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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5180359" data-attributes="member: 22779">Just another thought to add to the wall of text.  Sorry about that.Let's move away from the elephant in the room for a second and look at another example.  In 3e, a number of people complained that the CR/EL system didn't work.  It was totally borked and virtually unusable.  Now, my experience was very different.  I found that the CR/EL system, while hardly perfect, worked largely as advertised.  I could use it rather nicely to judge the outcome of a given encounter.So, should I conclude that all those people's experiences were invalid?  That they just didn't know what they were talking about?  Sure, I could have done that.  But, instead, I engaged the critics and started looking behind the complaints.  What were they doing differently than I was and a couple of commonalities leapt out very quickly:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Groups with more than 4 players</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Very high (35+) point buy value characters</li> </ul>While this was hardly universal, it was very, very common.  So, it wasn't that their experience was invalid, it's that their game differed from mine in pretty significant ways (I almost always have only 4 players, and we played 27 point buy).  Looking at the guidelines for CR/EL, it became pretty obvious why these people were having different experiences.But, there's the difference.  I could have simply written off their experiences.  They are having trouble with something that I don't, so, they're just wrong.  But, instead, step beyond the primary issue and look into the background.  What's different about their situation that gives rise to different experiences.  I've found that this explains almost every difference in play that we talk about on these boards.  It's rarely the mechanics that cause the issues.  It's almost always external elements - grindy fights are caused by slow players+particular encounter design.  DM's in 3e used very large numbers of creatures in encounters because they almost always used classed humanoids which work fairly well.  People have these long, complex sandbox games because they have stable groups of players who have gamed together for years.  On and on and on.  Discounting a differing experience based on my own personal experience rarely yields anything productive.</blockquote>

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