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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shiroiken" data-source="post: 7121082" data-attributes="member: 6775477">According to WotC (Mearls?), the encounter design of 5E was set to be somewhat easy, meaning that the players are going to win most of the time. Deadly encounters are not lethal, per say, merely that there is a moderate chance that a character might actually die, whereas hard and lower have only a slight chance (usually from critical hits or very bad decisions by the players). That should be taken with a grain of salt, however, since the guidelines are not perfect (they can be manipulated to make super easy high CR encounters or crazy hard low CR encounters with some work).The real result is that the game is as difficult as the DM chooses to make it, and is strongly based on the skill/power-gaming of the players. I myself have a very smart group, so I make things as deadly as I can, with mixed results (6 character deaths over 17 levels, but only 1 was permanent). I've also heard of DMs that don't actually kill PCs, preferring to allow for a more continuous story. The majority of players do not try to optimize (or at least, that's not their focus), but a handful feel that they MUST optimize, regardless of the difficulty of the game (to "win" the game). The good thing about this is that 5E allows for a variety of difficulties, from super-easy to insanity, depending on the desires of the group.</blockquote>