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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord Zardoz" data-source="post: 4807511" data-attributes="member: 704">As a DM, there is a fine line you have to tread with respect to combat.  On the one hand, you want combat to be engaging, and challenging enough so that any combat you run should be one that is worth running.  Outside of specific roleplay situations, you wont break out the dice and do initiative for a single standard orc vs a 10th level adventuring party.  You do not want fights to be so easy that they wont tax the player resources at all.On the other hand, you do not want to fall into the trap of over optimizing the combats to negate your players strong points.  Doing this is simply unfair.I deal with this in two ways.  On one level I do tend to pick monsters that I think will create an interesting fight.  This inevitably leads to me considering what my players have and what I want to get out of the fight.  This does lead to me picking monsters that are better able to give the players a challenge.But when running combat, I make an effort to have the creature only use tactics that are reasonable for its in game knowledge.  This means I won't have an archer ready an action to nail a spell caster if that archer does not know a given character is a spell caster.When I want to use the most optimized tactics, I take steps to justify it.  In Red Hand of Doom, I had hobgoblins retreat for combat and had the survivors report the combat tactics and abilities of the players.  When someone later tried after the players, they knew exactly who was dangerous and tried to deal with them accordingly.For your balor example, I do not think it is unreasonable for the Balor (or any spell caster) to target a character it suspects will be most vulnerable to a given spell or attack, as long as your a few rounds in and the Balor knows the spell caster is a caster.END COMMUNICATION</blockquote>

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