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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thurbane" data-source="post: 3075984" data-attributes="member: 43273">Funny thing is, I was suggesting the "older brother" option from a DMs perspective, yet everyone seems to have assumed it is some kind of con that players would pull. It was just a suggetion for limiting an influx of magic by keeping the existing amount of magic for the players new character rather than giving the new character WBL.I never thought the idea could raise such hackles.  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/nervous.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":heh:" title="Nervous Laugh    :heh:" data-shortname=":heh:" /> OK, now to REALLY open myself up to a public beating...I think WBL is one of the worst things to happen to D&D in the new editions. Instead of magic items and treasure being a reward for good adventuring, they have become merely standard wages. Magic items have lost their wonder and mystery, since anyone with a few levels and feats can sit down and churn them out wholesale....which will of course meet with howls of "OMFG but you MUST slavishly obey WBL to make sure encounters are balanced!". Which I have never quite understood. Sure, the CR system is a good guideline, and the CR systems assumes a certain level of wealth, but come on. Why not trust your DM to excercise a bit of common sense with encounters without needing a strict mathematical formula to do so. The whole CR/WBL vicious circle reeks of video game logic to me. You can't fight the end of level boss until you've got the Green Key and Red Key from rooms 22 and 23...Here's a poser for you: say no one in my party has a ghost touch weapon, and the party does not include a cleric, and I throw a group of Spectres at them. They might well be within WBL and CR parameters, but will most likely annihilate the party anyway.Bottom line - CR and WBL are wonderful guidelines, but it irks me when players demand their DMs follow them to the letter of the law, else they are horrible DMs who hate their players, apparently...Or maybe I'm just a crusty old man who can't let go of previous editions.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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