billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
AD&D just sort of tossed you in the shark tank and let you swim or not. Some people got eaten, the rest have forgotten that they were ever in that boat. I'm not real sure what sort of advice 3.x DMGs gave there since I have never read them, but I suspect it was pretty much similar to the AD&D advice, not much at all.
So now we have this weird perception that 4e is only good for making these 'sporting encounters' where everything is always balanced in a certain way, and the best tools in the game gather dust or at least everyone is just using their nice 3 axis milling machine as a drill press. lol.
I'd say that 4e set that tone. The 4e DMG spends a lot of effort on the mechanical systems of balancing the encounters, spending an XP budget, creating interesting terrain, but it spends only a couple pages on varying the difficulty of encounters. And even then, the spread is still narrow.
If you haven't read 3e's advice, I suggest you look into it. The 3e DMG deals with the ideas of status quo and tailored encounters, includes a wider spread of encounter difficulties, discusses factors that may serve to make an encounter more or less difficult depending on character mix, terrain, and a variety of other factors. On the XP tables, there is a wide range of PC levels and NPC CRs. Taken together, I think 3e gives off a different tone than 4e in mixing up encounter difficulty variables.
That said, you still had a lot of people coming away with the impression that 3e was also about setting up sporting encounters (give the gamers an inch of a CR system and they try to make it go yards...) or at least encounters that didn't vary in difficulty much from the party's level. It's like everyone read about tailored encounter but skipped the bit on status quo ones. With 4e's initial tone, I don't see how it could have escaped the same impression. It didn't even work as hard as 3e did to escape it.