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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue" data-source="post: 9820334" data-attributes="member: 20564">I gave another answer that I don';t think would be all that useful about RPGs solving it because the goal of their combat scenes not being a mini wargame.  But I have another answer that I think may be more useful.It's got a couple of parts, but they all go together.1. Don't balance around attrition.  D&D, every edition, has done this.  5e especially requires 4+ (2014!DMG recommeendation of 6-7) encounters per adventuring day.  With that you can make them challenging, but you break the balance between the at-will classes and the long-rest-recovery classes like full casters.  It's where the 15 (or 5) minute adventuring day comes from, and it is entirely true.But you cannot plan a series of encounters for attrition, and also make each of them nailbiters, because when PCs have full HPs and spells it's hard to get it interesting with the default kill-or-be-killed stakes.  Now, if there are other combat goals that can make it better, but few DMs I know do lots of different combat goals every single adventuring day.Basically, attrition wears them down, making the last battles fun and tough, but it is hard to make those early encounters also in that point.2. Swinginess is an issue.  Lots of systems have a swingy mechanic, but sneakily tone it down because a combat is made up of lots of rolls so statistically it balances out.  However, when you get to the point where there's a single encounter-defining roll, other rolls aren't going to offset it.  An example could be a large battlefield control spell that ends up freezing the whole party -- or all of the remaining foes.  Either way, the encounter just went to either easy or deadly because of the swinginess.3. Allow retreating mechanically.  D&D 5e, for example, it is notoriously hard to pull off an effective, full party retreat from an encounter the party is losing (until high levels where "A wizard did it" makes that it can be solved via magic.)  This means that if an encounter is too much, either because of design or bad luck with swinginess, the party can't change the goal to survival, and instead it becomes deadly.  13th Age had a simple, rather gamist, mechanic for this: the party could always accept a campaign loss (something bad happens big picture) to successfully retreat, including with the unconcious or the dead.  Now that's not to everyone's taste, but it made 'deadly' a whole lot more campaign friendly while also giving excellent opportunities for recurring baddies the party loves to hate.4. Blurring the borders between challenging and deadly.  Say a combat kills a PC, that's deadly, right?  In a game like D&D 5e, after 5th level as long as the one who went down isn't the (only) PC with Revive, it's not deadly.  As dead isn't a condition that has more effect on that character than being knocked out ofr the rest of the combat would have been.  (It does have an affect on another character, in terms of a spell slot and component cost.  Still less then the death of a PC.)Basically, an RPG needs to expand the 'challenging' band of encounters, especially turning some 'deadly' back into challenging, make sure that attrition isn't part of the mechanics so a first combat can be as interesting as a sixth, cut down on swinginess for save-or-suck type of things (which need not be saves) for both PCs and (major) foes, and mechanically make retreat viable.</blockquote>

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