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You really shouldn't say this, because even the DMG explicitly says NOT to do this.
Like, repeatedly. It's EXTREMELY clear that you ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT do things "everything at the same level." You should provide a wide diversity of challenges, from very easy to very hard, loosely centered around the party's level. Which...is exactly what many, MANY DMs have been doing for every edition (and several other totally distinct games!) since the very beginning. Making challenges that are at least somewhat reasonable for the party.
Yeah...people have a tendency to pretend that those lines simply don't exist or have no significance. They are exactly the thing requested, but it always gets blown off. It's honestly really disheartening and annoying, because it's such a blatant "no true scotsman" argument. "There is no fluff text!" "...what about the italicized text? Which is literally fluff description of the action?" "Pfft, that's not REAL fluff text!"
You really shouldn't say this, because even the DMG explicitly says NOT to do this.
Like, repeatedly. It's EXTREMELY clear that you ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT do things "everything at the same level." You should provide a wide diversity of challenges, from very easy to very hard, loosely centered around the party's level. Which...is exactly what many, MANY DMs have been doing for every edition (and several other totally distinct games!) since the very beginning. Making challenges that are at least somewhat reasonable for the party.
If I may, it's not what I was saying. I was not speaking about the difficulty of the challenge. I was speaking about using creatures (and traps) at the player level. Every module does that. Look at every module from H1 to E3, every single encounter, the monster level is within 1 level of the level of the adventurers, 2 for exceptional cases. I don't call that "loosely", I call that "strongly centered", to the point that every single monster has to be adapted to the character level.
After that, if you take oine minion or 3 solo, the difficulty varies, obviously.
The above has been acknowledged in every post on that other thread, and if you look at @pemerton's description, level 28 PC implies level 28 minions and elite. It's not even within one or two levels.
And NO, this is certainly not what I've been doing for ANY edition. First, in AD&D and BECMI, there was no such concept as monster level, and these were (as 5e now is) way more resilient about monsters staying relevant. Then came 3e, but 3e (as 5e is) is not based around monster levels, it's based around CR and combining CR into an EL. It does say not to go overboard with differences between average party level and the CR used, but that's it.
4e is the only edition where monster level is a thing, and the "show, don't tell" is clear: in all modules, the almost equality is used (within one level, even for level 27 adventures), and is recognised by most of the DMs. So I think that yes, it can be said.
Now, it's a GOOD thing if you are looking for balance and challenge, because it makes your encounter calculation precise (especially when coupled with calibrated PCs). But first it's a lot of work if you are running a sandbox game, and it's also very artificial if you're thinking more "sandbox" and open world than "series of calibrated encounters".
If I may, it's not what I was saying. I was not speaking about the difficulty of the challenge. I was speaking about using creatures (and traps) at the player level. Every module does that. Look at every module from H1 to E3, every single encounter, the monster level is within 1 level of the level of the adventurers, 2 for exceptional cases. I don't call that "loosely", I call that "strongly centered", to the point that every single monster has to be adapted to the character level.
And because mounter math was so dead easy you could just make them higher level to increase difficulty really easily? The math literally fit on a business card. I have an excel sheet that lets me put in level, type, check elite or solo and boom, math. All I have to do is do the fn part and make powers.
Sir, I find it incredibly shocking that you might suggest that people trying to sell a product to you would error in the most conservative ways so that the experience was maximally predictable within the market. Such poppycock should be punishable by lashes with wet noodles! Please forgive my vulgarity, there, I am extremely animated about this.
I never realized 4e actually made a fireball what people expect when you throw fireball instead of the 'pea beam' from 3e that was apparently in place so Produce Flame could let you throw fireballs..
Here's a link to an account of 25th level PCs confronting the 34th level Torog. To support that encounter in mechanical terms, I was using an escalation die (at the time, 13th Age had made these all the rage) which corresponded to the fiction of Torog weakening (as the PCs had wrecked his Soul Abattoir).
Looking through my adventure notes, generally I'm seeing 3 to 6 level ranges as the norm (eg 2nd to 5th; 7th to 10th; 7th to 12th; 9th to 12th; 9th to 13th; 12th to 16th; 16th to 18th; 18th to 21st; 22nd to 25th; 22nd to 26th; 26th to 30th; 28th to 33rd; etc).
This is no great surprise: as a general rule, significantly lower level creatures/NPCs are not mechanically well-suited; and rather than significantly higher level ones, it makes more sense to restat them as an elite or solo of a more mechanically appropriate level.
The 4e DMG is not entirely consistent in its advice: the table on p 56 suggests a five-to-seven level range as the norm (+/- 2 to 3 levels), with 10 levels as a possibility for easy (up to -4) or very threatening (up to +5) challenges; the text on p 57 suggests up to +7, giving a 12 level range. I have used challenges up to 4 levels lower - eg a 7th level Hobgolin Beastmaster in an encounter with 11th level PCs. Because an encounter like that will generally figure larger numbers of opponents (so that the low-level creature/NPC has some safety in numbers) the upper level creatures probably won't be so high (in that same encounter, the highest level NPC was 12th level, and the overall encounter difficulty was 17th. Here's the full roster, s-blocked:
When it comes to combat encounter difficulty - which is a function of the level of the creatures/NPCs involved, plus their number - my practice is varied. At low levels, on-level encounters can be interesting. When the PCs were level 9, I ran an encounter with 3 level 7 soldiers - it was quite interesting because there were only 4 PCs and they were quite resource depleted. At upper epic, most encounters tend to be well above party level - the most recent, for instance is a 38th level encounter for 5 30th level PCs (28th level elite, 2x 29th level elite, 2 x 29th level solo, 2 x 30th level solo - the map is roughly T-shaped, about 50 squares long and varying between 12 and 25 squares wide). From memory, that 17th level encounter was the first that we played at paragon tier.
I think the DMG advice about encounter levels, on p 56, is suitable for Heroic tier (a hard encounter is two to four levels higher) but not for the tiers beyond that, where hard encounters have to be four to eight levels higher.
An Explanation of the Usages of the Term "level": The term level has multiple meanings in this game system. Although substitute terminology could have been used in ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, common usage of the term level to include multiple meanings is prevalent amongst existing players, so the term has been retained herein. The usages for level are: . . .
Level as a gauge of a "monster's'' potential threat: Relatively weak creatures, monsters with few hit points, limited or non-existent magical abilities, those which do little damage when attacking, and those which have weak, or totally lack, venom are grouped together and called 1st level monsters. Slightly more powerful creatures are ordered into 2nd level, then comes 3rd. 4th, 5th, and so on all the way up to 10th level (the highest, which includes the greatest monsters, demon princes, etc.).
The DMG classifies monsters from the MM by level, based on the XP they are worth if defeated (which is calculated via the process in the DMG): see p 174 and Appendix E. And on pp 174-75 the DMG picks up monster level via the wandering monster charts, which are grouped by monster level, together with the following rule for wandering monsters:
Lesser monsters on lower levels have their numbers augmented by a like number of the same sort of creatures for each level of the dungeon beneath that of the assigned level of the monster type encountered. Example: First level monsters on the 2nd level of a dungeon will be twice as numerous as the Numbers variable indicates, i.e. 2-8 giant ants, rather than 1-4, if they are encountered on the 2nd level (or its equivalent) of a dungeon. The same is true for second level monsters encountered on the 3rd dungeon level, third level monsters on the 4th dungeon level, etc. . . .
Greater monsters on higher levels will have their numbers reduced by 1 for each level of the dungeon above their assigned level, subject to a minimum number of 1. Example: 1-3 shadows are normally encountered on the 4th level of the dungeon; as shadows are fourth level monsters, a maximum of 2 can be encountered on he 3rd dungeon level, and but 1 on the 2nd level. (Fourth level monsters cannot be encountered on the 1st level of the dungeon.)
For completeness, it's probably also worth noting this remark on p 179 of the AD&D DMG:
Number of creatures encountered should be appropriate to the strength of the encountering party.
The idea that it is a relevant consideration, in GMing D&D, to have regard to the threat that a potential combat encounter might pose to the PCs, was not invented in 2008. It was alive and well in 1979.
This is discussed in the DMG, pp 65-66, which includes a discussion (on p 66) of objects' immunities, resistances and vulnerabilities to various damage types (eg "a pile of dry papers might have vulnerability 5 to fire because any spark is likely to destroy it").
The text for the 4e fireball is almost identical to that in Cook/Marsh Expert: "The spell creates a missile of fire that bursts into a ball of fire . . . [that] will do 1-6 (1d6) points of damage per level of the caster to each creature within the sphere of fire." Despite the reference to creatures, back in the early 80s we had no trouble with the concept that a 20' radius ball of fire might set things alight, and we retained that imaginative ability all the way through to our play of 4e!
