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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 6680682" data-attributes="member: 2011">That's an interesting take that I've not heard before.Based on what you have said earlier about your players planning out and controlling encounters, I wonder if part of the reason that your group decimates encounters might be due to cross table talk. You've mentioned that your players talk about what to do mid-encounter and obviously, 5 brains are better than 1. Our table is a lot less tactically capable, but part of it is that we let each player play their PC without the undue influence of metagaming suggestions mid-combat. Sure, someone says something every once in a while, but for the most part, I'm not really playing my PC if you are suggesting a course of action "out of character".Part of that is that we have one player who has only played for 4 years, one player for 1.5 years, and one player for half a year. When I have new players in my group, I don't want the 3 players who have 35+ years to dominate the play of the newer players. So there has been a definitive push at our table to let players make their own decisions.Only two of our seven PCs are heavily optimized, and we have at least two players who do not always make the best decisions in combat and as a table, we mostly let them. So our encounters are a lot more swingy. A few sessions back, a hard encounter ended up almost decimating the party (to be fair, it was a medium encounter for 6 or 7 PCs, but there were only 4 PCs there at the time, 10 foes, and the player dice rolls were extremely cold) whereas last session, an even harder encounter we wiped out in 4 rounds.Having an entire group of "been there, done that" players with a lot of experience and optimized PCs would create challenge issues for any DM. But, side quests is not one of them. Side quests are a flavor preference. A DM can make a side quest just as challenging as his main quest line, in fact, because the players might often have less information going in, the DM can make the same encounters even more challenging.</blockquote>

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