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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vayden" data-source="post: 4599437" data-attributes="member: 57791">Hmm - I don't know if we can go that far. I think it is safe to assume that the designers view that as a fairly optimal buy - I remember seeing Mearls in a thread somewhere saying that if the players had bought an 18 and then used racial to get to 20 in their primary attack stat, then they must have a weak defense in fort/ref/will, and you as a DM should target that. So we can probably assume that Mearls at least believes buying anything higher than a 16 is un-optimal. I think he's probably wrong from a strict optimization standpoint - attack wins over defense in D&D, so it's better to have a weak defense or two in exchange for a strong attack. Still, from a fun perspective, I almost never buy above a 16 myself - I like being decent at a broad range of skills and not having a glaringly weak defense. Still, even if you're going with the 16, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10 default arrangement, if you pick a race that boosts your primary attack stat, you're going to start with an 18 which is honestly quite good enough to get by. I think you may have hit on something here with the designed power balance assuming a 16-18 instead of 18-20 in your primary attack at level 1, but I don't think that in itself is enough to throw off the math so completely that level-appropriate could be considered "a decent challenge". (Though I'm not up to crunching the numbers in detail - is Stalker0 around?)I think this may be a small piece of the puzzle, but I still think a bigger piece is the assumption that a level appropriate encounter should only drain about 1/8 - 1/10 or so of a party's resources, as can be seen from the rough distance between good "resting spots" in the published adventures. While I understand the desire to increase the length of the adventuring day, I think they made a design mistake here - the adventuring day is more exciting if each fight pushes the players enough that they use up about 1/4 to 1/5 of their resources (defined as healing surges, daily powers, and magic item dailies). While that may shorten the day, I think it makes the day more cinematic and exciting. Because of this, I usually build my dungeons/adventures planning on about 3-5 combat encounters (along with some social or puzzle encounters) before providing a break. I've found this to be much more rewarding than the DMG suggestions.</blockquote>

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