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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Runestar" data-source="post: 4400217" data-attributes="member: 72317">I suspect the design philosophy is more of an average over multiple encounters, than what would actually happen in every fight.For example, lets say we run run 10 separate fights, each involving a 8th lv party against a mindflayer. Some may experience bad luck by rolling badly on their will saves, with the entire party getting stunned/charmed (the equivalent of a TPK). Others may luck out on their rolls, and make all their saving throws, eventually killing the mindflayer without taking any damage. So you have widely varying results (and other factors can further swing this. For instance, magic circle prevents charm monster from working. Undead/construct PCs won't be affected etc). But if you average everything, the final result is roughly 25% resources expended per party, just that some end up losing more, others less.The same rationale may apply here. The designers likely don't expect your party to actually deplete exactly 1/4 of their resources every fight. But in the long run, the amount of resouces your party does end up using should be more or less consistent with said formula. If your wizard gets pertified by the medusa, the resources spent could be in the form of spending money to hire a wizard to cast stone to flesh or break enchantment (because its damage dealing capabilities is practically nil). Or the value of a raise dead/revivify scroll for the rogue who fails his fort save against the bodak. Naturally, as is the problem with any one-sized-fits-all guideline, there are bound to be lots of outlier scenarios which slip through the cracks. The designers likely arrived at the values they did from playtesting under certain predetermined assumptions and conditions. Thus, how well or poorly your party fares would also depend on how closely or greatly they deviated from those underlying set of assumptions. Considering all the possible options in building your party, some form of deviation should be expected.You do have a point though in that in a worst case scenario, a round of bad rolls could mean certain death for the whole party (say everyone rolls a natural 1 on their fort save against the medusa's gaze). All I can say is that I am lucky in that this has never occured in my games.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

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