There’s no wrong answer here. Different people play D&D for different reasons. Some want a tactical game. For others it’s collaborative storytelling punctuated by combat to create excitement and tension.
But the problem with making encounters balanced is there’s no motivation for creative solutions. If you just roll your bag of dice, you can count on winning, because the DM has ensured the monsters’ hit points run out faster than yours. And if you do come up with something clever, your only reward is a combat that’s boringly easy. On the other hand, if original thinking is required, there’s a chance the players won’t find a solution, and get TPKed.
The question can apply to non-combat encounters too. Usually, when I come up with a puzzle, I also come up with a solution. The players may find that one or another. But I could also come up with a puzzle I don’t know how to solve, and be surprised by the players’ answer. Or if worse comes to worse, I could let them Gordon Knot the problem.
I usually throw some decently difficult but still easily winnable encounters at my group earlier in the day. That way they can feel cool by using their awesome abilities, but they also use up their awesome abilities early, so that they don't have them later on. Then I throw some more difficult encounters at them, so that they have to think tactically to win. Luckily, my group is pretty clever and aren't afraid to retreat, so they've been able to run from some encounters in which they were outmatched.
If anyone's interested, here are my encounters so far:
All stars fade. Some stars forever fall. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Homebrew (Mostly Outdated):Magic Items,Monsters,Spells,Subclasses ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If there was no light, people wouldn't fear the dark.
You're missing some options; "Winning" shouldn't always be the measure of a fight.
By default my encounters are designed to be "survivable" and what matters is how the players reach the other end, and the consequences that follow. For example, in an upcoming encounter, if my players don't work together well, their NPC guide might end up getting killed, which will turn the next part of the adventure from a more linear combat montage into a wilderness survival arc. Not all encounters are meant to be "beaten", some just need to be endured.
I have nearly all my encounters balanced so that they will most likely succeed, unless they have terrible roles, with a few battles (usally boss type battles) that are very hard, and have a high chance of failure without proper preparation and tactics.
Your options seem a bit odd; in particular, I don't consider a fight where "If they don't use clever tactics or lateral thinking they'll likely lose" to be unfair. An unfair fight is one where they'll lose even if they do use clever tactics or lateral thinking.
On the original question, I'm not going to have a fight that is both unavoidable and unwinnable, but if the PCs go picking fights they don't need to pick there's really no guarantees.
I only worry about a TPK when they’re jumping gaps or climbing and then all of a sudden a DC 15 Athletics check inexplicably becomes the hardest thing ever for every PC simultaneously. That’s a TPK I worry about, because that would be on me. It was just supposed to be a puzzle for them to solve and becomes a death spiral that’s not cool.
But if I specifically drop a meat grinder in front of them and they choose to walk in it and then don’t figure their own something out, then that’s on them. I only fudge stuff like HP when I need to correct for my screw ups, and usually it’s to make the fights harder. They could have not walked blindly into the meat grinder, and they know it’s me and it’s gonna be a meat grinder. They know that sure as they know the sun come up in the east. (That’s why I give out magic items early.)
All my encounters (with the exception of that one incident with the Beholder) are winnable with reasonably smart play, good resource management, and decent luck. However, most can also very easily be lost by stupid tactics, over or underuse of resources, or really bad luck. In that unusual case, the characters will have to retreat and/or trust their fate to the death saves.
Oh yeah, and there was that time the party debated joining some redcaps to murder a friendly old man who was an archmage in disguise. That would’ve been a TPK.
I personally just ignore encounter balance, especially for random encounters. If the players start losing, it is up to them to notice and do something about. The reason for not balancing random encounters is because I personally think that it doesn’t make sense for, say, a 5th level group to never see a wolf in the wild ever again because it is too weak of an encounter. Players should know when to fight and when to avoid fighting, but if they see a group of 30 goblins, they are likely to understand that this fight should be avoided.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Anything is edible if you try hard enough!
I am a swimmer. If you see me running, you should run too, because it means something horrible is chasing me.
" Try to set winnable yet challenging encounters, but the adventurers just smash through every foe as if they were made of wet tissue paper."
Eh, at least my psychology winds up being "Wow, guess then can handle that. Let's make the next one harder and see what happens". It is probably not a coincidence that I have a significant number of TPKs over the years.
" Try to set winnable yet challenging encounters, but the adventurers just smash through every foe as if they were made of wet tissue paper."
Eh, at least my psychology winds up being "Wow, guess then can handle that. Let's make the next one harder and see what happens". It is probably not a coincidence that I have a significant number of TPKs over the years.
In 18+ months of DMing I've never even reduced one player to 0 HP despite trying my hardest.
" Try to set winnable yet challenging encounters, but the adventurers just smash through every foe as if they were made of wet tissue paper."
Eh, at least my psychology winds up being "Wow, guess then can handle that. Let's make the next one harder and see what happens". It is probably not a coincidence that I have a significant number of TPKs over the years.
In 18+ months of DMing I've never even reduced one player to 0 HP despite trying my hardest.
Increase your encounters by 50%. If this doesn't work, increase them by 100%. Repeat until success (or everyone dies).
It's much easier to control the flow of battle with a dynamic encounter, rather than a pre-defined one. Add in a fog of war element, so that you can spawn in minions as needed. Imply greater threat beyond line of sight for increased drama, and control the the flow of adversaries to keep up the tension.
Add legendary resistances, legendary actions, and lair actions to important encounters regardless of what's in the monster statblock. As long as you don't overcommit to the on-map CR, then you should be able to release the pressure right as PCs start to panic.
" Try to set winnable yet challenging encounters, but the adventurers just smash through every foe as if they were made of wet tissue paper."
Eh, at least my psychology winds up being "Wow, guess then can handle that. Let's make the next one harder and see what happens". It is probably not a coincidence that I have a significant number of TPKs over the years.
In 18+ months of DMing I've never even reduced one player to 0 HP despite trying my hardest.
Wow. That's kind of insane for me. So far, we've had three almost death scenarios in the group I run, where the player would have died and only one player had to go before they had to roll death saves (or before they would be attacked).
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
All stars fade. Some stars forever fall. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Homebrew (Mostly Outdated):Magic Items,Monsters,Spells,Subclasses ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If there was no light, people wouldn't fear the dark.
You have to remember that the DM's job is to present interesting situations for the player's characters to deal with, all the while maintaining a cohesive storyline. Ergo, the difficulty of the encounter should be based off of how you want the players and the non-existent audience to feel. An easy encounter will make the players feel confident or bored. A gruelingly difficult battle will leave the players feeling hopeless if they lose and flee, or perhaps exhausted if they survive. Encounters that are fairly difficult, but not too much so, will have the players feel powerful, and a deadly encounter can have a triumphant feeling when the players defeat the BBEG.
So in reality, the difficulty of an encounter simply dictates the flow and emotion of the current chapter of the story.
But if you want to make an interesting encounter, my advice is to start with an even more interesting battleground. While dynamic battlefields are complex and hard to handle as a DM, they make far more interesting battles. They could have traps, doors, high ground, water, fire, and any number of features for the players and monsters to play with. You should also consider your player's abilities when designing such encounters. Does one of your players love to control water? Stick in a supply of water for them to *ahem* turn the tides with... (Sorry). Perhaps the artificer is the only one capable of operating a critical component of the battlefield, and suddenly the encounter becomes a "Defend the Orb" scenario as you keep the Artificer from dying. There are many, many more ways you can make truly interesting encounters, but just remember that in the end, an encounter is just another chapter in a book.
Small note, you should be willing to fudge your rolls or make monsters willing to flee if the situation isn't working out the way you intended. But at the same time, don't railroad the players by babying them, let them make their own decisions (Even if they're bad ones.)
You're missing some options; "Winning" shouldn't always be the measure of a fight.
By default my encounters are designed to be "survivable" and what matters is how the players reach the other end, and the consequences that follow. For example, in an upcoming encounter, if my players don't work together well, their NPC guide might end up getting killed, which will turn the next part of the adventure from a more linear combat montage into a wilderness survival arc. Not all encounters are meant to be "beaten", some just need to be endured.
Yeah, that's fine, I do that too, where the objective of one or both sides is not to wipe out the other, but I feel like I've been doing it a little bit too much. Some of my recent combats have been:
2x l6 vs. Magma Roper: They had badly split the party, which was originally 5 members, and I wanted to scare them into not doing that. They would have been wrecked, but I had an environmental hazard appear that damaged the Magma Roper enough to scare it away.
5x l6 vs. 3x Chimaeras: The players were aboard an airship with some heavy guns (more or less ballistas), and the Chimaeras were coming at them from distance. I had tried to balance it so the Chimaeras would lose about half their HP on approach, but the players got good rolls and only one Chimaera made it all the way in. It wasn't supposed to be hard, but it ended up being a complete cakewalk.
6x l6 vs. Young Red Dragon: The dragon could probably beat them, but it wasn't really trying to. Just defending its eggs. And the players weren't really trying to kill the dragon. For plot reasons they wanted it to live. They really just had to survive until they could make it out of its lair.
6x l7 vs. Solar: The Solar is following a set battle plan that's not trying to maximize damage, and the players are supposed to figure out how to appease the Solar and it will leave them alone and actually be nice to them. I still had to nerf its attacks a little mid battle.
It's actually been a long time since I've done a combat where the bad guys are just trying to kill you and you're trying to kill them, and I feel bad about that, because if I do have players who really want a combat challenge, I'm not giving it to them. And I worry they're catching on when I'm pulling my punches and making a monster that was going to slay them give up. I've killed PCs before, so probably no worries about that, really.
So I plan to give them a good straight fight, but I'm not very confident about the difficulty. I'm running an adventure with a highly modified Death Knight as the boss, but the adventure was originally designed for higher level players, so I've nerfed the Death Knight down with 121 hp, 18 AC (Parry +4), +7 to hit and 1d10 + 3 + 1d8 psychic Longsword attack, and Hellfire Orb that does half the damage (total 10d6). But the thing is so highly modified in the first place that I don't really know if the encounter is well balanced. There's a good likelihood I'm going to be fudging some dice.
Perhaps the difference in our approaches is that I'm not thinking in terms of sides. Sometimes the party encounters puzzles, dangerous environments, and/or combat that they need to overcome, but each is the party versus the story, not a "6v6" encounter.
For example, in our upcoming combat encounter, the theme is "spiders in a forest", so there is going to be a couple of highlighted monsters, and countless swarms of tiny spiders that will operate more like traps and environmental hazards.
If I want a deadly encounter, then the conflict will escalate as needed, and if I want an easier encounter, then they'll eventually succeed in clearing out the nest. Essentially, I set an initial manageable CR for the encounter and then use the venue to adapt the encounter difficulty on the spot to achieve the desired effect. My monsters want to defeat the players, or whatever, but by introducing the encounter in waves, I can ensure that the difficulty always matches my hopes within a reasonable margin of error.
This is easier with a large number of smaller monsters, but the principle is the same for a BBEG. One creature is the figurehead for the encounter, but it uses its environment as a buffer for hit points, armor, and actions to ensure the desired level of intensity. The monsters themselves are a lower CR than the party can handle, but the encounter CR is arbitrarily adjustable.
The players don't know what is and isn't set in stone, so there is no reason not to tell the story the way it should be told and then canonize it after the fact. Building the encounter up typically feels more satisfying than introducing a deus ex machina to save the party when things get rough.
I concur with the responses that talk about "story". A combat encounter should have enough stuff happening that players don't spend too long going "I attack/ roll/ I hit/ roll/ I'm done". That gets boring fast.
But at the end I want, generally all of my PC's to survive a fight unless it would be a good time for them not to. Having a party member die to a random zombie attack doesn't have the same narrative bonus as having them fall in the final battle with the zombie lord. And while it can be good in literature for a party's numbers to thin over time, and it does suck for an actor to stop getting paid after 4 weeks of filming, it's not the same at the game table. People will want to be involved so a PC death mid campaign just means that they party will bond with a new character played by that player. Saving "really hard to beat combats" for the last battle makes that work better narratively; new campaigns are invitations for new characters.
People will want to be involved so a PC death mid campaign just means that they party will bond with a new character played by that player. Saving "really hard to beat combats" for the last battle makes that work better narratively; new campaigns are invitations for new characters.
Whilst I agree players shouldn't be dying most of the time, I think a challenge is also a good thing.
As for player death's or at least 0 HP situations, they should occur sometimes even if just to ramp up urgency for other players.
I always find Marvel movies lame case there's no real threat to the good guys and most things don't threaten them. It's what I liked about Netflix's Punisher and Daredevil shows - fights weren't easy and the danger was real and sometimes they wouldn't win but instead lose badly.
I can’t vote here because it very much depends on the narrative, what has happened in the story, why the encounter is in the game, it also misses an important encounter type. Unwinable because the characters are meant to retreat and come back another day fitter, faster, stronger, wiser to fight.
But, generally my encounters are meant to be winnable, they might be hard and risk failure but I never set the party an impossible fight they can’t retreat from and I never ever fudge dice rolls or switch out hit points or armour class.
There’s no wrong answer here. Different people play D&D for different reasons. Some want a tactical game. For others it’s collaborative storytelling punctuated by combat to create excitement and tension.
But the problem with making encounters balanced is there’s no motivation for creative solutions. If you just roll your bag of dice, you can count on winning, because the DM has ensured the monsters’ hit points run out faster than yours. And if you do come up with something clever, your only reward is a combat that’s boringly easy. On the other hand, if original thinking is required, there’s a chance the players won’t find a solution, and get TPKed.
The question can apply to non-combat encounters too. Usually, when I come up with a puzzle, I also come up with a solution. The players may find that one or another. But I could also come up with a puzzle I don’t know how to solve, and be surprised by the players’ answer. Or if worse comes to worse, I could let them Gordon Knot the problem.
I usually throw some decently difficult but still easily winnable encounters at my group earlier in the day. That way they can feel cool by using their awesome abilities, but they also use up their awesome abilities early, so that they don't have them later on. Then I throw some more difficult encounters at them, so that they have to think tactically to win. Luckily, my group is pretty clever and aren't afraid to retreat, so they've been able to run from some encounters in which they were outmatched.
If anyone's interested, here are my encounters so far:
Level 1: 6 bandits
Level 2: 3 kobolds and a kenku, a blue dragon wyrmling
Level 3: 2 magma mephits, 2 magma mephits a smoke mephit and a magmin, a chimera (avoided), a salamander and a swarm of firegills, a level 6 character (ended in a draw), and 6 guards
Level 4: 3 awakened trees (group fled), 4 gnolls a gnoll flesh gnawer and a gnoll pack lord, a manticore (avoided), 2 shadow mastiffs, a demonfire and a bloodthorn bush, and a CR 7 legendary monster (group fled)
Level 5 (so far): a shambling mound, 2 owlbears, a bulette (monster fled), a chimera, a mummy (mythic variant)
All stars fade. Some stars forever fall.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Homebrew (Mostly Outdated): Magic Items, Monsters, Spells, Subclasses
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If there was no light, people wouldn't fear the dark.
You're missing some options; "Winning" shouldn't always be the measure of a fight.
By default my encounters are designed to be "survivable" and what matters is how the players reach the other end, and the consequences that follow. For example, in an upcoming encounter, if my players don't work together well, their NPC guide might end up getting killed, which will turn the next part of the adventure from a more linear combat montage into a wilderness survival arc. Not all encounters are meant to be "beaten", some just need to be endured.
I have nearly all my encounters balanced so that they will most likely succeed, unless they have terrible roles, with a few battles (usally boss type battles) that are very hard, and have a high chance of failure without proper preparation and tactics.
I am an average mathematics enjoyer.
>Extended Signature<
Your options seem a bit odd; in particular, I don't consider a fight where "If they don't use clever tactics or lateral thinking they'll likely lose" to be unfair. An unfair fight is one where they'll lose even if they do use clever tactics or lateral thinking.
On the original question, I'm not going to have a fight that is both unavoidable and unwinnable, but if the PCs go picking fights they don't need to pick there's really no guarantees.
I only worry about a TPK when they’re jumping gaps or climbing and then all of a sudden a DC 15 Athletics check inexplicably becomes the hardest thing ever for every PC simultaneously. That’s a TPK I worry about, because that would be on me. It was just supposed to be a puzzle for them to solve and becomes a death spiral that’s not cool.
But if I specifically drop a meat grinder in front of them and they choose to walk in it and then don’t figure their own something out, then that’s on them. I only fudge stuff like HP when I need to correct for my screw ups, and usually it’s to make the fights harder. They could have not walked blindly into the meat grinder, and they know it’s me and it’s gonna be a meat grinder. They know that sure as they know the sun come up in the east. (That’s why I give out magic items early.)
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All my encounters (with the exception of that one incident with the Beholder) are winnable with reasonably smart play, good resource management, and decent luck. However, most can also very easily be lost by stupid tactics, over or underuse of resources, or really bad luck. In that unusual case, the characters will have to retreat and/or trust their fate to the death saves.
Oh yeah, and there was that time the party debated joining some redcaps to murder a friendly old man who was an archmage in disguise. That would’ve been a TPK.
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
Need another option:
" Try to set winnable yet challenging encounters, but the adventurers just smash through every foe as if they were made of wet tissue paper."
I personally just ignore encounter balance, especially for random encounters. If the players start losing, it is up to them to notice and do something about. The reason for not balancing random encounters is because I personally think that it doesn’t make sense for, say, a 5th level group to never see a wolf in the wild ever again because it is too weak of an encounter. Players should know when to fight and when to avoid fighting, but if they see a group of 30 goblins, they are likely to understand that this fight should be avoided.
Anything is edible if you try hard enough!
I am a swimmer. If you see me running, you should run too, because it means something horrible is chasing me.
Eh, at least my psychology winds up being "Wow, guess then can handle that. Let's make the next one harder and see what happens". It is probably not a coincidence that I have a significant number of TPKs over the years.
In 18+ months of DMing I've never even reduced one player to 0 HP despite trying my hardest.
Increase your encounters by 50%. If this doesn't work, increase them by 100%. Repeat until success (or everyone dies).
It's much easier to control the flow of battle with a dynamic encounter, rather than a pre-defined one. Add in a fog of war element, so that you can spawn in minions as needed. Imply greater threat beyond line of sight for increased drama, and control the the flow of adversaries to keep up the tension.
Add legendary resistances, legendary actions, and lair actions to important encounters regardless of what's in the monster statblock. As long as you don't overcommit to the on-map CR, then you should be able to release the pressure right as PCs start to panic.
Wow. That's kind of insane for me. So far, we've had three almost death scenarios in the group I run, where the player would have died and only one player had to go before they had to roll death saves (or before they would be attacked).
All stars fade. Some stars forever fall.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Homebrew (Mostly Outdated): Magic Items, Monsters, Spells, Subclasses
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If there was no light, people wouldn't fear the dark.
You have to remember that the DM's job is to present interesting situations for the player's characters to deal with, all the while maintaining a cohesive storyline. Ergo, the difficulty of the encounter should be based off of how you want the players and the non-existent audience to feel. An easy encounter will make the players feel confident or bored. A gruelingly difficult battle will leave the players feeling hopeless if they lose and flee, or perhaps exhausted if they survive. Encounters that are fairly difficult, but not too much so, will have the players feel powerful, and a deadly encounter can have a triumphant feeling when the players defeat the BBEG.
So in reality, the difficulty of an encounter simply dictates the flow and emotion of the current chapter of the story.
But if you want to make an interesting encounter, my advice is to start with an even more interesting battleground. While dynamic battlefields are complex and hard to handle as a DM, they make far more interesting battles. They could have traps, doors, high ground, water, fire, and any number of features for the players and monsters to play with. You should also consider your player's abilities when designing such encounters. Does one of your players love to control water? Stick in a supply of water for them to *ahem* turn the tides with... (Sorry). Perhaps the artificer is the only one capable of operating a critical component of the battlefield, and suddenly the encounter becomes a "Defend the Orb" scenario as you keep the Artificer from dying. There are many, many more ways you can make truly interesting encounters, but just remember that in the end, an encounter is just another chapter in a book.
Small note, you should be willing to fudge your rolls or make monsters willing to flee if the situation isn't working out the way you intended. But at the same time, don't railroad the players by babying them, let them make their own decisions (Even if they're bad ones.)
Yeah, that's fine, I do that too, where the objective of one or both sides is not to wipe out the other, but I feel like I've been doing it a little bit too much. Some of my recent combats have been:
2x l6 vs. Magma Roper: They had badly split the party, which was originally 5 members, and I wanted to scare them into not doing that. They would have been wrecked, but I had an environmental hazard appear that damaged the Magma Roper enough to scare it away.
5x l6 vs. 3x Chimaeras: The players were aboard an airship with some heavy guns (more or less ballistas), and the Chimaeras were coming at them from distance. I had tried to balance it so the Chimaeras would lose about half their HP on approach, but the players got good rolls and only one Chimaera made it all the way in. It wasn't supposed to be hard, but it ended up being a complete cakewalk.
6x l6 vs. Young Red Dragon: The dragon could probably beat them, but it wasn't really trying to. Just defending its eggs. And the players weren't really trying to kill the dragon. For plot reasons they wanted it to live. They really just had to survive until they could make it out of its lair.
6x l7 vs. Solar: The Solar is following a set battle plan that's not trying to maximize damage, and the players are supposed to figure out how to appease the Solar and it will leave them alone and actually be nice to them. I still had to nerf its attacks a little mid battle.
It's actually been a long time since I've done a combat where the bad guys are just trying to kill you and you're trying to kill them, and I feel bad about that, because if I do have players who really want a combat challenge, I'm not giving it to them. And I worry they're catching on when I'm pulling my punches and making a monster that was going to slay them give up. I've killed PCs before, so probably no worries about that, really.
So I plan to give them a good straight fight, but I'm not very confident about the difficulty. I'm running an adventure with a highly modified Death Knight as the boss, but the adventure was originally designed for higher level players, so I've nerfed the Death Knight down with 121 hp, 18 AC (Parry +4), +7 to hit and 1d10 + 3 + 1d8 psychic Longsword attack, and Hellfire Orb that does half the damage (total 10d6). But the thing is so highly modified in the first place that I don't really know if the encounter is well balanced. There's a good likelihood I'm going to be fudging some dice.
Perhaps the difference in our approaches is that I'm not thinking in terms of sides. Sometimes the party encounters puzzles, dangerous environments, and/or combat that they need to overcome, but each is the party versus the story, not a "6v6" encounter.
For example, in our upcoming combat encounter, the theme is "spiders in a forest", so there is going to be a couple of highlighted monsters, and countless swarms of tiny spiders that will operate more like traps and environmental hazards.
If I want a deadly encounter, then the conflict will escalate as needed, and if I want an easier encounter, then they'll eventually succeed in clearing out the nest. Essentially, I set an initial manageable CR for the encounter and then use the venue to adapt the encounter difficulty on the spot to achieve the desired effect. My monsters want to defeat the players, or whatever, but by introducing the encounter in waves, I can ensure that the difficulty always matches my hopes within a reasonable margin of error.
This is easier with a large number of smaller monsters, but the principle is the same for a BBEG. One creature is the figurehead for the encounter, but it uses its environment as a buffer for hit points, armor, and actions to ensure the desired level of intensity. The monsters themselves are a lower CR than the party can handle, but the encounter CR is arbitrarily adjustable.
The players don't know what is and isn't set in stone, so there is no reason not to tell the story the way it should be told and then canonize it after the fact. Building the encounter up typically feels more satisfying than introducing a deus ex machina to save the party when things get rough.
I concur with the responses that talk about "story". A combat encounter should have enough stuff happening that players don't spend too long going "I attack/ roll/ I hit/ roll/ I'm done". That gets boring fast.
But at the end I want, generally all of my PC's to survive a fight unless it would be a good time for them not to. Having a party member die to a random zombie attack doesn't have the same narrative bonus as having them fall in the final battle with the zombie lord. And while it can be good in literature for a party's numbers to thin over time, and it does suck for an actor to stop getting paid after 4 weeks of filming, it's not the same at the game table. People will want to be involved so a PC death mid campaign just means that they party will bond with a new character played by that player. Saving "really hard to beat combats" for the last battle makes that work better narratively; new campaigns are invitations for new characters.
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Whilst I agree players shouldn't be dying most of the time, I think a challenge is also a good thing.
As for player death's or at least 0 HP situations, they should occur sometimes even if just to ramp up urgency for other players.
I always find Marvel movies lame case there's no real threat to the good guys and most things don't threaten them. It's what I liked about Netflix's Punisher and Daredevil shows - fights weren't easy and the danger was real and sometimes they wouldn't win but instead lose badly.
I can’t vote here because it very much depends on the narrative, what has happened in the story, why the encounter is in the game, it also misses an important encounter type. Unwinable because the characters are meant to retreat and come back another day fitter, faster, stronger, wiser to fight.
But, generally my encounters are meant to be winnable, they might be hard and risk failure but I never set the party an impossible fight they can’t retreat from and I never ever fudge dice rolls or switch out hit points or armour class.