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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5207405" data-attributes="member: 42582">I was the one who used the phrase "abuse of encounter-building guidelines".In a game like traditional AD&D, there are no encounter building guidelines of the very tight sort found in 3E or (moreso) 4e or HeroQuest. I still think there are loose guidelines - a lot of AD&D players would regard it as abusive to put a beholder in the first room on the first level of a dungeon - but the GM otherwise is given a lot of flexibility and it is part of the players' job to use scouting, detect spells, gathering of rumours in town, etc to work out which encounters are doable for them and which not.I think it's pretty clear that this is not the sort of play that 4e envisages as its paradigm. I'm not saying 4e couldn't do it, although you'd have to houserule back in a lot of the necessary divination spells. But the 4e DMG says (pretty explicitly) to the GM: if you build encounters within this sort of range of levels, using this sort of approach, you'll get an awesome fantasy game of heroic adventuring - otherwise, you're on your own. Now obviously 4e is not everyone's idea of awesome, and maybe some people would get an awesome game out of 4e only by ignoring its encounter building guidelines, but as far as the rulebooks are concerned it promises to support only a fairly specific approach to encounter design.It's this sort of fairly tight connection between encounter building and the game delivering what it promises to that I've got in mind when I talk about "abusing the encounter building guidelines". (I think 3E has tighter guidelines that AD&D, but I suspect they're not as tightly integrated into the overall gameplay as they are in 4e - I don't have enough exprience with 3E to express a definite view about this.)As for Lanefan's example of the slavers striking to subdue - I wasn't arcing up at the striking to subdue, I was arcing up at the too-powerful but not easily detectable as such encounter where they strike to subdue. It was the "gotcha" element of the suggestion that I personally didn't like. "Gotcha" is a fairly big part of AD&D play, but I'm not sure it works as well in other systems where the goals and expectations of play are different.For my players, I think "gotcha" play, or successive GM attempts to derail the party of its current course, would be a lot more objectionable than frank metagame discussions about what elements we want to figure in the game. But then, my players dont' want to play AD&D. If they did, we'd ditch the metagame stuff and bring on the ingame "gotchas" and derailments.</blockquote>

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