Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
I mean, if that were the purpose, perhaps it would. But it's not. The purpose is to follow game physics. The previous battle is simply a red herring - but a useful one, that can teach them about the area, and give various characters a chance to shine.
Still not quite following.

Unless you are just saying that it follows versimilitude that NPCs would have random encounters while traveling thriugh a dangerous area, which is technically true but probably not actually realistic most of the time.


Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
Ironically, this is probably more an example of an asymmetry than a symmetry. If the antagonists have a 50% chance of entering a fight wounded, lets say, then that means that they're ostensibly engaged in an encounter difficult enough to cause them enough that a few hours of rest doesn't heal it every other day on average. Meaning that, if they were really using symmetric rules with the PCs, then they should be gaining a level roughly once per month. You could run a campaign where you write down a list of all of the antagonists and their forces ahead of time, and once a month (regardless of whether they have interacted with the PCs yet), everyone's level goes up by one. But it would be a brutally difficult campaign since now, if the party ever spends a month of downtime or a month travelling without dense encounters, they're permanently 1 level behind the curve.

There's an implicit asymmetry here - PCs level, the world doesn't. And it's one that's important to maintain game balance.

I suspect Talakeal's players would hate it if this particular asymmetry were made symmetric or if e.g. Talakeal spent as much effort optimizing each enemy as a player is likely to spend on their build.
This is typically not a huge issue in D&D. It more often occurs in games like World of Darkness were resources take months rather than days to replenish and you get XP for storyline progress rather than killing stuff.