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Message: <blockquote data-quote="OB1" data-source="post: 7119985" data-attributes="member: 6796241">[MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] - If you stop thinking of these design decisions as problems, and instead focus on using them as tools, you can start to use them to accomplish what you want.I'm not sure it takes any more work, just a different approach and way to think about things.  I know I've mentioned this before, but I basically run my games in two modes.  Exploration Phase - Heavy on Social and Exploration pillars, light on combat.  Purpose is for PCs to decide on what mission to take on next and develop a plan on how to attack it.  Combat, when it happens, tends to be on the easier side, because resource attrition is not a designed part of this phase.  What combat does typically do is provide the players insights into the types of threats they may be facing on the mission they are exploring while the Social and Exploration pillars provide ways to mitigate challenges or encounters they may face in the mission phase.Mission Phase - Heavy on combat, light on Social and Exploration.  In this phase the players have decided to "make their move" on their current objective, and are opposed by environment, monsters and enemies.  The path to their objective consists of encounters that total more than the recommended daily XP budget, possibly by a substantial margin depending on the specific mission.  Reaching their goal requires a combination of average luck and the ability to avoid some encounters along the way.  A secondary objective (such as raiding a treasure room guarded by a deadly foe) may have to be abandoned depending on how well they have fared in earlier encounters.  Short rests tend to lead to escalating complications (and here I found newfound and welcome advice from Angry) while long rests will almost always cause either immediate failure of the objective or make the objective unobtainable for the present time.Of course, I'll also throw in an unexpected Mission Phase in the middle of exploration just to shake things up.  The party comes across something that needs to be done now and can either choose to take it or not.  As for published adventures, they aren't designed to kill PCs, they are designed to create a fun and memorable story, exactly what WOTC says the game is supposed to do.  If you want challenge here, try creating a party using roll 3d6 in order as a way to provide a unique challenge.</blockquote>

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