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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 6704099" data-attributes="member: 20323">I just ran a party of six 2nd level PCs thru a fight with three carrion crawlers. No magic items.PCs had one minor fight before this one that day (with troglodytes in sunlight). They had to blow a lot of spell and class feature resources. One PC was paralyzed (and got better). One PC dropped (and was healed up).In short, they stomped the crawlers.According to the DMG this was a "deadly" fight. In play it was more like "hard."So... from your experience with 5e what does it take to have an ACTUALLY DEADLY fight?I'm gathering data for myself (and anyone who wants to add theirs) on a Google Spreadsheet. You need to be logged into GoogleDocs to enter data, but once you are all you need is this link:Google Spreadsheet for Data Collection: <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AAIBDemfxoX8DTxAg2q7AzkZVZxwwONvhsxQ2eHTxXY/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AAIBDemfxoX8DTxAg2q7AzkZVZxwwONvhsxQ2eHTxXY/edit?usp=sharing</a>[SBLOCK=How do you expect this to be used, Quickleaf?]Simple answer: I expect this to be used as a tool to help inform my encounter creation (whether prepped or impromptu) as a 5e DM moreso than the DMG encounter difficulty guidelines. Potentially it could be helpful for others too, hence why I'm sharing.[/SBLOCK][SBLOCK=Is "actual difficulty in play" the DM's retroactive expectation of the probabilities, or is it outcome?]I'd say it's more a retrospective of how everything panned out. Often this is from the DM's perspective, but just as often it can come from talking with your players about it after the game."ACTUAL" encounter difficulty is purely based on perception. It trusts DMs and players to use their good judgment, camaraderie, and communication skills to arrive at an accurate assessment of how a given fight went.And, for the record, there are going to be some fights which so entirely break the mold that they're not useful for data collection purposes. And that's totally cool. Run those weird wild organic fights. For my part, I'll be restricting recording to more "standard fights" that I feel confident in my/our difficulty assessment of.[/SBLOCK][SBLOCK=Aren't you a tyrant DM who wants to slaughter your PCs with Deadly encounters, Quickleaf?]Sure, aren't we all?Seriously, I don't ask because I'm some tyrant who wants to slaughter PCs. I ask because sometimes their foolhardy actions call for a truly DEADLY encounter, while sometimes the narrative/foreshadowing calls for a truly DEADLY encounter. To not follow thru on that "promise" is IMHO to do a disservice to the players by invalidating their choices just as much as if I'd foreshadowed an amazing dragon's hoard and there only be a sizable pouch/chest of gold at the end.[/SBLOCK][SBLOCK=But Quickleaf, it dependsss...]No guano, Sherlock. <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=";)" />And some encounters are pitched fights, some aren't fights at all, and sometimes the halfling just goes bat guano crazy.The existence of variables, outside-the-box scenarios, and the "art" of encounter design doesn't invalidate the utility of a metric for general difficulty estimating.[/SBLOCK]</blockquote>

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