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<blockquote data-quote="Gus L" data-source="post: 9614588" data-attributes="member: 7045072">It makes sense to me - but only in the context of play style.One of the difficulties in discussing &quot;D&amp;D&quot;, especially in a community like EN-World which skews towards newer editions, is the tendency to lump all the editions of D&amp;D's together, when different editions clearly seem to encourage different playstyles -- even while many of the rules remain similar at first glance. The differences between how one plays, what players expects, and how one designs adventures for AD&amp;D and 5E are vast - and then with the OSR we got a whole new set of interpretations on those older rulesets. I sometimes think the play style of 5E has gone through a similar reinterpretation since release, perhaps in response to streaming play? My impression is that &quot;CR&quot; (in Pathfinder, 4E, and 5E ) is a system structured around balancing individual encounters. This works in these systems (a play style I call &quot;Contemporary Traditional&quot; and others have called things like &quot;OC&quot;) because they focus on set-piece combat encounters with fairly complex tactical rules between small numbers of combatants. There's absolutely a discussion to be had about to what degree 1974 D&amp;D was originally envisioned as a tactical game - but it was certainly a skirmish game with larger numbers of &quot;figures&quot; on each side then Contemporary Trad - and the OSR did not champion this style of play.&nbsp; So CR, and the adventure design it supports focuses on individual (mostly combat) encounters.&nbsp; It's part of a style of play using &quot;Encounter Based Design&quot; - something I generally see supported in the Contemporary trad Community and literature.The thing here is that the older Level Based design doesn't work that well for set-piece tactical encounters, but for larger navigation and exploration based challenges.&nbsp; The challenge in an OSR dungeon crawl is almost always extracting valuables from the hostile environment and that environment has both difficult areas/encounters and less difficult ones. A big part of play is making decisions at the &quot;level&quot; layer - which route to take (and the players should be able to learn this), which encounters, risks and even treasures to avoid etc. It's risk management and planning ... but disrupted by random encounters.&nbsp; For an encounter focused game most of the decisions are in the individual tactical encounters and want to tune them to be tricky... the party should need skill, luck and to use the right resources at the right time to fight through them... This becomes much harder when there are things like random encounters and lots of navigation/supply decisions.So Level vs. Encounter based design and Level/Random Encounter Table vs. Challenge Rating based balance have different goals and likely work well for the play styles they support.&nbsp; The issue is that since we call both play styles &quot;D&amp;D&quot; a lot of the time people get confused and use the wrong tools.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Gus L, post: 9614588, member: 7045072"] It makes sense to me - but only in the context of play style. One of the difficulties in discussing "D&D", especially in a community like EN-World which skews towards newer editions, is the tendency to lump all the editions of D&D's together, when different editions clearly seem to encourage different playstyles -- even while many of the rules remain similar at first glance. The differences between how one plays, what players expects, and how one designs adventures for AD&D and 5E are vast - and then with the OSR we got a whole new set of interpretations on those older rulesets. I sometimes think the play style of 5E has gone through a similar reinterpretation since release, perhaps in response to streaming play? My impression is that "CR" (in Pathfinder, 4E, and 5E ) is a system structured around balancing individual encounters. This works in these systems (a play style I call "Contemporary Traditional" and others have called things like "OC") because they focus on set-piece combat encounters with fairly complex tactical rules between small numbers of combatants. There's absolutely a discussion to be had about to what degree 1974 D&D was originally envisioned as a tactical game - but it was certainly a skirmish game with larger numbers of "figures" on each side then Contemporary Trad - and the OSR did not champion this style of play. So CR, and the adventure design it supports focuses on individual (mostly combat) encounters. It's part of a style of play using "Encounter Based Design" - something I generally see supported in the Contemporary trad Community and literature. The thing here is that the older Level Based design doesn't work that well for set-piece tactical encounters, but for larger navigation and exploration based challenges. The challenge in an OSR dungeon crawl is almost always extracting valuables from the hostile environment and that environment has both difficult areas/encounters and less difficult ones. A big part of play is making decisions at the "level" layer - which route to take (and the players should be able to learn this), which encounters, risks and even treasures to avoid etc. It's risk management and planning ... but disrupted by random encounters. For an encounter focused game most of the decisions are in the individual tactical encounters and want to tune them to be tricky... the party should need skill, luck and to use the right resources at the right time to fight through them... This becomes much harder when there are things like random encounters and lots of navigation/supply decisions. So Level vs. Encounter based design and Level/Random Encounter Table vs. Challenge Rating based balance have different goals and likely work well for the play styles they support. The issue is that since we call both play styles "D&D" a lot of the time people get confused and use the wrong tools. [/QUOTE]

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