I am a first time DM and have just finished running the Dripping Caves.
My party went in, guns blazing, and were almost wiped by the ogres. Moving forward, the encounters are well over the deadly encounter range from the DM's guidebook.
I want to lower the difficulty but I'm worried that I will overcorrect and create a new problem of fights that are much too easy.
How can I judge the correct difficulty for the fights they are going to have without making them too easy or too hard?
Best Answer
From my reading the Storm King's Thunder, it seems not all of the encounters can be solved by brute force. Giants themselves are meant to be formidable and difficult to take down foes. And multiple encounters actually encourage the PCs to run away.
While you can adjust the difficulty of encounters in a number of ways (reducing the number of foes, spacing them out over multiple rounds, etc.), I would instead encourage the players to thinking of alternate means or strategies for achieving success.
Furthermore, you might look at these early encounters as good training, and a way of learning through experience that brute force will not always work. Later encounters are extremely difficult if alarms are raised and multiple other enemies join in.