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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 7701537" data-attributes="member: 17607">Let's not forget that the classes were 'balanced' in an asymmetrical fashion as well -- something I'd forgotten until I picked up the old Gold Box SSI games on gog.com not too long ago. You could have three characters with the exact same number of XP, but the magic-user would be level 4, the fighter level 5, and the thief level 6. So saying 'a party of characters from level 3 to 6' was simply a recognition that some parties did combine level 3 and level 6 characters, not that the adventure was set up to accommodate anything from a level 3 party to a level 6 party. I'm going to disagree with you here -- yes, the game was very popular among its fanbase back in the day, but the fanbase wasn't that large. TSR sold 750,000 copies of the AD&D core books in 1984 (according to Wikipedia), and WotC estimates that roughly 5 million people are playing D&D regularly today. Given the much greater degree of public acceptance of D&D today, I'd argue that this is the 'golden age'. The increased number of players is absolutely connected to the perceived ease of DMing, supported by systems like the encounter-building system.I still don't think the encounter-building system in 5e works, as presented in either the core books or the UA article. But I think it has enough of a feel of 'yeah, this doesn't seem too complicated' that it does what it's really intended to do -- get people behind the screen running games so that more people can play.My advice is to let the players make memorable changes to your campaign world -- it's the best way to let them know that their actions really do have consequences. For instance, in my homebrew world, I once had a charlatan thief who decided he wanted to breed rust monsters and sell them to local kobold tribes as pets. Now, two generations later, the kobolds have their own kingdom and nobody wants to mess with them.--Pauper</blockquote>

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