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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Odhanan" data-source="post: 2920139" data-attributes="member: 12324">The <a href="http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/sg/20060630a" target="_blank">Save My Game</a> article is really interesting for several reasons. In my opinion, it clearly shows one of the areas where Third Edition falls short on game design: the number of PCs around the table.The game's designed for four player characters. Period. Once you are out of this scheme of things, you have to know, as a DM, that you cannot in all situations run the game as written, since the whole point of CRs and equations of challenge surrounding loses a bit more of its meaning with each additional player added/substracted from the base situation the game uses. That forces the DM to know what s/he's doing, experiment with various types of encounters to find out what will work and what won't with a particular set of characters. Of course, you have to do that kind of thing with any type of RPG really, to explore the rules and get a grasp of the principles underlaying the design to then take it to the next step and tailor the system to your particular needs. But the window of game design Third Edition uses seems to be extremely narrow. I don't know where that comes from. Was there a overwhelming amount of customer data clearly showing that a huge number of gaming groups out there had four players at the table versus any other possible number of players? Or was it the goal to create a system with this base situation knowing full well that DMs would just sort of houserule the whole thing according to particular groups? Still then, a bit more advice on tailoring encounters according to the number of players at the table, with clear equations and principles, would have been really useful. The article seems to answer a question I was thinking about for some time: was there some kind of equation that was not specifically spelled out in the DMG? Looks like there isn't, for all intents and purposes. Which I find extremely surprising to say the least, given the detailed nature of the Third Edition rules. Heh. Nothing's perfect. I love the Third Edition rules! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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