Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zappo" data-source="post: 629662" data-attributes="member: 633">Every foe is defeatable. Only, some times you can only defeat him indirectly (foiling his plot or something). Other times, the way to defeat him passes through "gain five levels beforehand". But that's semantics... in reality, I loathe presenting the party with mostly challenges of their CRs.About half the fights IMC are 2-3 ELs above the party level. They are designed to be winnable if the players act clever.Some fights are 4-6 ELs above the party level. The PCs may win after a mortal battle, or be forced to flee. I keep plans for both possibilities.And occasionally, I want a guy that the players know Not To Mess With. In these cases, I'll drop enough hints that picking a fight with him is a bad idea.I've found that my players tend to behave more realistically this way, and they've become very good at correctly estimating a challenge using in-game reasoning. They know when they are safe, when they can win if they prepare well in advance, when they can win if they are willing to expend some non-renewable resources, when they'd better have an escape plan too, and when it's not even worth trying.An exception is that I'll very, very rarely if ever force a fight where the players must lose. This is a useful plot device. It can realistically happen that a fight is physically impossible to avoid (the guy scries and teleports), or psychologically impossible to avoid (no way to know that this particular apparently random mugger is in fact a major NPC and 17th level). But, I just don't like it. And besides, it's too unpredictable; unless the disparity is ridiculously high there's always the chance that the players use an unexpected tactic and actually win.</blockquote>

Verification