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Message: <blockquote data-quote="slobster" data-source="post: 7925554" data-attributes="member: 6693711">On the one hand, I do agree that 5E was written such that a by-the-book, standard encounter is ASSUMED to be something that a group of PCs will eventually defeat, even allowing for bad luck or poor decisions. There is a lot of slack given to basically guarantee the PCs win. Posing a serious threat just wasn't a design goal when crafting the monsters and the challenge system. Posing the APPEARANCE of a threat was the goal.That said, in terms of the actual experience of how threatening a given "level appropriate encounter" actually ends up being, I actually feel that 3.x D&D was similarly toothless in providing actual threat of PCs being killed or seriously injured, at least if the party was above level 3 or so and any good at optimization. I clearly recall spending a lot of time building encounters for my parties back in the 3.x era, choosing a CR 20 monster to throw up against my level 11 party thinking it would be something that they'd have to flee from after a big epic fight, then watching it go down in 2 rounds without inflicting a single point of damage. For that party, from what I recall I would typically build an encounter for EL about 6 levels above the PCs actual level, and then double the number of cannon fodder, and they would STILL sail past most of them as barely more than a speedbump. So yeah, like other posters have said, 3.x and other editions had more scary monster mechanics like level drain etc. which could shake things up. But if you are specifically just following the encounter design suggestions given in the DMG, like most people seem to be saying in this thread for 5E, then 3.x encounter assumptions were quickly far outstripped by actual PC power level, to a vastly greater extent than is true in 5E given bounded accuracy etc.So I'd say that 5E is definitely less deadly at low levels than any other edition of D&D I've played, with 3.x being comically unchallenging as-written for the mid to highish levels. Again, assuming you just follow the encounter planning rules as-written, which no DM worth their salt will do IMO. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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