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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CapnZapp" data-source="post: 8242622" data-attributes="member: 12731">I should add that in my experience (I have GMd one adventure path from 1 to 20; whether you call that limited experience or not I leave up to you) the most danger doesn't come from a single high-level boss. The most danger comes from fights where there are as many monsters (or nearly so) as heroes. For instance, given an Extreme-threat encounter budget, you can place a single L+4 monster in that encounter. But it is likely more trouble for the heroes to feature four at-level foes, for instance. Or two L+1 monsters and one of those at-level ones. Three monsters have three times as many actions as the single BBEG, and at least twice as many hit points. And most debuffs are likely to only hit some, not all, of the monsters.Disclaimer: This applies during the first half of the game. Once heroes reach level 15 or so, they can handle much harder fights than a mere 160 XP fight, since by that time monsters below your own level just melt away: the casters now have so awesome spells that you can add a dozen L-2's and the difficulty doesn't change, because the spell the wizard planned to cast is going to wipe these with zero extra effort.Case in point: [SPOILER="The final fight of our Extinction Curse campaign"]It's one of the few Extreme-threat encounters of the entire campaign. And it was a rout. This fight is scripted to take place on a platform that raises to the top of the tower, where beams of light will grant the BBEG five lives(!)And I stuffed the encounter with many more opponents because I knew Extreme wasn't nearly as scared as before. But the BBEG didn't even get the chance to initiate the encounter. He got slapped with the Fleeing condition and so he could not start the raising of the platform, and when he got back to normal all his eleven allies were dead (the party wiped them all in two rounds flat), and he made an attack, inflicted a bit of damage, and was then promptly whaled upon by everybody and died. Then the heroes scored a critical success and I told them about the light resurrection thingy. So they simply lifted his carcass outside the platform before going up to investigate (and disable the source of his energy)Fight over - and campaign over - like it was some Moderate-level routine warm-up exercise.[/SPOILER]</blockquote>

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