Mummy Lords and CR

[Tanarii]

Truly? It's designed for 100% victory? That's pretty crazy to me because I have lots of deaths in my games and I don't go ridiculously outside the bounds of suggested CR.

I don't like the idea of a system that is designed so the players will never face anything seriously dangerous, but I suppose that reveals how out of step I was with the CR system in the first place.

Success != No deaths. Success == no tpk. There's a huge difference. And if you're equating "has a decent chance to tpk" with "seriously dangerous", that's not the stock assumptions of the system.

Yup. I thought I was pretty clear when I posted that you might lose a player character to death, might even lose a character to permadeath, but tpks are pretty much impossible within the DMG guidelines. But I guess not.

If you're running an honest-to-God sandbox, even if it's one with level appropriate adventuring zones (aka dungeons), it's entirely possible for a party to TPK itself by overextending itself or intentionally facing things far beyond their capabilities. Same if you're running an 'actions have consequences' game and they end up drawing down an vast force they can't handle on their heads because of carelessness. But in those cases they're well outside the recommended guidelines.

It's also fairly easy to kill off one character. Goes down, then gets pop up healed by Healing Word, goes down again and gets crit-killed by the enemy because they're not stupid. (Not all DMs will do this, but IMX enough will.) But Raise Dead only requires 500 gp and a 9 level Cleric within 10 days travel, which is easily affordable by a level 6+ character. YMMV on that of course. Removing that very intentional safety net for characters with a lot of invested time increases danger to individuals in the party fairly drastically.