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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7196200" data-attributes="member: 16814">I'm confused, which is it:  is it to not always have 3 deadly encounters an adventuring day, or is it that you just pick the right encounters and limit adventuring days so they only occur where they don't affect worldbuilding?Because the former is totally what I said to begin with and the latter is still having your encounter pacing affect your worldbuilding -- you're defining locations that cannot have encounters of that frequency and magnitude because it breaks your worldbuilding.Let me try to explain it from a different angle.  Let's say I have a pretty safe area, where few threatening things occur.  If I vary my approaches of encounter difficulty and pacing, I can still have the occasional encounter in this area, even the occasional deadly one, because I'm not locked into a specific pacing requirement.  So I can still have an easy encounter where the party chases off some bandits far below their level in a town as part of a social encounter building up reputation in the area in a bid for political power, say.  But, if I instead have committed to a exclusive 3 a day deadly regimen, I cannot every have these kinds of encounters in this area -- so I cannot have bandits threaten the townsfolk and the player stomp them.  I've now changed my world from one where bandits can threaten towns and the party can intervene without issue (open, varied encounter pacing) to no bandits threatening towns at all (3 deadlies a day).  I can't really even have this happen off camera in the 3 deadlies pacing because if the party hears about it and wants to intervene I either have to suddenly make those bandits very terrifying (or accompanied by other dangerous threats) or come up with some reason they can't go find the bandits and kick their butts.  In effect, but choosing the pacing method to be exclusively deadly exclusively 3 a day, I've now impacted the world as the players level -- the bandit story works in tier I, but not past that, so I can no longer have bandits that the players can encounter in my 'safe' area.That's my point.  You keep addressing this in a single day, single encounter, single party power issue and, sure, you can always justify just about anything in isolation like that.  But, as the party levels along, you start running into having to discard the ability to have encounters at all in some areas, not because the world changed, but because the party outlevels the content possible in that area according to your worldbuilding.  Areas that were dangerous at 1st level become completely pacified at 10th, through no necessary action by the PCs.</blockquote>

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