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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hong" data-source="post: 664628" data-attributes="member: 537">Did anyone say otherwise?Look: a 20th level party facing off against an EL 20 encounter is not any less deadly than a 5th level party facing off against an EL 5 encounter. In fact, it's MORE deadly, because the damage output of each of those 20th level combatants (and their foes) is an order of magnitude greater than for their 5th level counterparts. This makes the margin of error that much smaller, so if you screw up even just a little bit, or the dice go bad on you, things can go pear-shaped very quickly.This has nothing to do with DM partiality or evilness or whatever. It's the inescapable result of taking the creatures in the MM and fashioning encounters that are of an appropriate difficulty to challenge a high-level party. The fact, plain and simple, is that if you get into fights on a regular basis at those levels, you _are_ going to lose people. And if you're _not_ losing people, chances are it's because you're not getting into fights on a regular basis, in which case combat mechanics probably aren't that important to you anyway.Now, it's true that I'm assuming the party is fighting monsters with CRs about the same as their own level; thus, for example, a 10th level party might be fighting fire giants, or a 15th level party might be fighting big dragons and demons, etcetera. I think this is perfectly reasonable. It's entirely possible that a group routinely goes into battle against big hordes of lowly 1HD mooks, in which case PC mortality might not be such a problem. But AFAIK, this is the exception rather than the rule.Well, there's nothing wrong with fashioning such an encounter. However, was there an _expectation_ that the PCs would just fall over instead of putting up a fight? Because as I said, most of the DMs I know wouldn't try to pull something like that, or would expect the characters to fight.IIRC, the only time I've been in a "surrender or else" situation was a few years back, when we all got captured by slavers and shipped off to the Vilhon Reach. However, that was because the DM wanted to run some adventures set in that region, it was the fastest way to get us all there, and we were looking for a change of scenery anyway. Not exactly your typical setup.So I'm a bit trigger-happy tonight. I blame the coffee. <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=";)" /></blockquote>

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