NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6800621" data-attributes="member: 177">The line of discussion I was engaged in was based, specifically on: Repetition of the word "fight" makes it seem like a combat encounter thing to me. But, if you want to talk about the approach to on-combat stuff....Now, certainly, past editions didn't have hard and fast numbers for scaling of non-combat challenges - but that's a bit misleading, because "challenges" were not a thing until 3e.  Non-combat skills, as we think of them today, didn't exist in 1e.  Design philosophy of how to present a given type of challenge was not consistent - sometimes there'd be a saving throw, sometimes an ability check, sometimes a mechanic created specifically for that obstacle.  Without a hard-and-fast mechanical design, you can't give solid guidelines on the use of mechanics, now can you?  There were *overall* fewer recommendations on what to put in front of your players.  Some will call that a feature, others call it a lack of understanding of good design principles present in the time.  So, saying "their approach was different" based on presence or absence of specific mechanics is not telling.  The real question is, did earlier games scale challenges to the level of the PCs, whatever the specific mechanical implementation might be?  Say you scaled down or removed the combat elements of an early published adventure designed for 15th level characters - could a 1st level character get through?  I think the general answer is no, they couldn't.  The lock that the 15th level thief as intended to pick couldn't be managed by a 1st level thief.  The poison trap intended for a high-level character would impose a major negative modifier on the saving throw, and would have impacts such that it would stop low level character in their tracks, and so on.   Whether or not the books explicitly gave you guidelines, the *intent* that things should get tougher as you went up in levels was clearly present.</blockquote>

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