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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7620605" data-attributes="member: 29398">My experience shows the kill rate to be more or less the same across the levels (except 1st level, which is higher); the difference is that higher-level types can either afford revival spells or have them available within the party, meaning that while the kill rate is the same there's much less actual character turnover.  The cause of death changes - less come from direct combat, more from save-or-die effects and spells - but it's still deadly, and survival remains a key goal.That was your approach, and the game could handle it, but by RAW you'd have got the same xp for intentionally bypassing or avoiding an encounter as you would have for beating it up.  More to the point, if the published modules are anything to go by combat only accounted for a small percentage of the available x.p.; with the vast majority of potential x.p. coming from treasure. (a long time ago a poster named [MENTION=3854]Quasqueton[/MENTION] ran the numbers on this, if you feel like digging through ENWorld's dusty archives)3e was a different breed of animal in a few ways:First, because of the steep (and open-ended) power curve it heavily relied on the DM to make sure encounters were more or less level-appropriate; where earlier editions with their flatter power curves could get away with a wider variance.Second, both the monsters and the PCs had a lot more going for them above very low levels/HD which tended to force a certain degree of character optimization.Third, while 3e was about as lethal as the earlier editions, various other nasty effects had either been nerfed (level loss made temporary; item saves much less frequent) or removed (no permanent penalty on revival from death)True, this does appear more often in the more recent editions - but even there, what %-age of the total x.p. available in the module do these type of encounters represent?  With rare exceptions, not much. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Again true, though I think this is an odd case where the underlying system design and the published modules are in conflict: the system wants to reward one aspect of play (combat) while the modules want to reward other aspects (exploration, social interaction, or whatever).</blockquote>

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