NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Windjammer" data-source="post: 4849428" data-attributes="member: 60075">I agree with the wording of this statement. You, sir, have hit the nail on its head. For your statement abstracts from the skill of the players controlling those characters. That's why the CR system is, and always will remain, such a crude tool for constructing well-balanced encounters. And no amount of monster design to the contrary, or further along extant lines, will ever change that fact. Not until you have constructed a game where a character's tactical in-game potential is no longer determined by the player. For instance, your selection of when to press the at-will/per-encounter/daily-buttons (never mind which powers you select, in case you didn't go with the pregens) doesn't matter when any set of choices will safely get you through 90% of Keep on the Shadowfell. So you might as well turn on auto-pilot, and be woken from slumber for the remaining 10% when things actually get exciting and your very input, as opposed to a computer's, is actually required by the game.Now, apparently this ratio of 90% to 10% makes for the sort of game  people nowadays get excited about. Guess what, I'm one of those people myself.  I'm the sort of person who when bored turns on invincibility mode in Neverwinter Nights for the sole purpose of getting some cheap thrills out of trashing monsters at zero risk. But when I run a table top game at home*, it's understood that everyone's playing to the hilt. That's why I personally don't get anything out this design ethos whereby catering to the lowest level of player skill is the default mode of catering to the lowest common denominator. What's discouraging, perhaps, is that the lowest denominator now includes people who can't be expected to think of attacking an allip or a rust monster other than by melee drawing on metal gear. It's, apparently, too much to ask for. So we need to pay designers to redesign whole generations of monsters to accomodate to that fact. Impressive.As I said above, I don't begrudge anyone their preferred source of entertainment. Just leave enough elbow room for other avenues, that's all. A tall order? You tell me!(* In just an hour, actually, and Jason Bulmahn's own Mad God's Key! Will report the PC fatalities in Blood of Cairn on a later occasion.)</blockquote>

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