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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jhaelen" data-source="post: 6019080" data-attributes="member: 46713">What made it difficult, imho, was that 3e introduced very clear guidelines about encounter design.Now, in hindsight most people agree that the challenge ratings given in the various monster manuals weren't particulary accurate, but they were still better than having no guidelines.Basically, as a DM I felt I had to make sure that if I made changes affecting the PCs, I'd also have to make sure to adjust the encounter levels to keep the balance and vice versa.E.g. what's the effect of granting every pc a feat every two levels instead of every three levels. How much more powerful do they get?What happens if I increase their skill points per level or get rid of non-class skills?Normally, you'd think, it wouldn't have much of an effect, but one important side-effect was that it allowed pc's to meet the requirements for prestige classes earlier than expected by the prestige class's designer.And something like this could seriously change a party's power level, trivializing encounters that should have been challenging for them.Since monsters used the same rules as pcs, you'd also have to be aware of the effect of making changes to the pc rules. This ís also why it was easier to create monsters in 1e, 2e, and again in 4e: Different systems for monsters and pcs.I still remember people feeling the monk was overpowered since monks eventually became immune against most anything and didn't really require equipment. Clerics were actually felt to be underpowered and people clamoured for better prestige classes...It took a while until people had a good idea about what made a class powerful and what didn't. The designers didn't have a clue either. E.g. the front-loaded class abilities that encouraged excessive multi-classing.</blockquote>

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