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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SuStel" data-source="post: 3436359" data-attributes="member: 28997">It's a game. The challenge for the players is to "score" as many experience points as possible. The challenge for the referee is to make this as hard as possible for the players, but keep them coming back for more. That's what "game balance" used to refer to. If players have so much stuff and power that they don't need to go adventuring, it's too easy, and the players will get bored.That's what wandering monsters are for. The more time you waste in the dungeon, the more times you're going to run into wandering monsters. And wandering monsters almost never have anything worthwhile, so you want to avoid them as much as possible.You prefer a game where the players can be careless?And then there are referees who aren't so reasonable…That's player-empowerment. *shrug*Nonono. Those are two different things. A referee is not an arbiter of the rules. The rules are set down in a book; a referee is an arbiter of things not covered by the rules. This is a totally separate function from rules-alterer. In early D&D there were few rules you needed to alter to run things your own way. In d20 there are a whole bunch of rules you need to alter to make things work your way. Thus, the focus of the DM has changed over time from game-arbiter to rules-alterer and cruncher.You're seeing a lack of rules and assuming it means there's nothing to do. The AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide discusses in general terms what high-level adventuring in the planes of existence might be like. It is not like anything in the Manual of the Planes or anything like that. The idea was: once you reach name-level, you're going to have to take the game in your own direction, because by this time you're so powerful we can't keep you confined to the rulebook anymore. Travel to another plane of existence, say, the world of Boot Hill, and suddenly you're literally playing another game in the same campaign! There's no way they could make up rules for all that stuff. The planes of existence were the ultimate bend-your-game-your-own-way vehicle.The D&D Companion, Masters, and Immortals sets should be viewed as just one way to do these things. And they're just frameworks at that. If you've ever read the Immortals rules, you know that they're very, very open to interpretation. Literally anything can happen in them!</blockquote>

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