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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8864665" data-attributes="member: 18">4E had incredibly precise and detailed guidelines that are totally unlike any other edition (very focused on "types" of monsters), has easy scaling so you could trivially level stuff up and down, and further, the wildest and most shocking thing was - the rules actually worked if you followed them closely! They reliably produced balanced and interesting encounters (so long you enjoy 4E of course lol).3.XE had CR, which was an active detriment to encounter design, for the very simple reason that the methodology used to assign CR lead to monsters/NPCs with insanely disparate power levels having the same CR. Seriously a monster that could casually wipe an entire party of level X would commonly have the same CR as one that would struggle to last two rounds and likely achieve little.5E has much looser guidelines than 4E, and the CR system is a lot less of a car crash than 3.XE. It's not a huge help, but at least it's not actively misleading like 3.XE's CR was.My experience is that most parties love the idea of taking prisoners exactly up until logistical stuff becomes an issue, and then the problems with that gradually make them averse to the idea. In games where you can have the cops come or whatever, taking prisoners suddenly becomes vastly more common.EDIT - I note that when henchmen/hirelings/bases were more common in 2E, we saw a lot more prisoners taken. Hell, the main base of the 2E group I ran for most (a fancy castle) had a dungeon that ended up so full they had to think about maybe releasing people. I kind of wish I still had the list of all the people they had in there, maybe do I somewhere...</blockquote>

Verification