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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3737346" data-attributes="member: 4937">Do you have any evidence for this claim?There are only two ways you can insure that multiple groups coming together is not a threat of a TPK.&nbsp; The first is if the individual encounters are individually not a threat, and only together are they balanced against the party.&nbsp; One is that the difficulty of the encounter doesn't change no matter how many mooks join in, so that for example you have a rule that says each time more minions arrive all minions collectively get a penalty to hit.&nbsp; In the second case, its true that several rooms converging on the players won't get out of hand.&nbsp; In fact, the problem here is that it might lead to metagame behavior where the players deliberately get themselves outnumbered so as to make the fight easier!&nbsp; In the first case, you can't in fact plan for which encounters are going to occur together.&nbsp; Ultimately, its the players that decide which encounters occur together unless the encounters occur in a wholely disjoined universe (say like the random encounters while moving through the outdoors map in Fallout).&nbsp; Unless you make each individual encounter trivial, collectively they are going to at some point overmatch the PCs.&nbsp; If the encounters occur in the same game space as each other, regardless of your planning they may or may not occur together.&nbsp; This has happened to me several times in 3rd edition.&nbsp; In one case a player opened a sarcophagus while another combat was still going on.&nbsp; In another case, a party fleeing one encounter took the wrong fork in the dungeon and ran into another one.&nbsp; What's 4E going to do to change that from happening?&nbsp; Conversely, I can plan so that several CR 4 encounters are likely to turn into one big CR 8 encounter in 3rd edition already (I just can't gaurantee it will happen).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 3737346, member: 4937"] Do you have any evidence for this claim? There are only two ways you can insure that multiple groups coming together is not a threat of a TPK. The first is if the individual encounters are individually not a threat, and only together are they balanced against the party. One is that the difficulty of the encounter doesn't change no matter how many mooks join in, so that for example you have a rule that says each time more minions arrive all minions collectively get a penalty to hit. In the second case, its true that several rooms converging on the players won't get out of hand. In fact, the problem here is that it might lead to metagame behavior where the players deliberately get themselves outnumbered so as to make the fight easier! In the first case, you can't in fact plan for which encounters are going to occur together. Ultimately, its the players that decide which encounters occur together unless the encounters occur in a wholely disjoined universe (say like the random encounters while moving through the outdoors map in Fallout). Unless you make each individual encounter trivial, collectively they are going to at some point overmatch the PCs. If the encounters occur in the same game space as each other, regardless of your planning they may or may not occur together. This has happened to me several times in 3rd edition. In one case a player opened a sarcophagus while another combat was still going on. In another case, a party fleeing one encounter took the wrong fork in the dungeon and ran into another one. What's 4E going to do to change that from happening? Conversely, I can plan so that several CR 4 encounters are likely to turn into one big CR 8 encounter in 3rd edition already (I just can't gaurantee it will happen). [/QUOTE]

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