Originally Posted by
Talakeal
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.