D&D 5E Encounter Balance holds back 5E

[Ruin Explorer]

What I'm saying is that 5E's focus on encounter balance gets in the way of creating more vivid and varied games because of the lack of tools and the created play culture which generally colors within the lines as opposed to outside. YMMV.

I don't see any evidence to support the claim re: "created play culture". What would you point to here?

My experience is to the contrary. That if anything, most people either:

A) Totally don't understand encounter balance guidelines and de facto ignore them as a result.

B) Intentionally don't use them.

I don't think I've ever seen a 5E game I could honestly say I felt had a "focus on encounter balance" aside from those I've run myself and even those I'm not 100% on!

One of the ways a TTRPG teaches you how it intends to be played is by what appears in it's published adventures. Focusing on WotC 5e, are there examples in its adventures of unbalanced encounters, in the sense that not every encounter is meant to be a combat victory for the PCs?

Whilst I can't cite examples I would strongly suggest there are an awful lot of encounters in official adventures that are balanced in ways that run contrary to the actual 5E encounter balance guidelines. Whether there are any which "aren't intended to be a combat victory" is a harder question, because it requires either an authorial statement to that effect, psychic powers, or an encounter that's truly insanely out-of-whack, and not just "a bad idea" - and such encounters would usually have an authorial statement. Also, you can go through adventures all the way back to 2E (and even a lot of 1E) and it's obvious that most adventures will only feature encounters look like they are "intended to be combat victories", so suggesting this is a 5E-specific trait as the OP does would be strange.

Actually, that goes all the way back to at least AD&D - the "level" entry in monsters in the FF & MM2. Both 1E/2E and B/X had the unspoken idea that HD roughly equated to level (with B/X adding "*" to account for special abilities that made them more dangerous).

Yeah it's nothing new.

*Personally, I'm hoping that in the new Vecna adventure, they make the final confrontation with Vecna impossible to beat by fighting him directly. Because someone will find a way, or more likely players will be forced to put on their thinking caps and up an alternate solution to thwarting him.

This is a flagship WotC official adventure intended to sell to the maximum-sized mass-market.

It's quite likely you won't fight Vecna in a straight-up dust-up, but there's absolutely no chance WotC is going to ask people to "put on their thinking caps" and "come up with an alternate solution". There isn't a solitary example of WotC asking players to do that in any official adventure in any WotC edition that I'm aware of, and it's certainly not going to be in a flagship adventure like this, because all that will happen is WotC will get tons and tons of complaints about how they "didn't put in a way to defeat Vecna", and not just from players. It'll probably just involve some MacGuffin or a few MacGuffins used in some relatively straightforward way that it would take a really spectacularly silly/foolhardy party to not "get". And then there may still be a combat with a "de-powered" Vecna or the like.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Also, are we really considering 5e CR to be encounter balance? There's more accuracy in an appraisal of a princess cut diamond as done by a 5 year old.

 

[GMMichael]

What I'm saying is that 5E's focus on encounter balance gets in the way of creating more vivid and varied games because of the lack of tools and the created play culture which generally colors within the lines as opposed to outside. YMMV.

I'm pretty sure it's the game's general focus on combat that does this, not just the encounter balance.

I want to clarify to everyone reading I stated in my post that none of what I said is WotC literally binding how people play.

Yeah, that sounds illegal. And would make it hard to roll a d20.

Who says you can't do all these things? The DMG (I'm pretty sure!) actually suggest these types of "solutions" or encounters. I agree that the books don't tell a DM or player how to be creative, because there are just too many ways to do this.

The last DMG I bought, printed in 2000, uses a good deal of words discussing topics outside combat. That being said, the "Running the Game" chapter is mostly about combat... so it probably should have been called "Running Combat."

This is one of the primary reasons I don't run 5e anymore: you can't predict how dangerous encounters are going to be.

PCs can't predict. The DM can predict this every single time.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Also, are we really considering 5e CR to be encounter balance? There's more accuracy in an appraisal of a princess cut diamond as done by a 5 year old.

Absolute truth.

5E is only better than 3E, CR-wise, in that 3E's CR was actively misleading, like if you used it, you'd get much worse results than by eyeballing, especially at higher levels. Whereas 5E's CR is, like, on-par with eyeballing, and if a monster has a surprisingly high CR you might want to double-check what abilities it has.

 

[LordEntrails]

Responding to the bolded, it couldn't be just one tool, ideally 3-4 tools would give a robust enough toolkit to cover the breadth of ideas inherent to 5E.

Yes, multiple tools are needed. The DMG already provides several. Such as;
DMG Chapter 3, especially Complications & Creating Encounters
DMG Chapter 4, esp. Designing NPCs
DMG Chapter 5, esp. Wilderness Survival, Hazards, and Urban Encounters
DMG Chapter 6, esp. Downtime Activities
DMG Chapter 8, esp. Ability Checks, the part about Contests along with Resolution and Consequences. And of course you can't ignore Social Interaction or the section on Roleplaying.

Again, I will state that there are lots of tools and direction provided by WotC, but it's easier to ignore than to dive in and comprehend what is being said in these chapters. Combat is simple and straightforward. Imaginative play and roleplaying are hard for lots of people.

So, which of these tools do you find lacking? How would you improve them? Which tools would you add?

 

[Warpiglet-7]

So I see the CR discussion. When we get to random encounters there is some helpful language…
————————
Random encounters need not be level-appropriate challenges….it's considered bad form to slaughter a party using a random encounter, since most players consider this ending to be an unsatisfying one.

Not all random encounters with monsters need to be resolved through combat.

…..but the characters should have the
option to hide or bargain for their lives if the dragon spots them
—————————————

Of note, this is in relation to random encounters. I do not see such language related to standard ones!

Perhaps this should have simply been applied to all combat encounters? Maybe this is again a layout/formatting choice that was not optimal?

I wager this will be changed in the new DMG

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The DM can predict this every single time.

Nah.

The DM can guess/eyeball, and the DM can use the CR system. But the CR system 5E uses is not great. Like I said in another post, it's much better than 3.XE's one, which was actively misleading, in that the power disparity between two CR 10 enemies could be absolutely insane - like one could potentially wipe the party in round 1, another would barely do significant damage, best case, and that compounded with the game insanely and flatly incorrectly just going by PC level and number, not PC class, in an edition where there was truly gigantic disparity of power between classes.

5E has far less disparity in class power. In 5E If the worst class/subclass combo is say, 6.5/10, the best is 10/10, where in 3.XE it was more like 2/10 vs 13/10 (once PrCs etc. got involved). 5E also has a less insane approach to rating enemy power, and doesn't let you slide in fully classed PC-style NPCs and then give you wildly incorrect CRs for them (AFAIK). But 5E does pretend magic items don't exist and avoids factoring them in, even though realistically, most groups will have them.

So you get a better result than that, but predict? No. 5E is swingy. Especially below level 10 or so, but even above it doesn't entirely vanish. 5E's CR system is not perfect. There is variation in class/subclass power. The wilful blindness to magic items means you have to basically crank encounters up and down for that with very little, if any, guidance. 4 weaker PCs with no magic items will fit better with the default CR guidelines than 4 stronger ones with even a "normal" number of magic items, let alone even slightly above that.

4E did a vastly better job if balance is what you want. In 4E, once the monster math was corrected, it was genuinely possible to predict things very well, as long you were following guidelines, and no PCs used truly broken charop.

 

[LordEntrails]

The last DMG I bought, printed in 2000, uses a good deal of words discussing topics outside combat. That being said, the "Running the Game" chapter is mostly about combat... so it probably should have been called "Running Combat."

I disagree, having just skimmed through this whole chapter twice now for other posts in this thread. At least half of this chapter is not directly related to combat. Sure, Visibility Outdoors is needed for combat, but it's also needed for exploration and to preface a social encounter as well. Almost every other section (~25) falls into being needed for a non-combat pillar except for; Attack Rolls, Combat, Combining Game Effects, Improvising Damage, Adjudicating AoEs, Handling Mobs, Adj Reaction Timing, & Siege Equipment.

Maybe Combat is what you took out of that chapter, but it really is not it's focus.

 

[LordEntrails]

Nah.

<snip>

4E did a vastly better job if balance is what you want. In 4E, once the monster math was corrected, it was genuinely possible to predict things very well, as long you were following guidelines, and no PCs used truly broken charop.

"Predict" does not mean perfect. At least not to me. the 5E CR system "predicts" the difficulty, but it's not perfect. YEs 5E is swingy, hence why something less than an absolute is needed.

I guess, to me predict means 65% or so accuracy. I think my local weather forecaster would be happy with 65% accuracy

 

[DEFCON 1]

Anyone who believes no one ever thinks about or cares about encounter balance has completely missed the hundreds of threads here over the last decade decrying the "5-6 encounters per day between long rests" supposed rule the game has and which has balanced itself around. Not to mention all the people who have been clamoring for "better CR rules". These complaints have been all over the place here, and even during all the talk regarding the playtest the concern about "combat balance" was done time and time and time again with all manner of people here white-rooming the new playtest rules WotC gave us to look at to make sure everything was "balanced" (even when WotC straight up TOLD us that the rules were not designed "balanced" for us because they do that separately).

Sure, a few of you can sarcastically joke that the CR building rules aren't actually rules cause they don't work (and I'd agree you would for the most part be right about that)... but the fact that they exist at all AND so many people have gotten so bent out of shape about them and the 5-6 encounters before a long rest thing tells us that @Shardstone isn't wrong that a lot of players have that combat-centric system in the front of their mind while building their games.

If some folks here can and do ignore CR and just build stories that you think are cool... that's awesome! I nod appreciatively. But there are lot of people who don't do that... who treat D&D like it's a board game to make sure everyone has an equal chance to "win" and anything that doesn't give people an equal shot is something to get up in arms about (like the Wizard class for those posters who know who they are, LOL)... hopefully they will slowly but surely start to move away from the rigid ideas that they sometimes appear to have when it comes to combat and its balance.