Party optimisation philosophy

[MaxWilson]

Per DMG p. 82, a "Deadly" encounter for a single level 1 character is 100 XP, or one orc. Two orcs would fall between "Hard" and "Deadly" for a 3rd level fighter.

An enemy equivalent to yourself (e.g. your evil clone who can beat you as easily as you can beat him, 50/50%) is Deadly by definition, since 5E defines "Deadly" as "could be lethal for one or more player characters. Survival often requires good tactics and quick thinking, and the party risks defeat." If the PCs could conceivably lose, it gets labelled Deadly. If there's a 50% chance (!) the party will lose without good tactics and quick thinking, that's very "Deadly."

It's certainly not impossible for a first-level fighter to defeat two orcs, but it's also not impossible for the orcs to defeat the fighter.

Anyway, in this thread I think we're talking about capabilities (how many orcs/mind flayers/etc. can a given party handle, for some given value of "handle"), not DMG guidelines.

That does raise an interesting question though: does a party which is optimizing to have a decent chance at beating extremely tough foes (a series of uber-Deadly 20th level encounters and 3x 20th level DMG adventuring days at party level 13) get built differently from a party which is optimizing to have a 100% chance at beating moderate foes very quickly (13th level DMG adventuring days at party level 13, but all the fights end in 1-2 rounds), or is one a superset of the other?