Quote Originally Posted by Talakeal View Post
Basically, my game is sort of like Pendragon in that you alternate adventuring phases and downtime phases.

By having only a single combat each adventure, the players were able to devote nearly 100% of their resources to the downtime phase, which they then used to buy or craft equipment far beyond what they would have in a normal game, which in turn meant they had an even easier time and used even less resources in the adventuring phase.

Now, in a normal game I could have simply adjusted combat difficulty or item costs on the fly, but this was specifically being used to test the combat math and challenge mechanics of my system, so I told my players I was going to need to alter the campaign so they had multiple fights every adventure, which the players didn't like; and then when one player actually died on the last fight of the adventure, it caused a total meltdown and the end of that campaign.
Considering what you knew about your players, how did you ever expect that to work ?

Such a setup has a couple of risks/downsides :

- By coupling advancement to performance, you have an inbuilt tendency to produce either a power runaway or a death spiral. (And not surprisingly exactly that has happened)
- By having permanent downtime progress depend on not using ressources in fights, ressource use in fights feels bad
- A close win feels like a loss as the characters are permanently weakened, only a curbstomp battle feels like a good achievement that benefits the characters.

I am not saying that this idea is horrible in general, there are ways to make it somewhat work. But it is something that really should never been used at your table with your players. Your problems were basically unavoidable with this. It didn't occur to me when you first described it because i didn't know much about the players yet, but now it seems utterly obvious.