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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The_Furious_Puffin" data-source="post: 6842100" data-attributes="member: 11831">Yeah, I know. Two people have done recuts of the 5E encounter design rules that I think are a lot better:<a href="http://slyflourish.com/5e_encounter_building.html" target="_blank">http://slyflourish.com/5e_encounter_building.html</a> <-- fast and generic solution to A. <a href="https://songoftheblade.wordpress.com/2015/09/09/improved-monster-stats-table-for-dd-5th-edition/" target="_blank">https://songoftheblade.wordpress.com/2015/09/09/improved-monster-stats-table-for-dd-5th-edition/</a> <-- solves both problems but requires restats of monsters. Sandbox games work obviously, I've run a game like this in 3.5. It's really tricky to do without fudging imho because the communication of the difficulty of an encounter prior to arriving at the encounter can be imperfect, and a modest difference in party level can result in it flipping from cakewalk to TPK. Fudging is an unsatisfactory solution for drama reasons, and if you dynamically readjust the encounters based on when the PCs arrive... well you need to do all that stuff ANYWAY except now you need to do it in 3 minutes while setting up. This is compounded though in 5E because it's much harder to bake the 6-8 encounter adventuring workday into the structure of the game.  Don't get me wrong. I like combat. If I didn't want combat, I'd play another game. The only issue though is if you're publishing a combat heavy game the biggest single draw on my time in preparation is designing combats (natch). If you want me to do this, your tooling to support the DM (me!) in designing and running combat heavy adventures better work. I think 5E has some significant gaps in this tooling. The discussion thread I was responding to can be loosely summarised as follows:A) It's not constructive telling me to use 6-8 encounters a day when the published adventures don't do this. B) Why not design your own adventures, that's easyC) I added the point that designing your own adventures is not super easy if you plan your encounters in a structured manner and don't fudge. Yes, there are published adventures. That does (hopefully, though, see our discussion about HoTDQ) solve the encounter balance problem, but brings the 'class balance is broken because the resource schedule is not adhered to in published adventures and lots of people's actual games' back to the fore.</blockquote>

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