[Encounters] How Difficult Is Too Difficult?

[SableWyvern]

Just wondering on people's experience with encounters over the party's level.

At the moment, I am thinking about making the hardest encounters the PCs face about four levels higher than themselves. These top-end encounters wouldn't occur more than once per level.

I know there are going to be a lot of variables at play that will affect whether any particular encounter is survivable, but I'm just looking for some ball-park thoughts on whether I'm going to be making things a little too difficult.

On a related note, assuming a group is fully rested and has at least some idea of what they're going to be facing, what is the highest level encounter you'd consider reasonable to put them up against, without expecting that they will need to flee or be TPKed?

 

[Family]

KotS examples.

Irontooth if they know what they are getting into is just above the high water mark.

Blue Jelly if they don't.

 

[Jhaelen]

I don't have any playtesting experience, but going by the suggestions in the DMG a hard encounter should be at level+4 top. The highest level of individual monsters in this encounter should be level+7.

When building example encounters from the suggested encounter templates I noticed that level+7 for individual monsters is too high. Using level+6 should be the maximum to get an encounter of max. level+4.
And level+4 encounters look extremely hard, especially in the low levels. I guess, they'll become more managable at higher levels. I wouldn't use one of those before the characters got their second daily (i.e. level 5).

The DMG section about mixing encounters says, a party should have one easy encounter (Level-1), one hard encounter (Level+3), and six standard encounters (3x Level; 3x Level+1). Add a major quest reward and the party levels up.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Ran our first session of Keep on the Shadowfell (review/comments at a later time):
The group was 4 characters (not the suggested 5), and was fully rested.

The last man standing was the Wizard, with like 3 hit points. They survived because I pulled my punches a little bit (but not that much, and I rolled _really_ well all the time). But in the end, the Dragonwyrm decided to not go beyond the waterfall (where the wizard has retreated to, closely followed by Irontooth himself), and insteat stabilize the possible sacrifices or slaves lying around.

The encounter level was level 6. You might be able to go to 7 with a 5 man party, but losses are to be expected. Never do this if the party doesn' have dailies left!

 

[JRRNeiklot]

There's no such thing as too difficult. Well, unless you trap low level partie in a room with an ancient red and no means of egress. Not all fights should be winnable. There's always a bigger fish.

 

[Doug McCrae]

An important factor is whether there's going to be only one encounter that day or several. If only one, I'd recommend setting a harder difficulty than [level], up to [level +4].