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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Justice and Rule" data-source="post: 8870008" data-attributes="member: 6778210">Or attack, attack, move (typically a step back for me, if possible).I think the biggest thing about getting the most out of your enemies is to know what they are good at beforehand. Like, the difference between Brutes and Warriors beyond some stats is largely their loadout, which means if you know Brutes have a weapon that has the Disarm trait you can use their numbers to try that with their first attack using their attack bonus instead of Athletics and potentially mess with a PC (particularly Fighters, where the -2 to attack until the start of their turn means their Attack of Opportunity isn't as powerful). Warriors have forceful-sweep weapons, so they are incentivized to make multiple attacks at different targets. You don't always have to follow these rules, but it does give you ideas, and helps you think when you create your own.Makes me kind of want to do a "What does your weapon say about you" post. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f606.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":LOL:" title="Laugh    :LOL:"  data-smilie="17"data-shortname=":LOL:" />As to the Encounter thing with APs... I just don't run them, so it's hard for me to comment. I do wonder if part of it is that players will often find themselves things to do socially outside of the adventure: you give players a town and they will find things to do in it. Thus you put in a bunch of combat encounters because the players are less likely to go running into those. Not great reasoning, but maybe? I dunno, it's probably that people just sort of expect a lot of combat from adventures and those sorts of players aren't the ones who go around talking on message boards like we do.I think that's also part of why people aren't getting what they want out of "Exploration Mode": you gotta give them something to explore. I feel like most adventures and GMs feel like they have to put combat encounters in almost every room, which makes using such things kind of meaningless; if you keep running into people, there isn't really much to do. For me, I run dungeons that often are large and don't have many denizens; I kind of play "Dungeon as Fantasy Archeology", where there's reason to search, research, scout, set-up camp, etc. I had one where the PCs stumbled into an old Gnomish outpost, so they took on individual tasks and setup a base camp. There was small Kobold village hidden away in a crack in the wall, and rather than confront the PCs they started taking stuff from their camp as they went exploring. Finally got a few of them to stay behind to figure out who the hell was taking all their stuff. But that's the sort of thing that the exploration system would be good for, though I don't think people use it at all for that sort of thing. Same for a hexploration game, but I feel like for the most part people want to get to where they are going without too much interruption. If you aren't making the journey to a place part of the challenge, then exploration systems don't mean all that much, do they?</blockquote>

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