Newish DM - Looking for advice

[Wacky89]

Hi so I simply can't get over my player mentality as a DM. When I sit and make my npcs and monsters I find myself optimizing the bazoo out of them using the nonassociated class levels.
I'm so frustrated that my players kill my monsters in 1 round, that's why I keep optimizing my npcs more and more, because I want to win? I know that is wrong, I have to be the entertainer. But how do you entertain if you're not that entertained yourself.

[NeoPhoenix0]

optimize the begeezes out of the boss fight. you are allowed to win the boss fight if the fight was sufficiently epic enough. (read as no cheap shot 1 turn win, that will just upset them)

if the boss fight was epic enough you might not even mind if you lose.

[Tohsaka Rin]

I have two categories for encounters: Thematic, and hordes of mooks.

For thematic, I usually design a setpiece. Last time, for example, I had a bone drinker in a field of gore on a weeks-old battlefield. The players loved that one.

For horde, I just throw a lot of CR1 creatures at them. Usually just plain guardsmen and the like.

Why? Because the encounter is pretty much solely to make the players feel like badasses, and to amp them up for the next thematic encounter.

When you have players who tend to optimize, you learn that anything that's going to challenge them will probably either kill them flat without much trouble, or it's something that they'll go through like an acid-edged chainsaw that's on fire, and blaring ACDC all the while.

So, don't aim for being mechanically satisfying, be thematic. Dramatic. Lightning, rain, burning buildings.

And whatever happens, always sound impressed with their results.

As a side note, I only bring out hard stuff for my players at their request. They get low XP, but generally, they enjoy Role Playing leaping from roof to roof, kicking assassins off, while running to rescue a princess, than they do killing CR18 dragons.

And really, I can't remember the last time I fought a dragon that lasted more than eight turns. I do remember chasing an assassin over the roof of a palace, shimmying along a narrow ledge, only for him to escape via teleport at the end. That was way more interesting, even with the Deus Ex Machina letting him escape.