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<blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 8782904" data-attributes="member: 6877472">I'm not entirely certain what causes the change in playstyles.&nbsp; What I think is occurring (and it's just a guess) is that some DM's feel that if a fight ends too quickly, it wasn't &quot;challenging enough&quot;.&nbsp; So if you let the melee guys dish out extra damage, killing monsters faster, then you run out of monsters more quickly.On the flipside, a DM who takes the long view and remembers they have more encounters that day, will happily sacrifice their pawns to give some pressure to ranged characters and casters.The number of encounters per adventuring day probably factors into this as well- I've yet to play a 5e game with more than 3-4 encounters per diem.&nbsp; In AL, this is the standard, after all, and even in a home game, I've noticed 1 session is roughly 1 adventuring day, even though there's no real reason for this to be the case, outside of maybe not wanting to track resource expenditures from session to session?Just theorizing.&nbsp; When I run, intelligent foes will make threat assessments and move accordingly, but generally, moving away to ignore someone waving a sword in your face is something I think is a bad move, so enemies tend only to do that if the person they are in battle with has too high AC or too little damage.I had a guy who played a Cleric &quot;tank&quot; in an AL game once.&nbsp; He used a shield and his tactic was to cast Shield of Faith, run up to the monsters, and take the Dodge action.He was incredibly annoyed when I had a monster just walk away from him, saying that wasn't &quot;fair&quot;.&quot;Look, unless you have some ability to keep the guy around, he's not exactly terrified of someone who isn't attacking, is impossible to hit, and is going to do, what, d8+3 with his little hammer, when there's a guy throwing fireballs around.&quot;He apparently went and complained to all the other AL DM's about me, and when it got back to me, I had a good laugh about it.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="James Gasik, post: 8782904, member: 6877472"] I'm not entirely certain what causes the change in playstyles. What I think is occurring (and it's just a guess) is that some DM's feel that if a fight ends too quickly, it wasn't "challenging enough". So if you let the melee guys dish out extra damage, killing monsters faster, then you run out of monsters more quickly. On the flipside, a DM who takes the long view and remembers they have more encounters that day, will happily sacrifice their pawns to give some pressure to ranged characters and casters. The number of encounters per adventuring day probably factors into this as well- I've yet to play a 5e game with more than 3-4 encounters per diem. In AL, this is the standard, after all, and even in a home game, I've noticed 1 session is roughly 1 adventuring day, even though there's no real reason for this to be the case, outside of maybe not wanting to track resource expenditures from session to session? Just theorizing. When I run, intelligent foes will make threat assessments and move accordingly, but generally, moving away to ignore someone waving a sword in your face is something I think is a bad move, so enemies tend only to do that if the person they are in battle with has too high AC or too little damage. I had a guy who played a Cleric "tank" in an AL game once. He used a shield and his tactic was to cast Shield of Faith, run up to the monsters, and take the Dodge action. He was incredibly annoyed when I had a monster just walk away from him, saying that wasn't "fair". "Look, unless you have some ability to keep the guy around, he's not exactly terrified of someone who isn't attacking, is impossible to hit, and is going to do, what, d8+3 with his little hammer, when there's a guy throwing fireballs around." He apparently went and complained to all the other AL DM's about me, and when it got back to me, I had a good laugh about it. [/QUOTE]

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