D&D's Terrible CR vs Overly Balanced Encounters
D&D's Terrible CR vs Overly Balanced Encounters
If D&D's CR is notorious for being bad and having nothing but perfectly balanced encounters is long term boring, why not just stick to CR religiously and let the two problems cancel each other out?
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In my experience, having stuck with CR religiously, you find yourself with tense, anyone-could-die sessions - against a pack of wolves from a random encounter. And then you have easy, bring it home encounters - against the arc's big bad. It takes control of the fight's narrative stakes out of the DM's hands, and makes it more-or-less random.
I want to stress that it was fun to play this way, but eventually myself and my players longed for more dramatic final encounters, and so I had to homebrew creatures.