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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 7171344" data-attributes="member: 6785785">I don't think you need to hand wave an easy encounter. You can, from time to time, especially if it's the equivalent of the entire party knocking out one inept guard or something like that. But most fights that are trivial don't take long, and you can breeze through them. Again, I think doing this helps prevents players from becoming too accustomed to a specific approach. Take one encounter that seems like it will be a breeze, and then in the middle of it, introduce some element that totally changes the difficulty (reinforcements, some crazy terrain element, etc.) and your players will remember that, and in the future will be less likely to assume victory. And with a overly difficult encounter, you need not TPK the characters. You have to give them alternatives to the fight, but if they go ahead and attack, you can always leave an out of some sort....they can escape, or their foes could underestimate them or what have you. My point about these kinds of encounters is not necessarily about the outcome of the specific encounter so much as how it affects how the players view encounters in an ongoing way. Sure, all of that is huge. In a way, 5E benefits by being the most recent, with the most proliferation of social media to help it spread. But even just a few years ago, if you'd told me that people would watch other people play D&D online, I'd have said you were nuts. The streaming shows are brinigng a whole new element to the equation.....D&D as viewing entertainment where the audience is not taking part. Some of this certainly started with 4E and Pathfinder, but it has exploded lately. Probably a bit of a chicken/egg thing, but there it is. Other than observing the general staying power this edition seems to have so far, there's no real way to say if it's retaining people beyond the anecdotal. Sales seem to hold up, each release that they put out seems to garner lots of attention.  Sure, but I think such a prognosis would be too early for this particular edition. Would you agree with that, or do you think we've started to see the beginning of the end? True, I suppose. But like I said, in retrospect, I wish I hadn't sunk the amount of money into the edition that I did. This kind of topic comes up from time to time when I discuss comics with people. You'll have someone who is a fan of Spider-Man, let's say, and he always buys Spider-Man even when he thinks it is terrible. I always say you shouldn't continue to pay for a product that you don't like....doing so does more to make sure that the product remains the same than it does to make it improve. True. Although, you'd have to be pretty awful to make an organized play session so bad that other players are turned off the hobby. I'm sure there are such players out there, but I would hope most people wouldn't blame the game in that case. Yeah, I wouldn't say never, but at this point, that's my feeling about it. This edition has reminded me that I don't need to buy every book that comes out in order to play and enjoy the game (mostly by not producing a whole lot of books, but also in the design approach, etc.).Sure, of course. I personally would prefer not to play more than one edition....I still mix up some rules in my head from prior editions, and there are certain improvements or changes in the game that I'd not want to go without.</blockquote>

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