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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7769148" data-attributes="member: 29398">I think he hits a correct conclusion (that the peaks and valleys are flatter) despite a somewhat faulty premise.I'm not saying they're polar opposites, but I am saying it's a relevant difference - with which you appear to agree. <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=":)" />Which sets him up to be flayed a bit here: the broader the brush the more opposing examples are liable to slip through the cracks.If he'd just stuck to D&D he'd be on much firmer ground.In such little 5e as I've played the combats followed the down-then-up pattern quite closely; and the 4e adventures I've converted and run were filled with them.If pretty much every publsihed adventure of the era hadn't blown this concept to hell I'd agree with you.  But they did, and let's face it: when designing their own adventures most DMs are going to look at the published ones for guidelines and how-to ideas rather than at the core rulebooks.  The 3e-4e-5e modules I've seen tend to hew much closer to the written design.Which by design takes away the challenge of the hard fail...see below...And this is where it presents a challenge to the players both in and out of character: find a way to make it not boring.  The easiest thing here is to simply go and do something else in the game - a different mission or adventure.  But there's other ways: in my game once the party for various reasons knew there had to be a secret door somewhere in the place but couldn't find it.  It was a wooden building.  Out came the Dwarf's axe...They found the secret room.  I'm not sure they ever actually found the door. Which both severely limits adventure design (from the metagame-DM perspective) and verges into non-realistic (from the in-fiction perspective).  If I'm a big evil wizard with a pile of treasure in my home I'm going to hide it as best I can so that it won't be found.  If I'm burying the dead's treasure with them and am concerned that grave-robbers might later come along and loot the place, that stuff's getting hidden by whatever means I have available.And from a purely DM-side view, if the party missing something vital means they later have to go back and finish that's great: I get two adventures out of one!Yes, to a point.  The question is whether the system frowns on a GM doing this or encourages it.  If the system frowns on it and it happens anyway, that's on the GM.  But if the system encourages it then when it happens the blame falls on the system.</blockquote>

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