NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 7452522" data-attributes="member: 37579">Encounter building was easy. The system worked much like the 5e system where each monster was worth a certain amount of xp and you added together the numbers to make a total. The difference is that groups larger than the baseline didn't increase the budget  Each monster statblock was given a role in combat, so you could easy slot those into templates given in the DMG to build certain encounter groups. The rules told you to use a mix of monsters, with one monster needed per PC of the same level. So for a 5-person party you could throw in a soldier, couple strikers, a brute, and an artillery.  (Using off-level monsters was trickier and required math, as the numbers didn't match.The tricky bit was having three to five different monsters on the board, that all had different powers, which you had to read and know how to use before the battle. As mentioned, very quickly on, WotC realised that having the various types of a monster synergize well together made this easy. And effectively designed the monster entries as encounter groups. Prior to this, they tended to have the monsters at a few different level bands, which made designing, say, an orc encounter harder. So just using a group of monsters at the same level tended to synergize. DMs looking to go that extra mile could compare the abilities of different monsters, doing things like pairing a monster with a push ability with one that dealt damage in an area.Now, this is all just the baseline. You were encouraged to think of terrain and the encounter area as well. That was harder, but no harder than 3e or 5e.</blockquote>

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