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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4032351" data-attributes="member: 4937">Personally, I think its because you are dealing with (for the most part) highly experienced players.I know from my experience that there was a big difference in the amount of challenge my friends could handle as players, and the amount of challenge that random kids could handle on an open table night at the gaming store.  There is a certain amount of skill involved.If the party doesn't lose cohesion, if the players don't become confused or paniced, and if the players make the best use of the resources that they have available, no deaths is the expected result for a game in the 'sweet spot' of any edition.  We know they've taken some steps to up the power level of low level characters.  We know that they've taken out 'save or die'.  So with an experienced play group, I think you can expect no deaths to occur.Two takes on that, one positive and one negative.First, it says something good about the system that DM's without alot of experience with the system can present balanced challenges quite easily.  We know that they are balanced challenges because we aren't hearing about a lot of player deaths, and even those skeptical about the new system (like me) have to admit that the early reports on how engrossing combat is are very positive.On the other hand, given how much they've 'nerfed' the danger of the game by removing dangerous conditions and attacks from the game, and the change in the relative ratio of damage per round to hit points (something incidently I largely approve of), the move away from 'operational' resource management toward purely tactical challenges, as a DM I'm wondering how you'd actually seriously threaten an experienced party.   It doesn't seem like there is much that can go wrong for a player provided that the team doesn't make really dumb mistakes.  This was actually a bit of a problem in 1st edition, in as much as the only way to really threaten a high level 1st edition party with experienced players (and by high level, I mean 'above 10th') was to spam them with random 'save or die' attacks and wait for random failure.  Otherwise, the players tended to mow over ordinary challenges because the rules were all heavily weighted in thier favor by that point.  Third editions removal of the rules separation between PC and NPC (among other things) tended to mitagate that.</blockquote>

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