damn, my players shredder through an ancient white dragon tonight with 4 critical attacks.

it sucks because i want to have stuff that actually challenges them, but on the off chance that they roll a bunch of critical failures instead and just don't hit something, then they will get the floor wiped with them instead.

high level d&d is insanely volatile. i kind of feel like at a certain point, you should just stop giving your monsters (bosses in particular) HP values at all and just wait for a good moment to have them die.

they fight an ancient red dragon as the next boss, but what am i supposed to do in order to balance an encounter like that? if i increase anything on an ancient red and they don't hit it a few times in a round, then they'll get throttled. if i don't do anything, and they get 4 nat 20s again, then my dragon gets throttled.