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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 8014361" data-attributes="member: 1465">I find myself in a strange position...For years I've been reading about most DMs wanting to carefully tailor the challenges around the PC, choosing how many encounters per day they should have, accompanying them to level up in sync with the adventure, making them find magical treasure appropriately. At the same time shaming any bit of metagaming on the players' part like it was a deadly sin. I am myself guilty of these, that's how I always DMed in 3e! And I started to do the same when coming back to D&D with 5e. But after passing the phase where I was afraid of the new system, this way of DMing frankly started to feel a mix of babysitting and pulling the puppets' strings.I still choose an adventure based on its general level, and I still check the monsters CRs and encounter difficulties, sometimes changing things here and there, but that's all... I don't want to think or plan too much for the PCs.I'd rather tell my players upfront "this is a hard encounters with CR5 monsters" and let them decide what to do with it. But I let the world work more like the proverbial sandbox, I don't want to care anymore about balancing stuff with a scale, just barring the extremes and keep a reasonable range is enough. Why should I be steering the players towards a specific number of encounters per day? They can do the math and figure out when they need to stop. If sometimes they are too slow and lose an adventure, that's good, why should they always win or have a TPK?So why is so bad that the players wonder if they are high level enough? That's fine. They can choose to risk it, they can invest all their money and everything else to boost their chances, or they can even give up.To be honest, my ideal adventure is probably one which happens without levelling up, and the ideal campaign the one that lasts 20 years with extremely slow advancement. I can't do it because players like going up in level often, but it would make my life easier. As a DM I would rather let the game go and have the players take care of themselves, and me basically be more like a referee and supporting cast, and less the director <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f914.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":unsure:" title="Unsure    :unsure:"  data-smilie="24"data-shortname=":unsure:" /></blockquote>

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