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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 9263943" data-attributes="member: 7006">Indeed!The deadliness of AD&D combat oftentimes would come down to whether or not there was AoE effects available for the party at the time of the encounter.  A "difficult" encounter made by the DM using lots of less-powerful monsters with lower HP could be removed quite easily through the use of a single Sleep spell or heaven-forbid a Fireball a few levels later.  If that M-U rolled high enough on Initiative and could cast those spells out there at the top of the combat, a huge swathe of the supposed difficulty would be removed immediately and now the rest of the party could clean up the rest.  Thus an encounter meant to be difficult due to disproportional numbers no longer was.But if you didn't have a caster able to do that and the party instead had to repeatedly face swarms of enemies using just melee... the feeling for the players would of course be different.  They might think most combats were hard as hell.Neither side is right or wrong on this... it all comes down to how players approached their games and how DMs chose to run them.  And the only way to see if there was any "proof" that certain problems existed for most tables is to see what TSR and WotC designers attempted to "fix" with each subsequent edition.  If something got changed when the new book came out... that's an indicator that perhaps the designers were aware of an issue hitting a lot of the playerbase and their hope to rectify it.</blockquote>

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