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<blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 9561314" data-attributes="member: 143">I've found WotC's published 5e adventures to be fairly difficult, and deadly in some cases (Icespire Peak, I'm looking at you). For my homebrew campaigns, I usually have five or six players who are good optimizers, so I'm used to having to beef things up well past the guidelines in the books. I recently finished up a campaign where the group ended at 17th level, and I don't think I used a single &quot;stock&quot; MM creature over the last 20 sessions, except for the occasional random encounter. In another game I inserted the stone giants' canyon from Storm King's Thunder into an existing storyline. The group was again 6 PCs that were a few levels higher than the recommended level, so I ended up doubling the number of giants in all of the encounters, and turning the human barbarians into bugbears. It turned out to be a fairly challenging adventure.I guess I just assumed that most DMs tweak the difficulty of their encounters based on what their players can do, but I can understand why beginning DMs might have more difficulty if they only stick to what's in the published material. This was one of the things I liked about the 2024 DMG, which had more guidance in this area, as well as more explicit &quot;permission&quot; for DMs to change things as needed to make a fun and challenging game.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Lazybones, post: 9561314, member: 143"] I've found WotC's published 5e adventures to be fairly difficult, and deadly in some cases ([I]Icespire Peak,[/I] I'm looking at you). For my homebrew campaigns, I usually have five or six players who are good optimizers, so I'm used to having to beef things up well past the guidelines in the books. I recently finished up a campaign where the group ended at 17th level, and I don't think I used a single "stock" MM creature over the last 20 sessions, except for the occasional random encounter. In another game I inserted the stone giants' canyon from [I]Storm King's Thunder[/I] into an existing storyline. The group was again 6 PCs that were a few levels higher than the recommended level, so I ended up doubling the number of giants in all of the encounters, and turning the human barbarians into bugbears. It turned out to be a fairly challenging adventure. I guess I just assumed that most DMs tweak the difficulty of their encounters based on what their players can do, but I can understand why beginning DMs might have more difficulty if they only stick to what's in the published material. This was one of the things I liked about the 2024 DMG, which had more guidance in this area, as well as more explicit "permission" for DMs to change things as needed to make a fun and challenging game. [/QUOTE]

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