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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6050280" data-attributes="member: 17106">And I question that of someone who has the time to post about a game on message boards but not to do basic background work for that game that takes a fraction of the time.I've yet to see it demonstrated convincingly.As far as I can tell from any of these posts, neither do you.Moving on...I run CoC pretty regularly, and occasionally other d20 offshoots and the BSG rpg (in general, lighter rules and different settings than D&D). Speaking generally, I am an experienced and expert DM. I would not, however, pretend to have the extent or diversity of rpg experiences that some of the people on ENW do who are twice my age and/or have a lot more free time for gaming than I do.I did play 2e before the 3e release. I certainly recall us having some issues as middle-school beginners, but encounter balance wasn't one of them.I do, however, recall that the DM at the time 3e was released purposely forbade any of us from seeing his DMG or getting one of our own because he didn't want us to know the secrets within. The Monster Manual was actually my first book, and I learned the rules by reading monster stats. At one point, I could recite a solid majority of CRs from memory.When I did get the DMG, I already had ideas shaping in my mind. I took one look at the chapter on how to use CRs, build encounters, and award XP, and immediately dismissed it. I've never looked back. I started writing my own monster stats and creating my own plots from day 1. While hardly flawless, even my first campaign was coherent, balanced, and generated some lasting memories. Nor do I take myself as some kind of DMing savant. (Nor did I have particularly helpful players or any expert supervision).Moreover, when other DMs did try to use the CR guidelines, they were invariably befuddled by the results and struggled to maintain appropriate challenge levels. If there's any benefit to CRs and XP, my group did not observe it.On the other hand, I've found designing stats for games that don't have the same assumptions about encounters or balance as D&D (particularly CoC) to be very informative.</blockquote>

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