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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9616033" data-attributes="member: 29398">One example I can recall is in the WotC adventure Marauders of the Dune Sea.  At one point in this adventure the PCs have to enter and navigate through a permanent sandstorm in order to reach some important bits of the adventure.  The module wants to concatenate this whole sandstorm sequence into a single Skill Challenge; when I ran it I split this sequence out into a series of more detailed steps each requiring some sort of roll - more opportunities for them to fail, sure, but also more opportunities for interesting and-or unexpected things to happen (but none did; due to their rockin' dice rolls they sailed through the sandstorm with nary a hitch anyway).The way I see it, fumbles are a necessary balance against criticals.  Take out crits and fumbles can go as well, but personally I'd see that as a negative change.Lingering injuries opens up the whole realm of resting and non-magical hit point/injury recovery; and I wish you luck in sorting that lot out to anyone's satisfaction. <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=":)" />For this I'd take a very light touch.  General guidelines, and leave it there.In 1e, all the DMG gives you is a list of monsters by level and some ideas for wandering monsters, after which you're kind of on your own.  The good part of this is it forces a DM to learn on the fly by trial and error; the bad part is that this trial-and-error piece isn't warned about anywhere in the books.Any hard-coded CR or encouter-building system is going to run aground hard on the fact that no two groups are the same, in either party make-up or player strengths-weaknesses; meaning an encounter designed as a stiff challenge for, say, a 6th-level party might wipe out one 6th-level group while another might stomp all over it without even working up a sweat.  Here, the DM-side trial-and-error piece extends to figuring out a) what the players are capable of and b) how (or even if) to adjust if for example the players bring a well-rounded party vs a party of all the same class.2e made ultra-slow levelling work OK, maybe there's ideas there to mine?</blockquote>

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