Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xetheral" data-source="post: 8654017" data-attributes="member: 6802765">Keep in mind that with larger battlefields you can safely increase the number of opponents without risk of TPK far beyond the number possible in a short-range encounter. There are several reasons this is so:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">When a sufficient fraction of the opponents are too far away to get into effective attack range on the first turn (either due to pure distance or the need to get around full cover), there's minimal danger that a failed initiative roll will doom the party, since they'll always get at least one action that can be used to try to prevent the enemies from being able to attack effectively.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Enemy groups that start the encounter out of line of sight to each other may have a hard time coordinating effectively once the fight begins. If the DM roleplays the enemies' coordination difficulties, the confusion of a larger battlefield works in favor of the smaller, more-cohesive party.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"> So long as the enemies don't start together, it will take time for the enemies to concentrate their forces to the point that they'd be able to overwhelm the party in a single round. During that time the PCs can whittle down their foe, take actions to prevent the enemy from concentrating, or position the PCs with AoE abilities to exploit that concentration.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Fights on a larger battlefield spread out incoming damage over more rounds, which gives the party more opportunity to recognize that the battle is not going their way and decide to escape. The larger distances between foes on a larger battlefield also makes escape mechanically easier (so long as the enemy doesn't have a mobility advantage over the PCs).</li> </ol>So even if you do decide to employ ostensibly Deadly++ encounters, if you make the battlefield large enough with the opponents sufficiently dispersed, you can all but remove the chance of an inadvertant TPK.</blockquote>

Verification