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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gold Roger" data-source="post: 3473192" data-attributes="member: 33904">Looks like your strategy for a challenging fight is as much power for as little HD as possible.I can't say I can really agree with that. I've been reading your story for some time (sadly don't have the time anymore) and while it's highly enjoyable and I usually agree with you on good design, it can be seen there to: Most of your hand-crafted opponents are paper tigers.Sure, the fights are hard, challenging and "lethal" (of course, your PC's can't die) and that's generally a good thing. But they are also often furiously short. Because you put all the effort in offensive power and I can't quite understand that.Why underline how you challenge the PC's with "low CR" opponents when in the end it doesn't matter. All you show is that the CR and EL system can't allways be an accurate indicator of an opponents challenge. In what way is an combat that takes out half the party below their challenge level outside of pure mathematics and a strange sense of pride on beating those mathematics (this may come of as an attack. Please understand that this is meant as constructive critique).I could understand if you didn't want your PC's xp to skyrocked, while still offering them great tactical challenges. But as far as I remember you don't use traditional xp anyway.Maybe your idea of encounter design is so hard to understand for me because I've taken the exactly opposite approach. I've found the best way to challenge my players is to create higher HD/CR opponents that are build for durability and style far more than raw power.And with this, we come to my second point of disagreement.You say putting a scare into the players with higher CR creatures is easier-no contest there. But that does by no way mean challenging them with those creatures is easier.Quite the opposite is true, especially if you don't want to have a safety net in your game that keeps PC's from dying.I've gone thrugh a lot of TPK's, total defeats of the PC's and more dead PC's than you can hit with a fireball till I've learned it. Luckily my group didn't mind character creation.A well done higher CR/EL encounter that puts the players on the edge without more than one death/PC going down is just as hard to craft as a similar encounter with lower hd opponents. The difference is that this encounter takes longer, as the opponents are far more durable. In my more recent campaigns there was rarely a battle that lasted less than 8 to 10 rounds.I don't want to mark your approach as badwrongfun. I just believe that by just looking at one end of the challenge spectrum you rob yourself and your players of a fair amount of extra fun. I know that you are sometimes using NPC's of a far higher CR. But whenever you did it was pretty much out of the book, optimised for power. And it either showed in the number of PC's going down, or they had some extra help for this encounter.Or maybe I just felt a bit Pood because your post felt like my approach was made out as "lesser" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" /></blockquote>

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