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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GregoryOatmeal" data-source="post: 5699480" data-attributes="member: 6667661">This is a good listThese are good points. Frankly I don't worry about balance or appropriate challenge much when running games. The only DMG I ever owned was for 4E. So enlighten me.4E has a really easy method for creating balanced encounters and 3.5 has the CR system which seems a bit trickier. Do previous editions have formulaic methods for creating balanced encounters based on XP budgets? I feel like you could just create a system for identifying a "hard encounter" for a level 5 encounter in 2E. We already know what a hard encounter is in 4E, so you would just have to create a similar hard encounter in 2E. And of course you'd have to measure how many difficult encounters a group could endure in that edition. I may be wrong, but I use much less formal metrics when homebrewing my games. Things go wrong in published adventures and homebrew  ideas and that's just fine. Ultimately if you give DMs the tools (crunchy numbers) I think they'll  figure it out.  This is an instance where crowdsourcing would be extremely helpful  (like how Paizo does public playtests and WOTC did the same with D&D  insider)That would break things a bit but still that's sort of okay. Players are clever and find ways to outsmart you. That's fine.Yes, that is indeed a tricky one.</blockquote>