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Encounter Balance holds back 5E
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<blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 9330866" data-attributes="member: 20323"><p>Some of the greatest fun my players have had is working around an "unbeatable" situation with clever strategies that create a total sea state change to what I'd anticipated the combat to look up.</p><p></p><p>In Mike Mearls' recent thread on rebalancing 5e's monster maths we had a laugh when we pointed out the tendency for players/designers to, just when they've dialed in the hit points, to then try every way possible to circumvent depleting hit points as the victory condition.</p><p></p><p>The whole idea that players consistently want "balanced combat" is a flawed premise.</p><p></p><p>I think a more accurate guideline is that players want to feel the GM is playing fair, they want to be challenged, and they want to have information in advance about prospective deadly* or especially unique/unfair scenarios (so they have some choice IF or HOW they engage), and for the GM never to be too precious about their monsters so that the players can utterly wreck them with clever thinking that elicits a "yes", "yes, but", or "yes, and" far more often than a "no."</p><p></p><p>I know there are exceptions to this in the player base, so I'm not saying it's 100% true at your table. Just my experience with a small swathe of players new and old (gamed with ~25 new folks in the past two years) is that that guideline generally holds across a pretty diverse set of players ages 11 to 40-something.</p><p></p><p><span style="font-size: 10px">* using deadly in common parlance, not the 5e DMG's narrow definition</span></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Quickleaf, post: 9330866, member: 20323"] Some of the greatest fun my players have had is working around an "unbeatable" situation with clever strategies that create a total sea state change to what I'd anticipated the combat to look up. In Mike Mearls' recent thread on rebalancing 5e's monster maths we had a laugh when we pointed out the tendency for players/designers to, just when they've dialed in the hit points, to then try every way possible to circumvent depleting hit points as the victory condition. The whole idea that players consistently want "balanced combat" is a flawed premise. I think a more accurate guideline is that players want to feel the GM is playing fair, they want to be challenged, and they want to have information in advance about prospective deadly* or especially unique/unfair scenarios (so they have some choice IF or HOW they engage), and for the GM never to be too precious about their monsters so that the players can utterly wreck them with clever thinking that elicits a "yes", "yes, but", or "yes, and" far more often than a "no." I know there are exceptions to this in the player base, so I'm not saying it's 100% true at your table. Just my experience with a small swathe of players new and old (gamed with ~25 new folks in the past two years) is that that guideline generally holds across a pretty diverse set of players ages 11 to 40-something. [SIZE=2]* using deadly in common parlance, not the 5e DMG's narrow definition[/SIZE] [/QUOTE]
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