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<blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6981192" data-attributes="member: 6787650">If you like, you can think of it the other way around: 4 level N PCs vs. 4 CR N monsters is a &quot;fair fight,&quot; in the sense that it's hard to predict who's going to win if they just hammer at each other in a straightforward fashion. (It's Triple- or Quadruple-Deadly, and my experience is that it's about a 50/50 for either side winning; if the players are losing they will often pull out one of their trump cards like a Horn of Valhalla, so they don't necessarily TPK even then. And of course players can do much better than 50/50 if they fight smart, since the monsters don't get to think in bullet time like players do--my monsters usually have one or two go-to strategies that they will execute, but I won't let them adapt on the fly in a fight that is over in seconds unless they are super-geniuses like Illithids or something.)If you do the math on 5E's suggested difficulties, Medium fights are the equivalent of having one or two PCs fight four PCs--call it 1.5 PCs. Plug that into Lanchester's Square Law and you see that the four-person party is about seven times as strong as the 1.5-person party: 4^2/1.5^2 = 7.11. That's because the four-person party has almost three times the HP and almost three times the damage output of the smaller party.Medium fights are like a grown man beating up on a kindergartener.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="FormerlyHemlock, post: 6981192, member: 6787650"] If you like, you can think of it the other way around: 4 level N PCs vs. 4 CR N monsters is a "fair fight," in the sense that it's hard to predict who's going to win if they just hammer at each other in a straightforward fashion. (It's Triple- or Quadruple-Deadly, and my experience is that it's about a 50/50 for either side winning; if the players are losing they will often pull out one of their trump cards like a Horn of Valhalla, so they don't necessarily TPK even then. And of course players can do much better than 50/50 if they fight smart, since the monsters don't get to think in bullet time like players do--my monsters usually have one or two go-to strategies that they will execute, but I won't let them adapt on the fly in a fight that is over in seconds unless they are super-geniuses like Illithids or something.) If you do the math on 5E's suggested difficulties, Medium fights are the equivalent of having one or two PCs fight four PCs--call it 1.5 PCs. Plug that into Lanchester's Square Law and you see that the four-person party is about seven times as strong as the 1.5-person party: 4^2/1.5^2 = 7.11. That's because the four-person party has almost three times the HP and almost three times the damage output of the smaller party. Medium fights are like a grown man beating up on a kindergartener. [/QUOTE]

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