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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 7701527" data-attributes="member: 17607">True, but I suspect there's something else going on that we all might remember -- say, that we all seemed to play through the Slavers series, and the G/D/Q series, and Keep on the Borderlands...In short, there were a lot more published adventures back then, and whether we ran those straight or incorporated them into our own campaign worlds, those adventures taught us more about what worked and didn't work in challenging our players and their characters than any specific 'encounter guidelines'.Let's also not forget that pre-3E adventures tended to run more toward the 'living site' model rather than the 'encounter' model for adventure design -- how many adventures do you remember running where a number of rooms had comments like 'if the bugbears in Area 4 hear the sound of combat in Area 2, they will move to reinforce their fellows in 3 rounds'. This kind of thing is virtually unheard of since the rise of the 'encounter' model in 3E design.That's kind of a problem for the game, then. The designers of the game identified some time ago that the biggest factor limiting the growth of the game is the rate at which new DMs can be recruited and 'trained'; at some point, the number of players at the table gets to be too large to handle effectively, so someone needs to step up and become a new DM to allow the table to split into smaller, more manageable parties. But if the perception is that DMing is hard and takes a long time and lots of effort to get 'good' at it, then people aren't going to be all that willing to step up to DM. (And anybody who has tried recruiting new DMs for Adventurers League or Living Forgotten Realms can sympathize with this.)Thus, the impetus for encounter-building guidelines, with the implicit promise that, if you crunch the numbers correctly, you'll come up with a challenging, not overwhelming encounter that your players will enjoy. That the encounter building guidelines are largely bogus** is not something a new DM is likely to figure out, and by the time the DM does figure it out, she'll be long-enough into her campaign that she'll probably just muddle through and find some other way to make it work rather than end her campaign and disappoint her players.** - Of all the versions of D&D that had encounter-building guidelines, 4th edition's was the most useful, because the structure of the game's abilities was much more rigidly defined, and there was a much firmer 'floor' on character effectiveness based on those definitions. You might still need to make adjustments for a party of munchkins (though doubling or even tripling monster HP would usually get you over halfway toward success even there), but barring some weird synergistic combination of monster abilities, your encounters would very seldom go off the rails.--Pauper</blockquote>

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