Fauchard1520
Adventurer
Not sure who needs to hear this, but I'll often see new GMs getting bent out of shape over the party's unexpected success: “Yeah man. They absolutely blew through an encounter that was, like, 5 CR higher than it should have been. I thought they were going to get TPK’d, but they wound up walking all over my beautiful mini-boss! My group is crazy OP. I think I’m going adjust encounter difficulty so they don’t just roflstomp my campaign.”
Now let me be clear: depending on the circumstances, that may not be a bad call. However, if you’re making that decision based off of a single encounter, then I’d encourage you to think again.
The bell curve skews towards the middle, but statistical anomalies happen all the time. That’s why parties sometimes KO your dragon in round 2, and why they sometimes spend half an hour dealing the last hit point to that goblin. So my advice is simple: Give it time, let probability do its thing, and wait a few sessions before throwing out Challenge Rating as 100% useless. Because if you overcompensate, you may wind up with a TPK on your hands, wondering what went wrong.
(Comic for illustrative purposes.)
Now let me be clear: depending on the circumstances, that may not be a bad call. However, if you’re making that decision based off of a single encounter, then I’d encourage you to think again.
The bell curve skews towards the middle, but statistical anomalies happen all the time. That’s why parties sometimes KO your dragon in round 2, and why they sometimes spend half an hour dealing the last hit point to that goblin. So my advice is simple: Give it time, let probability do its thing, and wait a few sessions before throwing out Challenge Rating as 100% useless. Because if you overcompensate, you may wind up with a TPK on your hands, wondering what went wrong.
(Comic for illustrative purposes.)