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Message: <blockquote data-quote="twofalls" data-source="post: 3563709" data-attributes="member: 23718">I'm blessed to have large numbers of game playing friends... I've run games for three decades, you meet a few people in that time. My games have always had a minimum of 6 players in them, and I've run games for so long that I've always designed encounters myself by estimating the power level the party can handle and eyeballing the monsters. I've not ever run a 4 player D&D session using the rules system for balancing encounters, until last night that is. I started a new game with two couples who are friends of mine, specifically so that I could experience the game rules for 3.0 played out as they were written... for 4 players with one character of each type (wiz, fighter, cleric, thief). I ran them in the Dungeon Classics Module #2 The Lost Vault of Tzathzar Rho. The first encounter in that module, which is specifically written for 1st level characters, is with an Orgre... CR 2 creature. According to the DMG 3.0 this is supposed to be a scaled encounter that 4 1st level players will have a hard time with, but can overcome. The party consisted of a Thief, a Ranger, a Diviner, and a Druid. They were annihilated. We ran the same encounter 3 times and they varied thier tactics but the end result was always the same, the gory death of the entire party and a modestly wounded Ogre.I then suggested that since I run a roleplay heavy game, and that is what the players came prepared for, I would allow them to restructure the characters and toughen them up... surely that is the problem we were facing, underpowered PCs. So we ran it one last time with a Thief, Evoker, Cleric, and a buffed up dual weapon weilding combat Ranger. They did do a little more damage but in the end thier broken lifeless bodies littererd the same battleground.Granted ,the dice rolls of the players were uniformly unspectacular that entire evening, which is hard on any level character, but particuarly for 1st levelers. But after 4 attempts we all found the play to be frustrating. One player was very disgusted that the scenario called for a CR2 creature to fight a level 1 party... but according to the rules this is supposed to be playable.Any observations?</blockquote>

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