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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 6019150" data-attributes="member: 2205">I'm sorry, but that sounds like sophistry to me.  Giving us tools to help us balance encounters made balancing encounters more difficult, because basically we just didn't care about it until we had rules to help guide us?  And now that we have these guidelines, suddenly what was never important before is so important that we're stressed out about it, and feel uncomfortable making changes that would effect these guidelines which... let me reiterate... we never had nor cared about before?Correct if if I'm somehow fundamentally misunderstanding where you're going with this.I guess I'm still sufficiently old school enough in my play paradigm to not care.Also not seeing how that's a concern.First off, you're assuming that prestige classes are more powerful than regular classes.  I'd argue that that's only true if the prestige classes are badly designed.  Granted, many of them are, but that's not related to how difficult the system is or isn't to houserule.  Again, if anything, it's incentive and motivation to houserule, not to not houserule.  Secondly, in my experience, the factor that has the most significant--to the point of completely trivializing any other factors--impact on making encounters more or less difficult than the GM plans them to be, is a handful of rolls during combat.  A blown save, a critical hit, a round or two where one side gets a bunch of whiffs and the other side does higher than average damage, etc.  Somebody having a level or two of a prestige class earlier than the designer thought they would seems completely inconsequential in comparison.And lastly, if you're finding that encounters are easier than you think--after a couple of encounters, buff up the NPCs or monsters a bit.  Give them a few more hit points, or an extra +1 or +2 to damage.  Throw on a template if you feel like you need to go so far as to mechanically represent that "correctly" in the rules.This kind of ongoing kaizen-style tweaking of encounters throughout a game is a key GMing skill.  Always has been.  If we've somehow lost that as a community because folks have been leaning on the ECL/CR system instead of using their judgement, well that's not the system's fault.  And it doesn't have anything to do with the system being harder to houserule.No you don't.  Why would you assume that because you change rules related to PCs that you need to go update statblocks of monsters?  That's a complete strawman.  That's not true at all.Yeah, I remember.  **shrug**.  I also remember that I didn't start with major houserules the first few weeks or months I played the game either.  After 12 years of playing d20 games, though, I'm pretty confident that I can make changes to aspects of the system that I don't like and be pretty confident that I can predict what the impact is going to be.  In fact, I consider doing so trivially easy.Plus, and this is true for any system ever, not just 3e--sure, you never know for sure until you playtest a change.  And after playtesting, you may find that additional tweaks are required to get it just right.  But again; I don't think that's at all unique to d20.  Quite the opposite, in fact.</blockquote>

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