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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6973722" data-attributes="member: 5834">How often do you do this? How often do you in essence use DM caveat to render their character choices moot and thus disempower the players and the choices they made? What percentage of the time? If a rogue or bard build to be highly stealthy or the wizard/warlock uses their owl or invisible imp to scout ahead, how often do you come up with an encounter option to overcome it? I would probably only do this 10 to 20% of the time at most. I don't want to make my players feel as though their character choices don't matter.Please don't forget that your way of defeating a powerful party was to design an environment they couldn't overcome with their own power. Then when said party (parties) still crushed your encounters, to tell the people they ran it wrong and explain how you would have ran it. Which in your mind would have automatically succeeded, even though it was proven quite clearly that your method if successful (meaning missed saves and such) would have resulted in only a marginal difference in the result, still quite easily defeated by the party. I don't call mindlessly claiming rightness to be a matter of DM style. Your encounters were beaten quite easily, except the very last one. That last encounter against the Shadow Dragon in a vast open area was not easy and likely to kill quite a few parties. I do admit it was a cool encounter set up. And the end encounter was a monster. Most of the earlier encounters were easy and did not take the level of resources you claimed. Nor did it work well on a battlemat, which people like CapnZapp and myself play with. When you use a battlemat, players expect you to use the rules for a battlemat meaning they get to use their Perception and Stealth abilities at very good range and all the time, for every single combat. I do give you credit for creativity. You're a very creative DM that makes up interesting encounters. They're not near as tough as you make them out to be, but they are interesting. If you were running some of our parties and players, you've already stated you would have quit those parties because you don't like min-max players that focus heavy on mechanics and demand the DM play a certain way. Well, I don't know for sure about CapnZapp, but my players do not tolerate DMs automatically putting them in bad situations when they take active measures to scout and put themselves in advantageous positions against the opponents. I can maybe do this 10 to 20% of the time for specific end game encounters. For most of the encounters in a given scenario, they crush those and I let them use smart tactical play to gain advantages. Scouting is a powerful player tool I don't punish players for using.I'm not going to rehash all this garbage with you. You still don't understand what CapnZapp and I are dealing with campaign after campaign after campaign. It's not DM style. You can give us a hard time for sticking by our respective groups and their play style. I don't feel like changing groups. I've known these guys twenty plus years and I'll keep doing what I have to do to challenge their mechanical min-max focus. I wish 5E gave me more out of the box tools for doing so. This much rewriting so soon is annoying. It's like I have to add Perception to nearly every creature to compete with the double proficiency bonus Stealth I know every party will have. 5E supporters like you won't even admit that the Stealth versus creature Perception is highly skewed in favor of the players 90% of the time following Monster Manual creatures and modules. Even when the math of a double proficiency stealth versus creatures without Perception skill or with a low wisdom shows a huge advantage when sneaking up on creatures. If a person can't admit such an obvious mechanical player advantage exists with baseline 5E, then you can't debate period because there is no admission of a mathematical fact of the game design.</blockquote>

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