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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7701629" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is what I mean when I say that AD&D is forgiving. It works with a rough sense of "tougher" or "less tough", but it's scaling is not sufficiently steep to make the sort of encounter building seen in later editions all that applicable.PC armour classes are relatively static once the PCs get to 2nd level and so have enough money to buy the best non-magical armour available to their classes. Monster/NPC damage is also relatively static (eg hobgoblins do d8 damage, ogres with 4x the hp do d10 damage, hill giants with about 8x the hp do 2d8 damage). So scaling is basically in hit points that can be absorbed (similar to 5e) and in to hit bonus (which is a bit different from 5e, which makes damage scaling more important than hit bonus scaling).Consider an ogre vs a 3rd level fighter. The ogre hits AC 2 on a 13+ (40% chance), and so is dealing about 2 points of damage per round, and so will probably take 4 or more rounds to kill the fighter (around 6 on average, or 8 if the fighter has a CON bonus to hp). The fighter hits the ogre's AC 5 on a 13 before any bonuses, and deals d12 with a longsword before any bonuses. Call it +1 to hit, +2 to damage and the fighter is dealing an average of nearly 4 per round, which will defeat the ogre in 5 rounds on average, and in 3 rounds without requiring absurdly lucky rolls.What will kill a 3rd level fighter is not so much a confrontation with a single ogre, but a group or sequence of ogres. So a 3rd level party can have a chance against a lair of ogres provided they can find a way to deal with them a handful at a time (eg barriers, luring them out one-by-one, stealth assaults, etc). I think this is quite different from the maths of 3E and 4e, where the simultaneous scaling of defences, damage, hit points and to-hit bonus makes the gaps across levels much more significant even for encounters with single foes. (I don't know what the 3E "solution" is to this difference from AD&D; in 4e the solution is to rewrite that single ogre as a lower-level elite or solo.)There's no need to be rude.You asserted that AD&D is not built with balance in mind. Gygax asserts, in the rulebooks that he wrote (or, at least, compiled) that it is. I think he knows better than you what his design goal was.As for AD&D being forgiving, I think it was obvious in the context that I meant "forgiving as to the relationship between a given encounter and the range of PC levels that might tackle it". See my ogre vs 3rd level fighter maths above for an illustration.The difference between a 1st, 3rd and 5th level party in KotB is not the ability to survive an encounter with any particular foe, but the ability to manage the rate at which foes are encountered and the number of foes encountered at a time. This is why "cunning strategems" are important in KotB.I know some people like to paint KotB-style D&d as rugged and virtuous, and 3E/4e encounter-style D&D as decadent and pissweak, but they are simply different sorts of rational response to different mechanical parameters.A 1st level party vs a AD&D ogre or minotaur, for instance, is facing d10 or 2d4 damage on a hit. That won't kill a typical fighter, though it might knock him/her unconscious. But the other members of the party will, in the meantime, be dealing damage. And 4 hits will take down that ogre, or two vials of oil. (Probably 7 hits for the minotaur - it's noticeably tougher - though it's AC is one less than the ogre's.)The 3E ogre, on the other hand, has half-as-many again hit points (and while the 1st level PCs are probably doing a bit more damage, I don't think its +50% except perhaps for the sneak-attacking rogue). And with +8 to hit and doing an average of 16 hp on a hit, it can easily be killing one PC per round.For the 1st level 3E party, making sure the ogre doesn't get into melee is the main concern - which is quite different from the AD&D situation, where melee with the ogre is quite tolerable provided there's only one of it, and so luring it out or otherwise isolating it from its fellows becomes the issue.</blockquote>

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