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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9007228" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Which I explicitly excluded with the whole "knowing" bit. If you're exploring, you don't have knowledge of what you're going to face, do you? But you're still going to at least try to go to places that aren't likely to be suddenly and shockingly difficult or absolutely trivial and unrewarding, right? Even in a "West Marches" game. You're foing to try to do things that are relevant and not things that are dull or deathtraps.People have been on the hyperbole train for ages in this thread. Feels a bit odd that it's only now unacceptable.Why is inference only a problem when one side does it? There's been plenty of it in the thread thus far.Question: What spying is required to gain the knowledge, "because we defeated the Goblin King's reinforcements yesterday, the Goblin King now has fewer forces to call on than he had before"? Because that was the core point here. When the Goblin King has quantum reinforcements that are always exactly as full as the DM needs them to be, that show up whenever the DM decides the players just did excessively well in a particular battle (or don't show up if the players struggled a lot), it's at least as artificial as it would be to have encounters balanced to selected levels (not the party's level, but whatever level makes sense for the various goblin squads to be.) I would argue far more artificial, actually, because real armies are actually organized into groups of roughly comparable ability so they may be deployed more effectively, while zero real armies have the power (and curse) of growing stronger when their enemies are unexpectedly strong and weaker when their enemies are unexpectedly weak.So following guidelines consistently is acceptable, but following rules consistently is not? Having guidelines is perfectly copacetic for allowing the world to feel real, but having rules is not? I just...I don't get it. ...because a system with a functional encounter design system will give you a good idea of that. An encounter that is designed to be a minor skirmish for 1st level characters (say, "medium" difficulty in 5e) is going to be pretty boring for 10th level characters, even in 5th edition. The party will roflstomp it. An encounter designed to be a serious challenge for 20th level characters (a step beyond "deadly") will be instantly lethal. The problem is, in 5e, the CR system is so useless, you can get the same problems from encounters built for level 8 and 12!Now, of course, some trivial things are still worth doing because they have some other rationale behind them, but we don't really have good words in English for "this genuinely trivial, no-challenge task that still needs to be done because we care about something that requires that task." Mostly, I think, because it's assumed that if the trivial thing is worth doing, you'd have done it already.Which...has nothing whatever to do with encounter building. This is a total non sequitur.Which also has nothing to do with encounter building.I don't understand how these things are at all comparable. Besides, it's not like 5e doesn't have magic item prices. It does! Yet the books exclaim the "magic item mart" just fine.I just wish there were more allowance for the problems of "verisimilitude without game." As in, y'know, any at all.It absolutely is, if the reason you don't use that power is because you know using it would have bad consequences you are unwilling to accept.Otherwise, every US President has always had absolute power. They just haven't chosen to use it because the consequences would be very bad for them and the country.Power you would not ever be willing to use is power you don't have.Likewise, there was a game I was taught to hate, without having ever played it, because friends I (formerly) trusted trashed it for being a cash-grab, flagrantly unrealistic, and full of stupid and meddlesome interference that ruined games for literally no reason.That game is called "4th edition D&D." Which, as most who know me on here know, is my favorite flavor of D&D.Relying on secondhand accounts and superficial impressions is often a faulty strategy.</blockquote>

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