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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 5419398" data-attributes="member: 55271">My opinion on this tends to coincide with Justin Alexander's: <a href="http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/wandering-monster.html" target="_blank">Death of the Wandering Monster</a>(TL;DR: It's only a problem if the DM allows the PCs to reliably control the pace of encounters. When the fifteen minute workdays and always-nova strategies are 100% reliable, the spellcasters rapidly become problematic. When they aren't, spellcasters are kept in check until somewhere between 12th and 15th level.)And I would go further to say that the root of the problem is the new school of My Precious Encounter(TM), in which every encounter is lovingly crafted in painstaking detail. When the wizard suddenly blows up the encounter you spent 2 hours prepping, that's a huge <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=":)" /><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=":)" /><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=":)" /><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=":)" />ing problem. The ratio of prep-to-play is completely screwed up.But if your encounter prep consists of writing down "6 orcs + 2 ogres", then when the wizard decides that that's the one encounter he's going to blow up for the day it doesn't matter.My Precious Encounter(TM) design tends to focus the game entirely on tactics. The older way of designing encounters made strategy an important part of the picture.Last interesting note: The fact that balance begins to break down around 12th to 15th level makes sense when you consider that in the original design for D&D this was the level at which fighters became Lords and began accruing dozens or hundreds of followers. And wizards didn't.The imbalance specifically exists because the game took away the fighter's high-level toys, but it didn't take away the wizard's high-level toys.</blockquote>

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