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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 4121218" data-attributes="member: 5143">Depends.  For some things, yes.  Others, no.I mean, you don't want the DM making up stats for monsters randomly.  It sucks to fight the BBEG after an entire campaign of buildup and find out the DM set his AC and hitpoints so low that he died in the first round of combat without being able to act.  So, you want a working formula for the difficulty of monsters.Do I want the DM to spend all his prep time running combats between the Bodak and the other residents of the dungeons to see if he can successfully defeat them or if he dies in the process just so that he can realistically model which creatures are left alive when we decide to go back to town for a week before returning to the dungeon?  No.  In this case, I'd much rather the DM just "make it up".I can't tell you what the rules are.  However, rest assured that there ARE rules for situations like this and you won't have to just make them up.  If it involves combat, there are likely rules for it in the book.Outside of combat or things that don't really qualify as "combat", making things up generally works faster and better.  Similar to the example of the Bodak above and whether you'd actually roll the dice to run combats between the Bodak and the monsters in the dungeon...you wouldn't in probably either edition.  It doesn't involve the PCs directly.Your concern as a DM is strictly: How does this affect the players and the storyline?  And there are a LOT of metagame factors that need to be considered.  If you decide that the Bodak, left alone for a week would kill everyone in the dungeon, are you depriving the PCs a bunch of interesting combats that you put into your adventure for a reason?  Are you making the adventure no longer give out the right amount of XP or lowering the difficulty to the point where the adventure isn't a challenge anymore?</blockquote>

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