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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9112933" data-attributes="member: 6690965">No, that's conflating variance with not actually doing design work. Can a level 5 party break a curse? How many rooms are they likely to handle in an average dungeon before death without resting? Is tunneling through walls an alpha strategy below level 6, and would tuning damage thresholds on stone change that?I want those questions to be considered, so that the end user of the product doesn't need to.....if there's a bell-curve of results, by definition the fight can't be perfectly predictable? I think that's a pretty reasonable output in general though. How does a 4 person party do against an ettercap? 2 ettercaps? What if they're all rogues? Should the game have player advice indicating the all rogue party is a bad idea, or should the game strive to maintain similar levels of expected difficulty regardless of party composition? I want the game to have the answers to those questions in mind when it was designed, and provide them to me.That's really beside the point. We can know all of those things, and still have variability in encounters. We can even make decisions like about say, how often PCs should die in encounters, and then use that to inform other parts of the design (like character creation). Knowing "a dragon is very likely to kill 4 PCs at level 3" is informative, not determinative. It may still be perfectly appropriate to use a dragon for the adventure or encounter structure you have planned.Yes, definitely. Fantasy Craft did a little of this with its "campaign qualities" concept, but it wasn't particularly rigorous and could definitely have gone further. I do just want a list of optional rules with "to make the game harder/grittier, you might consider..." I want to know what a change will mean for the gameplay loop, what incentives will change for players, why that lever isn't tuned that way in the base design, and so on.</blockquote>

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