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Message: <blockquote data-quote="knasser" data-source="post: 6954919" data-attributes="member: 65151">I've been reading through this thread and it's moving quickly so I'm not replying to most things because they're already far behind where the thread is at. But the above I feel compelled to comment on. It's the antithesis of where I'm coming from and makes a virtue out of difficulty. It is not that some DM's live on a lower moral plateau than others and deserve a worse game (presumably their players inherit the sins of their "father" too) because he or she "refuses to put in the work required". Whilst of course effort should be rewarded, it's not a good thing if the finite effort a busy, adult DM has must be directed to compensating for published materials' short-comings rather than designing exciting maps or enticing atmosphere details. The points CapnZapp are raising would be valid to criticise if they came at a cost elsewhere in the system. But they've have provided multiple examples (I especially like the Jubillex one) where a little thought provides a lot more viability to out of the box encounters without over-powering the monster or requiring fiddly details. Their theory seems very solid to me.But the main point is that I can't avoid pitfalls like this thread is revealing to me by just "putting in the work". Because I'm a new DM who has never run a game at these levels and would require extensive ability to learn the sort of things that CapnZapp is explaining analytically in this thread. I require the game designers (who should be the most familiar with game theory for their rules system of all) to do that for me. If there is a weakness in the published materials - and it seems there is - I need someone else to fix that for me. At the end of the day of work and social commitments, I do not have time to re-design the creatures from the MM or the depth of understanding necessary to do so.And as regards the six encounters a day not being a problem / being a problem, that is obviously going to depend on the type of stories a GM chooses to tell and thus is inescapably subjective. But what is not subjective is that it is undeniably a constraint. And if something is a constraint then that is a negative unless removing the constraint would cause a different and significant other problem. So the question then becomes could something be changed to remove that constraint (i.e. make games work that leaned towards one or two encounters a day) without causing problems elsewhere. I think it can be conclusively shown that this is possible because whilst changing the rules would alter other factors (e.g. viability of six encounter grind playing), changing monsters does not. This is because choice of monsters is inherently optional. You can have monsters that work for lesser / numerical encounters and monsters that work for big solo fights and the presence of one doesn't preclude the presence of the other. And I believe that was CapnZapp's original line of exploration - how to create monsters that worked better as high level solos.</blockquote>

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