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The people who hadn't played D&D before weren't D&D designers or editors, they worked elsewhere in the company.

I'd just like to state for the record that I wasn't in distress and pain because I'd rolled the dice poorly. I was in distress and pain because I'd punched the wall after rolling poorly, and damned near broke my knuckles. This was in a situation where all I needed on a die roll was anything but...

Not a bad option at all. These kinds of calls are hard to make when you're in the middle of a daily scramble to hit your word outputs. WotC originally wanted two 128-page books. Wolf wisely negotiated them down to 96 (and I agreed with his decision), because the deadlines were too tight to...

Lots of good ideas here. Our outline for this adventure was way too big to fit in 96 pages. Some chapters were culled entirely while others, like this one, had to be shorter than we liked. Two factors weighed heaviest in that decision. First, no matter how we staged the encounter, it would...

Exactly. At least, it would be useful to a statistics geek like me. Steve

I agree on all counts. The DMG's CR guidelines do seem to produce tougher monsters (or lower final CRs), but I haven't applied that system to enough monsters from the MM to generate a statistically significant amount of data. (If someone has and posted it online, I'd love to see it; it would...

I don't recall whether anyone pointed this out yet in the thread, but it's also important to remember how the DMG defines a deadly encounter. It doesn't mean "expect a TPK, or a near-TPK." It means one, possibly more, PCs are likely (not guaranteed) to die -- which in 5E, might only mean they...

But again, no amount of math is going to be a fix-all answer to this question. Here's an anecdote from a campaign we wrapped up a few months ago. A group of five 7th-level PCs stumbled into the lair of a CR 15 mummy lord and inadvertently set him loose. They were completely unprepared to face a...

I prefer to use monsters straight from the books as much as possible, because it's easier that way and I'm lazy. I just recognize that what the MM calls CR 8 probably is closer to CR 7 or 6 in practice. The easiest, one-stop solution would be to redesign the XP Thresholds table to take into...

From what I've seen, the "XP Thresholds by Character Level" table is pretty well constructed from a mathematical standpoint. The problem arises because so many monsters in the MM were given CRs that are too high. If every monster truly was as tough as its CR says it is, then the XP Thresholds...

A single book is less expensive to produce than multiple booklets with separate map folders, and substantially less expensive than anything that goes into a box. Those classic AD&D boxed sets came to the TSR building from the printer in separate pieces. TSR had an assembly department where...

I've also had a CR 15 mummy lord humiliated by level 7 characters. It doesn't matter how many cool abilities it has (and it does have some doozies), 97 hit points + vulnerability to fire means it's going down hard. Nowhere near a CR 15 challenge. Steve

A caution to readers -- the article contains at least one spoiler for anyone who's planning to be a player in this adventure. Read at your own risk. Steve

I know how arduous it is and I totally feel for you, Morrrus, but at the same time, this is the sort of thing I love doing. When I miss a deadline, it's often because I spent too much time on research (because I was having so much fun) and was late getting around to the actual writing. In...

Yeah, those numbers don't make sense. Five years at an average 9% growth puts you at one-and-a-half times where you started, not double. You'd need 15% growth annually to double in five years. Either someone doesn't know their math (often the case) or is doing a bad job of putting it into words...

In the great film The Wind and the Lion, when an American diplomat complains that hauling a pair of lions across a hundred miles of trackless desert as a gift for the Sultan of Morocco "wasn't easy," the Sultan's servant replies, "the ease of others is not the concern of the Sultan." I expect...

Gotta disagree at least in part, Dalsgaard. I've worked as a full-time employee and as a contractor, for employers that I knew valued me and would do their best to keep me on the payroll and for employers where I knew I was a disposable cog. Now, this is purely anecdotal, but it's based on many...

Mark Painter is/was one of just three TSR veterans still working at Wizards. I haven't heard independent confirmation of this layoff rumor yet, but I've heard enough to believe that it's probably true. All of the remaining TSR vets (including Mark) work on graphics, and none of them works...

But Hasbro was a manufacturing specialist, one of the top in its field. They had people who know every facet of game manufacturing inside and out. Very little of the company was dedicated to designing games; the vast majority of it was in place to manufacture and sell games. It is surprising (to...

Over the last year, I've deconstructed the MM down to its foundations and completely statted or evaluated CRs for over 400 monsters converted from d20 and S&W. The DMG section on creating monsters is 6.5 pages of text plus 2.5 pages of tables, so it's not simple or concise -- except by...