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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6155811" data-attributes="member: 5143">I think D&D Next is very close to achieving it.See above, I think D&D Next has basically done it by making magic items optional, making the rules for monsters and PCs different, carefully creating combat stats for monsters, and constraining attack bonuses for PCs while limiting spellcasting.So far, every encounter I've run has had its difficulty predicted by the different between the monster's level and the PCs.I do.  I ran my game like this before I ever even knew what LG was.  It required basically no adjustments to write LG adventures.As for the EL thing, the issue was that PCs started off at one power level where the CR/EL system worked fairly well.  Then, as players became more accustomed to the rules and learned to powergame, they became more and more powerful.  In addition, each book that came out caused power creep for the players.Authors just learned that it was possible to increase the difficulty of an encounter without increasing it's CR(which means it's EL stayed the same).  This shouldn't be possible, since CR is supposed to be a measure of difficulty.  But it was, so authors learned to use the holes in the EL/CR rules to increase the challenge without breaking the rules.Though, this was always a large debate.  Since a player would show up with a character created entirely from the PHB and would die the first adventure they played in because of how weak they were compared to the rest of the players.  The CR guidelines DID work for their character.  And since the adventure writer "bent" the CR guidelines in order to make the monsters more powerful, it was a guaranteed death for this type of character.It explains not to use monsters too high or too low because it'll be too hard or too easy for the PCs.  It says the XP you give PCs is based on the difficulty of the monster compared to the power of the group, which is it's CR.  You can't give out XP(or you make a mockery of the idea of the XP system) if you don't acknowledge that CR is a measure of difficulty.I mean, it's difficult to say that any rule that says "Here's how difficult monsters are, be warned if you use enemies more difficult than X, you will likely kill off the PCs...be warned.  Because of this, we won't give you XP for anything above this level, since it's impossible for the PCs to win if you run that encounter.  We recommend not killing off the PCs playing in your game since it can be no fun, therefore here is the percentage of each difficulty encounter we suggest using in your game to provide a good mix of easy and hard encounters" is a RULE.  It's a statement of fact with some advice attached to it.You are correct that nothing in the game requires you to run a game with 60%(or whatever it was) encounters with EL=APL.  Though, the book gives very good reasons why you SHOULD(which were once again ruined by the fact that CR didn't work, but that's another story).Then again, nothing in the rules says you HAVE to have a 1d6 per level damage on fireball.  It just suggests that damage is the most balanced for the game.Agreed, 100% if that's what we're calling everything else in the book.Here's the problem.  I've done that.  My 2nd edition games were FILLED with incidents of me doing a Total Party Kill with monsters I had NO idea were going to be that hard.  A couple of times I had to write contrived ways to save the PCs when I wanted the campaign to continue.I also broke the guidelines and ran a couple of APL+5 and APL+6 encounters in my home game with equally bad effects.  I killed everyone without really meaning to.  It wasn't very fun for anyone and I decided to stick to the guidelines in the future.</blockquote>

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