D&D 4E Thing I thought 4e did better: Monsters

[pemerton]

I don't try to railroad my players at all. I try to leave things up to them as much as O can. However, there is going to be some form of narrative thread that must be followed to at least some extent. Not sure if that's a railroad or not.

<snip>

to use the Star Wars example I gave...I'd likely see what the players did as the closed on the Death Star and realized their peril. The tractor beam would likely be my way of forcing the issue of it seemed they were going to do something foolish or something like that. Perhaps a bit railroady....but sometimes it doesn't always have to be a negative.

<snip>

I think that in general, when I set things up like this, the threat is clear. They're closing in on the Death Star...they've created a hill to see an entire orc army. They've encountered rival adventurers who seem far more powerful than they are.

My goal is to leave such decisions in the players' hands. I present the info and they decide what to do with it. If they don't seem to realize then I'll add more comments to try and make it clear.

What counts as a railroad is prety table-sensitive. I'll respond to your post from my own perspective.

I see two main statements in your post, and to me they seem to be in tension.

(1) "I try to leave things up to [the players] as much as I can."

"My goal is to leave such decisions in the players' hands."

(2) "I'd likely see what the players did as the closed on the Death Star and realized their peril. The tractor beam would likely be my way of forcing the issue of it seemed they were going to do something foolish or something like that."

"[W]hen I set things up like this, the threat is clear. They're closing in on the Death Star...they've created a hill to see an entire orc army. They've encountered rival adventurers who seem far more powerful than they are."

"If they don't seem to realize then I'll add more comments to try and make it clear."​

(1) suggests that the situation with which the GM has confronted the players gives the players a choice to make.

(2) suggests that there is only one right answer (or, at lesat, some limited spectrum of right answers) to that choice - such that other responses would be foolish responses to a clear threat which the players need to realise. The GM knows what would count as a right or wrong answer, and the players are meant to realise this from the GM's description of the situation.

The tension that I see is that the presence of (2) makes (1) illusory. For instance, if attacking the Death Star is TPK, then in what sense is that a choice at all?

A possible reply: a bad move in chess, that opens me up to being checkmated, is still a choice that I make. But I don't think this is a very apt reply.

In chess, the whole situation of the game is a result of the interaction between my choices and those of my opponent, and winning or losing on the basis of those choices is the whole point of chess.

But in a D&D-style RPG, the GM doesn't have to play the game well to confront the PCs with the Death Star. S/he can do that by stipulation. So it becomes less a game of chess and more like a chess puzzle in a newspaper: the players encounter a situation that someone else has already configured, and have to work out what to do.

But how does this sort of puzzle work, in the context of an RPG? When it comes to the newspaper, I can keep trying unttil I solve it. Or, suppose that I only have my train commute to finish it (then I have to start work), if I don't get it done nothing happens, and I can still enjoy tomorrow morning's puzzle. But, in the RPG, what happens if the players can't solve the puzzle, or make the "foolish" choice? TPK and start over? And how often do we think it's good for the game to run that risk?

And the more the GM sets up flags and foreshadowings and makes things clear so that the "sensible" choice becomes obvious, then why bother presenting it as a player choice at all?

My own view as to how to handle these things is quite different: if the players want their PCs to attack the Death Star, let them! There must be a slim chance that they get lucky and send a torpedo down the right shaft and blow it up. And if, as seems more likely, they are defeated then they get taken prisoner, or tractor-beamed in anyway, or jettison themselves in pods, or whatever else.

In other words, coming at it from a higher level of abstraction, the stakes for picking an unwinnable fight don't have to be death and hence game over. And once the stakes are changed in this way, so that losing a conflict doesn't mean ending the game, what counts as a "foolish" choice can be decided by the players, relative to the priorities that they have set for their PCs, rather than by the GM in framing the encounter.

(I should add: none of the above is novel to or invented by me. I'm basically repeating the "indie" theory of RPGing found in games like Over the Edge, Burning Wheel, PbtA games like Dungeon World, etc. Those RPGs also take a different perspective on a 3rd statement in your post - (3) "there is going to be some form of narrative thread that must be followed to at least some extent." If (3) is true in a game, then the GM has to force outcomes somehow, or else how will the thread be followed? Hence (3), which is a statement about scenairo design and resolution, feed back into the minutiae of the framing/management of individual scenes. The "indie" RPGs reject (3), and hence its implications for how scenes are framed and managed. The "narrative thread" is whatever emerges from applying the resolution mechanics to the players declared actions for their PCs - which might include a failed (or even, miraculously, a successful) assault on the Death Star.)

 

[pemerton]

I want my players to think of the fictional world as closely to their characters as possible. I think when an army of orcs doesn't cause a PC to blink, or when several high level threats are easily defeated, that works counter to that goal.

Why?

If the PCs are demigods, or Beowulf-style "culture heroes", then why should an army of orcs make them blink? I remember 10th level fighters in my old AD&D game cutting there way through hundreds of orcs, with their 10 attacks per round that could miss only on a 1 and killed any orc they hit, while the orcs needed natural 20s to hit PCs wearing full plate+4 (AC in the low negatives even disregarding shield and DEX for the inevitable flank/rear attacks).

(The maths: with 8 attacks vs the fighter per round, that is 2 hits every 5 rounds for a total of 9 hp of damage. Which means the fighter can kill 190 orc in 20 rounds and take a bit more than 70 hp damage. Average hp for a 10th level fighter with 16 CON is 70.5, but stopping to drink a healing potion during the carnage will only cost 1 round of attacks, and restore about twice as many hp as are taken (on average) in that round.)

In my 4e game, the mid-paragon PCs took on phalanxes of hobgoblins (statted as swarms with actual number of soldiers kept narratively somewhat ambiguous, but at 9 or 16 sq somewhere between 20 and 40 of them). (unlike the AD&D game, this is a case of genre/fiction first, mechanics second - but the situation in the fiction is much the same.)

As long as the mechanics of the game are fairly transparent, the players should be able to tell whether or not they need to blink in the fact of an orc army, or a couple of dragons, or whatever.

If someone ignores the role-playing part (flavor, how would a monster act and behave, etc), and instead places the monsters down on the battlemap and literally treats them like game pieces, then they are in fact playing a board game. You cannot play a role playing game and ignore the role playing parts or else by definition it's not a roleplaying game. It's no different than playing Wrath of Ashardalon or something. However, that does not mean it's a pejorative label.

<snip>

pointing out how if you ignore the role-playing you're left with something more like a boardgame is neither good nor bad, it just is, by the definition of what role playing games are.

<snip>

it's important to realize that that is not how the game is designed nor expected to be played.

Telling people who describe themselves as RPGers, and who describe what they're doing as RPGing, that in fact they are boardgamers, and that in fact they are playing the game contrary to how it is designed or expected to be played, is absolutely pejorative.

It's also condescending, because it is setting yourself up as the arbiter of what counts as true RPGing, rather than trying to engage in a dicsussion among peers predicated on the recognition that people play RPGs in a range of ways (a range, furthermore, that these days, is pretty well-known).

If you want to play that way, knock yourself out

I've got more actual play posts/threads on these boards than most other regular posters (who, as far as I'm aware, typically have none). They cover my GMing of multiple systems (4e, BW, MHRP). As far as whether or not I can GM an RPG or my games are merely "boardgaming", I'd invite you to read a few and then get back to me (I've s-blocked some links for your convenience).

[sblock]Some tweaks to H2 Thunderspire Labyrinth
Time-travel with witches and spiders
An ancient temple
Combat-free session
Social-only session, and very pivotal for the campaign
More combat-free, with a moral twist
First dealing with Kas
Hobgoblins and Calastryx
Doppelgangers
Wizard reborn as invoker
Some downtime skill challenges
The underdark
Rescued by a duergar
The PCs “return the favour”
A purple worm
Entering Phaervorul (P2, scaled up)
Epic dreams
More adventures in Phaervorul
On the Barrens in the Abyss
In Mal Arundak
The Shrine of the Kuo-toa
The Soul Abattoir, and Torog
Into the Feywild
Frost giants
More frost giants
The Prince of Frost
Slaads
Githzerai
Confronting Lolth
Defeating Lolth
Sealing the Abyss
Defeating Orcus, then escaping through the Abyss
Arrival at the Mausoleum of the Raven Queen
Still fighting Kas and Jenna Osterneth
Inside the Mausoleum of the Raven Queen
Trying to hold off the end of the world by defeating the tarrasque[/sblock]Wanting monster mechanics that express the theme and narrative significance of a monster has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not a table is boardgaming. (As I think I mentioned upthread, T&T has some of the slimmest stat blocks around in FRPGing, but if you want RPGing that is pretty close to a game like Talisman then I think T&T is as good a vehicle as any.)

"I don't play the game as it was designed, but rather than me take ownership of that, I'm gonna say the game is broken and if you don't agree, then you're accusing me of badwrong fun and you're wrong for doing so!"

<snip>

We just had a thread by CaptZapp in the past week or so where a few people made these arguments.

some folks suggested that in order for the enemies to be the threats that they should be, they need to be run by the DM as such.

Other posters then literally said "I want X monster to be threatening as is" meaning tactics and environment should not matter. Which I can somewhat understand the sentiment...but I think this stance taken to the extreme is absurd. I mean, to be a threat, a creature must behave in some way, correct? So the DM must apply some tactics. Since that's the case already, why not simply try and make those tactics be effective?

<snip>

I am not even saying that playing the MM stars straight from the book with little else applied to an encounter is bad in and of itself. Just that to complain that higher level monsters are easily defeated when the DM certainly can do things to mitigate that seems a bit odd.

Why not make those tactics be effective?

My first answer is a genre one. In the real world, not all fighting is undertaken in means-end rational ways. For instance, many people - even very intelligent people - have regarded honour as important. (And therefore, for instance, might refrain from [MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION]'s cage match tactics of grappling a creature and holding it prone while stabbing it to death.) In the world of fantasy, this is even moreso. Conan does not always fight in the most rational or effective way, and he's a somewhat ruthless, rather modernist hero. For characters in JRRT-style romantic fantasy, considerations other than expedience are even more important.

Which takes me to my second answer. Within the fiction - given the above considerations of genre - not every creature wants to use effective tactics. A lich may wish to gloat over its victims, rather than simply kill them at long range with a curse. A dragon, convinced of its physical supremacy to all other earthly beings, might revel in that supremacy and disdain hiding behind a network of spies and a nest of koblods. Etc.

People who want to run games that evince these sorts of genre tropes aren't simply "playing the game differently from how it was designed". If D&D is designed to do anything, it is designed to support the basic genre tropes of S&S and romantic fantasy.

And experience shows it's not that hard to design a monster that, plonked down 100' or so from the party, can provide a reasonable challenge in a fisticuff confrontation. I think everyone recognises that an ogre or a minotaur would provide this sort of challenge to a 1st level AD&D party of 4 or 5 PCs - it will hit every second round or so and typically knock out or kill one PC per hit, while the PCs will probably get one or two hits per round at best and thus need probably 3 or 4 rounds to take the critter down. (I'm assuming pre-UA PCs in this example.) And there's no in-principle reason why this sort of thing can't be scaled up to higher-level PCs, although the parameters of scaling obviously extend beyond hp, AC, to hit numbers and damage.

If the GM wants to have some encounters be more subtle than that - with NPCs/monsters using cover, defence in depth, combined arms tactics etc - well nothing wrong with that either. But I personally don't feel that's the norm for the fantasy genre; and I think it would be a weakness in a FRPG (but not, say, a WWI RPG) if it made such tactics essential for being viable in combat.

I find the feigning ignorance to be disingenuous. Almost as much as your earlier post when you asked where did the expectations of always winning encounters coming from and immediately posting about how Gygax said encounters should be balanced for PCs to win. "I don't know where people got that idea from, now here's a quote of where people got that from."

Gygax didn't say that encounters should be balanced so the PCs "win" (by which I assume you mean - beat all their enemies in combat). He said that numbers appearing should be balanced against the strength of the encountering party. Those aren't the same thing, or even approximately the same thing.

Gygax's concern, as best I can tell - reading that remark in conjunction with his discussion in the intro of his DMG - is that the players should always have a meaningful choice: so that if they choose to fight the creatures they encounter (eg because they want to get past them) then the outcome is not utterly foregone; or, if they choose to flee the creatures they encounter (out of fear, or a desire to conserve resources, or whatever), theny they have a real chance of doing that too (hence the evasion rules in the classic game).

I don't know where the idea came from that it's good GMing to confront the PCs with a situation where there are right and wrong choices in how to approach it (as determined by the GM in choosing the encounter) and the players are expected to puzzle them out (eg by reading the GM's cues), with the stakes for making the wrong choice being TPK or something similar. But it's not found in any of Gygax's advice, and personally I find it a bit at odds with what I enjoy in RPGing.

 

[hawkeyefan]

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] I don't think the two statements are at odds. I do prefer to let the players determine what happens. That does not mean I don't step in from time to time.

To run with the Death Star scenario I would not simply engage the tractor beam immediately. Assuming the story led them there for a reason, I'd see what they did to try and get onboard. If they were clever, I'd let their plan work. If they had no plan or if they decided to attack, then tractor beam engaged.

You even offer this as a solution above so I don't think we disagree so much as you are misreading me and/or I'm not being clear.

I don't use unwinnable fights to trick the PCs into engaging and then having it result in a TPK. I never said that would be the end result. I'm sure it could be...but that would really be an absolute last resort for me.

However, I disagree in letting the PCs achieve victory in a scenario that the fiction has indicated to be unwinnable. It undermines the threat that the Death Star, and by extension the Empire, is meant to be. I think the same applies to monsters and other villains. So a Death Knight, in my opinion, should not wind up being as easy to kill as a far lesser threat.

And while I can understand the criticism that perhaps there are monsters whose mechanics don't support the threat that longtime gamers may expect...I understand this opinion and even share it to some extent...I think such issues are only exacerbated when these creatures employ weak tactics.

As for the indie approach you mention, I'm a bit indifferent. I am fine with how resolution mechanics and my narrative interact and work in my campaign. My players are very free to have their characters do what they like most of the time, but there is a story being told, so we have to stick to that a bit. Luckily, they enjoy the story, so they tend not to stray far afield from the thrust of the narrative.

Most of this is tangential to this thread, at best, though. If you want to discuss things further maybe we could find the old thread or start a new one? I hate to hijack a thread that's meant to be about comparing what 4E did better than 5E.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Why?

If the PCs are demigods, or Beowulf-style "culture heroes", then why should an army of orcs make them blink? I remember 10th level fighters in my old AD&D game cutting there way through hundreds of orcs, with their 10 attacks per round that could miss only on a 1 and killed any orc they hit, while the orcs needed natural 20s to hit PCs wearing full plate+4 (AC in the low negatives even disregarding shield and DEX for the inevitable flank/rear attacks).

Because that's how we want it to play. The PCs aren't demigods or immortals or anything like that. They're mortal men and women.

And even if they were not, let's say they are demigod like characters...why would they assume they were the only ones? Why would the characters calculate their odds of success in the face of hundreds of enemies based on the Monster Manual entry? What can't any orc ever be anything like them? I find the idea kind of absurd, and for me and my players, I think it runs counter to the theme we are going for in our campaign.

Now, depending on the campaign and the world and its associated details, maybe the characters would know that they are beyond most mortals and that they are capabale of decimating armies on their own. The hat's fine if that's the style of the campaign.

For me, the mechanics are there to simulate what I want the world to be. We use the mechanics when an outcome is in doubt. When 5 adventurers charge an army of orcs, I don't really care what the mechanics would say, because the outcome Ian not in doubt. Mechanics determining the world is, in my opinion, a case of the tail wagging the dog.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Telling people who describe themselves as RPGers, and who describe what they're doing as RPGing, that in fact they are boardgamers, and that in fact they are playing the game contrary to how it is designed or expected to be played, is absolutely pejorative.

It's also condescending, because it is setting yourself up as the arbiter of what counts as true RPGing, rather than trying to engage in a dicsussion among peers predicated on the recognition that people play RPGs in a range of ways (a range, furthermore, that these days, is pretty well-known)..

If you go and buy a race car, and call yourself a race driver but never actually ever race the car, then no, it's not a pejorative for someone to say, "No dude, you're not a race car driver. You're a race car owner." It's simply pointing out a fact. Added irony if you go around complaining about the car is broken and the engineers suck because you can't race it outside of a track.

Comments like this are maddening to me, because it's you who is refusing to do something but demand everyone else cater to your exception and on top of that constantly complain about how the system is broken or the designers are bad. Take ownership man. There's nothing wrong with taking D&D and playing it like a boardgame if that's what you want. But if you ignore the role playing aspects, then you are not playing a role playing game and stop accusing everyone else of insulting you for pointing that out. I'm not setting myself up as some sort of arbitrator, and that's a cop out by you. I'm saying that in order to play a role playing game, it requires role-playing. That's not me being an arbitrator, that's common sense by the definition of what role playing is. It's absolutely ludicrous for someone to sit there and they are a role-player but never engages in any actual role-playing. Just like it's ludicrous to say you're a race car driver but never actually race any cars. Do not demand that everyone else accept something that isn't true, and then insult them as bad people if they don't.

The bottom line is D&D is designed, and built with expectation that you as the DM will assume the role of the monsters/NPCs and play them like they were living beings and everything that goes along with that (motivations, reactions, out of combat behavior, etc). If you refuse to do that and instead play monsters/NPCs as pieces on a battlemap that can't do anything other than what's listed as a power in a statblock, then you're playing outside of that expectation and it's up to you to modify things to make them work. You're demanding the game shift to cater to your needs, and that's needless entitlement. D&D has always been about allowing you the tools to modify to your playstyle because so many different playstyles exist. If everyone demanded that their style be represented in an official book, we'd end up with 1000 page books that most people wouldn't bother using most of the content in. That's horribly impractical.

 

[Grazzt]

Why?
I remember 10th level fighters in my old AD&D game cutting there way through hundreds of orcs, with their 10 attacks per round that could miss only on a 1 and killed any orc they hit, while the orcs needed natural 20s to hit PCs wearing full plate+4 (AC in the low negatives even disregarding shield and DEX for the inevitable flank/rear attacks).

That one attack per fighter level wouldn't apply to 1e orcs. They had 1 HD. The fighter ability only applied to creatures with less than 1 HD (e.g., kobolds).

 

[werecorpse]

Things seem to have gotten a bit off topic so I'll address my post to the op.

I didn't play 4e save for a few test games, I was still enjoying 3/3.5/pathfinder at the time.

Ive got the 4e core books and have had a look at the 4e monster manual and watched matt colville's YouTube video on this topic which I can recommend.

As for the specific points raised in the op.
1. Ramping up humanoids. I don't agree with this. I like that their are a bunch of basic races that are all very close to each other in power but are separated by a small mechanical margin and benefit. I see these as sort of the base template in the same way that a human commoner and a dwarf commoner are the base template for those races. But see my comments on point 3.

2. Variety of monsters. I love variety of monsters and like the idea of different types of gorgons, basilisk etc. I think the reason that the NPC appendix are so important is that they enable you to have a variety of humanoids by just smooshing together two templates. Goblin scout, goblin spy, goblin Druid have all made appearances in my game.

3. Monsters that do cool stuff. This IMO is where 5e has dropped the ball a bit. I agree that it would be great if monsters had a few more tricks. Even in 1e the owlbear had a special attack, the 5e version is just sad. I look at the 4e abilities of the ettin and dragons and think I'm gonna add these in to my 5e monsters. I don't think they are too complex and they make a fight interesting as new obstacles have to be addressed. I am happy with the base low cr critters as they work well for early learning games but as the cr goes up (say 3+) they should all have a nifty trick. Further I like the idea that some well trained humanoids learn new racial specific tricks. I think some particularly feral gnoll tribes in my game will have quick bite as an additional bonus action option.

The pre 5e talk when it hadn't come out was all about how it would be modular. For mine I would love to see a more complexity to monsters module. Just a list of the monsters with a couple of optional add on abilities as they have done with spell casting dragons.

Ie
Dragon: bloodied breath, tail swipe
Green dragon: Lure, aura of poison.

Now I know that I can just do this stuff myself, and I will I have been customising monsters for decades and will now be cross checking the monsters in my 4e monster manual to mine for ideas. But if it was available as a 5e module that would be great.

 

[pemerton]

That one attack per fighter level wouldn't apply to 1e orcs.

True. I may be thinking of goblins, or even armies of human mercanaries. Or we may have been house-ruling it (or misreading it) to 1HD and below rather than "below 1 HD". It's too long ago for me to remember exactly; but I think the basic idea still stands.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Now I know that I can just do this stuff myself, and I will I have been customising monsters for decades and will now be cross checking the monsters in my 4e monster manual to mine for ideas. But if it was available as a 5e module that would be great.

I'm an AD&D guy, and have been as my preferred edition until 5e came out. That means I like intelligent dragons with spells. So all I do is look at something like the mind flayer arcanist varient to see that adding similar spell casting to a dragon is about a 1 CR bump. Nice and easy and smooth.

 

[pemerton]

I disagree in letting the PCs achieve victory in a scenario that the fiction has indicated to be unwinnable. It undermines the threat that the Death Star, and by extension the Empire, is meant to be. I think the same applies to monsters and other villains. So a Death Knight, in my opinion, should not wind up being as easy to kill as a far lesser threat.

<snip>

Most of this is tangential to this thread, at best, though. If you want to discuss things further maybe we could find the old thread or start a new one? I hate to hijack a thread

I'll confine my reply to this bit of your post - partly because I think I've made my views about "narrative thread", "railroading" etc clear enough and so don't need to reiterate them; and partly because I think replying to this bit is on-topic for this thread.

So, focusingon the Death Star as unwinnable. My basic problem with that is that it's not. At the end of the movie, the Death Star is beaten.

Mutatis mutandis for a death knight, or ancient dragon, or whatever. Ultimately, in fatnasy fiction, these "unbeatable" creatures are defeated.

Adapting that to RPGing, then, the question becmes - How can the players, via their PCs, replicate the feats of Luke Skywalker, Bard Bowman, etc?

I see two main answers, refelcting broadly differing playstyles. There may be others, or intermediate/combo approaches, that I haven't thought of at the moment.

(1) Winning the "unwinnable" fight requires the GM-specified MacGuffin (the info from the R2 unit, the arrow of slaying, etc). In this case, the mechanics of the Death Star or Smaug become very unimportant.

(2) Winning the "unwinnable" fight is just the same as winning any other fight - so in D&D, it requires the players to reduce the enemy's hp to zero before the same thing happens to their PCs. In this case, the mechanics (in the richest sense of that term) are pretty fundamental, because they set the parameters within which the competion of hp attrition taks place. If the mechanics are wonky, things won't work out: get the maths for housecats wrong - eg two attacks for 1 plus 1-2 (with a like follow-on attack on a hit) - and it becomes as dangerous as a goblin with a shortsword or a hammer-wielding soldider, which is rather implausible; get the maths for Smaug wrong, and he withers under a round of concentrated bowfire.

I feel that focusing on enviromental or tactical considerations doesn't really deal with this basic issue about the maths of hp attrition; and for people who feel they have this issue, pointing out that approach (1) doesn't have it doesn't really help either.

That's not to say that WotC need to change anything: it seems to me that there is a widespread disparity of mechanical effectiveness across PC builds, perhaps at least loosely correlated with broader gameplaying experience, and it's probably reaosonable for WotC to assume that more experienced players who have some issues can sort it out - especially if they're already familiar with 4e! (Eg combine 4e's off-turn actions, auras and hp numbers with 5e's legendary action mechanics.)

For me, the mechanics are there to simulate what I want the world to be. We use the mechanics when an outcome is in doubt. When 5 adventurers charge an army of orcs, I don't really care what the mechanics would say, because the outcome is not in doubt. Mechanics determining the world is, in my opinion, a case of the tail wagging the dog.

This is not contradicting anything I said, though - as I said, in my 4e game I statted up a phalanx of around 20 hobgoblins as a 3sq x 3sq swarm of level 15 or thereabouts, because I thought (i) that would provide a satisfying experience at the table, both mechanically (in that it would feel like a hobgoblin phalanx) and fictionally (in that it would produce the right sort of flavour for the game). And it did.

But presumably sometimes the mechanics determine the world. Eg presumably, in your game, the question of whether this particular character can climb this particular cliff-face is answererd by making a check.

And presumably if a 12th level fighter in your game came up against 20 hobgoblins, you would roll the dice to see what happens rather than just fiating it, wouldn't you (maths in sblocks below)? Or, if a 18th level wizard launched a meteor swarm against a band of orcs, I'm guessing you wouldn't do that simply through narrative fiat either.

[sblock]Let's say a 12th level Champion has Plate+1, Shield+1, Sword+1, and Duelling and Defensive style, 20 STR and 18 CON: that's AC 23, 124 hp +18 from Second Wind makes 142; and 3 attacks per round with +10 to hit and 1d8+8 damage. 3/4 of hits kill a hobgoblin (roll of 3+ on d8 ensures 11 hp damage - crits up this ratio a little bit, but not much), and 13/20 attacks hit, so that's about 1.5 dead hobgoblins per round, or 12 rounds (+Action Surge) to kill 20 of them.

The fighter suffers 8 attacks per round for 8 rounds (I'm assuming melee vs a phalanx), then 7, 5, 4, 2, 0 . That's 82 attacks all up. The hobgoblins have +3 to hit, so that's a 1 in 20 chance to hit. On a hit - which is a crit - their damage is 2d8+1, +4d6 due to their racial trait, or 24 hp damage. That's expected damage per attack of 1.2. So the fighter, from those 82 attacks, should take about 100 damage, which s/he can withstand.

If the hobgoblins try to knock down the fighter, the fighter (assuming Athletics proficiency) has +9, vs +1 for the hobgoblins. So a 1 on 1 contest requires the fighter to roll 11 or less (for a result of 20 or less) vs the hobgoblins 20 to 10 (for a result of 21 or more): that's a 66/400 chance of success for a hobgoblin - so to get the fighter down, the hobgoblins (on average) have to make 6 attempts, which then (roughly) doubles their chance to hit until the fighter stands up on his/her next turn. In the early stages of the combat that is a reasonable tactic, as the hobgbolins can turn 2 rounds (16 attacks) into (effectively) 20 attacks worth of damage. But it then starts to become less effective. The hobgoblins need the equivalent of 35 extra attacks worth of damage to beat the fighter, and they won't get there: probably only about plus 17 or so rounds.

If the hobgoblins knock the fighter prone and then grapple him/her so s/he can't get up, it looks perhaps a bit uglier for the fighter, but that will take about 36 of their attacks. The fighter's chance to hit then drops by about 2/3, which is only 1 hobgoblin per round, giving the hobgoblins more rounds and more attacks at advantage. But the fighter can just break free, which costs 1 or 2 round of killing hobgoblins - but they've spent about 4 rounds to bring the fighter down, so even if they do double damage in that 1 or 2 rounds I still think the fighter should come out on top.[/sblock]

let's say they are demigod like characters...why would they assume they were the only ones? Why would the characters calculate their odds of success in the face of hundreds of enemies based on the Monster Manual entry? What can't any orc ever be anything like them? I find the idea kind of absurd

In the Iliad, Ares or Achilles or one of the other gods or major heroes can reasonably assume that the bulk of the soldiery will fall before them.

So the idea that the PCs are somewhat unique in being demigods (or Conan-esque paragon-tier characters) is not something I find that absurd. I feel it has firm roots in the broader fantasy genre.

depending on the campaign and the world and its associated details, maybe the characters would know that they are beyond most mortals and that they are capabale of decimating armies on their own. That's fine if that's the style of the campaign

I think focusing on the details of the fiction can become a distraction. As WotC showed when it released the Neverwinter campaign guide for 4e, you can layer new flavour over the same mechanics if you want to (eg in the Neverwinter game, the story elements progress from heroic to paragon - to use the 4e terminology - although mechancially it is all set between 1st and 10th level. One consequen ce of this is that Neverwinter monsters aren't genreally suitable for standard campaigns, becausse Neverwinter stats up a mindflayer as 10th level that in a standard campaign should be closer to 20th.)

I think it is more helpful to focus on the dynamics of play at the table. In the context of this discussion, I would ask what is wrong with the players haveing some genral sense of what their PCs are capable of (which is, at least in part, expressed in mechancial terms)? Or, to flip it around, How does it improve the game if the players aren't confident - at least in general terms - of the threat posed by a band of orcs? I mean, you seem to be implying in your posts that the players, in your game, would have reasonable confidence that their PC couldn't defeat a band of orcs. So why do things become any worse for play if the players do have confidence that they could take on the band with at least some prsopect of success?