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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6864684" data-attributes="member: 6787650">I'm not super familiar with the Basic Rules (only used them briefly, over a year ago), but yes, that starting point sounds reasonable as a performance floor. It is possible that even a Basic Rules party might be able to exceed that floor significantly. For full PHB (and especially if EE and SCAG are included) my general rule of thumb is that anything under Deadly is too easy, and that Deadly x3 or x4 is about the right setting for a "fair fight" which either side could win depending on how well the players play. To clarify what I mean here, let me say that I mostly ignore encounter construction guidelines and usually compute difficulty only after the fact--when I say that triple- or quadruple-Deadly is about right, I mean that when I construct a fight that feels about right and THEN check the difficulty, it tends to come out around triple- or quadruple- Deadly. But if I'm deliberately gaming the system in order to minimize the XP that players will gain on victory, e.g. drow warriors in the dark, a Medium or Easy encounter can be plenty deadly too.One other point is worth emphasizing: I do not metagame my monsters, I roleplay them. I play Black Puddings as stupid monsters that just want to eat you, and orcs as cunning but still relatively straightforward glass cannons who want to win glory in battle so they can win wives, and drow as stealthy, patient killers. Non-tool-using monsters will generally just attack whichever PC is closest to them (depending on their motives for attacking) so they can eat them; they won't usually deliberately attempt to bypass the front line to attack the "squishies", because they don't like being surrounded, and usually the monsters' goals aren't so much about "kill these PCs" as "get food". Undead are an exception, since murderizing as many people as possible really is what they're interested in. Most monsters don't fight to the death if they can avoid it. Etc.A DM who views the game as a tactical contest between himself and the players will play monsters very differently than I will. It is possible to squeeze more performance out of low-difficulty encounters with low-intelligence monsters than I generally do; but I prefer to just turn up the monster quantity and therefore the "difficulty."Response to math: we view campaigns differently too. I don't want a 55% chance of sixty successful encounters in a row without losing no matter how well the players play. That would probably be six months to a year of play without any real tension. I like a game where every single conflict that occurs has something at stake. I'll play out low-stakes encounters if I feel like the players would benefit from the experience or if it's a dungeon crawl where ablative resources and logistics are important, but the nature of my sandbox is such that if I can't at least imagine the players losing a given combat, I think of it as more of a social encounter than a combat encounter, and I give the players the option to skip over it at a cost. "Hooray, you're in the troll cave, and there's nothing here but a single troll! If you want to skip this fight, it will cost someone 30 HP and then you can start looking for treasure. You can't see any other trolls right now. What do you want to do?" If I didn't offer them the option to skip the fight, it would be because I was trying to fake them out into thinking there was actually a troll ambush waiting for them.Risk is about weighing probabilities. Uncertainty is not knowing exactly what the risks are. Uncertainty, not risk, is what my games are about.</blockquote>

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