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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 6730264" data-attributes="member: 17607">This threatens to get off-topic, but might actually be germane. There's a reason why I chose the word 'rout' rather than 'defeat' when describing the level 20 fighter vs the king's army: the soldiers comprising the army are almost certainly not genre-savvy enough to know that 'bounded accuracy' is supposed to make them a collective threat to the fighter**.That might be the way out of our problem with NPCs, though -- the king's advisor might not be genre-savvy enough to realize that the adventuring wizard he advised and who defeated the previous apocalyptic threat is actually more powerful than he is now. "He is but a whelp who only survived based on my counsel -- he certainly could not replace me!" Add in that most DMs are loath to bring previous high-level PCs into a new lower-level game, or to portray such to their former players, and you get at least a decent story-based explanation of why the status quo would persist despite the previous party's victory. (It's a little bit harder to justify in shared-world environments like the Forgotten Realms, where thousands upon thousands of heroes have adventured -- you still end up, when a new party starts out adventuring, effectively hitting the 'Start Game' button and firing up the campaign from the default settings.)** - And I'm not sure an army could easily defeat a 20th level fighter, even with 'bounded accuracy'. Give me a sword-and-board Champion fighter in +3 plate mail, the Heavy Armor Master feat, and a Cloak of Displacement. If he goes up against an army composed of Guards from the DM Basic Rules, only 1 in 400 is likely to hit him in any given round (they need a 20 to hit, and the Cloak imposes disadvantage on their attacks), and each hit is going to do a single point of damage on average. And of course, once they do manage to whittle the fighter down to half his starting HP, he'll regain somewhere between 8 and 10 hit points each round he's below half. The main question would be, how long would the army persist on pursuing this fight before an increasing number of them just say 'the heck with this' and take off? The fighter might well rout a 10,000 man army this way, killing only a few hundred.--Pauper</blockquote>

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