review tag is as follows:

For questions about evaluating the viability of new rules content homebrewed for an existing system. This tag should be used when locally-created, non-published content is at the heart of the question. [...]

Note that questions asking "what should be the CR of X monster" aren't about the viability of a new rule, they are asking for a determination of where to place something on the CR scale. Most of the questions include some form of the word "balance" (basically a synonym of viability) but here is a list of questions that do not contain "balance/balanced", and are neither closed nor duplicates. There are only 44 of these out of the 177 total questions which are neither closed nor duplicates. Here are some examples from the list put into some categories:

About spell level:

About item rarity:

About item pricing:

About monster CR:

Other:

It is pretty clear that many of these questions aren't about the viability of homebrew content, but instead are about where to place homebrew content on a particular scale such as CR, pricing, rarity, and spell level. Seeing as how these are 18/177 or about 10% of the question variety found under this tag, it is no insignificant number.

Though this is only the precedence thus far I do believe that "Where do I put this?" questions should be tagged with .


The skill sets required to answer such questions are sufficiently similar to those required to answer other questions

I believe this to be the case because they are often very similar to or even already a common part of the more obviously questions. For example, say a question is asking whether a spell is balanced, and it has a given level. A good answer does not simply say whether something is balanced or not, but will explain why and suggest ways to balance the spell, including changing the originally proposed level.

Somebody who provides good answers to questions about if something is balanced can also provide good answers to questions about when something would be balanced.*


The two type of questions ask effectively the same things

The usual answer is as follows:

This content is/isn't balanced, here are the reasons (and thus also suggestions for fixing it.)

And with these sorts of "Where do I put my homebrew content on scale X?" questions, an answer goes as follows:

This content is balanced if you put it here (basically, if you apply this fix)

I find that asking whether something is balanced is near-identical to asking when something would be balanced and so the tag is correctly used on both sorts of questions.


Though the tag description doesn't particularly suggest questions of the form "Where on this scale should I put this homebrew material?" are on-topic for the tag, I believe such questions correctly have this tag. The skill sets required are sufficiently similar to warrant doing so.

That said I'm unfortunately not sure how to update the tag description given that it has only 19 free characters left.

\$\endgroup\$
6
  • \$\begingroup\$ Precedence/example/fraction might not be the best basis for this because we are nowhere close to done retagging [homebrew-review] questions and we're not quite set on which to retag. Also, the tag description can (and should) be changed if we decide one way or the other (which is the intent of is this discussion). \$\endgroup\$
    – Someone_Evil Mod
    Nov 14, 2019 at 17:02
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Someone_Evil Hopefully that's better now \$\endgroup\$ Nov 14, 2019 at 17:23
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ I like the write up. One side note about uses of CR - XP gained for defeating the monster can be an important component and directly impacts the game by determining how quickly the characters gain access to new abilities. \$\endgroup\$
    – Avilyn
    Nov 14, 2019 at 17:34
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Avilyn Oh that's a good point. I'm debating just removing the bit about countering claims that CR is less important, I'm unsure people are actually saying that in the first place so it may just be well agreed that it does in fact matter. Yeah I think I'll remove it for now, but thank you! \$\endgroup\$ Nov 14, 2019 at 17:36
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ If the expertise is the same and there’s no distinction, then shouldn’t [cr-calculation] be made a synonym of [homebrew-review]? Otherwise it’s just a tag tax. (Possibly also [pricing] then.) \$\endgroup\$ Nov 14, 2019 at 17:50
  • \$\begingroup\$ @sevensideddie I've changed a bit of my answer to hopefully account for that. I don't think expertise is the only (or most) important thing here \$\endgroup\$ Nov 14, 2019 at 18:01

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .