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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7701522" data-attributes="member: 42582">A fair bit of biography here masquerading as universal.Eg my 4e game - with the Rod of Seven Parts, the Eye of Vecna, the Sword of Kas, and an Orcus-slaying party that includes a dwarven cleric/fighter swapping between hammer and axe and an elven ranger-cleric with a demon-slaying bow - does not disrespect the game's history. That list of stuff is basically the roll call for D&amp;D nostalgia!Nor does my game, or other 4e games I've read about on these boards, involve &quot;cookie-cutter&quot; or &quot;totally predictable&quot; encounters.And as for the memorabilit of encounters - whether or not they involved good luck or bad presumably has no connection to whether or not they were mechanically balanced (which is not a property that depends upon actual dice rolls during resolution). And I remember plenty of encounters that were mechanically balanced (as in, conformed to the explicit or implicity guidelines for building encounters). The maths of an encounter doesn't have very much to do with its predictability (at least in my experience).HARP has guidelines (based around comparing average combat bonuses).Burning Wheel doesn't have encounter-buiding guidelines (it's not really an encounter-based system) but it has advice on NPC building which emphasises the need to manage degree of challenge, pacing, etc.Robin Laws's HeroQuest revised has, as its core, a system for managing DC escalation or de-escalation based on consecutive party successes. (Like BW, HQrev is a bit different from typical D&amp;D, in that it takes for granted that the PCs will fail from time to time and yet the game will go on without the GM needing to take some sort of emergency action.)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7701522, member: 42582"] A fair bit of biography here masquerading as universal. Eg my 4e game - with the Rod of Seven Parts, the Eye of Vecna, the Sword of Kas, and an Orcus-slaying party that includes a dwarven cleric/fighter swapping between hammer and axe and an elven ranger-cleric with a demon-slaying bow - does not disrespect the game's history. That list of stuff is basically the roll call for D&D nostalgia! Nor does my game, or other 4e games I've read about on these boards, involve "cookie-cutter" or "totally predictable" encounters. And as for the memorabilit of encounters - whether or not they involved good luck or bad presumably has no connection to whether or not they were mechanically balanced (which is not a property that depends upon actual dice rolls during resolution). And I remember plenty of encounters that were mechanically balanced (as in, conformed to the explicit or implicity guidelines for building encounters). The maths of an encounter doesn't have very much to do with its predictability (at least in my experience). HARP has guidelines (based around comparing average combat bonuses). Burning Wheel doesn't have encounter-buiding guidelines (it's not really an encounter-based system) but it has advice on NPC building which emphasises the need to manage degree of challenge, pacing, etc. Robin Laws's HeroQuest revised has, as its core, a system for managing DC escalation or de-escalation based on consecutive party successes. (Like BW, HQrev is a bit different from typical D&D, in that it takes for granted that the PCs will fail from time to time and yet the game will go on without the GM needing to take some sort of emergency action.) [/QUOTE]

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