NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4957816" data-attributes="member: 82106">Interesting. I'd have to say that its pretty tough to gauge monster threat level overall though in a specific situation. There are those monsters like the Wraith and Needlefang Drake Swarm that are just plain out of line for sure. Others its much harder to say. For example I had a Death Jump Spider encounter a good while back that just turned quite nasty. 3 of them had a 4th level party for lunch. I think it was a combination of slightly high die rolls on my part coupled with a bit of a tactical mistake the party made at the start of the fight and all of a sudden they became quite lethal. Nobody died but only because the terrain made it pretty easy for them to withdraw quickly. The same party came back the next day and owned the exact same encounter with no problem. It may look by strict numbers like the monster is going to have to get quite lucky to swing to the high side of its potential, but it seems to me that swingy monsters in practice are more threatening than the math would strictly suggest.I think another factor overall in encounter design is that you find a lot more swinginess when using mostly a bunch of the same monster, at least at lower levels where resistance potions and such aren't much of a factor. Throwing a single wraith in with some other types of undead, not too much of a problem. Throw in 3 wraiths and it becomes murderous really fast.It seems like some of the very low damage monsters are analogous in the other direction. A single low damage high defense monster combined with the right terrain and some backup from a controller or artillery is not bad at all usually. Several of them together on the other hand is just a real drag. The SS could be interesting as a way to flag things not to overuse or that need a bit of extra help from the encounter design to be interesting. That and some of the low offense monsters are good candidates for customizing since you can throw in a couple of variant powers and all of a sudden they perk up without having to worry too much about turning them into something way too scary. It'll be interesting to look at.</blockquote>

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