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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3819121" data-attributes="member: 4937">Dr. Awkward: I find your responce to be internally contridictory, which I suppose is a natural result of wanting to have your cake and eat it to.On the one hand you admit that 1e fights were easy and you want to recapture that feel, yet you say that you also want them to be challenging.  How can they be both?  Either they are challenging or they are not.  I don't think we every really had 'good old days' where an encounter with 15 orcs was challenging beyond the levels that they are challenging now.  As I said, and you agreed, in 1e - pretty much as soon as your front line could afford plate mail - mooks could be faced by the dozen because of thier low chances to hit and low average damage (no strength bonuses).  In all my time playing 1e, I don't think I can ever recall losing a PC to be overwhelmed by mooks, nor do I ever recall killing a PC with hordes of mooks except those that were 1st level.I do recall being underwhelmed by encounters with 15 trolls or 20 minotaurs, or similarly 1st edition style fights, in the sense that we were never really threatened.  I'm not at all sure that many 3rd edition monsters don't make more credible threats over a wider range of levels than they did in 1st edition.I'm not sure your memory here is trust worthy.  A 1st edition 10th level fighter could face about 200 orcs by himself.  Has anything really changed, except that in 1st edition playing the fighter at age 12 we might have tolerated and been excited by this fight more than we would today?  How many rounds of hewing down weak foes do you really find exciting?  Many 1st edition monsters arguably stop being signficant foes much earlier than thier 3rd edition translations because of thier lack of attribute scores.  I remember fighting things more like 30 bugbears or 50 beserkers or 100 bandits in 1st edition than 15 orcs, and really did I enjoy this because I was really challenged or because I objectively probably wasn't?I think what you really remember is something quite different.  First, once you got into the sweet spot if your DM didn't just dump treasure on you to force you to level, the rate of advancement slowed signficantly.  More threats stayed reasonable for longer because the rate that you leveled up slowed down and because most threats weren't signficant so they were all basically engageable for a long period of play (if not a long mechanical period).  Second, I think you remember not being fully conversant with the math of the game.  The rules were safely tucked away in the DM's section of the game, and even if you'd glanced at them you didn't necessarily know them.  So you didn't know that the 15 orcs would probably inflict less than 15 points of damage on the whole party before you cut them down.  You weren't keeping track of that.  You were emersed in the scene.  Thirdly, I think you remember being a kid, and tolerating long periods of static combat and and dice rolling and slaying orcs who only rarely landed a blow far more than you would now.How?  How do you think that it will really deliver?  Is it really going to cause you to forget your 20+ years of experience?  Is it really going to make monsters weaker so that you can face bigger hordes of them AND make them individually tougher so that they've got a chance of cracking your defences at the same time?</blockquote>

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