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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dragonblade" data-source="post: 4503544" data-attributes="member: 2804">I find the whole premise of this thread hilarious. And I don't mean that as a slam of the original poster.I just DMed last night. Party of 4 level 1 PCs. 82 point buy, 1 for 1 for stats (no starting stat below 8). A barbarian, wizard, cleric, and swordmage. My players are smart tactically. They make good decisions and min/max like crazy.Case in point. The barbarian is a minotaur using a large dire flail (minotaur's can use oversized weapons) meaning his base [W] damage is 2d8. His CON and STR are both 20. He is sick. The other PCs are similarly optimized.I ran the FRCG intro adventure, the Barrow of the Ogre King out of the book. No modification at all. However, I played the monsters as brutally efficient as I could given the party's power. Let's just say that despite the powergaming on the part of the player's, I had to secretly fudge die rolls to prevent TWO TPKs in two different encounters. And the Swordmage STILL ended up dying in the last fight of the night.If your players are walking through your adventures, its because you aren't leveraging the monsters natural synergies for maximum nastiness. Case in point; the Gobline Hexer has an ability called Vexing Cloud. This power is SICK! Its area is huge, Burst 3 within 10, and the Hexer can sustain it from round to round.All enemies (i.e. the PCs) take a -2 to hit. ALSO, it grants concealment to all the Hexer's allies. That's an additional -2 to hit. That's essentially a +4 AC boost to ALL the Hexer's allies within the cloud. Plus the Skullcleaver Goblins the PCs also fought, do 2d10 +5 damage when bloodied. That's an average of 15 points of damage to a 1st level PC not likely to have much more than 30 hitpoints. 1,2, DEAD.Also, one of the combats had hobgoblin soldiers. Well, when they line up they get a +2 to AC. With the Hexer's vexing cloud in play, that's effectively a +6 to their AC. Those hobgoblins went from AC 20 to AC 26.Frankly, I'm surprised the party survived at all even with my fudging. Its a testament to their smart play and tactics that they lived. Now, granted the adventure assumes 5 PCs so it probably would have been a little easier with 5 PCs, but I doubt by much. Especially if those 5 PCs were made by the book and without my generous ability score rules.</blockquote>

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