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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 9229081" data-attributes="member: 6670763">As I see it, wealth by level and challenge rating are all suggestions by the designers of the system that are meant to provide guidance for the kind of adventures they assumed would be played.Unfortunately, I was never able to infer the kind of play style they had in mind from the PHB and the DMG, and it seems pretty clear that the writer of the later splatbooks didn't concern themselves with any of that either.To be completely blunt, I don't believe in balance. Because I don't believe that the GM should plot out which scenes are going to take place in the campaign, how the scenes play out, and what their outcome should be. What I am looking for in an RPG is that the GM sets up locations and populates them, and that it is up to the players to judge what they see, compare it to the capabilities they have, and make a decision how they want to interact with it.I don't know what the party will get into a fight with. I don't know the composition of the party that would be in that encounter before the fight happens. I do not need the party to get a complete victor without casualties. And I don't need the party to be in any specific shape to go into further fights after that.If the party gets into a fight with something that beats them up, forces them to retreat, takes them prisoner, or kills some of them, then that's what the players will have to deal with in the next scene. All that I need for the campaign to work is that the players don't get squashed before they have time to realize that they are outmatched or in serious danger and make an attempt to save themselves.Challenge ratings help me to narrow down what pool of creatures I might draw from to populate a location and which ones I can ignore right away because there won't be much hope for the players to make an escape. I still have to read the whole creature description to get a feeling for how much telegraphing I need to do to avoid the players being completely surprised when they when they get a mighty smack in the face.If the PCs have lower stats than some number cruncher once crunched, this only means to me that the party will have a slightly lower performance in combats overall. This means that the players will have to progress a bit slower and more cautious, but that would be in comparison to another hypothetical campaign that never got to be played.</blockquote>

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