D&D 5E 5E's "Missed Opportunities?"

[Sadras]

Again with monster complaints. It is like no one bothered to read what I posted upthread regarding modifying monsters, using terrain, weather and most importantly using the fluff.

More ideas.
1. Rest: Change up rest periods or possibility of rest. If rest is always possible, then PC's resource management and attrition (a big part of the game) is absent and will negatively affect combat encounters. Furthermore the ability to rest all the time negates recovery time needed to heal from ability loss and the like.

2. The "Plus": Remove the +1, +2, +3 from weapons and armour for obvious reasons.

3. Incorporeal Creatures: Have creatures that are incorporeal like the Banshee and Wraith (even the Shadow) bypass armour but not force protection).

4. A Case for Intelligence: Have intelligent monsters like red dragons and vampires act intelligently and viciously. Have them focus fire until they absolutely destroy their target, let them use all their legendary AND lair actions to kill that PC cleric. Why would they not? Stop being soft DMs and then complaining about how weak monsters are.

5. Drain other Resources: Have certain attacks (Banshee, Sorrow Bound or her Wail) drain Inspiration (or make it temporary unavailable) in addition to their standard damage.
Have a Succubus's Kiss drain Hit Dice in addition to damage or steal a Fighter's Action Surge, A Rogue's Cunning Action, a Wizard's Arcane Recovery, a Barbarian's Rage, a Druid's Wildshape, a Sorcerer's Sorcery Points...etc

6. Size Matters: Creatures two two sizes larger than the PCs, should automatically be able to shove with every successful attack.

7. Other Actions beside Full Attack: Disarm, Mass Grapple to Force the Restrained Condition, Weapon Length (long spears, halberds), Sundering Spell Foci, Trip should all be common place actions when multitude of minions are attacking the group besides your normal hack and slash actions.

8. Cursed Terrain / Lair Actions:
(a) Imagine fighting with a Wraith which has Sense Living while every round the area falls under the effects of a Darkness spell thereby keeping the casters busy burning up slots and actions trying to negate the Darkness.

(b) A Shambling Mound whose very accursed presence affects the area around it similarly to an Entanglement spell.

(c) A dragon graveyard that every once in a while bleeds out Phantasmal Killer effects.

9. Incorporate Degrees of Failure.
Fail that poison save by 5 or more, the poison lasts an additional round.
Fail that Swimming check by 5 or more, you gain 1 Level of Exhaustion.
Fail that Dragon Fear check by 5 or more, you have Disadvantage on your next check.

10. Other Effects. Arcane Maladies. Age. Memory Loss. Blindness. Deafness. Curses. Additional Flaws (personality characteristic). Scarring, Mutation....etc

 

[delericho]

2. The "Plus": Remove the +1, +2, +3 from weapons and armour for obvious reasons.

While I would very much like to see this, I'm beginning to think that those might be one of the truly sacred cows of D&D.

 

[Ratskinner]

I do have problems when running 5e to try to strike the right balance with challenging combats. I can run a red dragon or vampire (even with their minions) that end up being complete anticlimactic push overs. Other editions seemed to provide tools that allowed greater customization or even built-in monster design that made combats fun and exciting.
For example, I ran a red dragon against a low level party that was in a trapped Lair in an abandoned forge. He could fly through the pipes and tunnels and blast the party with flame jets. Minions would harass the party.
He was dead within a couple rounds. The players were disappointed that the dragon died so quickly and did so little damage.
Counter this with my recent game of 4e. Goblins were peppering the party with arrows, dropping characters in an ambush. They had to make decisions whether to stabilize their dying comrades or deal with the enemies. I don't think I've been able to run a similarly exciting encounter in 5e.

IME (YMMV) to make a 5e final combat really "climactic", you actually have to stack several combats together in tight sequence, so that they don't get the chance to rest up. If a paladin has the chance to "gear up" for a fight with a good rest...it ain't even pretty. Additionally, add water (or some similar thing like smoke/fog) that puts the characters at a disadvantage right off. Mobility and sensory disadvantages are some of the most important things to add uncertainty, interest, and terror to a fight. (normal darkness will not do it.) 5e relies heavily on the environment to add interest to the fight, to the point where I don't the the DMG really emphasizes it enough. The other big tactic to make it scarier is getting the paladin or other "nuke-capable" characters to blow their powers unnecessarily. A small group of weaker foes is often better for this that one big foe. IME, 5e difficulty is all about the "death by a thousand cuts" and not the Boss Monster. Boss monsters alone (or close to it) are roadkill, and CR is garbage for determining difficulty of a fight.

 

[jayoungr]

The flanking comment just goes to show how groups differ. Toward the end of my 1-20 campaign, I had to get the enemies to flank in order to give them a decent chance of hitting sometimes.

But that's probably why it's an optional rule.

I'm not a fan of Inspiration, but we usually just ignore it.

 

[Gadget]

1) Backgrounds. They just don't contribute enough to the character's abilities and feel tacked on.

I can agree that after a handful of levels, they make less of difference, but they're really there to make a nice role play hook for the character, not be the meat of the mechanical design. I do agree that something like paragon paths or epic destinies would have made a nice addition at higher levels.

2) Inspiration. Half-baked idea that is literally never remembered. Unless you have people always fishing for bonuses in annoying ways.

Well, it is optional, if I'm not mistaken. And there is a lot of flexibility to taylor it to your group.

3) Treasure Hordes. This is in the DMG, and there is actually a recommended schedule for awarding magic items and treasure. Too bad no official products ever used these guidelines.

I guess so. It depends on what your group expects. I've always found it easy to modify a treasure horde to make it more palatable for my group.

4) Advantage/Disadvantage. +5/-5 is too big of a modifier for most conditions. Flanking is lethal against the PCs (so we didn't use it).

It is only +5/-5 under certain conditions, it could be as low as +2/-2. It all depends on how high you need to role to hit.

5) Bonded Accuracy. A good idea in practice, except that it turns monsters into bags of hit points.

I can see this being kind of an issue, and I think they could have followed 4e monster design a bit more myself, but that is more of a problem with monster design than bounded accuracy. I can see that they didn't want to make things overly complicated to run. One thing this does is make the Hit Point threshold spells (sleep, color spray, Power Word <blank>) far more effective to use against PCs than for the PCs to use against monsters, especially the higher level spells. I sometimes wonder if it would have been better to have attack bonus or something scale instead of HP, but--on the whole--I far prefer Bounded Accuracy to the ever increasing arms race of previous editions.

What did I miss?

CR is...less than accurate. While I get that they are not trying to cater to the min/max, finely balanced within a hair crowd, some of the spells and feats could have been better designed.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Again with monster complaints. It is like no one bothered to read what I posted upthread regarding modifying monsters, using terrain, weather and most importantly using the fluff.

Or maybe, just maybe, they found your post upthread unsatisfying.

1) Modifying monsters. Sure, we can modify monsters. But if you want to extend that argument we should never post any complaints about the game at all, because we can modify anything want. Ranger problems? Stop complaining and modify!

Furthermore, while we can modify...and we can also use 3rd party mods...I think we can all agree that it's better if a game has fewer flaws in the first place that don't need to be rectified afterwards. I can think up new options for a monster, but I'd much rather have options that are the result of hard work and creativity from a team of designers and an even larger team of playtesters.

The rest of your post has some ideas, some of which are pretty good, but surely you can understand that it would be better if ideas like that were in the monster manual so that DMs wouldn't have to track stuff like that down in random posts on 3rd party websites (in threads with titles that seem to have nothing to do with improving monsters)?

2) Using terrain and weather: sure, we can do that, too. But one of the goals is to make different monsters feel like different fights, and there are a finite number of weather and terrain options to pair with the monsters. If two different monsters feel like the same fight, then fighting them in the rain is also going to feel the same.

3) Fluff: sure we can also use the fluff. But, again, same as the modifications: I'd rather have a team of designers and playtesters turning the fluff into mechanics than do it all myself, solo.

While new mechanics would be welcome for the monsters, it would be nice simply having a paragraph with each entry that makes some suggestions for how that monsters might behave in unique and interest ways. E.g. turn the fluff into...not exactly mechanics, but strategy (or lack thereof). Some tips for the DM on how to make the monsters come to life a bit.

 

[Lanefan]

1) Modifying monsters. Sure, we can modify monsters. But if you want to extend that argument we should never post any complaints about the game at all, because we can modify anything want. Ranger problems? Stop complaining and modify!

This leads me to a suggestion that might make a good rule for this site: as 5e is intended to be kitbashable, no complaint regarding 5e design may be posted without also including a suggestion for how to fix said complaint in the same post.

Howzat?

 

[Stalker0]

My general notes:

1) I agree with many others that there are too many dump stats in 5e, especially Int. I don't need it to have a lot, but it would be nice if it gave something generally to characters.

2) Melee vs Ranged: I still see a lot of melee characters because melee is cool, but at the end of the day ranged is actually a superior option.

3) Too many encounters needed per day. 5e offers a wonderful gambit of variants to cater to people's taste, but one area I feel that was sorely missed was the huge number of encounters the game expects for a reasonable challenge. That as the baseline as fine, but I would have loved some variants to balance the classes for 1-2 encounter days.

4) Concentration: I have a love hate relationship with 5e. On the one hand, I think it is the rock by which so much of 5e's balance and cleanliness comes from. It dialed down casters, made buffs a cool spell instead of a 10 minute checklist fest on your character sheet. But there are times when a caster can really be limited by their spell selection due to concentration. They have one good option and one decent option. Both require concentration....so the good option is the only thing you ever see on the sheet.

I also think they tried to do too much with concentration. Ultimately it serves 2 purposes:

1) Reduce a caster's ability to buff and maintain a lot of spells at once.
2) Reintroduce the idea of powerful spells that can be disrupted by hurting the caster.

Both are good things, but combined you get into some weird scenarios. For example, I think its terrible that shield of faith can be brought down as soon as you take some damage. In my game I split these into 2 different effects. Concentration still works great as a caster limiter, but now a lot of defensive spells no longer go down with damage, which I like a lot better.

 

[rgoodbb]

My general notes:

1) I agree with many others that there are too many dump stats in 5e, especially Int. I don't need it to have a lot, but it would be nice if it gave something generally to characters.

Yeah. Link it to number of Languages/Monster knowledge/something tactically useful and it might be less of a dump stat.

 

[Quartz]

I like the chips idea.

I cannot claim credit: I stole the idea from (I think) Usenet decades ago.

You can use poker chips or tokens for status effects and being under the effect of a spell too. And to denote you're Concentrating on a spell. And so on. The thing is that it's an immediate visual cue and reminder to everyone. You just need to remember to colour-code consistently and for everyone to remember - or have a note - of which colour means what. Black is, of course, somewhat obvious.

If you have a printer, you can print sticky labels to put on the chips to make it even clearer.