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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 7168766" data-attributes="member: 6785785">Well, this is mostly because combat in general is the most time consuming part of the game. There are sessions where combat makes up a much lower percentage of the time, but overall I think it balances out to about 65%.I'd like it if it took a little less time, as much as we enjoy combat.The importance is where mine is lower. I like a variety of elements to contribute to PC success, so i try to keep it somewhat even, and give them alternative approaches to success. I actually prefer a variety of encounters. I don't tend to think in the "level appropriate" mindset, which is why I ditched the XP budget and so forth. I design encounters by feel and what makes sense for the story. This is not to say that I don't keep party strength and encounter difficulty in mind, it's just not my primary concern. I find a variety of encounter types, easy to very difficult, helps to make combat a bit more surprising. Some fights should be easy. Some should be impossible. However, in those cases I make sure to provide other paths to success. This is more on my own encounters and content rather than a published module like Curse of Strahd. With those, I used what was in the book as a base and made a few modifications based on the party's strength. Most of this consisted of adding Strahd's "brides" to some encounters, who were tougher than vamp spawn but not quite true vampires. That kind of thing.</blockquote>

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