5e combat system too simple / boring?

[Jeff Albertson]

This is very interesting to hear. As I've designed fights throughout of the 10 or so months of my DMing career, its gotten easier to design flashier tactically interesting fights, but I don't think I have a clear idea of how to repeat it with success. I play on Roll20 and run on a grid, so I usually design maps beforehand. Do you have some sort of methodology when designing these set piece battles to ensure they become incredible fights? I put in environment effects and different elevations but its a fine line to walk. You want to provide interesting decisions to players while not frustrating them with overly punishing environmental challenges that make for un-interesting gameplay.

Iserith doesn't really approach the game in a normal way, more of a tactical, skirmish, gameshow, board-game, scenario approach. They all seem to boil down to: Grab the cherry, and place it in the golden diaper, before the clock hits 12.

 

[Celtavian]

It's not clear to me if the weapons are in the room beyond this treant or in the same room. I'd probably put them in the same room, perhaps tangled up in its roots or high up in its branches. Small subchambers spread out in the room might also be good for this (like one weapon per room) or small mounds. This adds the exploration pillar to the challenge.

The weapons are hidden in a hidden vault. The treant rests on top of the vault. The key to open it is inside the treant. It is set up so the key cannot be stolen.

If the PCs can figure out a way to get the weapons and get out, then the damage output of the monsters effectively become a countdown to doom - linger and pay with blood. Get the weapons and flee and you have a better chance of survival. This is a good way for you to set aside any concern about the monster's damage output. One good hit will demonstrate the danger in slugging it out to the bitter end and, if your players are as savvy as you say, they'll modify their approach accordingly.

I want them to slug it out with the treant. No fun to make monsters if they don't fight them. My plan was to use this as a test run for monster design in 5E. That's why I want them to fight it. See if I could design a monster that was capable of an epic fight even with the action economy in their favor and all their special abilities being required for victory.

I still think the needle blights are the way to go. They're easier to dispatch individually or perhaps with an AOE, increase the action economy of Team Monster, and are a little more interesting than a couple of extra trees to fight. Two dozen or so ought to do it. If the thought of running 24 monsters is troubling, you could make it a swarm that degrades into 12 individual monsters when reduced to half hit points.

Needle Blights were used earlier in the module. A bunch of little cone attacks would be nasty.

I would probably limit the boulders to three and have the chamber be big enough where if the boulder is thrown at a PC at the edge of the chamber, then the treant has to move to recover a boulder. If the players are clever, they can get the boulders spaced out enough to where the treant can't use that throw rock Legendary Action.

My players like to leverage ranged power. I'd like to be sure to be able to match them if they do. Three boulders feels too limiting.

How much access to fire does the group have? What's your call on a PC lighting up his or her arrows? Does one of the druid weapons have some kind of "flaming" quality? I would probably put one of those in as a reward for engaging with the exploration pillar, provided you use the idea I mentioned above.

I think one sorc/rogue has fire bolt. The cleric of light has scorching ray and fireball. That will help. Most of the others are physical attackers. The bard is mostly a buffer.

When I see Siege Monster, I want to break stuff. I would give some serious thought to building the environment such that this becomes a thing. The Samson moment is cool and is a classic trope of the cavern/ruins crumbling after the BBEG goes down - the challenge of escaping the place before being cut to shreds might be a good finish.

Another idea might be to have the chamber be some kind of big thorny pit with the treant in the center and wooden platforms running from the door to a central platform that surrounds it and out to other chambers (perhaps where the weapons are stored). The treant generally stays put in the center, but it can smash the platforms the PCs are standing on, causing a fall. It can also smash the platforms that lead to the weapon chambers, complicating the PCs' efforts to reach them. This may also alleviate some of your concerns about its damage output since it isn't attacking PCs if it's attacking platforms.

I see the lair action as an environmental factor. There are a bunch of bushes and grass in the area that it causes to entangle people.

My main goal here is to try my method of creature building to see if I can build the type of creature that can go toe to toe with a 5E party and stand up to them with its own abilities. I don't want to use the environment or any other factors until I see if this creature can do it. So far the PCs have been steamrolling most encounters because they don't have the standard four PCs most monsters are built to challenge, we're using feats, and they are optimized. I have to figure out how to build a creature that can go toe to toe with them with those advantages.

I worked in environmental factors in some earlier encounters like chasme in a poisonous cloud on a high platform and needle blights in a hedge maze with the ability to move through the hedges like a teleport. I built them like Pathfinder Twigblights. This fight I want to be a challenge power on power. It will be interesting to see if I accomplished my goal.

 

[iserith]

This is very interesting to hear. As I've designed fights throughout of the 10 or so months of my DMing career, its gotten easier to design flashier tactically interesting fights, but I don't think I have a clear idea of how to repeat it with success. I play on Roll20 and run on a grid, so I usually design maps beforehand. Do you have some sort of methodology when designing these set piece battles to ensure they become incredible fights? I put in environment effects and different elevations but its a fine line to walk. You want to provide interesting decisions to players while not frustrating them with overly punishing environmental challenges that make for un-interesting gameplay.

Mostly I go with my gut (been at this a long time!), but I do try to include the opportunity for all three pillars to come into play during the challenge. Engaging with the exploration or social interaction pillars is at the players' option and usually rewards the players with things that make the challenge easier. Typically, the combat pillar is beyond deadly, by the official numbers anyway, and has a goal other than Kill All Monsters - though the players can do that if they wish. Sometimes the monsters have their own goals too, the achievement of which means the PCs lose.

I look at a monster's traits and abilities, then build the environment or goals around it. Thus, I cannot agree when posters suggest that D&D 5e monsters are lacking as written. They are inspirational enough to me at least to build fun challenges. You just can't stick them in a featureless white room and expect the challenge to be awesome. As someone said on Twitter regarding this part of the discussion, "They're throwing whole apples at a sack of flour and complaining that the pie is terrible. It's not a pie yet."

If you haven't already seen them, here is a link to some scenarios I created and posted that shows some of what I'm talking about.

 

[Celtavian]

Mostly I go with my gut (been at this a long time!), but I do try to include the opportunity for all three pillars to come into play during the challenge. Engaging with the exploration or social interaction pillars is at the players' option and usually rewards the players with things that make the challenge easier. Typically, the combat pillar is beyond deadly, by the official numbers anyway, and has a goal other than Kill All Monsters - though the players can do that if they wish. Sometimes the monsters have their own goals too, the achievement of which means the PCs lose.

I look at a monster's traits and abilities, then build the environment or goals around it. Thus, I cannot agree when posters suggest that D&D 5e monsters are lacking as written. They are inspirational enough to me at least to build fun challenges. You just can't stick them in a featureless white room and expect the challenge to be awesome. As someone said on Twitter regarding this part of the discussion, "They're throwing whole apples at a sack of flour and complaining that the pie is terrible. It's not a pie yet."

If you haven't already seen them, here is a link to some scenarios I created and posted that shows some of what I'm talking about.

The fact that you're using monsters beyond deadly with environmental challenges only confirms what we've all been saying: 5E monster are weak if you follow the guidelines for their use. That's the disconnect in this discussion between us. None of us are saying that you can't build a challenging fight in 5E. We're just saying that out of the box, the game is soft and the encounter guidelines don't provide the challenge befitting the name. This can go both ways with some creatures that are lower xp being much harder and some monsters that are higher xp being much easier. When compared to older editions, this one doesn't have the lethality for things like energy drain, critical hits, death saves, and the like. It's all built around hit point attrition even if you're a paralyzed guy laying on the ground.

D&D out of the box was always fairly soft with some outliers for missed saves outright killing you in older editions. 3E/Pathfinder CRs and encounter building guidelines weren't helpful. You had to build stuff to fit your party or they would get wasted. I had that system down. I could build encounters to fit what I wanted them to do very well. I don't have that kind of system mastery with 5E yet.

The the following analogy fits closer to my view, "Challenging experts with a game made for novices don't work." I've acknowledged that with 5E and started building my own stuff to get what done what I want to get done.

 

[iserith]

The fact that you're using monsters beyond deadly with environmental challenges only confirms what we've all been saying: 5E monster are weak if you follow the guidelines for their use. That's the disconnect in this discussion between us. None of us are saying that you can't build a challenging fight in 5E. We're just saying that out of the box, the game is soft and the encounter guidelines don't provide the challenge befitting the name. This can go both ways with some creatures that are lower xp being much harder and some monsters that are higher xp being much easier. When compared to older editions, this one doesn't have the lethality for things like energy drain, critical hits, death saves, and the like. It's all built around hit point attrition even if you're a paralyzed guy laying on the ground.

D&D out of the box was always fairly soft with some outliers for missed saves outright killing you in older editions. 3E/Pathfinder CRs and encounter building guidelines weren't helpful. You had to build stuff to fit your party or they would get wasted. I had that system down. I could build encounters to fit what I wanted them to do very well. I don't have that kind of system mastery with 5E yet.

The the following analogy fits closer to my view, "Challenging experts with a game made for novices don't work." I've acknowledged that with 5E and started building my own stuff to get what done what I want to get done.

I think the expectation that the monsters on their own, out of the box, should be engaging and challenging is folly and has never really been the case in any edition of D&D in my experience. The challenge and engagement is about more than just the monsters' stat blocks and CR has never been a reliable gauge of difficulty. Advice given in DMGs generally suggests giving thought to the goals, environment, and other factors that contribute to a good challenge. Given this, I wonder where this expectation some posters have come from.

 

[ChrisCarlson]

That treant encounter earlier looked pretty easy actually. At least for me and my group it would be. Because we are so epically tactical and always make sure our party is designed optimally, and under the understanding that we require every base and contingency to be not only coverable, but easily manhandled. We could probably take that encounter down with four 3rd-level PCs, to be honest. No sweat. But that's just because we are so awesome...

 

[Tony Vargas]

I think the expectation that the monsters on their own, out of the box, should be engaging and challenging is folly and has never really been the case in any edition of D&D in my experience... CR has never been a reliable gauge of difficulty ... I wonder where this expectation some posters have come from.

They may have had a different experience than you did with one or more editions. You're right that CR has not been a reliable gauge of difficulty, but, technically, only 3.x/PF and 5e ever used CR, and they've proven notoriously poor at gauging difficulty of encounters. Classic D&D may also have required more art than science in encounter-design (if it could even be said to have a concept of encounter-design), but had HD, exp values, and grouped some monsters together in tables by monster-summoning-spell-level or dungeon-level or the like, providing a very rough guide, but no CR. 4e assigned monsters a level/exp-value and it's level-treadmill made them fairly tight fits to that level, but it had no CR (CR would have been a combination of level + secondary role into a single statistic obscuring both those components - and you can see how that'd've been a poor guide - for instance, it'd've made a 1st level solo and 10th level standard the same CR).

 

[Jester David]

They may have had a different experience than you did with one or more editions. You're right that CR has not been a reliable gauge of difficulty, but, technically, only 3.x/PF and 5e ever used CR, and they've proven notoriously poor at gauging difficulty of encounters.
...
4e assigned monsters a level/exp-value and it's level-treadmill made them fairly tight fits to that level, but it had no CR (CR would have been a combination of level + secondary role into a single statistic obscuring both those components - and you can see how that'd've been a poor guide - for instance, it'd've made a 1st level solo and 10th level standard the same CR).

CR is a term for gauging the difficulty of a monster. Level is a term for gauging the difficulty of a monster. Level and CR are effectively the exact same thing. A rose by any other name.
You could replace "Challenge Rating" in 5e with "Monster Level" and the system would work exactly the same. And you could replace "Level" in 4e with "CR" with identical results.
The name has no effect on balance or the effectiveness of a mechanic.

Pretty much the only reason they went with CR over level is because of fractional monsters at low levels. A 1/8 level monsters is odd. And starting at 1 rather than 1/8 would have the oddity of level 1 PCs regularly facing level 3 or 4 monsters.

 

[Tony Vargas]

CR is a term for gauging the difficulty of a monster. Level is a term for gauging the difficulty of a monster. Level and CR are effectively the exact same thing.

Nope, they're really not, at least, not consistently across editions. A monster in AD&D might or might not have had a 'level' assigned to it, and it might have been a level based on the dungeon-level it was expected to appear, or the level of spell that could summon it, or the number of HD it had, or whatever. It might have had 3 or more different effective levels for different purposes - or no discernible level, at all. A 4e 11th-level solo was a very different challenge from an 11th-level minion, and intentionally so. It's true that the 4e level treadmill made monster level a strong indicator of the level of party that could be challenged by that monster, but it wasn't CR, and it wasn't, by itself, enough to design encounters - secondary role also had to come into it. So, even though that system may have worked, it's not technically an example of CR working.

It may well be where some folks got the expectation that CR should work, but, when you think about the latitude 5e gives DMs, not just to change the game if they want to, but in running the game, at all, it's obvious there's no way for a simple statistic like CR to provide any but the roughest of guidelines.

 

[Jester David]

Nope, they're really not, at least, not consistently across editions. A monster in AD&D might or might not have had a 'level' assigned to it, and it might have been a level based on the dungeon-level it was expected to appear, or the level of spell that could summon it, or the number of HD it had, or whatever. It might have had 3 or more different effective levels for different purposes - or no discernible level, at all.

I didn't mention AD&D.
And I imagine the over use of the term "level" was likely why they went with "CR" in 3e.

A 4e 11th-level solo was a very different challenge from an 11th-level minion, and intentionally so. It's true that the 4e level treadmill made monster level a strong indicator of the level of party that could be challenged by that monster, but it wasn't CR, and it wasn't, by itself, enough to design encounters - secondary role also had to come into it. So, even though that system may have worked, it's not technically an example of CR working.

It wasn't exactly the same no. That's nitpicky.
But at it's heart, the 4e level system and the 3e/5e CR system were about determining the appropriate challenge of monsters. You can look at a level 5 monster and a CR 5 monster and know they're appropriate for a level 5 party, easy for a level 6 party, and harder for a level 4 party. Give or take.

4e could have easily (easily) had CR11 solo and CR11 minions. The reason they didn't was because the CR system was so-so in 3e, and just changing the name made it more accepted. It's pure perception.

It may well be where some folks got the expectation that CR should work, but, when you think about the latitude 5e gives DMs, not just to change the game if they want to, but in running the game, at all, it's obvious there's no way for a simple statistic like CR to provide any but the roughest of guidelines.

True... but I could say the same thing about "level" in 4e. If I change and house rule the game, level just provides a rough guideline.
And from what I've heard (and experienced) of 4e, level was a pretty rough guide of the challenge of encounters as well. My party ripped through some pretty hard encounters with high level crap.