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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 6951586" data-attributes="member: 22779">Just to backtrack a bit about what I said about swinginess.  Let's do a bit of back of the envelope theorycrafting for a sec.  Yes, I know that I'm painting with a very broad brush here, but, stick with me.5e combats, particularly the first combat of the day, tend to be very short.  Say three or four rounds.  Not much more than that typically.  Assume 4 bad guys.  That means, in the course of combat, the DM takes about 10 actions, at best.  ((I'm ignoring Legendary actions for the moment))  If you also assume 5 PC's, that means that the GM is taking about two actions against each PC.  That's it.  Just two.  Granted, area of effect actions will up that number, but, many monsters don't have area attacks.  What that means is that 5e monsters have to pack a fair bit of punch in each attack.  And, again typically, they do.  But, this is where swinginess kicks in.  If the DM is hot (my DM today rolled FIVE crits in a single round!  Yikes!)  then maybe all ten of those actions are successful and the party gets the stuffing beat out of it.  OTOH, if the DM is cold, the monsters get steam rolled and can't do anything.  Because of bounded accuracy, the die roll matters a lot.  Which is going to make predicting the outcome of encounters more difficult.  Sometimes a single failed or successful save can turn an entire encounter in either direction.  Where it smooths out is if you pile on the encounters.  You really can't expect one encounter days to routinely challenge fresh parties.  They just can't.  The party can pull out far too many stops and make sure that they punch way above their weight class.  Really, the difficult encounters are the fourth to sixth ones where the party really has to conserve its resources.Not that you have to do 6-8 encounters all the time.  Just a enough times to teach the players to not pull out all the stops all the time.  Force the choice - pull out the stops now and run out of gas later or save it now and maybe get beat on.  That's where the tactical interest comes from.</blockquote>

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