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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6861364" data-attributes="member: 6787650">My players don't really optimize their builds or their tactics, but I do favor Combat As War style play and emphasize player agency, so they usually have some kind of choice whether or not to engage vs. run away, and sometimes they have the opportunity to do stuff like smear captured drow sleep poison on their weapons, etc. Overall I'll call it a wash and say I expect their performance is about average, outside of their occasional bursts of brilliant creativity like using Stunning Strike + a Bag of Devouring to stun high-level monsters and stuff their appendages in the bag until the monsters get eaten. With that in mind:I find that players have absolutely no problems at all with a Deadly fight, and Triple or Quadruple Deadly is about the right difficulty range if I want the fight to be a coin toss. There have been cases where they won fights at 10x difficulty or more, but those generally involved me emphasizing player agency and allowing them to set some kind of ambush. (E.g. around 11th level they rammed and boarded a neogi ship full of umber hulks, but instead of throwing all 22 Umber Hulks + 1 8th level neogi wizard + assorted regular neogi at them at once, I declared that the umber hulks were distributed over the ship and that only 1d4 would emerge onto deck and join the fight each round. I thought they were going to die for sure anyway, but the players still managed to "win", in the sense of driving off the umber hulks and getting the neogi to pay ransom instead of detonating the ship's suicide device.)I remember one time in particular, after two or three Deadly fights with vampires, the players proceeded to a Triple-Deadly fight with vampires and zombies. The Triple Deadly fight in and of itself was 130% of the adventuring day XP budget when I calculated it afterwards, and the players won it partly through cleverness (the hobgoblin vampires were firing arrows out through the windows of a mansion at the PCs in the sunlight, while the zombies fought them outside; the PCs grappled some of the vampires and dragged them out into the sunlight, just as I had planned) and partly through brute force and character abilities (cleric blew 20 zombies away with Channel Divinity; it took him a couple rounds of Dodging to get them all clumped up around him nicely first, then he let them have it).Anyway, I'd suggest still sticking mostly to the adventuring day XP guidelines, but use fewer, harder encounters. If you later on decide to abandon the adventuring day guidelines completely you'll at least have a feel for how things work.One of the big surprises of 5E for me is how incredibly resilient 5E characters are. You may think they're almost depleted but if you actually game it all the way out to TPK it turns out they were only about 50% down. They can handle way more than you think they can.One more note: none of the above applies if the DM is deliberately trying to game the system. You can TPK parties with Easy fights if you try hard enough (e.g. drow with sleep poison targeting PCs with weak Con saves). My observations above apply to a DM who roleplays the world without metagaming or tailoring challenges to PC weaknesses.</blockquote>

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