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The First Person To Ever Play A Wizard: A Short Clip
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7704386" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>There are no sections in the 4e DMG that really fit what you describe here.</p><p></p><p>The advice in the 4e DMG is primarily descriptive - eg it tells you that encounters of a level more than two greater than the PCs will typically be hard, and will "really test the characters’ resources, and might force them to take an extended rest at the end" (p 104; see also pp 56-57). The experience of most 4e GMs that I've discussed the issue with is that these predictions are pretty accurate at Heroic Tier, but that at Paragon, and even moreso at Epic, you need to increase the level gap to really push the players to the extent suggested in the quoted passage. (I am currently running an upper-Epicl 4e campaign. To really push the players in the way described, I would use an encounter of level +8, ie 38th level for my 30th level PCs.)</p><p></p><p>Those pages in the 4e DMG also have some normative advice, but it is much more banal than what you describe:</p><p></p><p style="margin-left: 20px">It’s a good idea to vary the difficulty of your encounters over the course of an adventure . . .</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px">If every encounter gives the players a perfectly balanced challenge, the game can get stale. . . . </p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px">The majority of the encounters in an adventure should be moderate difficulty - challenging but not overwhelming . . .</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px">[M]ake sure to include about one [hard] encounter per character level. However, be careful of using high level soldiers and brutes in these encounters. Soldier monsters get really hard to hit when they’re five levels above the party, and brutes can do too much damage at that level.</p><p></p><p>I think the advice about mixing things up is sound - though I think that <em>story</em> and <em>mechanical</em> variations (eg differences of NPC motivation, of combat range and terrain, etc) are ultimately more significant for 4e GMing than differences of encounter level.</p><p></p><p>I think the advice about avoiding too many high level soldiers is also sound (the advice about brutes I think is useful at very low levels but then the issue becomes less important as the mechanical parameters and hence dynamics of the game change).</p><p></p><p>The advice about the "majority" of encounters is probably not sound - I think that, on the whole, more "hard" encounters make the game better - but that's my own experience. I suspect others might disagree.</p><p></p><p>But in any event, I really doubt that this advice has done much serious damage to many games. Whereas I suspect that it has been helpful to some GMs (whether new in general, or new to 4e). It's certainly not the first advice I've read about paying attention to the mechanical threat posed by monsters or NPCs with whom the PCs are likely to come into conflict, although in earlier such discussions (I'm thinking Moldvay Basic, Gygax's DMG, early White Dwarfs, and similar sources) the emphasis is often on balancing risk against reward against dungeon level. Because 4e doesn't use a concept of dungeon level, the advice has to be a bit different in its details. But I think it is pretty similar from a big picture point of view.</p><p></p><p>I'm not sure that the analogy to cooking really works, because I'm not sure that the main goal of RPGing is RPG design.</p><p></p><p>But anyway, I don't really follow your comment about "restrictions" - most Americans, for instance, I would guess are restricted to certain amounts of spices compared to the amounts that would be used by those whose cooking traditions originate in South Asia; and whether that's good or bad, I don't see quite how it relates to eating from a restaurant.</p><p></p><p>And even when it comes to home cooking - do you grow all your own vegetables? make your own pasta? Once I went to a colleague's place for dinner and the satay sauce came out of a jar.</p><p></p><p>Bringing it back to D&D - every time you build a dwarven fighter, or an elf F/MU, or write down +3 sword on your sheet, you're borrowing someone else's stuff. Borrowing stuff that was written and published more recently than the 1970s doesn't make it worse.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7704386, member: 42582"] There are no sections in the 4e DMG that really fit what you describe here. The advice in the 4e DMG is primarily descriptive - eg it tells you that encounters of a level more than two greater than the PCs will typically be hard, and will "really test the characters’ resources, and might force them to take an extended rest at the end" (p 104; see also pp 56-57). The experience of most 4e GMs that I've discussed the issue with is that these predictions are pretty accurate at Heroic Tier, but that at Paragon, and even moreso at Epic, you need to increase the level gap to really push the players to the extent suggested in the quoted passage. (I am currently running an upper-Epicl 4e campaign. To really push the players in the way described, I would use an encounter of level +8, ie 38th level for my 30th level PCs.) Those pages in the 4e DMG also have some normative advice, but it is much more banal than what you describe: [indent]It’s a good idea to vary the difficulty of your encounters over the course of an adventure . . . If every encounter gives the players a perfectly balanced challenge, the game can get stale. . . . The majority of the encounters in an adventure should be moderate difficulty - challenging but not overwhelming . . . [M]ake sure to include about one [hard] encounter per character level. However, be careful of using high level soldiers and brutes in these encounters. Soldier monsters get really hard to hit when they’re five levels above the party, and brutes can do too much damage at that level.[/indent] I think the advice about mixing things up is sound - though I think that [i]story[/i] and [i]mechanical[/i] variations (eg differences of NPC motivation, of combat range and terrain, etc) are ultimately more significant for 4e GMing than differences of encounter level. I think the advice about avoiding too many high level soldiers is also sound (the advice about brutes I think is useful at very low levels but then the issue becomes less important as the mechanical parameters and hence dynamics of the game change). The advice about the "majority" of encounters is probably not sound - I think that, on the whole, more "hard" encounters make the game better - but that's my own experience. I suspect others might disagree. But in any event, I really doubt that this advice has done much serious damage to many games. Whereas I suspect that it has been helpful to some GMs (whether new in general, or new to 4e). It's certainly not the first advice I've read about paying attention to the mechanical threat posed by monsters or NPCs with whom the PCs are likely to come into conflict, although in earlier such discussions (I'm thinking Moldvay Basic, Gygax's DMG, early White Dwarfs, and similar sources) the emphasis is often on balancing risk against reward against dungeon level. Because 4e doesn't use a concept of dungeon level, the advice has to be a bit different in its details. But I think it is pretty similar from a big picture point of view. I'm not sure that the analogy to cooking really works, because I'm not sure that the main goal of RPGing is RPG design. But anyway, I don't really follow your comment about "restrictions" - most Americans, for instance, I would guess are restricted to certain amounts of spices compared to the amounts that would be used by those whose cooking traditions originate in South Asia; and whether that's good or bad, I don't see quite how it relates to eating from a restaurant. And even when it comes to home cooking - do you grow all your own vegetables? make your own pasta? Once I went to a colleague's place for dinner and the satay sauce came out of a jar. Bringing it back to D&D - every time you build a dwarven fighter, or an elf F/MU, or write down +3 sword on your sheet, you're borrowing someone else's stuff. Borrowing stuff that was written and published more recently than the 1970s doesn't make it worse. [/QUOTE]
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