[PseudoFenton]

Originally Posted by Stripe

I have no idea how the Pathfinder/D20 Challenge Rating works in practice, either. There are complaints, I've read.

However, the point is those respective designers have such a mechanic. We now have something of the equivalent, something sorely lacking until MotFD, what I consider the other, more important half of DFM1. I may never run the adventure, but Lord knows I'm using everything else in the book.

Sadly the CR of D&D breaks down very easily, and is purposefully misleading in places too - like how all dragons are 'costed' at a lower CR rating than they really should be (even more so for the bigger tougher ones designed for higher level groups), just to ensure they're always dangerous and 'memorable' encounters.

Also, an optimised wizard/cleric/druid can make a CR several levels higher than them childs play, whilst other classes are highly underpar even when optimised (mostly fighters to be honest, especially the monk) which means they'll struggle with CR's that should be equal to them by level. This makes 'appropriate' CR dependant on how well optimised the party is, and what classes they chose to go. Once you throw in idealised loot drops or high purchasing power, its also very easy to elevate the power of a party with equipment alone, making their levels (and thus how CR is calculated) even less important.

So although other games do have a mechanic for this - I wouldn't agree that they're in any way less based on guesswork and approximations of what the likely potency of any given party is. Which only leads to greater and greater discrepancies the longer you play, leading neatly into this sort of trouble...

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

In my experience in 3.5 it worked perfectly at low levels and became progressively more unwieldy and less accurate at higher levels. I eventually ended the campaign early because I was tired of the work that had to go into encounters (one of my personal challenges was to run it "by the book") that weren't actually guaranteed to be "balanced" in any meaningful way.

Originally Posted by ULFGARD

Also, when you're running a campaign in a point buy system, or even a level system with lots of choices at higher levels, the characters diverge enough that gauging encounter difficulty becomes more and more of an art than a science. So N becomes "fuzzier" in general the more choices PCs have to choose from. In practice, even with templates, this happens immediately in GURPS, but will happen eventually in any system that grants lots of choices to characters as they advance.

This is perfectly true, the ability to make choices means you can make non-synergising/under-par ones just as easily as you can make 'average' or optimal ones. So although in theory all choices should be equal and all average out to form perfect balance - the truth is the more choices you give, the quicker and easier it is to deviate from the expected profile.

The problem mostly being that potential power and applied power are different things, and once you start min-maxing some traits over others you get disproportionate applied power even when you've rigorously maintained the potential power available - this is why its hard to 'balance' GURPS, nothing (but the GM) stops you min-maxing a small field of excellence and thus dominating that area at the cost of all other areas.

Originally Posted by Anthony

Or, you can be old-school and not worry about whether the fights are balanced ;)

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

I know it is absolutely no help to anybody, but in GURPS I just do what makes sense. ... If a fight is especially easy or hard for the PCs, I'm not overly concerned as it's the PC's choices that led them there.

This is how I do it, balance is all well and good, but it doesn't mean anything if you're party isn't playing by the normal rules of combat/social etiquette in the first place.

Yeah a troll might squash you flat if you try to engage them in a toe-to-toe fight, and therefore should be a 'tough' foe for the party to deal with. But nothing stops you collapsing their cave/bridge on to them, or kiting them into traps with ranged weapons and harrying tactics, or even just pacifying them with a silver-tongue or a well picked spell.

How you approach a problem determines its difficulty, and maintaining a world which makes sense allows you to use intuition and logic to solve problems - rather than trying to shoe-horn every problem into little boxes of "can only be solved by a party of N engaging it in direct combat" and then finding it doesn't work out that easily.

Originally Posted by Anthony

That's reasonable for a sandbox game, but for a prepared adventure, it should be designed so the characters expected to play the adventure can reasonably succeed, without too much time-wasting extraneous stuff. That means that expected fights should be beatable and shouldn't feel like a waste of time (this doesn't mean all fights have to be challenging, but there should be a reason to play out the fight, rather than declaring that the PCs win).

Although I agree with your counter-argument, I still think published adventures should have a list of potential solutions (ranging from "this instantly solves the problem" to "if you're players are desperate or misguided enough, they might be able to employ this solution effectively, but it'll be tough") and then encourage the GM to accept any logical course of action the players might take that could lead to a solution. This applies to traps, barriers, social interaction and plot progression ('you need x clues to progress') and not just combat (although combat is a type of problem that needs a solution, even if most solutions tend to involve blood).

As such successful completion of an adventure often is (even when it's not explicitly stated, or even considered by the author) based on how well suited your players approach is to the challenges they face. Therefore it's entirely dependant on how well they choose to balance the world in their favour, rather than how well the world is already balanced to suit the players.

Nothing stops any player/group pulling a leroy jenkins or choosing to fireball in close-combat whilst in a tinder-dry rickety old tower that's half leaning over the side of the cliffs of insanity. Ultimately you make your own luck, the world shouldn't conspire to keep you from failure (or success for that matter).

Published world or not, there is only so much you can anticipate ahead of time when writing an adventure, and it's up the GM to skip over things that are wasting the groups time.