Can we take the fight to each of tens of thousands of shadows, every one of which can effortlessly evade us, any one of which is a match for our most competent fighters?

Signs point towards no.

Lyvina will bite her tongue, as she has nothing useful to say here.

Aren't shadows CR 3?

Shadows have the HP of your average CR 4 monster, the to-hit of a CR 5 monster (against unenchanted light armor) or a CR 8 monster (unenchanted heavy armor), or higher, and their damage never falls off.

And none of that is what makes them scary.

What does CR stand for? From context it sounds like a classification system for monsters you've fought?

Biting. Tongue.

....I'm not sulking, you're sulking.

"Challenge Rating."

It's a measure of how challenging something is to defeat. The scale is exponential, so a CR 3 creature is twice as dangerous as a CR 1 creature, a CR 5 twice as bad as CR 3, and so on.

I would have thought "how challenging something is to defeat" too contingent to lend itself to a tidy scale.

Do you find that it works well?

ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

...Why do you use it, then?

Choryon has never considered this question. The CR scale is just a background feature of reality, to her.

I just eyeball things, but not everyone's comfortable with that.

You want to make sure your character can kill anything plus or minus four CR of you.

...She doesn't want to get out into the weeds at this particular moment, but Kroft is going to make a note to herself to ask about "Challenge Ratings" later.

Odds are we're fighting at least one shadow at level 3. What's our plan for it?

I don't know how much help I'd be against one.

Megapope, you've been prepping magic weapon, right?

Natch.

I've got it too. Twice.

If we do have to fight a shadow at third level, let me tank the hits.

Barry's got a plan!

But does he plan to share it?

Not where the GM can hear.

There's no group I'd rather game with.

That's in the "important but not urgent" quadrant, also known as the quadrant we clear out later.