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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Justin Bacon" data-source="post: 2739249" data-attributes="member: 3795">You've basically got two things going on here:1. People misuse the tools that the designers of 3rd Edition gave them and then blame the game for it. DMs skim through the DMG, pick up on the basic concept of "CR/EL = party level = balanced encounter" and then slavishly work to make every encounter a perfectly balanced encounter... despite the fact that the DMG specifically tells you not to do that.But there's absolutely no need to do that. The CR/EL system is there, as you say, to provide a rough idea of whether or not an encounter is going to be simple, challenging, difficult, or virtualy impossible for a given party to accomplish. But that doesn't mean that you should never have a simple or a virtually impossible encounter happen in your game.Now, as a DM, I'm not going to setup a situation in which a beholder is likely to ambush a 3rd level party. But I have been known to roll a beholder as a random encounter and terrify a group of 3rd level PCs when they spot it floating by a few thousand yards away in the Ironwood Forest.And, on the other end of the scale, one of the best encounters I ever ran involved a group of mid-level characters rampaging through a tribe of gutter goblins that didn't pose any kind of threat at all (largely due to the set-up and surrounding circumstances).Not everyone misuses the CR/EL system in this fashion, of course. Necromancer Games tends to design good, solid location-based adventures which present a realistic environment -- with some encounters that will be easy and some that will be difficult, depending on when exactly the PCs encounter them.2. The rules in 3rd Edition are just too darn good for some people to resist. And like a fat man blaming the sugary treats for his inability to resist them, some people choose to blame the rules for being there.Take skills for example. Yes, almost every skill has detailed support explaining how to set very accurate DCs for the skill. That's a great resource that you can tap as a DM. But there's nothing stopping you, when you're just trying to adjudicate quickly, simply setting a DC based on your gut instinct of how difficult a task is... just like you would in any game system.And then you've got the combat rules for specific situations -- like trying to charge at someone and push them back. Those are great rules to have when the situation comes up. Otherwise, as a DM, you'd be left with your dick flapping in the wind triyng to adjudicate some kind of ad hoc mechanic to figure out whether or not Frank the Fighter can shove his way past the hobgoblin blocking the only door out of the room. (And you'd probably end up with some sort of opposed Strength check provoking an attack of opportunity that looks an awful lot like the system they've codified.) These rules aren't complicated and you don't have to memorize them: You just have to be barely aware of their existence so that, like the detailed guidelines of skill DCs, you can tap them when you need them.Finally, let me say that there were only three ways to explain people who claim that 1st and 2nd Edition had fewer rules than 3rd Edition:(1) They are ignorant of the previous editions;(2) They are filthy liars; or(3) They, like the rest of us, ignored massive swaths of the rulebooks because they were nonsensical, pointless, and even contradictory. As a result, they've simply forgotten that those rules ever existed.I sat down with my 1st Edition PHB a couple days ago and found myself simply laughing at the number of completely nutso, oddball, random rules strewn recklessly around the pages.Justin Alexander Bacon<a href="http://www.thealexandrian.net" target="_blank">http://www.thealexandrian.net</a></blockquote>

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