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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gimby" data-source="post: 4697325" data-attributes="member: 49875">I think the fine tuning has been overstated a little, but the point is that for encounter building guidelines to be of any use, its got to be possible to predict the capabilities of the party.  A simple example would be two high level 3e parties, say 17th.  Both parties are built on the same point buy, have wealth spot on the wealth by level guidelines and access to the same splatbooks.  Party A consists of a Fighter, a Monk, a Paladin and a Soulknife.Party B consists of a Cleric, a Druid, a Wizard and an Artificer. Party A spent their wealth on Cloaks of the Manta Ray, Rings of Regeneration and Stone Horses.Party B spent their wealth on the Big 6 and Metamagic rods.  They also got the Artificer to make them so they effectively have twice as much.Any encounter that challenges Party B will splatter Party A in short order, conversely one that party A will find challenging will be steamrollered by Party B.  Now, if the players move tables such that the Soulknife and Druid swap parties, we have a different problem - the Druid will dominate Party A, while the Soulknife will barely contribute to party B.Now, if you are happy with tailoring encounters to your party and your players are happy with widely varying power within the party then thats great - you don't need to worry about inter- or intra-party balance and can make really any changes to the system that you want.  The point of the mathematical basis of the system is so that you can have encounter building guidelines, that its possible to design new classes and abilities that are in line with the old ones and to ensure that all characters and hence players remain relevant at the table at all times.  The more you diverge from the system assumptions, the harder these things are to maintain.If you do make the changes that have been suggested in this thread, the game won't suddenly stop working, any more than 3e somehow couldn't be used to run both Party A and Party B.  Its just that the DM will have to do more work to ensure that the encounters remain interesting, as now the encounter building system will not produce reliable results.  Even with the changes suggested however, I don't think the game would break that much - the core assumptions of +1/2 level to rolls and so on would remain, so the capabilites of the party would not be massively changed (particularly if you are generally using Str or Dex based classes in the first place - then it would hardly change at all).  I'd not expect as massive a divergence as would be seen between Party A and Party B for example.Predictible for the players? Yes, I agree.  It should be predictable for the DM however, so that you can plan a climactic battle and not have it ended anticlimactically in the first round, or so you don't accidently TPK your party on what was meant to be a filler fight.  -I think one thing to note about balance arguements is that you'll still get them no matter how close you get - from WoW for example, where the difference between best and worst is of the order of 10% or so to Exalted, where one character can be orders of magnitude more capable than another.  The changes discussed here are likely to cause a variation of somewhat less than 20% or so in capability, so its robuster than it sounds.</blockquote>

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