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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 8079859" data-attributes="member: 8461">What I took away from this article is that "balance" - which is already a nebulous term, and often defined in terms of goals rather than processes - was always going to be difficult to achieve when designing combat encounters for D&D Third Edition.That's not really surprising, of course. Simulationism has always leaned hard toward the "anything can be attempted" aspect of role-playing games, whereas gamism tends to be more comfortable with limiting options in the name of standardization. Both have their pros and cons: simulationism's greater freedom allows for a wider range of play, but makes fewer guarantees about the results, whereas gamism will either use a single (or small group) of mechanics to measure all such non-standard actions or simply disallow them altogether. It's <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/very-long-combat-as-sport-vs-combat-as-war-a-key-difference-in-d-d-play-styles.317715/" target="_blank">combat as war vs. combat as sport</a>, in other words.D&D Third Edition, to my mind, tried to have its cake and eat it too...and to a surprisingly large degree, succeeded. Dungeons & Dragons has always had firm roots in simulationism, tracing back to its wargame heritage, and while it's always had rules and restrictions, Third Edition felt like the first time that gamism wasn't treated as a secondary concern. But neither was simulationism critically compromised for it (the way I and a lot of other gamers felt that it was in Fourth Edition).Instead, an uneasy truce was struck, as standards were set even as the the methods for breaking them remained firmly within the game, easily found by those who went looking for them (and oftentimes stumbled onto accidentally). If someone wanted to break the game, they often didn't have much trouble doing it. But players who weren't interested in optimization or system mastery could still be effective and make a contribution without having to fight the rules to do so. It was, to my mind, probably the best compromise that could be made under a system that gave so many options and so much overall power to the PCs.So in other words, good on you for that, Mr. Tweet. You and Mr. Finch both. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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