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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tormyr" data-source="post: 6436372" data-attributes="member: 6776887">I had heard of how deadly Age of Worms was, but the players were cruising through during the play test rules. Even when I started getting the monsters in Basic and the MM, things did not get too much harder.  Then the party lost the cleric to real life, and the updated encounter building guidelines came out.  Ouch. 2 sessions ago, the 6 member party was mired in a sea of 7 mimics, which they handled after a drawn out fight. Last week they fought 3 invisible stalkers while walking across rotting beams above a stagnant pool with sharp pokey things sticking out. 2 went unconscious (1 twice), another fell in the water, and without the Dragonborn Sorcerer firing every lightning bolt he had, they would not have survived.So yeah. Now that the rules of 5e are getting finalized, watch out on the lethality of the encounters. NPC spell casters especially. If you use a spell caster of the same CR, they are much scarier in 5e. In 3.5 they had a spell caster level that matched their CR. So they had the same level of spells as the party.  In 5e, the spell casters have a level 50% above their CR.  So an NPC could have spell levels above what the party has available. Even back when the characters were level 3, a wizard NPC had a couple castings of fireball available. I had to pull my punches on that one.</blockquote>