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Message: <blockquote data-quote="marelion" data-source="post: 5713032" data-attributes="member: 6679828">In my homebrew campaign my players tend to find the encounters challenging, yet satisfying. I`ve basically been tweaking monster damage, by about +3 on average. Our Warlord sometimes complains that my skirmishers/brutes deal more damage than he can restore with an Inspiring Word, but I have to do it that way because the characters are extremely sticky and dish out some serious damage due to nice party synergies (two strenght-based melees in conjunction with a Warlord, `nuff said, right?!). Í try to maneuver around action denial as much as possible, since being dazed/stunned is not fun for any player. Instead I try to make my encounters more challenging by adding a monster or two or by upping global damage. That way my players do feel challenged due to constantly being low on HP.Most important for judging the difficulty of an encounter is the terrain, especially if there are:a)monsters with nasty auras or b)controllers with zones around. Some of those can easily be turned into a TPK if the GM places the zones/monsters wisely while the same encounter with the very same monsters might feel like a piece of cake if the GM makes the zones or auras too easy to circumvent.My favourite advivce to adjust the perceived difficulty of an encounter is to forgo the use of effects that reduce the characters` to hit-probability. A -2 penalty to hit turns encounters into slogfests and makes encounters feel static and dull since monsters take more time to take down and feel less pressure to move out of the range of the party`s strikers/controllers.And a little hint: If you want to upset your players go for Dracoliches!<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> Yeah, area stun powers that can be recharged <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/erm.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":erm:" title="Erm    :erm:" data-shortname=":erm:" /> Nothing is more important for my personal perception of an encounter from a player perspective than stunlocks. Taking damage equal to the value of two healing surges while standing around doing nothing simply freaks me out. Big numbers of damage sure get noticed, but if I get to hack back at the baddies I`m fine with that. After all, adventuring is not for the faint of heart and an encounter should be challenging. All in all, it is not so much the numbers the GM throws at the players that catch the attention of the players but their capability to engage in a fair and square combat situation. That`s why I went to such lenghts to stress the importance of terrain and action denial. So my two guidelines for judging an encounter really are: a) terrain andb) the frequency of action denial I/my players have to deal with. The loss of Healimg Surges and Daily Powers is definetely the more `crunchy`approach but after all I´m there to have a good time with some friends that`s why I care more about the flair of an enconter than actual numbers.BTW: Instead of waiting for something like MM 4 I would rather see the wizards show up with a guideline for judging terrain and creating it accordingly. The way the wizards have implemented terrain  into their encounter-balance system so far hasn`t really convinced me and it is by far too crucial an element not to implement it into an official guideline. Why not make a terrain manual for the GM with a quick guide to creating exciting encounter maps with pc-based tools and battlemats. Selling Dungeon-Tiles was an imteresting place to start but it´s no place to end imho.</blockquote>

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