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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Silverleaf" data-source="post: 2389159" data-attributes="member: 30790">Well not much has changed in that respect.  Today there are hundreds of d20 publishers, and hence just as much diversity.  You still don't know what rules the DM next door is using, unless he limits himself to the 3 core books.  And even then house rules pop up, because that is the nature of the beast.  Everyone wants something different out of their campaign.  Even those who supposedly follow the rules put more emphasis on some aspects of them, and de-emphasize other aspects (eg, "yes we use AoO but we just eyeball them, and we don't have a battlemap" is a very different game than "we like the wargaming aspect and follow the combat rules to the letter and always use minis & battlemap").BTW, there were guidelines for encounters in earlier editions.  They may have been looser than a specific CR number, but they were there nonetheless in the form of monster HD and "special" powers denoted with an asterisk.  It was a good bet that a 5** HD monster was going to be a tough encounter for low-level PC...  The rules also suggested placing X HD monsters on dungeon level X, and increasing or decreasing the number of monsters encountered if you placed them on higher or lower levels of the dungeon.  OTOH, wilderness enounters had no such guideline, and could be very dangerous or very easy.  But at the same time, a smart group of players knows when to attack, when to talk, and when to run.  Making every encounter balanced & winnable through battle, and precalculated to deplete X number of party resources is not my idea of what fantastic adventure is about...In much the same manner, I don't see that having weak thieves or powerful wizards is a design flaw.  In fact, thieves aren't weak unless they try to go outside of their domain.  If they wanted to be good at fighting the player should have made a fighter instead.  He made a thief, that means he's going to play a character who uses stealth and guile (which "sneak" attacks aren't <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />) to his advantage rather than charging into battle.  The player who rolled up a magic-user knows that his character's chances of surviving past the first few levels are small, but it's a risk he's willing to take for the possibility of great power later on (should the campaign even last that long).  In that sense, the classes were balanced, and they all had their niche in which they excelled.  The much-touted alternative of making every class equal at overcoming challenges in battle feels very arbitrary to me, and much less fantastical.I run a quite rules-light B/X D&D game, and frankly this concept of "mother may I" is totally alien to me.  The players decide what action they're going to take, regardless of rules.  If the swashbuckler wants to jump from the balcony, swing from the chandelier and kick the BBEG, he's well entitled to try that.  Depending on the nature of the action, we'll use either a to-hit roll, ability check, or more rarely something else.  The other factor is the difficulty of the task, for which we'll adjust the roll.  It's a very simple 2-step process and it works very well in practice, at least that's been my experience throughout the last couple decades...</blockquote>

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