No one would adventure if it were really that dangerous. 10% sounds small, but it's super high if you're talking about having five fights each day or something. Adventuring is a profession remember, a dangerous one but not an insane or impossible one. 0.2% is more reasonable. If you have a campaign where every fight is dangerous, though, and say you have one fight every week on average, you could get up to 10%.
If you're doing a campaign where the action is not about adventure per say, but trying to save someone or something likewise important, then it justifies the greater risk.
This, the bolded part. I don't like campaigns that are all about professional "adventurers" casually delving dungeons for fun and profit. Such settings bore me. I like campaigns that start off with a gigantic, snowballing disaster, like a John Ringo novel, and the PCs are the ones trying to hold things together in the absence of someone who is
really qualified for the job.
Dynamic settings, not steady-state.
In the long run, the unimportant fights pay off both for experience and for giving the players time to relax and enjoy how powerful their characters have become. They also add immersion and verisimilitude, of course.
I agree! This is why I've given my players a whole month of dungeon delving and fighting relatively simple threats, which they handled easily. (It was only two days of game time.) Meanwhile, the crises are boiling elsewhere.
And this is why I would only make it an
option to skip fights. I don't know if they'd take it, because I don't know whether it's fun to
narrate taking away the enemy hobgoblin sergeants' spear and gutting him with it, backwards, while taking only a small scratch from a lucky hit by a trooper--or to roll it out using dice. I honestly don't know.
To each his own. I've played in campaigns that were like that and I found it terrible. The fights could be fun (although oftentimes frustrating), but it was difficult for the players to invest in their characters, since they knew they'd probably only last a session or three. I like combat a lot, but I like role-play and character development better, which is why I don't care for that style of game.
If you don't like unimportant fights, I recommend making the majority hard/deadly fights, with easy and medium encounters thrown in just for an occasional change of pace. My players like to be challenged, so that's what I do.
To each his own. As a player, I like hard fights, and I don't mind dying. As a DM, I leave it mostly up to my players which part of the sandbox they play in, and I try to telegraph difficulty so they can cut and run if desired. I'm still a pretty new DM, and I have yet to actually challenge my group with the kind of opposition I would want to face, myself. (Well, I have, but so far they've walked away each time without engaging, which is probably some kind of signal.
Maybe if I use bigger monsters with a higher XP award...?)
