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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6755506" data-attributes="member: 6787650">Three comments:1.) Check with your players. Maybe they like slaughters. Many players do and 5E is calibrated to be easy.2.) You're correct that Hard encounters from Kobold.com tend to be easy for an optimized party. There's nothing wrong with turning up the difficulty. My game is combat-light, but when combats do occur I find that 200% to 300% of Deadly is about the right level for a challenging encounter, one that makes me think, "Hey, I'd want to play a PC in this fight" instead of "I'm tempted to handwave this and just say, 'You won. What do you do next?'"I don't usually go over about 130% of the "XP per adventuring day" DMG chart though, not so much because of difficulty as for story reasons--it's rare to do that much fighting in a day.3.) What makes a combat boring is not so much whether it's easy on the DMG scale as whether it's predictable for the players. I've had fights that looked under control for the party using regular tactics, until at the end of the fight something fails a morale check, decides to charge instead of running away, and overruns the front line heading for the back line spellcasters. At no time during that fight was the party in any danger of TPK or even PC death, but they were in danger of having their nice predictable game plan shredded by a monster doing something unexpected. They managed to pull things back together without spending any unplanned HP or resources (thanks to the Paladin choosing to charge and grapple) and got it back on track, but the player's goals (beat this Hard encounter without losing any HP or spell slots above 1st level) were threatened, and they had to make decisions to get things back on track.So, use monsters who Hide before combat and don't reveal themselves immediately on the first round of combat; use monsters who are willing to retreat behind cover and wait with readied actions instead of immediately charging; use monsters who will occasionally find reason to ignore the tasty fighter on the front-line in favor of something unexpected; use unusual terrains like vertical cliffs, and monsters who take advantage of those terrains to harass the PCs.It doesn't matter if they come close to dying as long as the players are forced to make decisions.</blockquote>

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