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Encounter Balance holds back 5E
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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9330771" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>I don't see any evidence to support the claim re: "created play culture". What would you point to here?</p><p></p><p>My experience is to the contrary. That if anything, most people either:</p><p></p><p>A) Totally don't understand encounter balance guidelines and <em>de facto</em> ignore them as a result.</p><p></p><p>B) Intentionally don't use them.</p><p></p><p>I don't think I've ever seen a 5E game I could honestly say I felt had a "focus on encounter balance" aside from those I've run myself and even those I'm not 100% on!</p><p></p><p></p><p>Whilst I can't cite examples I would strongly suggest there are an awful lot of encounters in official adventures that are balanced in ways that run contrary to the actual 5E encounter balance guidelines. Whether there are any which "aren't intended to be a combat victory" is a harder question, because it requires either an authorial statement to that effect, psychic powers, or an encounter that's truly insanely out-of-whack, and not just "a bad idea" - and such encounters would usually have an authorial statement. Also, you can go through adventures all the way back to 2E (and even a lot of 1E) and it's obvious that most adventures will only feature encounters look like they are "intended to be combat victories", so suggesting this is a 5E-specific trait as the OP does would be strange.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Yeah it's nothing new.</p><p></p><p></p><p>This is a flagship WotC official adventure intended to sell to the maximum-sized mass-market.</p><p></p><p>It's quite likely you won't fight Vecna in a straight-up dust-up, but there's absolutely no chance WotC is going to ask people to "put on their thinking caps" and "come up with an alternate solution". There isn't a solitary example of WotC asking players to do that in any official adventure in any WotC edition that I'm aware of, and it's certainly not going to be in a flagship adventure like this, because all that will happen is WotC will get tons and tons of complaints about how they "didn't put in a way to defeat Vecna", and not just from players. It'll probably just involve some MacGuffin or a few MacGuffins used in some relatively straightforward way that it would take a really spectacularly silly/foolhardy party to not "get". And then there may still be a combat with a "de-powered" Vecna or the like.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 9330771, member: 18"] I don't see any evidence to support the claim re: "created play culture". What would you point to here? My experience is to the contrary. That if anything, most people either: A) Totally don't understand encounter balance guidelines and [I]de facto[/I] ignore them as a result. B) Intentionally don't use them. I don't think I've ever seen a 5E game I could honestly say I felt had a "focus on encounter balance" aside from those I've run myself and even those I'm not 100% on! Whilst I can't cite examples I would strongly suggest there are an awful lot of encounters in official adventures that are balanced in ways that run contrary to the actual 5E encounter balance guidelines. Whether there are any which "aren't intended to be a combat victory" is a harder question, because it requires either an authorial statement to that effect, psychic powers, or an encounter that's truly insanely out-of-whack, and not just "a bad idea" - and such encounters would usually have an authorial statement. Also, you can go through adventures all the way back to 2E (and even a lot of 1E) and it's obvious that most adventures will only feature encounters look like they are "intended to be combat victories", so suggesting this is a 5E-specific trait as the OP does would be strange. Yeah it's nothing new. This is a flagship WotC official adventure intended to sell to the maximum-sized mass-market. It's quite likely you won't fight Vecna in a straight-up dust-up, but there's absolutely no chance WotC is going to ask people to "put on their thinking caps" and "come up with an alternate solution". There isn't a solitary example of WotC asking players to do that in any official adventure in any WotC edition that I'm aware of, and it's certainly not going to be in a flagship adventure like this, because all that will happen is WotC will get tons and tons of complaints about how they "didn't put in a way to defeat Vecna", and not just from players. It'll probably just involve some MacGuffin or a few MacGuffins used in some relatively straightforward way that it would take a really spectacularly silly/foolhardy party to not "get". And then there may still be a combat with a "de-powered" Vecna or the like. [/QUOTE]
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