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<blockquote data-quote="The_Gneech" data-source="post: 7701618" data-attributes="member: 6779">I played enough 1E to entertain the idea that Gygax was confused about his own game. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink&nbsp; &nbsp; ;)"&nbsp; data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> (Or at least, the game design equivalent of an &quot;unreliable narrator.&quot; A lot of what he wrote was motivated as much by external factors such as marketing and brand protection as it was by what actually happened at the gaming table.)Seriously tho, the &quot;balance&quot; of AD&amp;D is mostly race/class combos relative to each other, rather than characters against the world. Parties were larger and made up of characters of different levels (sometimes wildly different), and encounter building advice boiled down to &quot;put tougher stuff on deeper levels&quot; and what numbers were &quot;baked in&quot; to the random encounter tables. Seeing that skeletons were on &quot;1st level&quot; encounter tables while wights were on &quot;3rd level&quot; (or whatever it actually was, it's been a long time) told the budding homebrew DM that wights were probably not something to mess around with for a starting level party. But Keep On the Borderlands has an ogre in one cave, a minotaur in another, and rooms with 20+ orcs just sitting there, where 1st level parties could blunder into them.3E, and particularly 4E, weren't made with that kind of a mindset, for better or worse. 5E isn't really either, but has enough wiggle room that it can be played that way.-The Gneech <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool&nbsp; &nbsp; :cool:"&nbsp; data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="The_Gneech, post: 7701618, member: 6779"] I played enough 1E to entertain the idea that Gygax was confused about his own game. ;) (Or at least, the game design equivalent of an "unreliable narrator." A lot of what he wrote was motivated as much by external factors such as marketing and brand protection as it was by what actually happened at the gaming table.) Seriously tho, the "balance" of AD&D is mostly race/class combos relative to each other, rather than characters against the world. Parties were larger and made up of characters of different levels (sometimes wildly different), and encounter building advice boiled down to "put tougher stuff on deeper levels" and what numbers were "baked in" to the random encounter tables. Seeing that skeletons were on "1st level" encounter tables while wights were on "3rd level" (or whatever it actually was, it's been a long time) told the budding homebrew DM that wights were probably not something to mess around with for a starting level party. But [I]Keep On the Borderlands[/I] has an ogre in one cave, a minotaur in another, and rooms with 20+ orcs just sitting there, where 1st level parties could blunder into them. 3E, and particularly 4E, weren't made with that kind of a mindset, for better or worse. 5E isn't really either, but has enough wiggle room that it can be played that way. -The Gneech :cool: [/QUOTE]

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