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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jhaelen" data-source="post: 4325760" data-attributes="member: 46713">Well, it certainly won't be difficult. This is supposed to be a (somewhat misleadingly called) 'challenging' encounter. A level 5 party is supposed to be able to deal with four of these in a given day without problems, since each encounter should cost them about 20% of their resources.Correct, however an 'even' fight in this case means about a 50% chance of failure! This is something you generally shouldn't do often.4 CR 5 monsters are an EL 9 encounter. This is a 'very hard' encounter, supposed to cost the party 80% of their resources.What are these resources anyway? Well, mostly spells and hit points, sometimes also magic items. Here's my point of view on resources:An encounter with an EL equal to the party's level is generally a 'safe' encounter for a party of four because each of them is supposed to lose only 20% of his/her resources: If you add these up you get a total of 80%, i.e. if only one character is losing any resources, she'll still have 20% left.An encounter with an EL of (party level +4) on the other hand is quite dangerous. There's a realistic chance of a dead character because in total they're going to lose 160%. It's not possible for a single character to lose that many resources, so one potential result of such a fight would be one character losing 100% of his resources (i.e. dying) and a second losing 60% of her resources, while two of them don't lose anything at all.This is why encounters of this difficulty are best reserved for boss fights. If there's no other encounter after it, the characters should be fine.Note, that an encounter with an EL of (party level +5) or more is supposed to be 'overpowering'. This is mostly because these encounters are extremely 'swingy'. A streak of bad luck at the beginning of such an encounter will likely doom the entire party.Edit: There are also several browser-based calculators available, like <a href="http://www.enworld.org/cc/fiend_factory/elc/encounter_calculator.htm" target="_blank">this</a> one.What werk was referring to - an this is also definitely worth considering - is the degree of power-creep in your campaign. The more splatbooks your players are using when they build their characters the more likely are they to be more powerful than their CR indicates.Similarly, the later Monster Manuals contain several monsters that are lot tougher than their CR seems to indicate - at least compared to a MM1 monster of equal CR.A final comment:Since you seem to have the 3.0 DMG, just have a look at page 102. It shows the recommended percentages for the different encounter difficulties. The table is just as true in 3.5.I'm using it all the time with mostly good results.For 'random' encounters I use encounter levels of (party level -2) to (party level +4). In a given day there can be 0-6 encounters (I roll 1d6 / 4 hours, a 1-2 results in an encounter).For 'random' encounters I stopped using 'overpowering' encounters, since it's not very satisfying to have one or more dead characters after an encounter that is not meant to be particularly significant.I still use them in 'planned' encounters, though. I believe it's a good thing to include encounters that are not meant to be defeated every once in a while. Otherwise the players get careless. Your mileage may vary of course.</blockquote>

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