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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3233106" data-attributes="member: 42582">The rules don't state that there are to be 13 challenges of EL X, each with treasure Z. They do state that there are to be challenges equivalent to 13 of EL X, with treasure over the course of them equivalent to Z per encounter. Monte Cook, Wolfgan Bauer and others have written in (sometimes excruciating) detail about the processes of designing adventures that conform to these requirements, and the difficulty that a DM will have with modules that are written in this way, if the DM has given out non-standard treasure, has a party of more than 4, etc. (These latter sorts of comments are, in their function, no different from conversion notes.)I think you're misunderstanding me. I also think you're underestimating the improtance of the encounter, treasure and XP rules in the DMG.I don't care whether or not people play 3E D&D as written. I don't very often - it's not my preferred game system. Of D20 games, I find Arcana Unearthed/Evolved, Conan or CofC give a play experience that I prefer. And my overall favourite game - due to the intricacy of its character design rules - is in fact Rolemaster.What I do care about is game design, and understanding the relationship between game design and play experience. I think that, for various reasons - perhaps due to the desire to market to as broad an audience as possible - D&D has a history of pretending that its game system is "play experience neutral". In my view such a claim is absurd. What D&D tacitly relies on is that, in fact, people will drop or alter bits of the system in order to go for the play experience that they want. As an example: although alignment appears in Core Rulebook 1 as a rule every bit as solid, mandatory and mechanically hard-wired as the system of skills and feats, we know that many people in play either ignore alignment as a practical matter, or just drop it altogether. They change the mechanics to get the play experience they desire.The encounter-and-reward mechanics in the DMG are written with a deliberate purpose in mind: they tell you how to build adventures that will deliver a certain type of play experience for which 3E D&D is optimised - namely, a game of fantasy action and combat, based on the idea that defeating (typically, killing) monsters is the main character goal, and that those who defeat such monsters will be able to loot their hoards.Just as no one is sitting at your table forcing you to use alignment rules, or forbidding you from giving every character an additional feat at 1st level, or declaring that all characters in your game also speak Elvish as a second language, so no one is forcing you to use these rules for encounter design. But it is interesting to reflect on what happens to the play experience as one moves away from them.As it happens, dropping alignment rarely has a profound impact on other parts of the game. We can drop detect spells, and handwave our treatment of those comparatively few attack spells that rely upon it. Without alignment, as many have noticed, it does become harder to explain, in-game, the moral legitimacy of the principal activity most characters engage in, namely, killing and looting, but not impossible. Appeals to self-defence or defence of others do the job often enough.What happens if you move away from the encounter-design and reward-placement rules? You gradually head into territory where the assumptions on which other parts of the game rely - particulary the character-building rules, but also the action-resolution rules, break down.Thus, if you don't give out enough treasure, high-level fighters don't get the equipment the game assumes they have to make their fighting skills good enough.If you give XP for roleplaying, or players (as opposed to their characters) solving puzzles, then you suddenly have to explain (the game rules don't explain it for you) why purely meta-game activities make characters better at fighting in-game.What happens if you want to run a predominantly political game, rather than a fighting game? One thing you notice is that every level, automatically, all characters gradually (or not so gradually) improve at fighting and saving throws against dying, but they don't automatically get better at social skills. Indeed, for most classes, Diplomacy, Bluff and Sense Motive are cross-class skills; so PCs don't have enough skill points. On the other hand, the bulk of feats are designed to improve combat or related performancy, so in the social/political game PCs have too many feat slots - there is a limit to how much fun it is to keep taking Skill Focus feats and double-aptitude feats for one's various social skills. On the whole, I think we can say that D&D's character-design mechanics don't support this style of play as well as the fighting style of play.Another thing you find, when you move into this sort of territory, is that the timing rules for task and conflict resolution break down. The rules are extremely clear on how many attacks can get made per 6 seconds, how fast people can move, etc. But once we move into social conflict, they again hand wave it all away. How many times do I have to roll a Bluff check if I am filibustering in the Senate for 36 hours? And how often do my political enemies get to roll Sense Motive checks. What is the unit of time for social conflict? And how far away can my friends be, how fluent in the subject-matter of the debate need they be, before they can Aid Another? There is nothing specified as clearly here as the Hit AC 10 rule for Aiding Another in combat.A third example, returning to the encounter-design and reward-placement rules: whereas the rules and the designers are very clear on assigning challenge ratings to monsters and physically harmful traps - we know these things are worked out by seeing how difficult the threat is for a party of iconics to overcome - they completey handwave the assignment of challenge-ratings in a social/political game.And even if we solve the problem of assigning challenge ratings, what about treasure? The magic item rules are clearly designed with the assumption that pluses in combat, whether to attack, damage, AC or save, are very important, whereas pluses on skills less so. In the political game, where characters don't care about weapons or armour, the treasure-placment rules will tend to break down.What about spending our loot on other things? We have a lot of rules in the PHB about what adventuring equipment costs. We have quite sparse rules on the costs of maintaining a court, bribing officials, and so on. To play this sort of game, then, the group has to alter various parts of the rules to deliver the desired experience. The rules as written won't do it for them. They simply fail to support this sort of play in the same way that they support the fighting approach.None of the above is remotely a criticism of D&D. No RPG system can support all styles of play. That's why we have different systems. If I want to play a game where the pedominant mode of resolving conflicts between PCs and NPCs is repartee, I'll play Dying Earth, not D&D.But as long as we keep pretending that D&D really is all things to all people, and that system and play experience are mutually independent - or, as is sometimes asserted, that there can't be mechanics better adapted than 3E D&D to supporting play experiences like the political/social game - we won't be able to explain why what, for some people, is the pinnacle of adventure design, is for others nothing but a snooze-fest or worse.</blockquote>

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