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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sacrosanct" data-source="post: 6955776" data-attributes="member: 15700">That's only half of the problem, at least with the OP's description of that scenario.  It doesn't matter what else you do, if you don't prepare your familiarity with the monsters you're running and play them up to their abilities, nothing else will matter, especially if you don't prep the boss fights (even if you don't prep every battle, the boss fights certainly should be).  He was running a party that included literal high level geniuses who were also casters, including a diviner, who only has ONE job.  the curb stomping the PCs did may or may not have had anything to do with their system mastery, but I doubt it.  I play with lots of people who couldn't care less about system mastery and they would have curb stomped this encounter as well because the NPCs were played horribly inept.  From the description, I have this image in my head of the DM just putting the NPCs down like pieces on a chessboard when combat started, without them doing anything out of combat to prepare, and ignoring half of their abilities for very spurious reasons when combat did start ("the DK didn't use it's powerful ranged AoE ability because it was a fighter type, and fighters don't do that")You can't blame the system, or the designers, for that.</blockquote>