Do you feel safe?

“aquelajames Now boarding giant eagles to defend the city against giants attacking from an earthberg! It’s on!! #dnd”

“aquelajames The giants disposed of, we venture into the earthberg, where more giants await! #dnd”

Now those two tweets sound like the expression of a cool and fun game, but they made me wonder are the players feeling too safe going into that earthburg?

Now I rarely get to play games outside of Living Forgotten Realms (LFR), where the scenarios  rarely allow the sort of set up where you can fight the guards outside then plow into their lair and fight your way to the boss for the climax, and even when they do it is 4 encounters at most, so by Paragon you are sitting pretty to manage that with everyone using a daily comfortably in any encounter they feel it is needed. (Note that doesn’t mean LFR games are low risk just that this particular set up is hard to achieve in them.)

As a DM I have used this from time to time, and I’ve never really thought about it before.

“jaron95 The DM could pull a Joss Whedon and kill a beloved character to emphasise the risk and stakes for the rest of the party! #dnd”

While I think for a movie narrative that is fine, I’m not sure it works so well in DnD especially above 8th level when the PCs can access means of returning such beloved characters to life!

So the questions that I have now are:

• How do players feel about what will be in a monsters lair based on the encounter with the guys outside the lair?
• If the encounter outside is what you categorize as hard would that change your feelings about the sort of difficulty you would expect to encounter in the lair?
• Would you expect the DM to adjust the encounters down or up based on what is happening in your group?
• Have you ever played a module like Tomb of Horrors where the module is really set up to be a very tough challenge?

This does give me an opportunity to talk briefly about Stun, Daze, Dominate, Immobilize, and Weaken as conditions and Insubstantial as a resistance. I personally do not think encounters where the monsters spam these things over and over are challenging, I think they are boring and grindy. I do think it is reasonable for the DM to use these and other conditions in encounters (yes even the Weaken+Insubstantial combo) as long as it is done in moderation, overcoming the challenge presented by such monsters is part of the game element after all. So when I talk about “challenge” I’m thinking monster levels above PCs and tactics or terrain to create challenge not “sorry you don’t have a turn” stuff.

Anyway I’d love to hear some feedback, here or on Twitter (or even other blogs) about these questions!