And that encounter difficulty system in D&D 4e isn't all that great either.
Seriously? It's extremely effective at almost every level of play. You get weird stuff if, for example, you de-level a monster from Epic tier to low Heroic or vice-versa, but even there the issues are relatively minor in most cases. The weird exceptions were rare and notable, nothing like "[not] all that great either." Coupled with the extremely useful stuff like "MM3 on a business card," 4e's XP Budget rules actually work extremely well to tell you how challenging an encounter should be. Really effective player strategy can of course let them punch a couple levels above their actual party level, but that's a perfectly appropriate result--and, as the books themselves note, it's perfectly appropriate to use monsters even eight levels above party level.
Which perhaps underscores how difficult it is to make a tool that is reliable in all cases, and why some DM adjustments will always be necessary.
No one is asking for something that is reliable in ALL cases, why do you keep saying this?
For goodness' sake, this is the
third time I've had to reject this idea from you, just stated in slightly different words. "Perfect," "airtight," "reliable in all cases"--these are just synonyms, each time setting up the strawman of "your position is simply 100% unattainable, stop trying." I have never, ever, NOT ONCE, suggested that something that works with ZERO application of DM judgment is required. I have, repeatedly, said that the system we have is lacking. It relies extremely heavily on DM judgment calls, to the point that numerous people in multiple places have explicitly described CR as hardly even a
suggestion, let alone an actually useful tool. It's not just my experience as a player, nor just the reports I hear from others. It's numerous sources from diverse places
and firsthand player experience from multiple campaigns (three, to be precise, two of which had the noted TPKs.)
As with 5e, I always look at the budget to check myself because the tool is useful if not always reliable, and then make changes to fit my group.
And I'm saying it's
not always useful, and in fact can be inaccurate or even outright misleading. The fact that WotC's own encounters frequently violate the tool's answers is damning enough. Further, I've been told by folks who I had good reason to believe were pre-release playtesters that basically all CRs in the game are almost totally ad-hoc; the tools that are supposed to tell you the CR of a custom creature are wildly inaccurate and the result requires significant
I was playing in a D&D 4e game Sunday night and last night. Those encounters were appropriate for 1st- and 2nd-level characters. We stomped their guts out with just 4 PCs. Our group is tactically-minded with lots of RPG experience, so the DM is going to have to work on this. The encounter difficulty rules can't really account for our level of skill.
Yes, they can. I even quoted them! The rules explicitly say that, for a typical party, "standard" encounters run from level-2(ish) to level+3(ish). Sounds like you could handle fights at the upper end of that range.