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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6686573" data-attributes="member: 5834">We're talking using appropriate encounter guidelines, right? Not extreme examples. As in I can't sit there and toss some monsters in without thinking about how my party works and expect them to be a challenging encounter if the encounter is level appropriate or even deadly. If I'm not taking into account how the party functions, then I can't expect a monster to challenge them given they will be using highly efficient, powerful group capabilities that far exceed what the monsters are capable of. Agreed.But's that not what happens. Hemlock has not described multiple deaths. He's described encounters his party supposedly wins against impossible odds far above their level because he comes up with some artificial means by which the monsters fail to take advantage of their superior abilities like 24 beholders in a ship. As far as I'm concerned that's just a different type of tailored encounter. This discussion is mostly foolishness as far as I'm concerned. I make my players feel like they are very much in a fantasy world. Tailored encounters has nothing to do with that. It has to do with challenging players that use powerful tactics as a group to win. Hemlock tosses out these ideas for how to beat an individual using tactics from specific monsters that doesn't apply to all monsters. Gee, thanks for the idea with stone giants. What about orcs? What about hill giants? What about ogres? What about creature number 80 without Athletics? Or dispels? And gee, I just figured out how ho the party would defeat the stone giants easily.Why do people waste my time writing tactics for a single character when a group attacks as a party? Why do they give me advice unsolicited for how to deal with an individual character when I stated a different problem like the AC variation situation I was dealing with in encounter design?Certainly I do. Anyone with a party of min-maxers has more work to do. When they are doing everything they can to limit the enemy from harming them, while doing maximum harm to the enemy as a group, you're going to have to work to hurt them and work to hurt them without killing them.When you're a DM dealing with min-maxing, it goes both ways. You the DM are pushed into a situation where you need to be able to min-max an enemy to challenge them. You as a DM have unlimited ability to min-max. You're usually using enemies that are higher level or have access to abilities the players won't know about. So you have to make sure not to...hmm...I guess the term might be over min-max...to the point you waste them. That can be a fine line. All the instant kill stuff didn't help in that edition. A single 1 and a character was done. Energy drain was harsh. Classic D&D was ruthless. It was fun at the time, especially if you did survive. It could be discouraging as well when you played up a character for months, then rolled a 1 against a banshee.It's not a matter of pride. My confusion stems from the idea that others don't seem to understand the situation I'm dealing with. I thought it was so common that the concept was easy to understand. The game has been out a long time. There must be other groups that have long time players that naturally min-max and naturally work together as a team that leads in general to the decimation of anything less than an encounter tailored to challenge them that includes countering the key strategies they use to gain an advantage over most enemies. I also find it surprising that they think I tailor every encounter. It's one of those situations where you're discussing something that is unique to how I do things. I don't know. When I state I tailor encounters, I certainly don't mean I tailor everything. I don't waste my time tailoring every detail of every encounter. I mean I take the time to make key encounters challenging. Encounters I feel should be challenging. Who wants to fight the villain in an encounter and have him be a pushover? If I look at a monster I'm planning to use and can assess my party will crush him using their common tactics, why would a DM want to run that encounter or a player feel satisfied beating it? That's the part I don't understand. It means either the DM in question doesn't care if the organized party crushes their encounter. Or the party going against their encounter isn't really organized and actually has trouble with the encounter. That's not the party I run. The guys I run are always looking for an edge whether they think it up themselves or find it on the boards. If I don't operate that way as a DM, the game won't even be worth playing because it will be far too easy. It seems that my particular experience either isn't common or the people playing this way don't post much. I think the only person that plays similarly to myself is Dave Dash that I've seen on this board. He seems to understand the chess game between the players and the DM that is constantly occurring.It is pretty annoying having posters like Hemlock completely misinterpret my posts as "trying to protect my players" and the like when nothing of the kind was being said or implied. I think it is pretty clear that trying not to kill your players when employing min-max lethal encounter design is a whole lot different than "trying to protect players."</blockquote>

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