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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3232709" data-attributes="member: 4937">I have no idea what the encounter level of the trolls are any more than I have any idea what level the characters were.  I also have no idea what the exact stats of the swords were.  Suffice to say that given the challenges which the DM intended to present the group, the reward was reasonable.  Looking at the rest of the story, the 'DM' was front loading a little to make up for the paucity of reward (sans one artifact of dubious utility) from the next nine or ten challenges.Of course, this a little bit absurd.  I'm not trying to suggest JRRT was trying to conform to gamist notions of good story design.   I'm simply trying to show that a story along the lines of the one Tolkein wrote is easier to simulate within the D&D framework than you are suggesting.  There are questions about whether it would be as fun to play as to read, but I think a quality game master could make it so.You do realize that there are alot of things written into the core rulebook which are not rules, right?  There are alot of things that a potential DM needs to know about running a game that aren't actually rules.  This is the first time I've ever heard anyone assert that the guidelines and suggestions for encounter design are hard and fast rules.  This is the first time I've heard anyone suggest that if you deviate from some supposed rules for encounter design that you are no longer playing D&D.You do realize that by the standard you suggest here, WotC itself has never published a module for 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons.  There isn't a single module out there that follows hard and fast rules for encounter design.  Every one of them presents encounters over a wide range of Encounter levels.  Consider the Roper in 'Sunless Citadel' as just one famous example.  Every one of them fails to offer a definate award after each encounter much less one always scaled exactly to the particular encounter.  All of them bend and break the guidelines... errr 'rules' as written.  So are you suggesting that they aren't actually D&D modules?  I'm not aware of any of Monte Cook's works that exactly follows the guidelines... errr 'rules' in the DMG.  For example, it wouldn't be at all hard to prove that Monte ignores Table 3-3 'Treasure Values per Encounter' and Table 3-5 'Treasure' and instead relies on his own sense of what he needs to provide globally over the course of the entire adventure rather than tieing rewards to a particular encounter.  Or, if what he does is following the 'rules', the rules on encounter design are so loosely written as to allow virtually all the sorts of things you claim that they prohibit, which sorta suggests that maybe they are only guidelines after all.What exactly are you suggesting is a rule?  Perhaps if you could give me some page numbers and paragraphs I could understand were you are coming from, but reading just what you wrote it seems to descend into absurdity in a hurry.  You not only seem to be treating things I consider guidelines as hard and fast rules, but you seem to be considering the extrapolations and conclusions you've drawn from those 'rules' to be hard and fast rules as well.  Or in other words, you seem to be saying, "If people don't play the game exactly how I play it, they aren't playing it right."  This is one of the most egregious sorts of rules lawyering I've ever seen, because you aren't only trying to enforce 'the rules as written' but what is apparantly your own understanding of 'the spirt of the rules'.</blockquote>

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