The Same Game Test is a balance standard based on the idea that all characters should be capable of overcoming an equal number of challenges, that all challenges of a given Challenge Rating should be equally difficult, and the rule that a character is an encounter of their own Challenge Rating. Therefore, a character should beat approximately half of the challenges of its level. This turns out to be curiously true for reasonably optimized transmuters, clerics, and rogues, and is an accepted standard in some gaming communities. The test is a fairly simple series of fights against equal challenge rating enemies and encounters of equal encounter level to be carried out at level ten, but some variants include higher and lower levels as well.
The original Same Game Test for tenth level characters
- A hallway filled with magical runes.
- A Fire Giant.
- A Young Blue Dragon.
- A Bebilith.
- A Vrock.
- A tag team of Mind Flayers.
- An Evil Necromancer.
- 6 Trolls.
- A horde of Shadows.
A fifth level Same Game Test
- A huge Animated iron statue.
- A Basilisk.
- A Large Fire Elemental.
- A Manticore on the wing.
- A Mummy.
- A Phase Spider.
- A Troll.
- A chasm.
- A moat filled with acid.
- A locked door behind a number of pit traps.
- A couple of Centaur Archers in the woods.
- A Howler/Allip tag team.
- A pit filled with medium monstrous scorpions.
- A Grimlock assault team.
- A Cleric of Hextor (with his zombies)
A fifteenth level Same Game Test
- A Marut.
- A Hullathoin (with its army of skeletons and bloodfiend locusts).
- A Nightmare Beast deep in a hedge maze.
- A Windghost in the sky.
- A Yakfolk cleric with a party of Dao.
- A Drow Priestess with an army of ghouls.
- A warparty of Cloud Giants.
- A Mature Adult White Dragon.
- A Death Slaad riding a Titanic Toad.
- A Cornugon.
- A Gelugon and his Iron Golem bodyguard.
- A Rube Goldberg series of contingent weirds triggered to a set of symbols of pain surrounding the artifact.
- A pair of Glabrezus
- A harem of Succubi.
- Twenty Dire Bears.
- A dozen Medusa mounted archers on Hellcats.
- A forest made out of lava and infested with hostile fire-element dire badgers.
- A pair of Beholders.