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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6155681" data-attributes="member: 5143">I like to point out when people say this the simple fact that in Living Greyhawk, it was passed down as a mandate from WOTC that ALL encounters MUST fit the EL guidelines for appropriate encounters.  NO encounters above APL+4 were allowed to be used.  The average of the encounters in an adventure had to add up to APL+2(which meant that if there were 3 encounters, one had to be APL=EL, one was APL+2 and one was APL+4).It was pointed out to us that WOTC(and the Circle, who were in charge of the campaign) saw the point of D&D as heroic characters fighting enemies who were reasonably defeatable.  That's the reason the EL guidelines were put in the book.I understand that some people feel the game should be more deadly and therefore don't like the EL rules.  Some even go as far as to somehow they were a mistake and no one meant to put them in the book in the first place.  This simply isn't the case.But the key thing to remember is that, above all, those rules are meant to help the DM estimate the difficulty of an encounter because so many DMs complained that in 2e they'd use a monster and when they ran it without cheating, it would kill off all the characters...when they didn't want that to happen.  There was no real way of knowing which monsters would kill all the PCs or not.  So, they added one.  Realistically, there is no RULE that says you need to use appropriate encounters.  Instead there is simply a game designed to have a 100% chance of killing everyone if you don't follow them.  DMs who don't follow them are simply saying to their players that they want them all to die.At least, in theory.  I'm the first to admit that WOTC did a very poor job creating CRs for monsters.  They also kept giving more and more powerful options to the players.  This meant that at various points in 3.5e's lifespan, you could easily take a CR 15 creature and throw it up against 10th level characters and watch the PCs win without much of a problem.And if the estimates aren't correct, it pretty much removes the entire point of the EL/CR system and makes it useless.</blockquote>

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