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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7411463" data-attributes="member: 6775031">Setting aside the concept of DM meta-gaming and whether or not the DM should contrive coincidences in the name of keeping things exciting (because that's been discussed to death recently), there's still the question of whether tailoring encounters to the party would produce encounter difficulties that are more satisfying to the players.From my perspective, tailoring encounters to the party - even with the best of intentions - completely negates any sense of achievement involved. As an extremely simple example, if the DM judged that the most exciting/challenging number of orcs for us to fight was seventeen, then how well we deal with that encounter (whether we succeed or fail, or succeed by enough of a margin to continue with a particular course of action rather than altering the plan to allow for rest) is primarily determined by the DM's skill in judging the capabilities of the players. If the fight goes easier than expected, then it's not because the players were exceptionally skilled or lucky, so much as that the DM under-estimated them. If the party loses, or is forced to expend more resources than their budget allowed, then it's because the DM over-estimated their capabilities. It's the same sense of futility that I get when playing Overwatch, when one team completely stomps the other team. I don't feel good for winning, or bad for losing. I just feel like my time was wasted, since the outcome was decided by the match-making algorithm.(I do agree that published adventures err on the easy side, and that a few difficult encounters are often preferable to numerous small ones. You don't need to look at the PCs in order to make the world a harder place, though; you can just replace goblins with hobgoblins, or make orcs hang out in larger groups, and have that be the way that the world is. It's like the difference between a video game that lets you choose between Easy/Medium/Hard difficulties so that you can challenge yourself, and one with dynamic difficulty where your skill is ultimately irrelevant.)</blockquote>

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