Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="rabindranath72" data-source="post: 8211177" data-attributes="member: 34007">Spellcasters never dominated my games, for two reasons:1- random encounters; the DMG (at least the 3.0 version) was pretty explicit about the role that random encounters play in the game. With random encounters, the DM controls the pace of resources expenditure, not the players. For the same reason, the "15 minutes work day" was never an issue. It had never been an issue with BECMI and AD&D, it wasn't an issue with 3.0 (I was in fact pretty baffled when much later I read people had this "problem" at their table, and even more baffled when one of the reasons for the design of 4e was to solve this "problem". Much as I liked 4e, it always seemed more like a solution in search of a problem.) The variety of encounters' EL (again, per DMG) was also fundamental; nowhere in the book is written that all encounters must be balanced; in fact, only 50% of the encounters should be at the same EL as the party. Table 4-2 has been my best friend. In fact, using Table 4-2 guidelines, encounters difficulty was consistently skewed against the party. I think I handed my players' PC's assess on a plate way more with 3e than with BECMI and AD&D.2- I used the Power Components variant, both for spells AND magic item creation. This meant a larger gold expenditure (20x the XP cost) if the power component could even be found; but most of the time, these components required special quests to find (scenario hooks!), consultation with sages (i.e. more gold spent), divinations etc. With this rule in place, creating magic items wasn't too dissimilar than what happened with BECMI and AD&D; with the advantage that the 3e rules gave the DM plenty more guidelines than the previous games. Since my players came from BECMI and AD&D, they didn't flinch at the harsh requirements.In short, we played 3e much like the previous versions of the game; and I think I read somewhere that the designers didn't really expect it to be played differently.</blockquote>

Verification