Creating Encounters on a Budget

the saga budget

John Robey aka the Gneech authored some good supplemental rules for a sword and sorcery SAGA game. One of my favorites is the encounter budget adaptation. It helps in gauging the difficulty of encounters. Many games tend to forget that adverse conditions are called such for a reason. Translated to game-speak that means adverse conditions = higher difficulty and higher awards.

In old school AD&D, a GM was encouraged to pile on the adverse conditions to make encounters more interesting. The flip side to this was players could potentially reap incredible amounts of experience points with a good strategem or incredible luck. That was unlikely in 3.x given the experience cap rule. with such a rule it became important to balance the other end of the equation. Giving experience for adverse conditions became important to the game.