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Message: <blockquote data-quote="der_kluge" data-source="post: 1597101" data-attributes="member: 945">Maybe it's because I'm getting over stomach flu/food poisoning, or something, but the game I ran last night seemed like a contest of me (DM) vs. my players.They are 13th level, and very tough.  To avoid a discussion of tactics, and rules, I'll avoid posting what they are, or what they are comprised of, but suffice it to say, I've got a party of characters that I have a really difficult time making a dent in.Last night, they found 5 blue slaad, 4 reds, and two greens.  And, I've bumped up the stats on all these creatures.  My green slaad are CR 18 creatures, with wizard levels.  While I managed to scare a few PCs into the "red zone" with some fireballs and chaos hammers, the battle was won without too much difficulty on their part.I just feel like they've been walking through most of these encounters without too much difficulty, or if they do have problems, I just get the ol' "let's throw up a rope trick and sleep it off" solution, which usually happens.I could always wake them up unexpectedly surrounded by vicious slaad, but I'm sure my players would accuse me of meta-gaming if I did that.  I can hear it now, "Oh, so the slaad just happened to be walking by this corridor with see invisibility up, yea.. that makes sense..."I guess I'm struggling with high level play to a degree, and I want to try to avoid making insane encounters to scare them to death, but the fact remains that I haven't had one really, really good encounter that left the party without resources, without resources, battling tooth and nail to the bitter last, with any kind of suspense about it.  I've been struggling to find that kind of supreme balance to where the players all stand on their feets watching every dice roll to make sure no one fails a save, or that the monster misses because of a blink spell, or something so that they just barely eek out a survival.  These kinds of things used to happen at 3rd level, but they seem nigh impossible at 13th.Anyone have any tips on how I can pull off that kind of battle without absorbing the entire evening into senseless combat?  I mean, I know I could do this with 20 slaad, but I shudder to think of how long that battle would last.</blockquote>

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