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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kalendraf" data-source="post: 909894" data-attributes="member: 3433">I thought I was pretty good at doing this.  I've been DM'ing for almost 20 years now, and have a couple years of d20 under my belt.  Before the last two sessions, the deathrate had been very low as well, as I'd improved my skill in balancing the encounters.  But the two most recent party deaths (1 in each of the last 2 play sessions) have made me a bit more leary.The party is roughly 11th level, with both a Cleric and Paladin.  I figured that a group of 8 shadows (CR3, leading to an EL9 encounter) would be a fairly easy one for them to handle.  In other recent adventures, they've encounter multiple non-corporeal undead, but have handled them so easily that I was beginning to doubt they were even worth the exp I was handing out.  But this time was way different.  The monsters hid well and surprised the party.  Several of them flanked the cleric who was dropped to well below 0-strength in a single surprise attack.  This is the same cleric who was wearing a greater cloak of displacement.  Somehow he managed to blow all but one of his deflection rolls.  I rolled well for the monsters hide and initiative, but rolled merely average attacks and strength drains, so there was nothing really out of the ordinary here for the monsters.  I'm wondering how many other DM's have managed to slay a 10th level cleric with shadows?The other encounter that lead to a character death was against 3 Large Ice Stalkers (CR6, from Hell in Freeport adventure).  Again, this is just an EL9 encounter which should be pretty simple for the party.  Instead, it killed a character and left several others badly wounded.  I do question whether these creatures are actually just a CR6.  In fact, I even posted that same question on the Green Ronin board after that night's adventure.  The party has now faced them a few times and in each case the stalkers did a bunch of extra damage via flanking/sneak attack, so I am beginning to think the CR6 is too low for these creatures.  If so, it would make this encounter with 3 of them higher than an EL9 and that could explain that resulting character death a bit better.</blockquote>

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