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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kinematics" data-source="post: 7353582" data-attributes="member: 6932123">This is certainly an interesting approach, but I'm not sure it's 'easier'. I'd say it's supplementary, where it helps you judge if you're making the encounter hard enough.  If you're not using up enough resources with a particular encounter, do you need to add more mobs, or change how you approach the fight?No, the "lie" is that 6 to 8 medium to hard encounters (ie: 6 hard, 8 medium) are suggested per day, but the XP suggested per day only allows 4.5 hard to 6.5 medium encounters.  And when I looked at what patterns of encounters could add up to the suggested total XP and remain fairly consistent across levels, I found that a balanced set of encounters was most reliable.Fewer combat encounters, yes.  A handful of combat encounters can easily eat up all the time of a session, and slow down progress along the greater storyline (outside of pure dungeon-delving), which is annoying for both players and DMs.  It's still feasible to reach the higher number of encounters by sprinkling some easy encounters in (which are much less likely to be combat encounters, but can still be a resource drain).Most of what I see where the players stomp all over the encounters is that the fights are like plain vanilla, "line up and shoot at each other" tactics from the 18th century.  That extra text in the DMG about adjusting the 'actual' difficulty based on differences of environment and advantages/disadvantages for each side could be used to fix the apparent difficulty relative to the nominal difficulty. If the players are easily stomping through a hard/deadly encounter, it's likely that they have unacknowledged advantages that are stepping the encounter down (possibly specific to the particular group of characters, so not easy to generalize), or the opponents aren't being played to their best potential.That might be an interesting challenge thread, actually.  Given a standard four-person party, and freedom to choose the parameters of the encounter, try to determine the most difficult situation you can put the players in with an encounter challenge rating of easy, medium, or hard.  Can choose what level to do the challenge at, too.</blockquote>

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