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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dark Dragon" data-source="post: 6275383" data-attributes="member: 1115">Hmm, I doubt that the DM had the intention of killing some (or all) PCs at that low level. I got more the impression that he relied too much on a) the calculated CR and b) hoped that we as players act in a better tactical way.For a), I made the experience that at low party levels, you have to be even more cautious about the CR, because a lot depends on the dice rolls. This makes it much less "controllable". Generally, at low levels the PCs actions, especially the melee options, are reduced to one attack roll per round. If the the DM places a group with double the amount of members against the PCs, the DM has a double chance to hit. At low levels this means that hp go down faster, forcing the PC cleric to heal and not doing damage => the foes may deal damage more often as well. The same holds if the foes have similar amounts of hps, then everything depends on dice rolls. If the players have bad luck with their rolls, PC will die most likely.For b), our tactical options were a faster regrouping followed by flanking attacks that allow some sneak attacks. However, in round 1, our main cleric was brought from 24 to 2 hp by a Scorching Ray of the goblin adept (the DM really rolled 22 damage with 4d6!), the scouting PC was alone and faced several goblins with javelins (and decided to cast an Entropic Shield, which absolutely did NOT work during the whole encounter, so much about luck!), the second cleric/ninja decided to heal the first cleric, and the rest of the party decided to stand and fight. And we constantly rolled poorly, but hitting AC 16 is still not so easy with attacks ranging from +2 to +4. Altogether, it was a combination of bad luck, sub-optimal tactical choices, and a CR issue...Be careful: the daze effect of Blasphemy lasts one round, giving the balor enough time to summon up a colleague without being disturbed by the PCs! Payment of this colleague would be a share of the PCs stuff <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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