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Message: <blockquote data-quote="painandgreed" data-source="post: 2908283" data-attributes="member: 24969">My take on what he is saying (or at least how I'm feeling) is that you may be able to judge encounters better in 3E, the problem is that encoutners can be judged too well. The rules have been balanced so that all groups played by different people will pretty much have the same challenge when facing challenge judged by EL. The spells are balanced so that only so much damage can be done and encounters are judged as ablative rather than decicive. Such players, with a realative assurance that they will not face anything such as a no-save death trap, never take the opportunity to try to avoid it.Meanwhile, parties that are faced with the save or die disintigrate or no-save death traps will think up ways to avoid them. The presence of such extremes will cause the nessecity of outside of the box tactics. This can be seen in the thread here about the slippery room in White Plume Mountains. One group (one used to 3E I'd wager) can't figure a way across while others (usually calling back upon old knowledge) came up with several clever way across such a room. Similarly, the old parties that went into ToH had a good idea of what to expect and had tactics for such. I remember parties herding livestock (or slaves) down corridors to discover traps, sending point men forward so only one guy died, and numberous other ways to avoid such traps (if a chicken didn't set off any trap on this corridor, then if we use a spell or magic effect to make ourselves the size and weight of chickens, we should be safe crossing too). They'd trick wandering monsters to go down suspicious corridors of trapped dungeons, spend most of an adventure preparing a complicated ambush for a wizard with disentigrate, or other things that modern parties just wouldn't bother with because they are realativly certain that there is no sudden death encounters to have to think around and the rules have been carefully balanced so that just as the enemy can't take them out they also can't get lucky.The careful balancethat D&D has may be good from the gamist point of view but for some it will hurt versimillitude(sp?) because, sometimes, life just isn't fair.</blockquote>

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