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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KidSnide" data-source="post: 5713813" data-attributes="member: 54710">At the risk of nitpicking, arbitrary doom is a bad thing.  That's when you walk into a room and the DM tells you, "Sorry, you rolled 2 on your  saving throw.  You're dead now."  It's arbitrary because there's nothing you can do, and you had no reasonable expectation that you were putting your character's life on the line.What we want is (1) a palpable risk that individual PCs will either die or suffer long-term consequences, where that PC and his friends can do things to seriously mitigate that risk (e.g. he's vulnerable, so the defenders try to pull enemies off him, etc.) and (2) a palpable risk that the party as a whole will lose an encounter when there is still an opportunity for the PCs to retreat.The key to making risk fun is that (A) the PCs must be able to perceive the risk and (B) the PCs must be able to make a conscious decision to either accept the risk or give up some plot benefit (i.e. put a less vulnerable character at risk instead or retreat from the battle wholesale).  If the PCs don't know about the risk then - from the player's perspective - it's arbitrary and random.  If the PCs can't do anything about the risk, it can still be exciting but it's not really fair.But yes, to address your particular example, foes that are deadly together and need to be divided and defeated piecemeal are great fun.  We should have more of them.-KS</blockquote>