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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rogue Agent" data-source="post: 5724702" data-attributes="member: 6673496">First, notice the switcheroo you pulled there. I suspect it's contributing to your misunderstanding.I'm not really seeing the contradiction. It's not like the only way to reach 20% of your HP is in one big encounter that costs you 80% of your hit points. You can also suffer slow attrition over the course of several encounters.If you follow that pattern even 25% of the time, you'll still end up limping into "A LOT" of encounters with 20% of your hit points over the course of a campaign.Maybe you're interpreting the words "a lot" to mean "most"? But that's not what the words actually mean.As for the general viability of the scenario DA describes, I'd like to hear more about the total number of PCs and the relative ELs of the encounters they're facing. If you get 6-8 PCs facing a mixture of encounters with ELs equal to or lower than the APL, the game plays a lot more like old school AD&D (because that's generally how encounters were designed in AD&D).That's how we generally play, and the result isn't too dissimilar from what DA describes: Anywhere from 5-10 encounters per day, with the last 2 or 3 featuring the wizard blasting the party clear to a safe zone because the fighters have been attritioned. (Where we differ is that our group sometimes gets into epic fights with dozens of strong opponents... at which point we fall back on our healing wands and other resources to win the day.)As DA describes, the trick is effective arcanist casting: Soften up melee mobs or take out the "tentpole" elites in mixed groups; then stop casting while the rest of the group mops up. Nova-blasting completely dominates a tactical encounter; it almost always sucks at achieving strategic goals.With that being said, I find DA's claim that they played levels 1-10 in Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil -- an adventure designed for 4th to 14th level characters -- to be the truly extraordinary part of the campaign he describes. IIRC, the first combat encounter in the Moathouse is a CR 5 dragon dealing 6d8 damage with its breath weapon. That's an average of 27 points of damage. Even on a successful save, that'll wipe out everybody in a 1st level party except a barbarian or fighter.My guess is that the module must have been heavily altered by his DM. (Although I guess if they managed to take out that dragon somehow they'd start leveling up pretty quick.)It's true. The DMG did say, "A fifth encounter [with an EL equal to the APL] would probably wipe them out."But do you know what the very next sentence in the DMG is? "The party should be able to take on many more encounters lower than their level but fewer encounters with ELs higher than their level."And on the page before that: "Parties with five or more members can often take on monsters with higher CRs, and parties with three or fewer are challenged by monsters with lower CRs. The game rules account for these facts by dividing the XP earned by the number of characters in the party."The game is capable of supporting a wide range of groups and a wide range of playing styles. Your desire to treat guidelines as rules while simultaneously ignoring significant portions of those guidelines (a) doesn't tell us much about how the game actually plays; and (b) is counter-productive when it comes to enjoying the game.</blockquote>

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