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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shiroiken" data-source="post: 7449733" data-attributes="member: 6775477">The books focus on lower levels of play, because that's what their research shows that most people play. Very few games actually run to level 20, usually ending at about 10th level instead. Thus, the books focus on levels 1-10 because that's the product most people want.  The game does work at higher levels, but requires a bit more work and DM experience to pull off well. I believe the assumption by WotC was that DMs would seek out advice from other sources, leaving more space available to focus on lower level play.These guidelines should not be considered hard and fast rules. They are useful for new DMs, but they can be easily bent/broken, creating super easy/hard encounters, so I ignore them. To be fair to 5E, encounter guidelines didn't work to well in prior editions either.Combats are as exciting or boring as the DM makes them. Don't limit your tactics to just what the monster has on the stat-block, and don't just prohibit innovative ideas players have. Yes, most monsters use HP as their primary defense, because players hate to miss, and players use AC instead of HP, because players hate to be hit. I'd suggest using more monsters of lower CR, because the number of attacks will eventually overcome a high AC. Also, I suggest NEVER giving out a +x shield... ever... because that really busts bounded accuracy to hell.Not in my experience. In my last campaign (levels 3-17, about 50 sessions) I killed about 10 PCs. One was with overwhelming damage, 1 was due to an insta-kill effect (Confusion spell caused a PC to wander off the Demonweb into the infinite Abyss), and the rest were due to failed death saves because the rest of the party was too busy to save them. In general, low level characters (~1-3) are very fragil, and can die pretty easily. From levels 3-16 or so death is less common, because it requires either an insta-kill effect or the character to roll a 1 on their death save (while the rest of the party is too far out of position to help). If you really feel the need to increase the number of character deaths, I'd lower the death by damage to either 25% or 50% of maximum HP, rather than 100%.Yup, so don't do that <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />Seriously, this I agree with. The big issue (besides people's preferred style of play, which is apparently fewer encounters per day) is that short rests are much less useful at lower levels, since you don't have that many HD. IME, at low levels are 2-3 encounters per day, while mid levels can do about 4-6. It's not really until levels 11+ that the 6-8 encounters per day becomes reasonable.Homebrew is good. 5E is meant to be customized in such a way to improve the game for each group. Since I like AD&D, I've drawn most of my inspiration from there, but you've found it in 4E. You'd probably hate my stuff, and I'd probably hate yours, but that's part of the beauty of 5E.</blockquote>

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