Difficulty Adjustment as a Game Balance Tool

There is a fascinating discussion over on the Pathfinder message boards. A GM has a fellow GM as a player in his game, and the GM-as-player has the opinion that 3.5 is horribly unbalanced towards casters, and wonders if Pathfinder follows the same design mantra. Notice here, we are not focusing on 3.5 or Pathfinder, we are talking about design.

Gauss (in the second post) says, "Also: Pathfinder almost universally dropped the CRs of monsters by 1. The effect of this is that monsters have slightly higher saves and more hitpoints. This benefits the martial classes."

Wow. Interesting take on this. Paizo dropped the power of an entire class by just adjusting encounter challenge ratings. This is a wonderful example of using difficulty to balance a class and its powers, without touching the powers or class itself.

Most game designers would first consider adjusting the powers, tweaking spell resistance rules, fixing the class, adjusting monster defenses, or any number of other fixes that would take a long time to iterate over the data in a game's lists. Game design is tough, and going back over your existing data can break lots of stuff. Instead, Paizo used their CR system, and tweaked it to put melee characters on an even keel with spellcasters - and they made the adjustment backwards on the existing system.

Examples of great game design techniques are hard to find, but I think we found one here.