Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends that have been playing D&D a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D was our training wheels for getting into roleplaying games.

How much experience do your players have? Not their characters, but your players. What do you need to do to run a game for players that don’t think about tactics and how classes complement one another, versus players that know the best collection of abilities to actions to defeat monsters way above their weight class. On the other hand, what about players that are naturally tactically minded, but haven’t quite warmed up to the aspects of D&D that doesn’t revolve around finding the best way to navigate combat? We’re going to look at different levels of player and their ability and appetite for tactics.

According to the D&D 3rd edition Dungeon Master’s Guide, a well constructed adventure will consist of 10% easy encounters, 20% conditionally easy encounters , 50% challenging encounters, i.e. the encounter level is equal to the average party level, 15% very difficult, i.e. 1 to 4 encounter levels above the party average, and 5% overpowering, meaning that the encounter is 4 or more levels above the average party level. Now that we know that part of the equation, if a challenging encounter should use 20% of the party’s resources, and characters should level up after 13.33 encounters equal to their average party level, how many times will the party sleep before they get killed trying to complete City of the Spider Queen?