D&D 5E What a DM has to do in 5E

[Lokiare]

As a side question, why did you not limit your spells/magic items and give the players free reign in 3.5? Almost every instance I see of people having trouble with 3.5 is the GM not restricting things. Instead of having to deal with these over powered things, why give the players access to them in the first place if it was going to ruin your game or make it very very hard for you to manage?

You're kidding right? There are super broken combos right out of the 3.5E core books. Just look them up. Here is a quick example: Scry, Teleport / Without Error, Finger of Death or Phantasmal Killer (preferably with their DC pumped up with magic or magic items to the point of not having a chance to save against it).

Personally I don't want to have to read every book and do a bunch of exploratory math on every supplement and every spell (some in the core game) to tell the players whether they can play it or not. That's not my job as a player, that's WotC's job as a company that is providing the game for us to play.

As to the 5 minute work day, Yes, we already acknowledged that the DM could mitigate it using story means such as random encounters, time limits, other adventurers, monster ambushes (despite them not doing that in the first place), etc...etc... That's actually what this thread is about "The DM will have to deal with this".

Oh and I run between 1 and 7 encounters in a day in 4E, my players never know what they are going to get and rarely complain about being out of daily powers. In fact the great limiter in my games is healing surges running out long before they use their dailies.

 

[DMZ2112]

As to the 5 minute work day, Yes, we already acknowledged that the DM could mitigate it using story means such as random encounters, time limits, other adventurers, monster ambushes (despite them not doing that in the first place), etc...etc... That's actually what this thread is about "The DM will have to deal with this".

I think my point is that it's not something the dungeon master "has to deal with." It's something the players have to deal with, as part of the game they are playing. The tone of this thread, whether purposeful or not, is that these things the dungeon master "has to deal with" are design flaws. And I refute that. It's not a problem, it's working as intended. It always has.

Yes, the players might decide to rest after the very first encounter of the adventure. They might also decide not to search for traps in the Corridor of Death, or disintegrate a miniboss before he can give away the identity of the big bad, or not find the secret door to the third level despite you having a goblin open and shut it in front of them repeatedly while singing "Hello! Ma Baby." Players ruin s**t, it's what they do. Dungeon masters don't "have to deal with" that -- it's what being a dungeon master MEANS.

Oh and I run between 1 and 7 encounters in a day in 4E, my players never know what they are going to get and rarely complain about being out of daily powers. In fact the great limiter in my games is healing surges running out long before they use their dailies.

As I would expect them to, given what I know about the D&D4 RAW and its focus on resource management. Seven encounters per extended rest in D&D4 just seems unfair, unless you are balancing each encounter at 4/7 strength, in which case you're defeating the purpose...

 

[Mistwell]

monster ambushes (despite them not doing that in the first place),

They don't do it in the first place because they don't know invaders are in their lair. Once they know, they do that. You keep acting like this is going against the natural flow of the game. Having them not react like intelligent beings would go against the natural flow of the game. This really is a feature, not a bug. It's not a video game where you enter a new zone and then escape back to a safe zone - you're in the "house" of intelligent humanoids, and you just killed some of their family and friends, and now you're camping out in their living room and assuming they won't do as sneaky and nasty stuff as they can to retaliate or defend themselves. You're acting like those natural responses are somehow the DM having to "artificially" react to a game rule, or like it's some sort of dirty trick by the DM, when none of that is the case. If you camp in the living room of a house full of monsters some of which you just killed, they're going to do nasty things back at you even while you're camping. That's not an artificial reaction to rules or a dirty trick - that's just a believable setting.

Tell you what, why don't you smack a hornet hive with a bat so hard your arm hurts, and then sit there and wait until your arm feels better enough to give it another thwack, and tell me what the hornets do while you're resting.

 

[DMZ2112]

you're in the "house" of intelligent humanoids

Isn't that a Korean horror flick? 지능형 인간형위 집. Freaking terrifying.

 

[Sadras]

You're kidding right? There are super broken combos right out of the 3.5E core books. Just look them up.
Personally I don't want to have to read every book and do a bunch of exploratory math on every supplement and every spell (some in the core game) to tell the players whether they can play it or not. That's not my job as a player, that's WotC's job as a company that is providing the game for us to play.

That is fair but let us examine which rules you did not use from the core PHB:
Rolling 4d6 for ability scores?
Arcane Spell Failure and Armour?
Adding Second Classes - making Training a requirement?
XP Penalties for Multiclass Characters?
Access to Skills (training)?
Cost of Item Creation (Raw Materials, XP, Time...etc)?
Armour for Unusual Creatures?
Spellbooks (limitation of 100 pages, each spell takes up 1 page per spell level)?
Carrying Capacity?
Concentration checks?
Spell Components?
Spell Preparation (Rest, Prep Environment, Prep Time)?
Spells Copied from Another's Spellbook or a Scroll?
Replacing and Copying Spellbooks?

The less of the above you decide to include, the easier you make it for the spellcasters.

And then there is the consideration of your setting. WoTC provides all the spells, however broken you believe them to be, which they might, I do not deny that they are not, your setting sets a precedent for the type of magic that will be wielded within the campaign. WoTC tests the materials up to a point, and sure they make mistakes, but they do not test every single magic setting with the exclusion of half their rules.
I feel that a lot of 'problems' with the spellcasters could have been mitigated if the extensive rules about magic were included by most groups.

 

[Mistwell]

Isn't that a Korean horror flick? 지능형 인간형위 집. Freaking terrifying.

I think it was called 오크와 파이의 집, but the translation might be off.

 

[Lokiare]

I think my point is that it's not something the dungeon master "has to deal with." It's something the players have to deal with, as part of the game they are playing. The tone of this thread, whether purposeful or not, is that these things the dungeon master "has to deal with" are design flaws. And I refute that. It's not a problem, it's working as intended. It always has.

Yes, the players might decide to rest after the very first encounter of the adventure. They might also decide not to search for traps in the Corridor of Death, or disintegrate a miniboss before he can give away the identity of the big bad, or not find the secret door to the third level despite you having a goblin open and shut it in front of them repeatedly while singing "Hello! Ma Baby." Players ruin s**t, it's what they do. Dungeon masters don't "have to deal with" that -- it's what being a dungeon master MEANS.

Yes, so you agree the DM has to adjudicate it. Glad we are on the same page. Saying "Its the DMs job." doesn't negate the fact that the DM is going to have to do it. This thread is about what the DM has to do. That's one of those things. Unless the DM doesn't have to do it? I don't think that's the point you are making.

As I would expect them to, given what I know about the D&D4 RAW and its focus on resource management. Seven encounters per extended rest in D&D4 just seems unfair, unless you are balancing each encounter at 4/7 strength, in which case you're defeating the purpose...

Yeah, actually RAW all of the encounter stuff in the DM guide is all suggestions to tell you what is balanced against a party and how much to expect. having the occasional 7 encounters per day is well within the RAW.

They don't do it in the first place because they don't know invaders are in their lair. Once they know, they do that. You keep acting like this is going against the natural flow of the game. Having them not react like intelligent beings would go against the natural flow of the game. This really is a feature, not a bug. It's not a video game where you enter a new zone and then escape back to a safe zone - you're in the "house" of intelligent humanoids, and you just killed some of their family and friends, and now you're camping out in their living room and assuming they won't do as sneaky and nasty stuff as they can to retaliate or defend themselves. You're acting like those natural responses are somehow the DM having to "artificially" react to a game rule, or like it's some sort of dirty trick by the DM, when none of that is the case. If you camp in the living room of a house full of monsters some of which you just killed, they're going to do nasty things back at you even while you're camping. That's not an artificial reaction to rules or a dirty trick - that's just a believable setting.

Tell you what, why don't you smack a hornet hive with a bat so hard your arm hurts, and then sit there and wait until your arm feels better enough to give it another thwack, and tell me what the hornets do while you're resting.

So intelligent creatures don't prepare ahead of time for invaders or in the first 5 minutes when the party invades? That's not very realistic...

 

[Mistwell]

So intelligent creatures don't prepare ahead of time for invaders or in the first 5 minutes when the party invades? That's not very realistic...

They do, but not nearly as well as they prepare for a known invader already sitting in their house. Much like I lock my door and set an alarm every night, but if there is an actual invader in my house I call for help and flee, or I try and trap them where they are, or I try and attack them in a way that won't get me killed.

Once you know where someone is at, and that they are hostile, you can do a lot more to prepare than you can prior to that. Because the things you do to deal with an invader are not conducive to everyday living. In everyday living you sleep sometimes - but not if there is an invader in your house. In everyday living the various people who live in a big house might be in many different rooms at any given time doing normal things like eating or washing clothing, but not when they know there is an invader in the house, then they gather together and grab their weapons and set a watch. In everyday living a fire in your house, or a big trap, or breaking down walls, isn't so convenient for moving around and using your house, but it's often useful for dealing with an invader bent on killing you. In everyday living waiting around in shadows all day for someone to come along means you're not getting anything done that you would normally be doing - but when an invader is in your house that's a good use of your time.

So yes, intelligent creatures don't prepare all the time, in the same way they'd prepare if they already know an invader is in their house.

As for the first five minutes, that depends on whether they hear or are alerted to the presence of the invader during that time. Often they are not aware - but they're told later, when someone who was just attacked and fled has time to run and tell them, or else when they casually enter that area of the house and see the slaughter, or if someone they were supposed to meet doesn't show up and they go looking for them. The more time goes by, the more likely the rest of the house finds out there is an invader, and they react appropriately as I described above.

 

[pemerton]

Does anyone else think the "five-minute workday" is a feature, not a bug?

<snip>

Does anyone really believe that the Tomb of Horrors, or the Temple of Elemental Evil, or the crash site in the Barrier Peaks were meant to be crawled through in four-encounter chunks, leaving the dungeon after each one? For that matter, does anyone believe that they were meant to be conquered entirely in a single day?

No! You fight until you are tired, and then you make a judgment.

Personally I think it's a bug, because in a system with asymmetric resources across PCs it overpowers those players whose PCs are able to nova.

ToH and its cousins aren't, in my view, a counterexample to this: rather, they exemplify it!

The only thing that matters in encounter design is in-universe reason.

This isn't a very big constraint, because the "universe" in question is an authored one. Are the NPCs too sick, tired, or distracted to mount a manhunt? Do their gods send them precognitive visions warning of the PCs' pending assault? Etc etc. These sorts of things, all of which make a tremendous difference to "in-universe" responses and encounters, are at the discretion of the GM.

In my 4e campaign, after the PCs killed the alien being who was holding the Raven Queen to ransom in exchange for keeping her name secret, they encountered some "friends" of that being (starspawn) trying to trade her name to angels of Vecna. Was there an in-universe reason? Yes. But suppose the PCs had had no daily powers and no healing surges left, would I have framed that encounter? Probably not - in that alternative universe, the stars take a little longer to get in touch with Vecna's agents.

For me, if the designers expect the game to be indifferent to the ratio of ingame action to player resource recovery, they should make sure that no player has any significant and systematic advantage over any other player in varying that ratio one way or the other. Otherwise, the game gives rise to needless balance-of-power disputes between the nova-ers and the others. (Of versions of D&D, 4e comes closest to that. But it's possible to have more symmetric player resouces in an RPG than 4e does.)

 

[Lokiare]

They do, but not nearly as well as they prepare for a known invader already sitting in their house. Much like I lock my door and set an alarm every night, but if there is an actual invader in my house I call for help and flee, or I try and trap them where they are, or I try and attack them in a way that won't get me killed.

Once you know where someone is at, and that they are hostile, you can do a lot more to prepare than you can prior to that. Because the things you do to deal with an invader are not conducive to everyday living. In everyday living you sleep sometimes - but not if there is an invader in your house. In everyday living the various people who live in a big house might be in many different rooms at any given time doing normal things like eating or washing clothing, but not when they know there is an invader in the house, then they gather together and grab their weapons and set a watch. In everyday living a fire in your house, or a big trap, or breaking down walls, isn't so convenient for moving around and using your house, but it's often useful for dealing with an invader bent on killing you. In everyday living waiting around in shadows all day for someone to come along means you're not getting anything done that you would normally be doing - but when an invader is in your house that's a good use of your time.

So yes, intelligent creatures don't prepare all the time, in the same way they'd prepare if they already know an invader is in their house.

As for the first five minutes, that depends on whether they hear or are alerted to the presence of the invader during that time. Often they are not aware - but they're told later, when someone who was just attacked and fled has time to run and tell them, or else when they casually enter that area of the house and see the slaughter, or if someone they were supposed to meet doesn't show up and they go looking for them. The more time goes by, the more likely the rest of the house finds out there is an invader, and they react appropriately as I described above.

Realistically if the party wasn't doing silence 10' radius in every room they engage in combat, its really likely that the rest of the dungeon is going to know they are there. So the logical thing for them to do would be to set up ambushes and try to come at the party in force.

I once set up a dungeon like this where every time the party engaged in combat without trying to do it silently each adjacent room or encounter would roll to see if they hear, and if they did they would converge on the party, and they would send a scout out to warn everyone in the complex about what was going on. That's realistically what would happen. However that is not how most dungeons are set up. Most of them are set up with each room separate and the monsters unaware they are being invaded.

Try it sometime. Set up a protocol and some perception (listen) checks for nearby rooms and then have them all gank the party when they engage in combat. See how fast that lasts before you have a few dead party members. It will likely turn into an epic battle where just as the party finishes off one group the next 2-3 groups have made it in to reinforce.

(The DC for a listen check in 4E is 0. You add 1 per square distant to the sound. So most checks in that dungeon were around 15-17 which monsters of the level made easily due to +1/2 level added to their ability mod.)