Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 6952346" data-attributes="member: 22779">Why are you using "trash" encounters?  Every encounter should have some meaning for the story.  If your story is so basic that you can't connect three different scenes to it, then perhaps adding a touch more complexity might be an idea.   And note, I DID say you don't have to do this all the time.  Just once in a while to keep the players on the their toes.The problem with this sensation is that it's almost entirely false.  Because, if those people really could wipe you in a heartbeat, they would have.  Encounters can never be that difficult because you TPK too often.The problem is, this is not actually true.  If every encounter has a significant chance of losing, then you'd be wiping out your party after the third or fourth encounter.  5e has simply recognized what has always been true - the odds are heavily stacked in the PC's favor.The other thing is, what you're outlining here is a very 3e approach to the game where you were only expected to have such a very short adventuring day - 4 encounters, and likely closer to one or two.  Other editions don't work this way.  Older edition monsters were even weaker relative to the PC's than 5e ones are.  It wasn't unusual for even low level groups to go through eight or ten encounters in a single day.  The monster attacks were so poor (an orc has a THAC0 of 19, and achieving an AC of 1 or 2 is easily doable for even a 1st level AD&D character) that they hit rarely, and even when they did, they didn't do much damage.  It was quite common to go entire combats with the main fighters losing no HP's.  3e is the outlier here, where it tried to make every encounter this "dangerous" encounter.  You really do have to adapt a different mindset when running 5e.  3e style encounter pacing just doesn't work.Only problem is, we saw what happened when WotC tried that.  People lost their collective minds.  So, it's not really a surprise that they are not going to go down that road again.</blockquote>

Verification