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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lyxen" data-source="post: 8622339" data-attributes="member: 7032025">It goes really really far, because it avoids the difference for a group between 10 rounds of buffing and surprise which could completely reverse the difficulty of an encounter in 3e. As for high level spells, sort of, because the opponents have them too, like in AD&D.The problem was that, with the incredible power of buffs, dispel magic and similar effects (there was a greater dispel for example), things kept changing, and that in addition to the duration of buffs, and the fact that sometimes they were applicable, sometimes not, etc.Indeed, it was really something that I felt silly in 3e/PF/4e, this assumption that some buffs where there and that PCs had the right equipment. Really annoying and so glad that 5e got rid of all that.That's the problem of action economy combined with bounded accuracy. A single CR 17 is, on paper, a match for a level 12-13 party, but how many parties today really have standard array stats, no feats and multiclassing and no magic item of note ? Because that is the basis...The reason people are running into snags is because encounter calculation is incredibly hard to do in a non-calibrated game. 4e did it pretty well because it calibrated the PCs and calibrated the monsters and then it worked well when the monsters were about the same level as the adventurers. And that's it. After that, the encounter calculator works rather well if you don't forget to factor in things like feats/multiclass, magic items, high stats, synergies (and there are lots of them between parties, with foes, with environment,...), etc.But it's also why the "adventuring day" is more about medium to hard encounters as a suggestion, because if one of these go badly, it won't go TOO badly. The idea is to have multiple encounters depriving the party of resources so that they can decide to stop when it gets too much. If you are pushing the envelope with only hard to deadly encounters, you are running the risk that an unseen synergy or stroke of bad luck pushes you into a TPK.5e has many qualities for the type of games my friends and I are running, but people should realise that it is far less suited to Combat as Sport and tactical challenges, because it's more fuzzy and open-ended, and all computations of power are very imprecise on a system that is not calibrated.</blockquote>

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