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<blockquote data-quote="Vhex" data-source="post: 6104516" data-attributes="member: 94831">For power/healing recovery, do keep in mind that the party up to this point has made two rather large &quot;bad&quot; decisions so the dragon should be structured as if they didn't make those decisions.&nbsp; There was the issue of splitting the party and triggering traps that caused a drop in healing surges requiring those who didn't lose a bunch of surges to replace the surges for those that did.&nbsp; There was also an all-out assault on an area that was likely meant to be a sneak/stealth encounter (but then...SLAVES, FREE THEM!).&nbsp; These two decisions should mean the party has lower resources than the encounter was designed for.&nbsp; Bad decisions should have consequences.&nbsp; If the encounter takes into account these bad decisions then the bad decisions don't really have consequences.&nbsp; You mentioned that you don't want the encounter to be unfair, but if you were designing the encounter in a vacuum then you wouldn't yet know what bad decisions the party had made.&nbsp; You would just know what you expected them to do with a bit of allowance for error.&nbsp; For that reason, don't go too overboard on providing methods of action/surge recovery.Another caution I would have would be on using player abilities.&nbsp; It worked okay in 3.5 due to the way the math was, but in general player spells are much different from monster spells.&nbsp; In many cases they're weaker or focus on certain feat combinations to make them work well.&nbsp; A stronger path would be to pull spells and abilities for different monsters of that level and use those (perhaps reflavored).&nbsp; The adventure tools monster builder is actually kind of nice for this.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Vhex, post: 6104516, member: 94831"] For power/healing recovery, do keep in mind that the party up to this point has made two rather large "bad" decisions so the dragon should be structured [I]as if they didn't make those decisions.[/I] There was the issue of splitting the party and triggering traps that caused a drop in healing surges requiring those who didn't lose a bunch of surges to replace the surges for those that did. There was also an all-out assault on an area that was likely meant to be a sneak/stealth encounter (but then...SLAVES, FREE THEM!). These two decisions [B]should[/B] mean the party has lower resources than the encounter was designed for. Bad decisions should have consequences. If the encounter takes into account these bad decisions then the bad decisions don't really have consequences. You mentioned that you don't want the encounter to be unfair, but if you were designing the encounter in a vacuum then you wouldn't yet know what bad decisions the party had made. You would just know what you expected them to do with a bit of allowance for error. For that reason, don't go too overboard on providing methods of action/surge recovery. Another caution I would have would be on using player abilities. It worked okay in 3.5 due to the way the math was, but in general player spells are much different from monster spells. In many cases they're weaker or focus on certain feat combinations to make them work well. A stronger path would be to pull spells and abilities for different monsters of that level and use those (perhaps reflavored). The adventure tools monster builder is actually kind of nice for this. [/QUOTE]

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