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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 7237189" data-attributes="member: 7006">I absolutely agree with your larger point towards the bottom, and goes along with it feeling weird for me in 4E when a goblin and a dragon could both become CR 15 challenges for no other reason than to actually make a threatening creature actually a mechanical threat should it devolve into violence.  But really, all of these issues come out of the fact that its the PCs that are gaining all these bonuses to their "combat stat box" due to leveling that causes this disconnect in the first place.  If PCs didn't "level up", then a band of hobgoblins would always remain a threat to the party, and attacking an adult dragon would be tantamount to suicide.Now I fully agree that that's kind of the whole point of D&D to begin with... that the game was built to set the players up so that they eventually CAN become superheroes and take on and kill a dragon.  But unfortunately that does run counter to many parts of the narrative type of roleplaying game.  A 12th level party has nothing to fear from the town guard because they mechanically decimate them.  But from a narrative POV, that isn't the case.  So unless you have players who are willing to subsume their mechanically identity and "play to the story" as it were... voluntarily acting subservient to authority despite them being more than capable of destroying them all should a fight actually break out... part of my job as DM is trying to find/create/fix/change the rules to assist in this for the particular style of campaign I wish to run.   [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] seems to have an issue here too.  As he said above, his players will take the bodies of Flaming Fist mercenaries they kill and throw them to the crocodiles to destroy the evidence because they are veteran players and its the most strategically sound action they can take.  Which sounds to me like his players are not ones who typically "play to the story"... where the party from a character perspective wouldn't necessarily kill these authority figures even though they mechanically know they can out-of-game... and most certainly wouldn't all be willing to just casually destroy the bodies in such a gruesome fashion just to avoid a Speak With Dead spell (which in-game who knows if any of these characters would ever think that would be a possibility in the first place.)  The players all know these these things, which is why they do them... but do their PCs?  Perhaps at his table, they consider them one and the same?  No idea (although based upon how he talks about them, it seems this might be how they lean).  So obviously his table plays much differently than mine does (not that there's ever been a question about that after 3 years of discussing how the game works for our players, LOL!) and thus what he needs to calculate and figure out and run will lean in a much different direction.A Flaming Fist patrol with an average level of CR 2 will mean things much differently for my players, his players, your players, and everyone's players because everyone will treat them differently depending on which perspective they would see this patrol (combat-based, story-based, realism-based, game-based etc. etc. etc.)  Which means figuring out the way to handle it becomes an important part of working the adventure to suit.  And is also why not a single one of us should ever really wonder why any of WotC's books don't seem to "work right"... because they can only be written to satisfy a single certain perspective... and if we are here on EN World discussing and arguing and diving into the weeds of this game and all it represents, that perspective they are satisfying sure as heck ain't going to be ours.  Most of us have probably "leveled up" past that perspective a long time ago.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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