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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 7016236" data-attributes="member: 6801228">There are so many different angles to this discussion, but I'm trying to relate this to my game and I wonder about a few different things. First of all, WoTC created a major problem for itself with the optional rules. Multiclassing, Feats, and Magical Items are optional, they are not necessarily included in any calculation being made in the MM. No one is going to deny that a party that is highly optimized using those rules is vastly more powerful than an optimized party that does not use those rules, but what WoTC didn't account for, for whatever reason, seems to be that a large portion of their fanbase, even ther own design team, want to use those rules all the time. They are essentially standard, but the Monsters were not designed with those rules thought of as standard, because if they did they would all be much more difficult for the people who are playing the game without any of the bells and whistles.Here's another thing I'm not sure what to do with, and it may be more my experience at the table than anything else. It becomes incredibly easy for monsters and players to meet in the middle and stay there. Drawing a dramatic environment is hard, and copying one from a sheet of paper onto my mat is hard, and I'd assume I'd find doing Theater of the Mind with a complicated environment would be nightmarish. However, that mobility and use of cover makes things much harder, and I think the designers counted on that happening a little more than they realized. But I've never seen a lot done with the lines of battle. It tends to start in one place, and stay there. Part of that has been my monster selection, they tend to encounter swarms of enemies that aren't very bright, I choose those enemies though because I would destroy the party with intelligent enemies that use cover and attack from multiple angles. In just this last battle I had one player spend 4-5 turns making perception checks to try and see an enemy that teleported away (an NPC who I had planned on running away, because he's a trap man and hunter, not a fight to the death knight) while the battle raged on behind them, then the heavies (a druid shaped into a Cave Bear, a barbarian and a swashbuckler) ran to one end of the field, leaving the squishy ranger and wizard with no cover from the enemy. The enemies were stupid, but not that stupid, and they turned back and nearly killed the two players in one round. And these were CR 1/2 creatures against a level 10 party, with a single (turns out) CR 10 beast in the back. I'm going to end up with a TPK at this rate, because my players don't seem to operate at squad level tactics. They weren't doing as bad as they sometimes do with this fight, but they are hunting a high level wizard and fighting his twisted creations, with the aforementioned hunter and a vampire they aren't even aware of yet. My point, some of the monsters don't meet our expectations. Sometimes like the Balor, I think it is bad design, with things like Strahd, I think it is an issue with expectations and genre transference. He is a beast of destruction to 3rd level characters I imagine, but as players get more powerful they are supposed to be able to survive and go toe to toe with someone who can wipe out a platoon of bog-standard guards by themselves. Could he have been made more powerful, of course, should he have been? No idea, seems to be a debate. But there is also at work here the difference in players. My players are powerfully optimized individually (to a degree, wizard is new and a pacifist), so I need to adjust monsters soemtimes to fit the story, keep them feeling like they are in danger, but their tactics and style of optimization is more geared towards single target damage. It is not uncommon for us to see 30-50 damage in a single attack or turn, but only against 1 creature at a time, so a mob is incredibly dangerous for them. I have a lot of rogues and high dex characters, so fireballs and lightning bolts get laughed at, but a cloud of poisonous gas cripples them because most of them have low con or strength. If I played a squad of enemies incredibly well, I can do a lot of damage, but if I just wipe the floor with my players, it would make the semester seem like a waste. We could potentially throw together new characters, but the game is over in May, and no one really wants to see a TPK. So, monsters vary in dangerousness, and players vary in strength, and sometimes one group wants more of a challenge, while another group has a DM holding back for fear of destroying a party that isn't working well. And WoTC has to thread that needle. They have to design monsters and encounters that can work for all groups, when the groups vary so widely that even here on the forums of a gaming site, we've got perhaps 4 or 5 different levels and expectations. It is a tall order, and despite my agreement that I would rather WoTC do the work than myself needing to, I imagine it is many times easier for an experienced high-level group to increase the difficulty of the game than it is a low-level group who has yet to develop the tactics and procedures to weaken monsters that were designed to take many times the punishment they can dish out.</blockquote>

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