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DM advice: How do you NOT kill your party?
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<blockquote data-quote="MonkeezOnFire" data-source="post: 7397323" data-attributes="member: 6784845"><p>An encounter building technique I like to use is to design the encounter in such a way that the enemies cannot bring to bear their full combined strength initially. So I will design the fight to have vague phases where more of the enemies can contribute as the fight goes on. Typically this happens most often with positioning and/or environment effects. There is a group close the PCs and a secondary group a couple of turns away so reinforcements will arrive as the PCs deal with the initial group. This also has the added benefit of making the fight feel dynamic as the power level of one side fluctuates instead of only draining. </p><p></p><p>A recent example was an encounter with 2 skeletons and 2 skeleton horses. For a group of level 1 PCs this is extremely dangerous as the skeleton horses pack quite a punch. But I initially had it so that one of the skeletons mounted on a horse used a short bow and thus kept its distance. This way the second skeleton horse didn't really participate in the combat until one of the PCs ran up to engage it.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="MonkeezOnFire, post: 7397323, member: 6784845"] An encounter building technique I like to use is to design the encounter in such a way that the enemies cannot bring to bear their full combined strength initially. So I will design the fight to have vague phases where more of the enemies can contribute as the fight goes on. Typically this happens most often with positioning and/or environment effects. There is a group close the PCs and a secondary group a couple of turns away so reinforcements will arrive as the PCs deal with the initial group. This also has the added benefit of making the fight feel dynamic as the power level of one side fluctuates instead of only draining. A recent example was an encounter with 2 skeletons and 2 skeleton horses. For a group of level 1 PCs this is extremely dangerous as the skeleton horses pack quite a punch. But I initially had it so that one of the skeletons mounted on a horse used a short bow and thus kept its distance. This way the second skeleton horse didn't really participate in the combat until one of the PCs ran up to engage it. [/QUOTE]
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DM advice: How do you NOT kill your party?
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