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Except their "just multiply the whole thing by a bunch as you add more" theory is really awful. It's the opposite of what you should do for monsters without synergies, especially melee-centric ones who will have difficulty bringing their might to bear and are easily taken down by AE, and the...

I thought CR and XP _were_ divorced? Ie, CR is more of a warning system for when something is reasonable to throw at a party, and XP is how you actually balance something. It may be that a few monsters are incorrectly XP-ed (or CR-ed), but the base concept seems fine. It is probably reasonable...

Word of warning - arcane trickster's spell selection is sufficiently focused that it doesn't work very well as part of a gish concept. It's fun, it can be effective enough at what it does, but it's much more an arcane trickster than an eldritch knight.

Much more helpful. I'll admit, I'm less versed in the Encounters seasons; helped playtest Crystal Cave and the first drow one with Elminster, DMed a couple of the earlier ones, but almost none of the others on your list. I think you might be right that WotC isn't marketing correctly to...

That 3-6 x2 thing is pretty bunk, depending on the monster types involved. If we're talking hobgoblins or intellect devourers, for instance, it applies a heck of a lot more than it does for goblins. I'd go so far as to say it applies SUPER extra multiply by x10 for intellect devourers ;)

It's generally a good policy to not pose useless questions. For example, you could cite what adventures you've played, why you didn't like them and/or what you look for in an adventure, and then ask which adventures (existing or coming) might help you out. That'd probably be more effective...

It's also pretty easily turned into a 1-round stun, as one creature not hit takes its action to wake up one, another wakes the next, and they just go in a line until all are awake, and the last one takes an action. That said, it is perhaps disproportionately strong against a single higher hp...

It really doesn't, cause it'll never come up.

How many of those items are actually in the adventure?

It should probably work. Entirely separate from whether the Champion should turn it into an autohit, an 18 or 19 on the die should pretty much always hit*, especially at that level :) * If your first level characters want to smack Moradin, maybe not, but in encounters that would actually happen.

In both cases, the adventure is not changed by the work of the PCs. That's the objection, really.

To be fair, since this is Encounters, it may be more "A vast majority of tables will not defeat him, so he should still be alive for future tables of (random PCs), so he is"

Yeah, I'm sure no one would call foul on the dragon sneaking cause his kobold minions made it work :)

Surprise is _really_ hard to pull off unless you do tricks like turn it into a group check, or you stagger the party to take into account their natural stealth abilities, or you build a party oriented towards stealth. Back to why I mentioned DM variation :) Some day, maybe I'll be at a table...

I'd definitely have advantage on them, being unseen and hidden, but they'd have knowledge of someone in the combat, and thusly not be surprised. "Any character or monster that doesn't notice a threat is surprised at the start of the encounter" - so as long as they notice any one of the three...

I was playing around with the idea of a rogue assassin recently, and I've largely decided that mechanics based around surprise are a benefit for solo play or for NPCs, but aren't all that valuable in a normal D&D party. YMMV, and definitely expect variation by DM.

The wordings vary a bit, unsurprisingly. Occasionally an attack is a bull’s-eye: It hits so well that a target takes more damage than normal. Such a lucky result is called a critical hit (sometimes shortened to “crit”). Natural 20: When an attack roll against a target gets a natural 20, the...

To be fair, only because that's been true for several editions of D&D and near D&D. Ie, 3rd edition, 4th edition, Pathfinder, 13th Age, etc. 20s are an automatic hit is enshrined in holiness, but if you miss on a 19, a surprising number of people don't think that should crit.

Fwiw, I'd highly encourage people to houserule charged magic items to some system that is less gameable. Or accept that they're just effectively a few extra slots of magic every day for the rest of the campaign. Example: Instead of recharging automatically every night, let the PCs choose when...

Absolutely; mostly through sheer number. But every edition of D&D since 1E has made giants tougher than they were in 1E. More hit points, more damaging attacks, higher level expectations. You might run into a dozen giants at 9th level in 1st edition, whereas a single one is a serious threat at...