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<blockquote data-quote="NotAYakk" data-source="post: 9282307" data-attributes="member: 72555">I mean, I spoke about it?It is like the difference between having the weight of the stuff in your room and a cargo van capacity, and having a program that lets you tag items and tells you if they fit in the cargo van.Sure, you can go around tagging items until the cargo van is full.&nbsp; You can even experiment with reducing the amount of bedding while increasing books by untagging bedding and tagging books.But if instead you know that the books are small and dense while the bedding is bulky and light, you can think about things without having to iterate on the tool.Lookup tables are a tool you blindly enter values into and get a result out.If you eliminate them, it becomes easier to reason the underlying problem, instead of having your view of the problem cut off.Finally, using Lookup tables without a computer is rather annoying.&nbsp; And if your system requires a computer to not be annoying, you might as well just simulate the entire encounter and give conclusions based on that - it will be more accurate than your analytically produced table anyhow.I've seen decent simulation based encounter balance systems.&nbsp; You feed in an abstraction of the PCs (with as much detail as you want, and even fudge factors!), and the monsters, and it produces a distribution of resources drained and failure chance.Again, this black box blocks the human from having an understanding of what makes an encounter harder or easier.&nbsp; They'll never be able to quickly say &quot;CR 7 is 60% more threat than CR 5, so we can swap 5 CR 7s for 8 CR 5s to bulk up enemy numbers in that encounter&quot;, or &quot;there is an extra PC, which means I should throw in another 175 threat - how about a CR 9, that makes sense&quot; using it.They can go and add that additional PC.&nbsp; Then experimentally use the tool to add and remove and change monsters until the light turns green again.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="NotAYakk, post: 9282307, member: 72555"] I mean, I spoke about it? It is like the difference between having the weight of the stuff in your room and a cargo van capacity, and having a program that lets you tag items and tells you if they fit in the cargo van. Sure, you can go around tagging items until the cargo van is full. You can even experiment with reducing the amount of bedding while increasing books by untagging bedding and tagging books. But if instead you know that the books are small and dense while the bedding is bulky and light, you can think about things without having to iterate on the tool. Lookup tables are a tool you blindly enter values into and get a result out. If you eliminate them, it becomes easier to reason the underlying problem, instead of having your view of the problem cut off. Finally, using Lookup tables without a computer is rather annoying. And if your system requires a computer to not be annoying, you might as well just simulate the entire encounter and give conclusions based on that - it will be more accurate than your analytically produced table anyhow. I've seen decent simulation based encounter balance systems. You feed in an abstraction of the PCs (with as much detail as you want, and even fudge factors!), and the monsters, and it produces a distribution of resources drained and failure chance. Again, this black box blocks the human from having an understanding of what makes an encounter harder or easier. They'll never be able to quickly say "CR 7 is 60% more threat than CR 5, so we can swap 5 CR 7s for 8 CR 5s to bulk up enemy numbers in that encounter", or "there is an extra PC, which means I should throw in another 175 threat - how about a CR 9, that makes sense" using it. They can go and add that additional PC. Then experimentally use the tool to add and remove and change monsters until the light turns green again. [/QUOTE]

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