Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6594429" data-attributes="member: 6787650">Yeah, I hate that too. NPCs should act logically and realistically. The DM shouldn't tone NPCs down just because PCs are involved.According to your quote, CAS players "tend to prefer" roughly evenly matched sides. Does your group tend to prefer roughly even matches, or do your combats often range from "so easy they're a social encounter" up to "triple-deadly encounter"? If they're Medium/Hard 60% or more of the time, you're probably playing Combat As Sport.The whole point of Combat As War is to give yourself lopsided advantages, or failing that, to at least negate the overwhelming advantage the bad guys have so you have a small chance of victory. If your DM played your opposition the same way you think I should have played mine (knowing everything about the hidden PCs' plans; strategically paranoid, always operating as if an enemy force is hidden under every bush and ready to instantly respond with overwhelming force in any direction; coordinated like a well-oiled telepathic machine so that, for instance, no one ever wastes a turn Dodging unless every other valid target is Dodging too; as tactically-smart as the DM himself) then you will lose 50% of the time to an equal force, and in any situation where the force ratio is against you you will lose far more than 50% of the time. So if you've had more than four fights in your campaign and survived them all, the odds are 15:1 that the DM is "holding your hand" by being less lethal than he could be in one way or another. (Because 50%^4 = 1/16.) You claim that you're winning victories through sheer brilliance and everyone else in the world is just "wrestling with their dads," but we know that you're wrestling with your dad too. D&D isn't a game designed for even fights, because D&D is designed to have lots of fights, and the two goals aren't compatible. Chess is an even game, but imagine what would happen if the loser of every chess match were executed. A chess "veteran" then becomes someone who has won four matches against other veterans, and veterans would assiduously avoid playing against each other. Mostly they would play newbies, and that's what the DMG encounter rules are built to guarantee. A fight against your mirror image is far beyond Deadly, and the DMG discourages you from using even fights (where you could lose or die!) frequently.[1] In spite of the fact that the fight was not only 10x deadly on paper, it was still triple-deadly even if we wrote off all the monsters you dismiss as "not played logically" and pretend they didn't exist. In fact, the neogi wizard/leader by himself would constitute a Hard encounter for the whole group of PCs and NPCs, and in my expert opinion re-playing the battle would have wiped out the PCs 3 times out of 4. They basically got lucky, and yet you think they had it too easy. [shakes head sadly] There's no pleasing some people I guess.</blockquote>

Verification