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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 4472489" data-attributes="member: 710">I think one of the problems with "deadliness" is that you need a baseline to compare to.Think about a typical EL = PL fight in 3E. How deadly is that? A 5th level party fighting a single Orc Barbarian 5? Or one Drow Ranger 3 and one Drow Fighter 3? How deadly is that fight? What about a 15th level party against a 15th level Sorcerer? Or against a 15th level Paladin/Black Guard? How about a Level 7 Party against a Level 7 Troll? Are these fights deadly? I think they are only deadly if the monster wins initiative _and_ has a save or die like effect (or rolls a critical). It is swingy, but "on average", it is not really deadly.But if you go into the areas of EL = PL +3 and higher, things change. I have run and played in many of these encounters, and they are very brutal, and if you're not vary, well-buffed and using smart tactics, character death is hard to avoid - but it is certainly avoidable. It's not as if every of these encounters ended deadly. The notable difference in 4E is that equal level challenge now contain more monsters, but if you'd pretend characters had only 4-6 healing surges (about as much as you can trigger in a fight) and all their encounter powers were limited by day, you'll notice that the party will expend most, if not all of these resources. Which is very similar to 3E equal EL = PL +4 challenges. But since the aforementioned powers only are a limited per encounter, not per day, you can run through more of them. And more important, you even have some extra resources (actual dailies) that you can spend if things go wrong. In an 4E equal level challenge, you are no more likely to die then in an 3E equal level challenge. In both cases, you usually have some extra resource that you can spend if things go unusually wrong. In higher level challenges, you eventually need those extra resources to survive at all. And at this point, the encounters get deadly for individuals or the entire party. The combats are not as swingy as in 3E (since a single critical or a save or die spell cannnot ruin your day), but at the end of the encounter, hit points and healing surges will be low, and sometimes, if things went wrong, the tactics were not good enough, people will die. If you're lucky, it's just one character. Sometimes, you'll have a TPK at your hands.And then, there are some cases were only one character is still standing, the rest are all making their death saves, and his final attack kills the last enemie(s). The TPK is averted, but the party will not claim for a moment that they "kicked ass" or that this encounter didn't feel deadly... (I've had this experience when I ran Irontooth. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> )</blockquote>

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