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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ratskinner" data-source="post: 5992547" data-attributes="member: 6688937">Not always. At times too much discussion can lead to frustration, and exacerbate peoples' reaction to things. Kind of like a reverse placebo effect. They might have enjoyed it if you just hadn't told them it was there.Followed by some fraction of the players griping about it, sure. The real problem is that guidelines have a terrible habit of becoming "word of the gods". The more numerical the guidelines, the worse that habit becomes. I have been accused of "cheating" and "not playing the game" when I've gone too far even within the limits of 4e encounter design specs.Short answer: "Yes, and in a good system, that's enough."Long answer:There's a lot of hidden assumptions there, primarily about the game system itself. 3\4e are (perhaps accidentally in 3e's case) designed with very tight tolerances. Going outside the boundaries of encounter guidelines can lead to un-fun results very quickly. The trick is....we're (well, WOTC is anyway) designing a new version of the game here. We don't need to do so in such a way that an encounter of level X (whatever that means) is only worth using between X-2 and X+2 levels. This is one area where, IMO, the best D&D is a little sloppy.The second big assumption is that DMs are just about utter morons. I know you didn't say that, but honestly this aspect of DMing isn't that hard. I'm not sure how exactly we came to think it was, but I suspect it has to do with 3e and its presentation of encounter design. Perhaps it also has to do with the utter complication of later edition monsters and abilities.I know that accidental TPKs or cakewalks can be an issue...but I don't recall them happening much in the 2e era. Sure they happened more (sorta) in 1e and BECMI, but I think that's partially because those games were designed to be "hard mode" while 2e changed its encounter advice to "story mode". 3e wanted to be "math/sim mode", but the CR system was so bad at its job that only the gods know that that ended up being. In response, 4e locked it down pretty tight and became "checkers++ mode". The third problem I have is that such guidelines define play, perhaps too much. Whether they are intended to do so or not is irrelevant, they do. I believe that part of the development of a good DM is learning how these things interact and what to do about them. Having some good and bad encounters and some hard and easy encounters is part of that development process. For better or worse, the large part of the creative burden in D&D falls to the DM. New DMs, just like young artists, need to learn how to use their tools to set up the stories and environments they use to mutually entertain their friends. Strict/narrow encounter guidelines and a rules system that require them limit that development and the scope of the tool. Whether that's a 1e "hard mode" desire vs 4e "tactician" mode, or 2e "storyteller" mode vs. 3e "realistic" mode, is irrelevant.I wish to also express that I make all these arguments solely within the context of a game that would call itself D&D and carry all the crusty old trappings of '60's wargames ....err, sacred cows....err, "shared culture" with it. There are plenty of story/indie games out there where "balance" isn't even an issue, because it has been designed right out of the system from the beginning. I love 'em, but I sincerely doubt that they would be accepted as D&D.</blockquote>

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