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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The_Furious_Puffin" data-source="post: 6842349" data-attributes="member: 11831">I have previously run this style in 2nd and 3.5 where encounter guidelines didn't really exist (AD&D) or are just comically bad (3.5). Look, it's not terrible or unworkable, but I don't love it. A lot of it boils down to how you think combat is supposed to/going to work.*I* want to have fun in combat too, so for me having to self nerf in combat because rolling out the full range of abilities on this terribly under CR'ed Centaur or Dragon will instagib the party in combat detracts from my fun. I like to play intelligent monsters all out - a style of play that's much harder to support with the serve yourself at the buffet style of play.   Secondly, I like combats to be dramatic and I *hate* filler fights. The best combats are ones where the players are intensely challenged, but pull through in the end. One of the reasons why I like the Zeitgeist AP so much is that my players (and myself!) are loving the combats once I figured out I need to chuck in 1 extra bad guy in a normal battle and 2 extra standard bad guys in a hard battle (or equivalent minions). Thirdly, I don't like actually killing players. Killing players in long running RPGs with complex character generation blows and is generally unsatisfactory, particularly if they get punked in a stupid battle.You can see with the things I want from the rules, I want good support for making well balanced combats before I put the miniatures on the battlemat, or sketch out the theater of mind situation. This A) Ensures that I can play the monsters hardB) The fight will be tough and dramatic requiring the players to step upC) It's unlikely that I will accidently make it too hard - there is a related thing here about swingy systems. One reason I like 5E more than 3.5E is that's it's not as swingy once you get past level 3. It's entirely possible to want different things from the rules though, so more power to you, but that's why I want to be able to prep reasonably well. I mean, this is what I used to do, but what do you do if you screw up and the players are going to get rolled by this combat in a very unfun way, such as getting blitzed by a T1 glitterdust? Or the lich has scry'ed them and is now going to execute a timestop powered 'die' phase on them? When you ran 3.5 did every mage from level 3+ heavily rely on save or dies? How did that actually work out in play?I mean, I had these problems and just didn't play the monsters optimally (I don't think I ever used the glitterdust/stinking cloud/black tentacles line of spells on players in 3.5), but we still had tons of bad fights caused by badly designed encounters (I can remember EXACTLY the first time I realised that dragons were under CR'ed because it killed two players).</blockquote>

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