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<blockquote data-quote="NotAYakk" data-source="post: 8946921" data-attributes="member: 72555">No, they are expected a DM to learn how well their party handles easy/medium/hard/deadly encounters.&nbsp; And then adjust based on that.If your party is 50% better than it should be?&nbsp; The DM starts out with medium encounters, and you wipe them out without spending resources.&nbsp; The DM is supposed to learn from that.&nbsp; They should start creeping up the difficulty until it matches their expectations of how hard a fight should be.The CR rating and encounter building rules just helps you work out how deadly an encounter is compared to other encounters, roughly.&nbsp; And to warn DMs that if they start to push into the deadly region that things could get, well, deadly for the PCs.This holds for magic items, it holds for subclasses, it holds for tactical optimization, it holds for build optimization of all sorts.If you follow the advised XP rewards and leveling speed, by the time your PCs are level 11 you'll have more than a year of experience DMing that exact party!&nbsp; You'll have a great idea of what they can and cannot handle and what is going wrong.&nbsp; You'll know that the Ranger is not doing very good damage, that the Wizard is OP, or that the Barbarian cannot be killed.&nbsp; And ... you are free to do what you want with that information.Maybe you'll provide a ranger-only magic item that closes the gap for the Ranger.&nbsp; You'll introduce a psychic BBEG that makes the barbarian melt and shows up once a month to taunt the party.&nbsp; Or whatever.Probably you'll have worked out that &quot;the party can handle 6 deadly encounters in a row&quot; so you'll keep on doing that (having slowly ramped up from 6 medium as they gained levels and kept on being bored by fights).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="NotAYakk, post: 8946921, member: 72555"] No, they are expected a DM to [b]learn how well their party handles easy/medium/hard/deadly encounters[/b]. And then adjust based on that. If your party is 50% better than it should be? The DM starts out with medium encounters, and you wipe them out without spending resources. The DM is supposed to learn from that. They should start creeping up the difficulty until it matches their expectations of how hard a fight should be. The CR rating and encounter building rules just helps you work out how deadly an encounter is compared to other encounters, roughly. And to warn DMs that if they start to push into the deadly region that things could get, well, deadly for the PCs. This holds for magic items, it holds for subclasses, it holds for tactical optimization, it holds for build optimization of all sorts. If you follow the advised XP rewards and leveling speed, by the time your PCs are level 11 you'll have more than a year of experience DMing that exact party! You'll have a great idea of what they can and cannot handle and what is going wrong. You'll know that the Ranger is not doing very good damage, that the Wizard is OP, or that the Barbarian cannot be killed. And ... you are free to do what you want with that information. Maybe you'll provide a ranger-only magic item that closes the gap for the Ranger. You'll introduce a psychic BBEG that makes the barbarian melt and shows up once a month to taunt the party. Or whatever. Probably you'll have worked out that "the party can handle 6 deadly encounters in a row" so you'll keep on doing that (having slowly ramped up from 6 medium as they gained levels and kept on being bored by fights). [/QUOTE]

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