NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MonkeezOnFire" data-source="post: 6469337" data-attributes="member: 6784845">While 5th edition is much less dependent on tactical decisions than 4th, but there are still tactical decisions to be made. I sometimes find myself struggling as a DM whether to have the monsters "play to win" or if I should ease up during tense situations. For instance this weekend my roommate and I wanted to get a taste of how high level would work so he made up 4 level 15 PCs and I ran an encounter for him to fight an adult blue dragon (CR 16, classified as a hard encounter by the DMG). His party consisted of the 4 classics: a fighter, a wizard, a cleric and a rogue. On the first turn I had the dragon breathe lightning on the wizard and fighter, dealing considerable damage to both (and making the wizard lose concentration on his fly spell causing the fighter to fall out of the sky. It was pretty awesome). On the dragon's next turn I then had a decision to make. I could focus all the dragon's melee attacks on one character, spread them around, or even just have the dragon keep to the air and wait for lightning breathe to return. My gamer mind was telling my to go for the wizard since the caster can be dangerous if left unattended and he was probably close to going down. However, I had a gut feeling that playing the monster to win was a jerk, move so I decided to land near the cleric and fighter and lay some hurt onto them. Maybe it was that since my roommate was playing 4 completely new characters and that he didn't have the time to fully digest their options, if he couldn't play to his full potential then I shouldn't either. This little experiment showed me that perhaps how you run a monster is more important to determine difficulty than CR. In a typical game however, I'll try to do what makes sense for the monster. Goblins attack whatever is closest in a bloodthirsty frenzy. Beasts will attack whats closest or turn to charge when something really hurts them. Most times I don't mind having my monsters take attacks of opportunity if I think they would want to be someplace else. TLDR: How smart are your monsters in combat?</blockquote>

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