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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7557119" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right.Well, TBH, it simply doesn't address this sort of aspect of running a game at all. The 'classic D&D' approach was that the game was at heart a sort of 'wargame' and once the DM laid his pieces out on the table, so to speak, then it was bad practice to start fudging the numbers. OTOH 4e is very encounter-based, so it only really engages in 'balance' or any kind of 'accounting' at that level. Thus what happens BETWEEN encounters, and the linkage between mechanical 'entities' in the game (IE creatures with statblocks and whatnot) and NARRATIVE elements (IE characters of whatever ilk) is less hard and fast.What I'm getting at is, it would be perfectly acceptable, IMHO, in 4e for a DM to utilize different statblocks for the same NPC in different encounters. In fact each encounter is authored out of whole cloth and thus an encounter budget is generated by deciding what stat blocks to put into it in relation to the PCs to create an encounter between level -1 and level + 5.Now, that doesn't mean I necessarily think that DMs should be ARBITRARY. The story should have narrative coherency. It would be a poor choice, IMHO, to suddenly restat the miners as minions after they just fought heroically against a similar opponent and the players have every reason to think the same outcome will arise again. They should be able to reason about things and make sense of them in story. They don't have to be totally mechanically consistent though, just plausible and 'genre consistent'. If the miners suddenly face some dire enemy, then maybe they ARE minions, their mojo is just not sufficient to make them a significant factor in a capstone showdown with the BBEG. If it feels more consistent, their dispatch can be narrated as being scattered to the four winds and running in fear, while the bad guy laughs evilly.</blockquote>

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