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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6987237" data-attributes="member: 6787650">I have one group of players who isn't very tactical at all, although they are wildly creative (e.g. solo monk using Stunning Fist + Bag of Devouring to kill a huge CR 12 Chain Wyrm that the monk in question probably could not have survived otherwise; they also like manipulating falling damage). Despite that, they have often survived Deadly x3 to x6 fights using straightforward tactics: "hit it until it stops moving; Dodge if the enemy is focusing fire on you". (They've survived other fights in the Deadly x10-20 neighborhood but there was some DM collusion there, and roleplaying considerations too, e.g. providing NPC backup, preventing all of the enemy troops from hitting the players en masse, and morale failures making some troops run away.)I have some ways to risk TPKs without risking the campaign's fun (in some campaigns, players have a karmic "undo button" they can use to rewind from disaster) so I've been able to calibrate more closely than I think many DMs do what constitutes an actual TPK in the works and what only looks like one but isn't. Surprisingly often, it may look and feel like the players are 80% of the way to TPK but it's actually only 50%, because that's when they start pulling out the one-shot magic items the DM has forgotten about, or the one big expensive power they were saving, or getting really creative.Despite all that, I'm not prepared to say that the DMG guidelines are wrong. The reason, simply, is that the DMG guidelines are also incredibly vague. "Deadly" means there's a chance one or more PCs could die. If one or more PCs don't die, does that mean it wasn't Deadly? I don't think so. I think it just means that death was on the line somehow, or at least that the players felt death was on the line. (I think that also implies that any combat that isn't deadly is implicitly either "boring" or has some kind of non-deadly-for-the-PCs stakes tied up in it, e.g. social prestige, or saving the lives of civilians before the monsters can kill them, a la X-COM Terror missions.)(And before [MENTION=6788736]Flamestrike[/MENTION] jumps in here to talk about the length of the adventuring day, I'll point out that some of those Deadly x3 or x4 fights have occurred after multiple other Deadly x1 fights on the same day, with or without a short rest in between, and that sometimes the Deadly x3-4 fight alone consumes more than 100% of the whole day's adventuring budget. And yet the PCs have a pretty fair shot at winning even if they don't do anything sophisticated. So no, this has nothing to do with needing "6-8 Medium combats per adventuring day".)But (1) that's still just anecdotal evidence, and (2) as I said, I'm not at all sure whether what I'm seeing contradicts the DMG or not, because I'm not sure what the DMG is predicting.It's exactly the desire to eliminate ambiguity and anecdotal evidence that drives my interest in a machine-learned difficulty metric for 5E.</blockquote>

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