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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Upper_Krust" data-source="post: 9729693" data-attributes="member: 326">Hey there TheSword!I agree with that to the extent of 'if we continue to use the official monster stats' then certainly we need to think 'outside the box' and involve the terrain and potential plot elements (Reinforcements for instance).Although I do believe a vastly simpler approach is to just increase the damage.If I boiled the problems down to 3 main issues:1. Monsters don't hit hard enough.2. Big difference between optimized and unoptimized Player Characters.3. Big difference when Player's go 'nova' (ie. Use best spells, action surges, high level smites etc.)Solutions:1. Easy solve -  up the damage.2. Relatively easy solve - know the party and up the Encounter Difficulty accordingly3. Tricky solve and not even necessarily a flaw, just player's being clever - but could be mitigated somewhat by a chance of Reinforcements each round (lets say reinforcements arrive after 1d3 rounds).You can have unnatural ways of mitigation such as (Boss cannot be harmed until 3 Magical Mac-guffins are destroyed)Agreed. That did happen in my example. Although this should have been a Highly Difficult encounter for 5 Level 20 PCs and instead it was an Easy Encounter for 5 Level 14-16 PCs.Certainly not if they punch well below their 'weight'.Low Level D&D is designed to deliver potentially deadly (and thus exciting) Encounters. High Level D&D does not keep pace with the damage numbers (in terms of PC percentages) and that coupled with greater synergy between characters, more chances for PC's to go 'Nova' and far more healing mean that the deck is ridiculously stacked in the favour of the PCs - although there is still the difference between unoptimized and optimized PCs which at high level is probably akin to 2:1 (as in 1 optimized PC is worth 2 unoptimized ones)....and just to be clear by optimized I don't mean wild CharOps exploit-builds I just mean characters built to maximise their strengths and mitigate their weaknesses.</blockquote>

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