NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 4988472" data-attributes="member: 5143">That is not my experience.  In 4e, when you make an encounter, you are allowed to take a monster from a Monster Manual...you are allowed to increase its level up or down, but no more than 5 points.  You may be able to apply a short list of templates on it(which are discouraged by the higher ups in the RPGA due to the balance issues they COULD cause).  That's it.Every monster listed in a book so far has not caused any problems for "substandard" groups in the RPGA yet.  I've seen some of these groups.  People who don't know how to use their powers effectively, use nothing but at wills and only have a 16 in their prime ability score.  They are able to defeat any encounter that is made for their level.  Even if the group is ALL fighters who fit the above description, they'll survive.I've found that in Living Greyhawk, if someone showed up for a table with a 10th level 5 bard/2 rogue/2 fighter/1 cleric that the other players in the game would rebel against them and ask them to play something else to avoid killing the whole party.Besides, it ISN'T bad encounter design.  It is a bunch of unchanged monsters out of the Monster Manual that is within the guidelines in the DMG for designing encounters.  It would already be very hard to near impossible without the terrain features.  With a couple small terrain features it becomes stupid.  But perfectly within the rules and a valid encounter.If you were forced to limit yourself to only "good" encounter design(depending on how you define that), you remove about 90% of all the choices you have when creating an encounter in 3e.  Which is fine, but you can't expect every DM who ever makes an encounter to say "The rules say this is perfectly fine, but I'm not going to do it."4e suggests that if you have terrain features that do damage that they are instead traps, which take XP from your XP pool.</blockquote>

Verification