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="DND_Reborn" data-source="post: 7854645" data-attributes="member: 6987520">Pacing is a huge issue in 5E towards balance. The rest frequency is a major factor. If you go into most encounters after a long rest, or even a short one, it is going to be easier of course.I think, like I would imagine many tables play, for overland travel (i.e. random encounters) we often fight them following a long rest (8-hours), and know we are likely to have only one more maybe that day. This means we can use our most powerful features very freely and dominate many encounters. It is a very rare occurrence for us to have 3 random encounters between long rests, and if a battle is hard, we can nearly always at least get in a short rest before the next encounter.This is very different from the dungeon crawl/ infiltration session, where we know we are likely to have many encounters before we get any rest at all. We've played entire sessions (ours are long, 10-12 hours) and had several battles without even a short rest!As such, our DM gears encounters to be easy, moderate, hard, or deadly in such a way as to make the game challenging at times, easy at times, etc. just as life is. At level 11, we fight creatures we easily defeat in a few rounds, and then later on we might encounter a solo creature powerful enough we know we still have to run away!Like others, I do miss save or die effects, and at lower levels since hp are exhausted quickly, the danger of low-level survival. However, even at higher levels I find it interesting how a character with 100 hp and is down to 25 or so, starts to panic. The player knows the threat is sufficient they another hit or two and they might go down. The other characters know they might have to act quickly to help their friend, who is now dodging more and on the defensive.The only thing that makes 5E easier, IMO, is Revivify. Very rarely can a lower level game not get to a character before the 10 rounds is up. We houseruled it so that the dead character gets one additional death save to attempt to save themselves. If they fail the roll, the spell fails. If they make the roll, they stabilize. It is our version of the old resurrection survival check. Of course, we also modify death saves by CON bonus.</blockquote>

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