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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alexander123" data-source="post: 5450632" data-attributes="member: 98794">I have been thinking about something.  In the DMG a group of four creatures at CR 1 have a total CR of 4. While a group of 4 CR 2 creatures have a challenge rating of 6. Therefore the standard adventuring party consisting of a (human) fighter, cleric, rogue and wizard at level 1 would have a CR of 4 while one at level 2 would have a CR of 6. So I thought that I would run a sort of experiment where I would create an adventuring party of the same level and have them face the standard adventuring party in an arena. The party consisted of a druid, cleric, wizard and artificer. I also wanted to see how many of these encounters the party would be able to take before another encounter would result in a TPK.  At level one the party was able to take 2 of these encounters a day before running out of resources. At level 2, the party was able to take 2 and probably had the capacity for 3 such encounters per day. The success of the party was due to winning initiative and battlefield control spells such as entangle and sleep. Afterwards, the druid and the cleric picked off the enemy team from afar using ranged weapons. One of the things that I don't like about having my party face one creature is because of the economy of action which oftentimes gives a significant advantage to parties consisting of more characters. Hence I had each team consist of 4 members. I did not downplay the strengths of the opposing team to favor my own and I made reasonable choices as far as spell selection, feats etc. etc. are concerned. I played them to the best of their ability but they lost due to their inherent weaknesses. The enemy teams lack of the entangle spell proved key in my defeat of them as well as my use of the sleep spell (although this they had.) resulting in the disabling of their characters. I think that the reason I was able to defeat them is because I was more optimized than the opposing party and because my strategy was better. In this sort of encounter, where the potential for a TPK exists for a party whose strategy is defective many things come to light about what good strategy can accomplish and what defective strategy can accomplish. In these sorts of encounters I also saw what a key role initiative plays. From my experience in this experiment, battles are won or lost within the first few rounds and the rest of the encounter is simply to clean things up. I plan to continue this for the higher levels also. Tell me what you think.</blockquote>

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