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<blockquote data-quote="Don Durito" data-source="post: 8342523" data-attributes="member: 6687260">I think there's a lot of ideological elements in discussions of sandboxes that obscure what's actually going on.In your traditional Hex Crawl you will often have safer areas and more dangerous areas with different types of encounter tables and different elements of risk.&nbsp; And the dangerous areas are clearly signalled. eg &quot;The haunted Forest&quot;.&nbsp; This is a kind of balance, just as making dungeon levels more dangerous as you go deeper is a kind of balance.It's just that sandboxes (and old school dungeons) tend to balanced at the level of risk rather than individual encounters.In this regard CR is actually useful in design environments, it's just that people before CR tended to just go by Hit Dice (and general knowledge).&nbsp; If there's an unavoidable beholder on the first level of a dungeon then something has clearly gone wrong.Edit: CR in 3e actually seemed originally designed with stocking in mind (3e was 'back to the dungeon'), it's just that it came to be associated with the idea of the balanced encounter, as playstyles changed, so got pushback more on ideoligcal grounds.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Don Durito, post: 8342523, member: 6687260"] I think there's a lot of ideological elements in discussions of sandboxes that obscure what's actually going on. In your traditional Hex Crawl you will often have safer areas and more dangerous areas with different types of encounter tables and different elements of risk. And the dangerous areas are clearly signalled. eg "The haunted Forest". This is a kind of balance, just as making dungeon levels more dangerous as you go deeper is a kind of balance. It's just that sandboxes (and old school dungeons) tend to balanced at the level of risk rather than individual encounters. In this regard CR is actually useful in design environments, it's just that people before CR tended to just go by Hit Dice (and general knowledge). If there's an unavoidable beholder on the first level of a dungeon then something has clearly gone wrong. Edit: CR in 3e actually seemed originally designed with stocking in mind (3e was 'back to the dungeon'), it's just that it came to be associated with the idea of the balanced encounter, as playstyles changed, so got pushback more on ideoligcal grounds. [/QUOTE]

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