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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mengu" data-source="post: 5391109" data-attributes="member: 65726">I realize I'm echoing some of what's already been said.The DM has a pretty big burden in 4e. A fight that's easy to a group of veteran tacticians can be lethal to an inexperienced group who care more about reacting to a situation, holding actions, and trying random things to see what happens.The published adventures straddle the line between the two. It's assumed to be the DM's job to make adjustments as needed for the group.What's worse since the DM is likely not the author for a published adventure, he may not be able to portray what's expected of the PC's and players can get wrong impressions about a situation. The PC's may think they are in a fun bar brawl, when the author may have intended for a band of assassins to try and kill the PC's and throw the blame on someone else. If the PC's fail to understand the gravity of the situation and are swinging chairs as improvised weapons using a tertiary stat to make basic attacks, the enemy alpha strike will leave them unable to retaliate before they know what hit them.The way to keep the game going against inexperienced or casual groups, is to be casual as DM. Have enemies attack bystanders. Have them ready actions to protect a leader type. Have one of them run past some PC's to close and block a door to trap them in, wasting some actions while drawing opportunity attacks. Whatever team PC seems to be "doing wrong", team monster can "do it wrong" also.Ultimately it takes some experience for DM to figure out what kind of balance is needed. In the group I DM for, initially I had to water the difficulty down a bit. Now I find that things work quite well just out of the box without tweaking the difficulty up or down too much. In one of the groups I play in, the DM pushes the difficulty to what feels to me like through the roof. In various LFR games, we seem to do fine playing with one less PC than intended.Best advice I can give is to take stock of the situation when things go bad, and take the adventure somewhere else (aka, cheat!). Maybe the city guard shows up just in time. Maybe an overwhelming number of enemy recruits show up, so the PC's either have to surrender, or the enemy feels safe with their numbers to knock the PC's unconscious and capture them alive for an agenda. Or have the enemies hear a rumbling from the woods, and flee. The PC's have the choice of waiting to see what the rumbling is, or flee themselves. Either way, you play it like that was your intention all along, having kept a secret round count, and no one will be the wiser. Even better if you had the forethought to drop in hints about a ghost haunting the woods.For the moment, my advice would be to run the encounters as though there was one less PC. That should tone down the intensity a bit, let the players learn how their characters work best, if they show interest in the build and action optimization aspect of the game. If not, you can run an easy mode game for an entire campaign and still have fun. There isn't a "wrong" way to play the game, so long as everyone is enjoying it.</blockquote>

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