D&D 5E I think I am going to stop using solo monsters.

The Crimson Binome · Mar 5, 2017

RCanine said:
Whut? That's only true if every familial interaction is both uninteresting and bad. Allow a noble player to tap their family for wealth and/or access and you counterbalance that sort of thing. At its core, D&D is a resource management game, and family is another resource.

If family was meant to be a resource which factored into the game, at that level, then it would have a mechanical interaction with those resources. For example, back in the 3.x era, there was at least one game which offered an "inheritance" feat that gave you cash from a family member having died; and I think Eberron had several chains of feats, and possibly a prestige class, which required certain family connections to take.

If you want to write up a whole sub-system for family resources, where each of various connections has some sort of codified benefits and drawbacks, then that's one thing. If you're just going to ad-hoc throw random benefits and drawbacks based on family, and the players have no way of knowing what to expect, then that's not a meaningful decision; and thus, it is not an aspect of the resource management.

Although, offering some mechanical incentive to have living family is still preferable to having no incentive for having family, as is typically the case with evil DMs who go out of their way to torture their NPCs.

dave2008 · Mar 5, 2017

Reynard said:
Last night we performed a little test in my 5E campaign. The party of 8 5th level PCs had acquired a collection of magic items that ended up being cursed by a demon (a marilith) and through the item she could spy on the party and even send demonic troops to attack them. They researched ways to lift the curse and opted to use the "summon her and kick her tail (heh) and get to keep the gear" over the "remove curse and lose the items" option.

Now, they were able to specify the time and place of the encounter and prepare in advance. They set up a magic circle and a few glyphs of warding, spending 800gp in the process. They summoned her into the circle which fired off the glyphs, creating clouds of daggers, and got a surprise round on her. She was destroyed before her first action. That is a CR16 creature.

I don't think solo creatures work with 5E at all. Every time I use a boss critter, even one with lair and legendary actions, the large party just runs over them, no matter how outmatched they are by the math. The action economy just does not work at that scale.

I think, therefore, I am going to adjust my encounter philosophy: bigger, more diverse groups where the "boss" critters aren't necessarily simply tougher but are the ones capable of wrangling such groups. I am also throwing out the CR system for 5E completely: it just does not work any better than simply eyeballing it, IMO.

Anyone have different experiences?

I feel your pain, but that is a horrible example. A marilith is not designed to be a challenge for 8 5th level pcs prepared to fight it in the scenario you described. You should have at least doubled its hit points and given it some legendary actions if you wanted it to be an interesting fight.

dave2008 · Mar 5, 2017

Ratskinner said:
This reminds me of some things I saw/heard of people doing in 4e. I wonder if it wouldn't make sense for a lot of solo creatures (particularly the big'uns) to be split into multiple units for combat purposes. A Dragon might be: Claws, Bite, Tail, and Breath Weapon, or (optional sneeze guard) wing buffet. Stat each one up as a critter with its own hp total. Do enough damage to the relevant body part and the dragon loses the ability to attack with it or use it. For movement, consider the dragon's "space" like a wagon that they all "ride" on. Perhaps they can each move it a few squares on their turn.

Just a thought.

I have down that with some of the epic monsters on my Epic Monster updates thread (the Primordials and Draeden use this concept). It is the monster in parts method. I only really think it is needed for really large creatures though. I think there are other methods to make boss fights interesting.

dave2008 · Mar 5, 2017

Saelorn said:
The major problem with this method is that you need to make each target worth attacking, which means it needs enough HP to divert a few attacks away from the main creature, but few enough that people would still want to bother attacking them. If you just stat up that each limb has 50 hit points, and don't bother to change the HP on its main body, then everyone will attack its body and it will die just as easily as always.

The key is that you make it in parts and when a part reaches 0 HP it isn't dead it is disabled (which causes some penalties to that part). Then you need a certain number of parts (or a particular combination) to be disabled to consider it dead. It doesn't work for every monster, and I don't think it is needed for every boss, there are lots of ways to make interesting monsters without it.

Saelorn said:
When this sort of topic comes up in the forums, it always comes with two caveats: 1) You're sticking to the challenge guidelines in the book; and, 2) Any new monster being created will still follow the general guidelines of the system. If you don't care about following those two limitations, then you can easily run solo monsters, by giving them way more HP than the book suggests or using monsters that are significantly higher level.

You can make each part following the system. So a CR 20 dragon is actually 3 CR 20 parts and the total dragon XP/HP/DPR = CR 20 x 3

The Crimson Binome · Mar 6, 2017

dave2008 said:
You can make each part following the system. So a CR 20 dragon is actually 3 CR 20 parts and the total dragon XP/HP/DPR = CR 20 x 3

If you're willing to break from the monster creation guidelines by modeling a single dragon as three separate monsters, then you could also just break from the guidelines by giving it three times as many HP. It's way faster, and it solves the fragility problem just as well.

dave2008 · Mar 6, 2017

Saelorn said:
If you're willing to break from the monster creation guidelines by modeling a single dragon as three separate monsters, then you could also just break from the guidelines by giving it three times as many HP. It's way faster, and it solves the fragility problem just as well.

A dragon was just an example, I don't use it for such mundane beasts personally. However, just adding hit points only solves the fragility problem while modeling it as 3 parts solves fragility, DPR, and action economy problems (though legendary actions help with action economy). If your only worried about fragility I wouldn't use the parts method.

Dausuul · Mar 6, 2017

dave2008 said:
A dragon was just an example, I don't use it for such mundane beasts personally. However, just adding hit points only solves the fragility problem while modeling it as 3 parts solves fragility, DPR, and action economy problems (though legendary actions help with action economy). If your only worried about fragility I wouldn't use the parts method.

People have taken the idea of "action economy" way too far. It's important to understand how much of a force multiplier it is; but the multiplier, while large, is finite, and the DM's resources are infinite. Sufficiently high numbers can counter any number of actions and absorb any amount of DPR.

Can your PCs dish out 200 points of damage a round? Give the monster 1000 hit points. Can they apply three save-or-lose effects per round at DC 19? Give the monster +10 in the relevant saving throws and 6 shots of Legendary Resistance. On offense, you don't have to keep piling on legendary actions, just crank up the damage on the actions the monster already has, until it's dishing out roughly one PC worth of hit points every round. Once you get a feel for what your party can do, you know what it takes to give them a fight; you just have to be willing to do it.

This knowledge brought to you by the broken bodies of PCs who went up against solo monsters in my campaigns.

UngeheuerLich · Mar 6, 2017

Giving monsters more hp to counter damage output will just make players optimize more... thrashkng an enrmy after such good preperation is okish. It is frustrating sometimes, I admit, but if you didn't spent hours to create your enemy, nothing bad happened.
I would rather think about how the enemy could easily be lured into that death trap.
Then you can pull out the old trick of making the fallen enemy only a subcommander and have a bigger enemy still out there.

FitzTheRuke · Mar 6, 2017

Reynard said:
Everyone had a blast, even me. It was great fun for sure, and watching my expectations evaporate was part of that fun (if you had asked me before the battle I would have said the PCs would win with 2 dead). I don't want to give the impression it wasn't fun or it made me hate 5e or anything. Rather, I came away with a clearer comprehension of just what a big party at the ready could do, especially with a master planner type player in the lead.

By the way -- some people are suggesting I reduce my number of players. I have 8 friends spread across the country able to get together to play D&D one a week on Fantasy Grounds. I am not giving that up for anything. That's why I say I am adjusting my DMing style to accommodate that group. As far as I am concerned having a big group excited about your game every week is the Holy Grail of DMing.

That's great! You just gotta remember... That's not a party, it's TWO parties.

MNblockhead said:
I'm not going to be able to give well thought-out crunchy observations and recommendations that many others in this thread have, but I've learned some things over the past two years of being a DM for players with FAR more experience in gaming than I, and comparing that to Adventure League games.

1. The game is designed for 4-6 players of casual players. It seems to go out of its way to not make things too deadly.

2. Experienced players will not be particularly challenged if you go by the DMG CR system, unless the dice are against them. Most AL games I've gone through would not be a challenge to my players. The only exception was the Epic game I played recently, which was brutal at tier one...but you are supposed to go begging higher tier tables for help in those games, so its a completely different experience.

3. I don't like to just give more hit points or more lair actions, etc., unless I'm building a new monster or there is a really good story reason for doing so. I like to play the game RAW. Instead, I've learned to try to put myself in the big bad's shoes. It is silly that so many powerful, sentient creatures, with strong wills to survive (especially those that are supposedly hundreds or thousands of years old), are so dumb in terms of preping their defenses.

4. With my players, I find that I still underestimate them. I will prep for a battle for a long time, worried that it is going to be a TPK and it rarely turns out that way. I keep the kid gloves off now. I have *finally* had some encounters where players have run away from, which is nice. The party shouldn't win every battle.

5. Sometimes, it is fun -- if you have the right players -- to build an opponent that so over powers the party that their goal isn't to defeat it, but instead to make a quick raid, or stealth in, grab a MacGuff'n and get out alive.

6. Always have some things in your random encounters that are undefeatable and require avoidance/escape. One, isn't that more realistic? The world doesn't level up with you like a video game. Also, if the party is used the occasionally having their buts kicked or having to say "oh HELL no! RUN AWAY!", even seemingly simply battles will be taken a little more seriously. If they know that you are not tailoring encounters to them using CR, they will learn to engage with care, preferably after some observation and analysis.

7. When you DO have a big bad that goes down "too easy", well maybe there is more to it. Maybe that demon they summoned was so easy to summon and trick because another demon was "helping" the party as part of some infernal power struggle. Not only do they now have an unknown infernal benefactor, perhaps the summoned and destroyed demon's superior is now pissed off at the party. I mean, come ON, you don't dabble in demonology and expect that you get away with attacking an officer without others in infernal hierarchy taking notice. The party is now either a threat to be crushed or a pawn to be used. Devils are are not scarry because each individual can do X damage per round, but because there is an ENTIRE HELL of these immortal mafia-nazis you might now have to worry about. Demons are scarry because of the hordes of power hungry eternal-psychopaths that want to see the world burn and your killing one of them may be part of that. A group of 5th level characters simply DO NOT KNOW WHAT THEY ARE GETTING THEMSELVES INTO when they start messing with demons and devils.

My groups has spent several months sneakingn around and avoiding an entire kingdom because they betrayed a Rakshasa. Sure, if they cornered him in a room, they would take him out without much sweat. But this is someone that has minions and spy networks and centuries of experience building and protecting his power, who commands armies, and plays neighboring kingdoms against each out. If they ever actually go after him and actually reach him, it would be anticlimatic. The challenge of killing Hitler is not the fight he would put up, its getting to him in the first place. Stop trying to make every big bad into a tarasque. The tarasque is one of the most borring monsters in D&D. You plink away at it until it dies.

The only way I've found making a bucket of hitpoints interesting is to have something at stake that make the party need to destroy it in a certain amount of time (before it reaches the capital city).

Sorry, I got long winded. In short, I think it is time another demon/devil approaches your party with a "deal they can't refuse."

GameOgre said:
I would have given it to them just like the OP did.

I mean they friggin summoned a Marilith! How cool is that? and had a great that a boy battle to! Heck yeah!

Now afterwards like 2 adventures latter I would start throwing massive almost overwhelming ambushes at them as Orcus or some other demon lord targeted them for termination! I mean come on they started a war with Hell itself!

Slap a curse on them, hound them with demons and devils. Maybe the most famous party member gets summoned by the demons! Turn about is fair play right? Have their families get killed off or become corrupted"Mom? Not you to mom? Noooooo!"

This is a DM's dream game.