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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 4275548" data-attributes="member: 5143">This is for playability reasons.  For example:The evil Necromancer has an army of undead rampaging across the countryside.  They will reach a major city in about 6 hours.  No one will believe the players that it exists, so they need to go stop it themselves.  The Necromancer sends a bunch of undead against the PCs in order to stop them.  One of the PCs gets wounded really badly due to a couple of crits in a row.  It ends up using all the healing of the party and he is still low on hitpoints.Now, the PCs know that when they face off against the necromancer himself that it is going to be a harder battle than the one they already fought and their fighter is low on hitpoints and nearly dead.  The DM planned his adventure around the fact that the PCs would be able to take both the group of undead and the necromancer in the same day.Now, "realistically", the fighter in question is hurt badly. It should take him ages to recover.  Probably months of bed rest or at least another day worth of magical healing.  In any novel or movie, the author would have just written it such that the fighter didn't take any damage in the first combat and heroically ran into battle against the necromancer.  Unfortunately, the dice are much more random than that.So, in this situation, you have 2 real choices: come up with a system that allows people to get hit and hurt and risk death in every encounter to make the dice mean something and bring tension to the combat WHILE simultaneously allowing the PCs to fight multiple battles during a day predictably OR change your adventure around unexpected damage/deaths/petrification/etc.The second option is valid, but requires almost as much suspension of disbelief OR a lot of work.  I mean, how many times do the evil cultists suddenly decide to wait a month to sacrifice the woman simply because the PCs took a lot of damage in the entryway of their lair and had to rest up to full hitpoints before it becomes kind of dumb?They weren't.  They REQUIRED you to factor in their mechanics.  You couldn't run more than 3 somewhat challenging combats per day at 5th level.  There wasn't enough healing spells to keep a party alive for 4 unless the group had 2 clerics.  You couldn't run a low magic game out of the box in 3e, the game assumed a certain amount of healing and magic items in order to defeat standard monsters.1st and 2nd Edition were more flexible, in that they had almost no rules so the default rule became "make stuff up", and when that is the default rule it becomes VERY flexible.  Plus, most of the monsters were extremely easy to beat.  They were so far below PC power that combat was an effort in die rolling.  Some other monsters were dangerous, but only because one wrong die roll and you were dead.However, the flexibility in 1e/2e was HEAVILY dependent on knowledge and experience with the system.  Knowing whether a medusa was an appropriate monster to throw against a 5th level party required factoring in so many things that it was near unpredictable.  Did this group happen to have +5 armor at 5th level?  Did the figher roll an 18 for strength and get a race from a book that gave +1 strength?  Did he double specialize in his weapon?  Was the person playing the cleric the type of person who prepared a lot of healing?In fact, it was SO unpredictable that most DMs worked under a "choose a monster that fits the plot of the adventure and pray it doesn't kill everyone".  At least most of the DMs I knew.Which is exactly why when 3e came out my first thought was "Wow...you mean, I actually get told by the book about how hard these enemies are?  So I don't have to guess?  AWESOME!"  Until a couple months later when I started to realize that there were so many different ways to tweak both the PCs and the monsters that the system didn't predict difficulty accurately.  So, you had to fall back on experience and knowledge of the system to be able to predict if any particular CR 10 creature was actually appropriate for a level 10 party.</blockquote>

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