Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jasperak" data-source="post: 4641980" data-attributes="member: 2487">I think this thread is an excellent discussion of the different DM styles throughout all of the editions. 1e, 2e, OD&D, B/X, BECMI, and RCThese editions trusted the DM to fairly adjudicate the game. There were no real guidelines for balancing encounters against the party. The DM was tasked with using experience and knowledge of the rules to create the types of encounters he desired.3eThis edition gave us CRs. It expected that if the PCs were at a specific power level then 4 PCs would be a match for and equivelent CR. While CRs may have been helpful at early and mid-levels, I started noticing them break down around level 9 or so, like the above poster mentioned. This edition also gave us wealth by level guidelines and the ability for PCs to easily create magic items to supplement their abilities. So for the DM to use the CR system he had to determine what power level the party was at. This was the first major attempt that I remember to find balance.4eThis edition in the quest for balance redesigns its power structure, assumes the PCs will be able to purchase whatever magic items they want, restricts the abilities gained from magic items by tier, and designs the monsters so that at comparable level the PCs will be able to hit on average 60-65% of the time. In essence even if the DM creates a monster from scratch, if he follows the guidelines, the players will have an excellent idea (with 10%) of what the monster's stats are.This in my mind takes the idea of balance to its logical extreme. Food for thought: can 4e get even more balanced?What does this mean with respects to the OP's thought about adversarial DMs? The original editions (not 3e or 4e) relied on the DM to generate the sandbox and gave little tools on how to fill it aside from maybe using XP as a guideline. Third edition relied heavily on a broken system for generating appropriate challenges and even so much as tied the XP system directly to the new system, but did not really help the DM generate appropriate encounters without a lot of extra work. Fourth edition takes a lot of the guess work out of the system, but wonder and fear went right along with it IMHO. At any given level a player should be able to guess the numbers behind the system and act accordingly. The DM should feel free to drop any equal level encounter on the PCs and not worry too much, provided he follows the rules and the players have each of the roles covered. Balance seems to have been reached in such abundance that any one can generate appropriate challenges for a group of players regardless of their other intangible abilities as a DM.As long as the numbers add up, the DM could throw whatever he wanted and not worry too much. Most of the guesswork has already been taken out.</blockquote>

Verification