Unearthed Arcana Unearthed Arcana Presents Alternative Encounter Building Guidelines

I gave up using the MM almost a year ago. It's a nice window piece at this point but the power-levels are absolutely idiotic when building an encounter at an y level and it just gets worse once you're past level 5. Almost every monster I throw at the party, from a level 1 bandit to a level 20 ancient dragon monk/sorcerer is redesigned from the ground up using the following metrics:
HP determines how long I want the fight to take against that mob.
AC determines how often I want my players to hit the mob.
DPR determines how high I want the stakes to be.

Everything else is fluff. Doesn't matter if its a dragon or a kraken or Bob from Accounting. And frankly, I've figured out one thing that every monster I design has in common: the monster design goals for 5E are completely bumpkis. Everything hits like a kitten, takes hits like a pothead and generally eats it in 5 rounds or less while providing no real threat to the party unless a whole friggen flight of dragons descends upon them backed up by a veritable army of kobolds, in which case I simply win by statistical chance (I'll crit more often than you will, aka: I win because math).

Maybe parties of bumbling idiots are still threatened by whatever WOTC had in mind, but I should hope that their design goals for 5E were not "Lets market this game to idiots!" Because really, marketing to noobs is fine, but you expect noobs to get better, idiots don't.

shidaku said:

Maybe parties of bumbling idiots are still threatened by whatever WOTC had in mind...

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Alternate explanation: there is a different expectation of what portion of the overall challenge of the game-play comes from an individual encounter.

AaronOfBarbaria said:

Alternate explanation: there is a different expectation of what portion of the overall challenge of the game-play comes from an individual encounter.

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I don't have the time or patience to assemble 6-8 encounters per "day" and frankly my players aren't interested in that sort of attrition-based gameplay. The implied assertion of your post (you're playing it wrong if you don't do what they say) only makes the situation worse. Games should be flexible. If the only way to get the mathematically expected outcome is to do one procedure one way then all we've done is make D&D less approachable by legitimizing badwrongfun.

shidaku said:

The implied assertion of your post (you're playing it wrong if you don't do what they say) only makes the situation worse.

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That's not my assertion, implied or otherwise. It's very odd that you took me saying "maybe we aren't idiots, we just play differently than you do" as some kind of accusation that you are playing wrong.

shidaku said:

Games should be flexible.

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The game is flexible. It works if you play it the way it is suggested to be played (I know, I've done it). It works if you play it completely differently, but acknowledge and adjust for the issues that arise because you are playing differently - such as by ignoring encounter building guidelines, giving the entire party young silver dragons to ride that are under the players control, and having the average day with combat only involve 1 or 2 combats that just happen to be with huge numbers or vastly higher CR than the party's level (I know, I've done it).

It even works if you throw out the whole monster manual and create your own monsters stats - or at least I believe you that it works when doing that, since I haven't tried it myself.

And it seems very hypocritical for you to claim that it takes "bumbling idiots" to enjoy playing the game differently than you do and then accuse me of calling someone's way to play badwrongfun.

You know what is totally not fun?
A perfectly balanced encounter.

You don't remember balanced encounters. Where there's the just right amount of challenge, but not so much you're at risk of death. When things go right, it's forgettable.
The memorable encounters tend to be unbalanced. The ones where you just steamroll over an enemy without a sweat, giving the opponents a humiliating pinkbelly before finishing them off with a wedgie. Or the encounters where you think you're going to die two or three times and bad luck keeps making things that little bit crazy.

When things get unpredictable, when you beat the seemingly impossible odds, when the game doesn't go smooth... that's when the game becomes memorable. Those are the times you'll sit around and recollect.

The article is a nice read and good food for thought. I've read it with gusto and pondered a few moments on it. Then someone in my head shouted "sandbox!" and blew it away...

unknowable said:

What math? it is a horror adventure that is meant to be crushing and overwhelming.

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I think this brings up an awesome point!

If "horror" is supposed to be actually scary, what better way than having most/only deadly encounters? The point would be not to fight, but to survive. A horror campaign would be all about avoiding combat, so pretty much the opposite of the traditional combat-heavy adventures. More generally, it would be about avoiding losing control of your PCs, not just because of death but also because of nasty effects which include transformations of both the body (penalties) and the mind (such as becoming mad or evil). "Winning" the adventure might still mean to destroy the BBEG, but not necessarily through combat, or it might mean something else such as to escape.

Otherwise, if a horror campaign is again about combat, what's the difference with a non-horror campaign? Slightly more gory descriptions?

callinostros said:

One of the biggest (to me) failures of 5E is the lack of a strong and intuitive encounter building system. This article didn't help in that regard.

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I'm just curious as to how many RPGs exist (outside of D&D 3e-5e and their clones) that have encounter building systems (regardless of being strong or intuitive).

Well, two out of three of the most recent RPGs I read have encounter guildelines: FFG's Star Wars and Shadowrun 5e. Ars Magica doesn't.

To be honest, this discussion makes me sad. Apparently, 5e didn't benefit from the lessons learned in 3e and 4e. Ah, well, it's unlikely I'll take another look at D&D before 6e, anyway.

shidaku said:

Maybe parties of bumbling idiots are still threatened by whatever WOTC had in mind, but I should hope that their design goals for 5E were not "Lets market this game to idiots!" Because really, marketing to noobs is fine, but you expect noobs to get better, idiots don't.

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Always problematic if the DM is less capable than the PCs. If the DM plays lurkers like brutes the Monsters Manual is of no help. In 4e at least the monsters hinted toward its use. Now you have to read the Text and maybe look at the skills and abilities.