Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Reynard" data-source="post: 4728959" data-attributes="member: 467">Ah, but what if you're not "setting it up". What if level 15 dragons happen to inhabit a certain mountain range and the 3rd level PCs decide to go there despite, or perhaps because of, all the talk of dragons (mmm... hoard)?  This is one of a handful of places where I rather like 4E's approach (*gasp* I know...). By building the game in such a way that it is highly unlikely that even a very powerful monster will destroy a whole party in a single round, out-of-level encounters become not only viable again, but "fair". Sure, if the random encounter table results in the 15th level dragon, and it decides that the party looks like a good meal, and the party doesn't have a chance to evade, then one PC is probably drake-snack (after all, it attacked because it was hungry -- why would it split its attacks; then again, if it attacked because it was hungry, a horse, mule or ox would be a much more satisfying meal, but I digress) but the rest have a chance to flee. A 2E or 3E party is probably fried. Not that i have a huge problem with that at a DM, but players tend to get irritated when random encounters result in TPKs. F'in' players... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />In any case, even for someone like me who doesn't like 4E much (to be honest, my dislike of 4E is far more on the PC end than the DM-oriented end) this is indeed a feature and not a bug because it managed that truly rare balance between preserving "simulation" in that a high level monster is a deadly threat no matter how you slice it, and preserving gameplay in that a single roll of the die is not likely to result in the end of a campaign (in the end of a character? I got no problem with *that*).</blockquote>

Verification