NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6866734" data-attributes="member: 6787650">Really? Here's the DMG text:Considering that the encounter is likely to be lethal for most or all of the enemy, that sounds a lot like a curbstomp to me."A Hard game could go badly for the players. Weaker players might need to sit down and rest for a while, and there's a slim chance that one or more of the enemies will outplay one of the players.""An Impossible game could result in one or more players getting outplayed. Winning often requires good tactics and quick thinking, and the team risks defeat."I acknowledge obvious and important differences between basketball and war (e.g. in war you'd have to be crazy to even want to face an enemy on equal terms), but you're the one who originated the basketball analogy, not me. The playing field is deliberately towards the players in a rather extreme way, because the 5E designers know they are designing for casual players and they don't want Uncle Bob and Cousin Ed to get curbstomped by a fight labelled "Fair Fight" (i.e. quadruple-Deadly) because they are new to the game and don't know how to play. So instead the designers chose nomenclature that guides DMs towards selecting super-easy fights and thinking of them as "fair fights", so that Bob and Ed get to feel great. And that's great! That's how it should be! But don't fool yourself into thinking that it actually was a fair fight. If you flip the roles and make Bob and Ed play the monsters and the DM play the PCs, Monster Bob and Monster Ed are going still to get butchered by the erstwhile PCs, because the fight is so lopsided that skill doesn't really even enter the equation.Hence, curbstomp. 5E out-of-the-box tilts toward escapist fantasy, not a challenge to player skill.</blockquote>

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