Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="SHARK" data-source="post: 4587111" data-attributes="member: 1131">Greetings!Wow. I don't know. Maybe I'm just not *getting* what some of you are so ferociously arguing about. Balance? Don't balance? It's the DM's responsibility to balance? It's *not* the DM's responsibility to balance encounters?Gee whiz. Honestly, come on now.If you have a party that is suitable in general to fight trolls, well, if 3 trolls would be too easy, the DM shouldn't ambush them with 10 trolls. The DM in such a case should think perhaps 5 or 6 or even 7 trolls might be just the right degree of challenge, without being overwhelming and giving the PC's a dismal--and forgone defeat.It *is* the responsibility of the DM--in my view, anyways--to design or adjuducate randomly rolled encounters--to be reasonably balanced--in that the party has a decent chance of emerging victorious, but also has a reasonable chance of experiencing defeat. Last time I checked...that's the goodness of providing a *Challenge*. Not a cakewalk, and not a damn exercise in smearing the party's characters all over the dungeon floor faster than they can blink. Isn't *ENCOUNTER DESIGN* something learned in basic Dungeon Mastering Campaigns 101 anymore?As for magic items. Well, honestly, yes, *textwise* 1E wins hands down. That's simply due to the great Gary Gygax. It's been a long time since then, so the flavour text in new editions of D&D magic items are *bleh* Yeah, I get that. I agree. Thus, you have to make up your own.Jack7, my friend, when it comes to making new powers and stuff, you just gotta get your hands dirty and make up your own interesting, mysterious magic items that will enthrall and exhilirate your players. When using published items, feel free to add, subtract, and tweak various powers and properties, adding new effects, drawbacks, limitations, whatever my friend. YOU must make the magic items interesting. We can all pretty much forget about WOTC making most magic items terribly interesting.Why, you might ask? Because it's not the same writers. A different generation of writers. Not everyone is a good writer, or you have good writers, but who have different styles and specialties, or talents, in what they write, and *how* they write. Matching the wonderful Gary Gygax is a asking to fill some very large shoes indeed!<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Semper Fidelis,SHARK</blockquote>

Verification