D&D 5E [DM problem] Is the group I am leading too strong? Is the 5E system unbalanced?

[CapnZapp]

The baseline game gets easier and easier as you level up - IF the PC's are given advantages (generous magic items, feats, multi-classing, better than normal stats) that are not compensated for by the DM.

There are many ways to compensate and make the game as challenging as the DM wants it to be.

Just use whatever works best for your DM'ing style - extra monsters, waves of monsters, monsters beefed up with special abilities or feats, whatever strikes your fancy. There is no one specific answer.

None of this changes the basic fact: the default 5e game is easier than most editions.

The default 5e game can't even handle the feats and magic items it ships with.

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[CapnZapp]

Combat is only a third of the game. How well can your party plan a wedding, bake a cake or travel through a desert?

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No it isn't.

Pick any published campaign. Count the number of combat encounters. Then count the number of EVERY other type of interaction, including cake-baking contests.

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[mflayermonk]

So you inadvertently changed it from 'resistant to weapons' to 'resistance to magic spells that cause hit point damage'?

Its from the DMG on page 277 where it talks about resistances being less relevant for PCs at higher levels.

 

[CapnZapp]

Well, it is as deadly as DM makes it.

Another relativizing chestnut that really says nothing.

Long before the DM even gets to open the books, there is the baseline, default, difficulty.

That is what's being discussed here. The fact you can change this to make every adventure a TPK has always been true, and doesnt change or resolve the complaints that 5e simply runs on easy mode.



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[CapnZapp]

Ok, so, the cleric has an insane AC. Actually, to be fair, 24 is not that insane. It's not that hard to achieve.

However, I'm going to assume that your cleric isn't running around with a +10 Athletics or Acrobatics score. So, knock him down more often. We're talking higher level monsters, so, switch one attack out with a push attack and then let everyone else get some Advantage attacks on him.

Or, better yet, ignore them and start doing a bit of focus fire on the sorcerer. He's nice and squishy.

Considering you're already upping the number of critters in encounters, it's not necessary for every critter to flat out attack. Let them help each other.

Or, how about, I don't know, wishing the PCs could get so high AC already from the beginning, so the monsters would have worked right out the box...?

Just a thought

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[Horwath]

Another relativizing chestnut that really says nothing.

Long before the DM even gets to open the books, there is the baseline, default, difficulty.

That is what's being discussed here. The fact you can change this to make every adventure a TPK has always been true, and doesnt change or resolve the complaints that 5e simply runs on easy mode.



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Didn't play 1st and 2nd ED, started playing with 3.0.

Even then published adventures were cakewalk unless DM didnt buff up half the encounters.

I think that 5e published adventures are medium in dificulty for new players and DM's.

But when you have expirienced players who know how to build characters that both work alone good but work together great, then encounters get easier and easier.

 

[Horwath]

double post...

 

[devincutler]

It still is a failure of communication.

WotC certainly doesn't get to both eat the cake (here! Lots of cool items!) and have it still (why you didn't think the game could handle actually using the 100+ pages of magic items!? We just wrote them, if you use them that's on you!)

In other words WotC shouldn't get away with not taking responsibility for making a game that cannot handle it's constituent parts.

They do not say "don't use feats and magic items unless you're okay with all our adventures becoming way too easy" on the label. In fact, they say next to nothing, hoping that apologists like you will deflect and shift the blame away.

Many DMs fall into this "trap". The blame for this should squarely rest in the lap of the designers.

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No one is saying don't use any of them. But I have seen far too many people on these boards giving out way too many of them way too soon. Clearly, these people are coming from a 3.5 mindset. But all you have to do is take a look at the magic distribution in the published adventures and APs and you will see that they do give items, but they are few and far between. When we see in a post that a PC has +2 armour, +1 shield, and a flaming sword, we logically assume that the rest of the PCs have similar magic items, and it becomes just plain silly. Now, if a group of PCs wants to give one PC all of the magic items, then the DM can compensate by making the other PCs suffer.

But, for example, I don't see many suits of +2 armour in the APs, nor +2 shields. Do you? And we have APs going all the way to level 15 or so.

 

[schnee]

Its from the DMG on page 277 where it talks about resistances being less relevant for PCs at higher levels.

That is talking about using that as a method for thinking about challenge rating.
It says nothing about actually messing with monster's stats.

If you buff the hit points that way, then it takes just as long as it did before to kill with mundane weapons (because the effect is the same), but it now takes much longer than it did before with HP damage spells or magic weapons (because the HPs are now so much more).

So, the effect is you just turned a thing that was easier to kill with magic into one that's harder to kill with magic.

 

[SuperTD]

This is particularly a problem in PotA, as the custom monsters in it simply don't match up to those in the Monster Manual. If you do the maths using the guidelines in the DMG, those monsters typically come out 1-2 CR lower than it says they are. This means that running the dungeons as the game expects will leave the players more powerful than the game wants them to be, as they are filled with monsters that the adventure designers though were stronger than they really are.