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No it's not. I still run and play D&D 4e. It's about as effective as D&D 5e's in my experience which is to say it's reliable most of the time, but not all the time. I don't know if it's rose-colored glasses or what, but a lot of D&D 4e folks just will not see the flaws in their preferred game...

As well, what player decisions impacted difficulty? Did they set up in a bad tactical position? Were they not working well as a team? Were they ground down from previous encounters? Did people hold back on fire against trolls to avoid being seen as "metagaming?" And on and on. This is a problem...

And that encounter difficulty system in D&D 4e isn't all that great either. Which perhaps underscores how difficult it is to make a tool that is reliable in all cases, and why some DM adjustments will always be necessary. As with 5e, I always look at the budget to check myself because the tool...

Effectively, everything's an attack in 4e. So if I throw a fireball at some monsters, I roll to hit against each of their Reflex defenses, but only roll one time for damage. A save in 4e is a thing that typically happens at the end of your turn when you have an ongoing effect/condition. If you...

What I really prefer are attacks directed at defenses rather than saving throws a la D&D 4e, with saving throws used to end ongoing effects. Which is probably "Middle Grade" in your definition? But I'll settle for "Modern."

As I stated in my very first post in the thread, the tool I use is telegraphing, which is employed for all challenges. Plus, we prepare for PCs getting in over their heads by having retreat/chase mechanics and are ready for PC death by having backup characters. As a result, I can be as...

As I've stated several times now, there are far too many variables to make it a very reliable tool. It's reliable enough, if a bit easy relative to experienced players as @robus mentioned. Considering how many monsters and combinations of different monsters a DM might use, plus...

Sorry, but I'm not obligated to defend a position I do not take. You'll have to have that argument with the person who puts adult red dragons into a cave then fails to telegraph it to the players by gating it behind an ability check. That's not me.

In my opinion, there are too many considerations involved to create an airtight system, including but not limited to, the players' decisions at the table which the designers can't possibly know. At best, we get something that's "close enough" which is what we have in my view.

For my part, I eyeball and measure. I know that the calculator might say a given encounter is Hard or Deadly - for those particular definitions listed in the DMG - but I also know the general capabilities of my players, so Deadly is probably no more than Hard and Hard is probably Medium. I...

That's a far cry in my view from taking the position that the "naturalistic view" or the passage in the PHB regarding dying and story are a "free pass to murder PCs" which is the comment where this tangent kicked off. The poster said that the PHB passage I quoted was "not a free pass to murder...

I did not say your post was irrelevant. I suggested it was criticizing a position that nobody in the thread has to my knowledge taken.

Obviously they exist, but it just seems odd to me for someone to raise them when nobody appears to have introduced that particular opinion in the discussion. I may have missed it though.

Some people enjoy games where the encounters are finely tuned for PCs of a particular level and player skill. Other people enjoy games where it varies sometimes into encounters that can't be resolved with brute force. Some people, like me, enjoy both. But the tools are there for judging...

I see the flaws in both, and the uses for both. Neither is strictly superior in my experience and a tool is only as good as its user. Or have we reached the part of these discussions where the usual handful of posters comes into the thread to criticize 5e but offer nothing for DMs to take away...

Eight years in with many different groups, I just don't see the problems you apparently see. And D&D 4e doesn't have CR and it isn't great either. I'm playing in a game tonight and we are just stomping these "balanced" encounters to bits. Sounds like the DM should just use it as a guide then...

If you want a perfect system, keep on looking. You got a long, hard road ahead of you. As I've said upthread, it works fine for most situations and most groups, but needs to be adjusted from time to time. (And encounter difficulty is modified by terrain, by the way, per the rules in the DMG. The...

Yes, I bake. But this isn't baking. It's cooking. The recipe is a starting place, to give you an idea of where you might end up, but you don't need to follow the recipe exactly to end up with a good dish. Strained metaphors aside, you'd have some work to do to prove it's a "failure of a...

It's not really so much an argument as it is a suggestion about potentially more productive courses of action as far as the discussion in this thread is concerned. As well, there's a separate forum for One D&D that will likely have more eyes on suggested changes, relatively speaking, than here...

I would not agree with the advice you've seen then. Eight years into playing, I think they're good enough, not always 100% accurate, with a greater chance of inaccuracy if the group has very experienced players with tactical acumen. For those groups - who are not the majority, surely - it's a...