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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6005390" data-attributes="member: 4937">No, you just have to set up your world to be non-linear and accept that not having every threat be either legitimate or surmountable is a feature rather than a bug.Insignificant threats are nice at the very least because they allow players to feel like they are in fact progressing in power.  When a player gets to revisit monsters a few levels later, and they dispatch them without any trouble at all it feels empowering.  You want players to be able to savor the occasional easy victory where they really get to just kick butt and chew the bubblegum.  Having a world where the challenges are more evenly dispersed also helps make the world feel more real.  Insurmountable threats are nice because occasionally you want players to experience the sheer terror of being in over their heads and knowing it.  That moment when you wake Cthulhu and know you have no other choice but run for the hills before he really takes notice of you is important.  And likewise, being able to come back eventually and punch out Cthulhu is also fun.In my current campaign, I put all the threats on the map prior to starting the game.  In the country there is everything from rats in the sewers to lurking low epic monstrousities.  The main difference is the rats are placed in places ordinary people might occasionally encounter them, whereas the lurking low epic disasters are placed in places you really have to work to find and get into.  It is quite possible to explore and discover things right out of your depth.  In fact, the PC's at 5th level just finished a foray into a dungeon where some areas - areas that they didn't find or enter - have CR 20+ challenges.  (In fact, they just finished exploring the foyer area of what is in my game, Acererak the Enternal's Grandfather.)  Some areas that they did enter had CR's between 9 and 12, and they really had no choice but flee and hope what was there couldn't really or didn't want to chase them.  Exploring the greater catacombs was an excercise intended to teach the players to stay focused on the mission at hand and not just go eagerly opening up random tombs the way a kid opens up presents.  So long as the DM is careful not to have these threats not easily awakened and not necessarily willing to actively chase the players around, there is nothing wrong with that.  And while there is a gamist explanation for not having low epic threats active at low levels, there is a strong simulationist explanation as well - if those threats were active then chances are they would have been already active, in which case the locality and its recent history would have been very very different.  This wouldn't be a populated center of civilization.  You don't just stumble accidently in to danger that is of much much higher CR than the average NPC is capable of handling, because an exclusion zone quickly develops around it with various warning signs to the effect of, "Beware the life destroying monstrousity."  And, in the event say an great wrym dragon attacks a city you live in while you are merely 1st level, chances are the dragon doesn't consider you any more special than an ant.  It's entirely reasonable that the dragon is busy gobbling up the maidens at the temple of the vestal virgin or the horses at the duke's stables and casually incinerating the few knights giving it trouble.  Why would it be chasing down random mercenaries of no special reputation?</blockquote>

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