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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 6787635" data-attributes="member: 22779">[MENTION=44640]bill[/MENTION]91 - the reason I tend to look at the math and the odds before accepting someone's claims is pretty simple.  If someone claimed that they got a royal flush every time they played poker with their friends, would you simply accept that?  Or would you question it?  After all, the odds of a royal flush are extremely small, and someone getting one every time they play is very anomalous.  So, you question, and it turns out that when they play poker, they play with several wild cards - 2's, 3's and 4's are all wild.  So, their experience is true, but, until you get that extra bit of information, it remains an anomaly.Let's take [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]'s claims about running combats that are extremely difficult and use up the entire party's resources.  Now, unless the entire party is Short Rest recharge (like fighters or warlocks), that's not an easy thing to do.  It's hard to blow through that many resources in a single encounter.  Let's do some back of the envelope calculations:1.  Take a 10th level party of 5 PC's.  Fairly standard party, 2 fighter (types), a rogue, cleric and wizard.  Now, that party, generally, should have about 350 HP total.  Give or take.  Make that 500 with healing.  2.  In order to blow through the cleric and the wizard's resources, we need about 10 rounds of combat.  You simply can't do it in a shorter space, the group doesn't have enough actions to use up their spell list. A 5 round combat can't use up this party's resources.  3.  If the combat lasts for 10 rounds, the bad guys cannot do more than about 50 points of damage per round.  Any more and they kill all the PC's.4.  A 10th level party should be dealing about 100 points of damage per round - between AoE spells, and whatnot, that's pretty reasonable.  Therefore, we need about 1000 HP worth of baddies.  Any less and the combat is over too soon and the party can't expend it's resources.  Let's see, trolls have 84 HP, so that gives us 12 trolls.  This is a Deadly level encounter.Now, let's work it out shall we?12 trolls get 36 attacks per round.  Each attack does either 7 or 11 points of damage.  The trolls can only hit 7 times, maximum, per round.  Any more than that, and they kill the PC's.  So, the trolls can't hit more than 20% of the time.  But, with bounded accuracy and a +7 attack bonus, trolls should be hitting considerably higher than 20%.  It should be closer to 40%.  Why are the trolls only hitting half as often as expected?  This is anomaly number 1.OTOH, the party is attacking 12 trolls.  The wizard isn't holding back, so, it's fireballs for everyone.  Hit 4 trolls with a fireball and you're good for about 80 points of damage, quite easily.  Why are the other 4 PC's only doing 20 points of damage per round? What's wrong with these PC's that their damage output is so low?  Anomaly number 2.As a result, I'm left with more questions than answers.  How do you design encounters meant to blow through the party's entire load of resources that A.  Last long enough to actually ALLOW the party to do this and B.  Do so without killing the PC's?This is an encounter Challenge Rating of 24.  The guidelines in the DMG tell me that I should be mopping the floor with the PC's in this encounter.  This should be a TPK, almost guaranteed.  Yet, this is the bare minimum that [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] needs to get the results he claims he is getting.  Any fewer monsters (and consequently fewer HP) and the encounter is too short to blow through the party's resources.  Any more monsters and they need to hit even less often than the half chances they are already hitting.When someone claims that the DMG is flat out wrong, and their experiences are contrary to the guidelines provided AND their experiences are so anomalous, why should I take them at face value.  I have a sneaking suspicion that two things are true - [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] fudges considerably more than the 2-4 times per campaign and there are some seriously strange encounter setups going on.  I talked to another poster recently whose campaign regularly featured encounters starting at ranges of hundreds of feet.  That would certainly give a different result than expected.  Is suspect that there is something similar going on here.  That if we were to drill down a bit further and gain a better insight into what [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] is doing at his table, we'd see why he (sorry, I did presume he, my appologies if I'm wrong) is getting results that are so far away from the results that the DMG states we should be seeing.</blockquote>

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