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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 3113421" data-attributes="member: 22779">Something that confuses me greatly is the misuse of the term balance in the game by people.  Balance is a specific element of game design and applies to specific parts of the game.  In particular it applies to <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Power level between classes</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Power level of magic items</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Power level of character elements like feats and treasure.</li> </ul>Balance does NOT apply to placing monsters and encounter design.  You can design encounters and have a reasonable expectation of how that encounter will play out BECAUSE of balanced design.  If the game was not balanced, with given classes having much more or less power than expectations, then you could not create generic encounters.To give an example.  I ran Tomb of Horrors pretty much as written with a 2e party using the Tome of Magic and Faiths and Avatars.  They blew past it like it was tissue paper.  The books had unbalanced my game so far that challenging encounters weren't even speed bumps.  Because the party had so many more options than a 1e party would have had, TOH was a joke.Now, running TOH in 3e would likely be the same, 3e characters being considerably more powerful.  However, because 3e is balanced (to a fairly decent degree), I can pick up a generic module like the World's Largest Dungeon, allow the players to use pretty much any supplement and still challenge the heck out of them.  Even though, as a DM, I'm limited entirely to the SRD (with a few fudges), I still kill one PC every 4 sessions.</blockquote>

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