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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Radiating Gnome" data-source="post: 3717282" data-attributes="member: 150">The first round adventures are all quite different, I think.  In ours we had a fight with yuan-ti purebloods in a tree (that could have been mitigated with good spot checks and tactics to keep them from raising an alarm), a fight with an apparently endless supply of bugbear barbarians (where the goal was to escape into a lake after touching a gate that would grant you underwater breathing.  We quickly figured that there would always be about 6 bugbears on the map -- ones we killed were replaced with new ones appearing, so we hit the ones on the map with us with the wand of slow and avoided them, touched the gate, and left the scene), a trap room (we ran around the traps and avoided most of the damage), a room with a standup fight against bullywugs that would help mitigate the challenge of the final fight with a gorgon (we were told later that if we had allowed any of the bullywugs to escape into the next scene they would have released the gorgon, and it would have been able to attack us right away.  Since we kept them from releasing the gorgon, the gorgon had to batter down the door itself, giving us several rounds to explore the rest of the encounter area, figure out that we were facing something that would petrify us, and prepare an ambush for it when it emerged from it's pen.  So, in each case there was something going on that was a little more than a stand-up fight.  My instinct is that the same was probably true for every fight in other first round adventures, too.  There were certainly some fights that you couldn't avoid, but even in those there would probably be ways to make the fight easier.  We didn't manage to make every fight we faced easier, but we did on enough of them. The whole thing is a test of resource management.  If you can avoid a fight, you spend less time and fewer resources on that encounter, and move on to the next. You may be able to totally mash up a particular encounter, stomp them into the ground, but if you spend too much time doing it -- use too many spells and charges doing it -- and use up too much healing recovering from it, you make it far less likely that you'll get through the whole sequence.I imagine that the two semi-final round heats also had different adventures, too.  Our heat,  on saturday afternoon, also had very very simple stand-up fights.  And that one was hard enough that I don't think anyone in our heat finished it -- we were one of only a handful of tables to make it past a particular battle (a fire elemental and four bronze guardians that ambushed us). Only four of our characters made it out of that room, and we made it to the finals, so I'm quite sure that most groups got bogged down in the fight, if not TPK'ed.  That room was NASTY.  But, even there, it was possible to avoid fighting with the fire elemental entirely, and we only bothered to kill two of the four bronze guardians -- one we killed as we were figuring out what we had to do in the room, and the other died as our tanks tried to keep the guardians occupied while other party members tried to deal with the room's tricks (to open the exit so we could escape). So, I suspect that there were ways to mitigate the challenge of most, if not all, of the fights you faced in your heat's adventures, too.  That may not have been true, admittedly, and you're only ever competing against the other teams in your heat, so it's not unfair if it was not true. But in my experience, very few of the fights in the open are really just straight-up smash & bash fights.  They can be that if you don't find the gimmick, but if you don't find the gimmick you spend too much of everything on the fight.-rg</blockquote>

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