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<blockquote data-quote="dropbear8mybaby" data-source="post: 6989901" data-attributes="member: 6863518">If I, as a DM, wanted to kill the PC's, this would be a trifling issue. If I want to hand-hold them, then again, this is of no significant challenge. But if I want to challenge the players and their PC's, then all of a sudden it becomes incredibly difficult to judge appropriate tactical responses of enemies due to the nature of initiative.What I mean by this is that, if I was being purely tactical, then smart enemies would focus-fire the primary threat from the PC's. Usually healers, spell-casters and then the rest in that order. Even with a moderately challenging encounter with about 7+ enemies (against a standard 4-5 PC party) will make mince-meat out of a single target in short order. I could use individual initiatives for every single monster, but that gets incredibly tiresome and complicated at the table, and only slightly alleviates the issue since although they wouldn't be going on group initiative, they'd still have enough turns in enough rounds to obliterate a single PC.I've found that because of this I can't really be very smart or tactical with my enemies. Even just one round of focus-fire will usually drop a PC at most levels. And because of this, there's developed a problem of the players perceiving myself and the NPC's as never being very tactical or smart. This in turn has led them to being very brash and uncaring of the threat since they can usually easily beat the encounters.What middle-ground is there to be had here using a standard initiative paradigm? Either it's too complicated or convoluted to have a more &quot;realistic&quot; initiative order, or I can't use intelligent tactics because it will result in a TPK. How do you handle this issue or is it even an issue you've realised or found to be true at all?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="dropbear8mybaby, post: 6989901, member: 6863518"] If I, as a DM, wanted to kill the PC's, this would be a trifling issue. If I want to hand-hold them, then again, this is of no significant challenge. But if I want to challenge the players and their PC's, then all of a sudden it becomes incredibly difficult to judge appropriate tactical responses of enemies due to the nature of initiative. What I mean by this is that, if I was being purely tactical, then smart enemies would focus-fire the primary threat from the PC's. Usually healers, spell-casters and then the rest in that order. Even with a moderately challenging encounter with about 7+ enemies (against a standard 4-5 PC party) will make mince-meat out of a single target in short order. I could use individual initiatives for every single monster, but that gets incredibly tiresome and complicated at the table, and only slightly alleviates the issue since although they wouldn't be going on group initiative, they'd still have enough turns in enough rounds to obliterate a single PC. I've found that because of this I can't really be very smart or tactical with my enemies. Even just one round of focus-fire will usually drop a PC at most levels. And because of this, there's developed a problem of the players perceiving myself and the NPC's as never being very tactical or smart. This in turn has led them to being very brash and uncaring of the threat since they can usually easily beat the encounters. What middle-ground is there to be had here using a standard initiative paradigm? Either it's too complicated or convoluted to have a more "realistic" initiative order, or I can't use intelligent tactics because it will result in a TPK. How do you handle this issue or is it even an issue you've realised or found to be true at all? [/QUOTE]

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