D&D 5E My biggest gripe with 5e design

[Weiley31]

And dont forget the deadly gazebos!!!!!!

Mimic Gazebo sounds like a delightful boss encounter.

 

[Lanefan]

There are a number of creatures that can reduce your max HP that a party is likely to encounter before they reach the level where they have access to Greater Restoration.

Access within the party, maybe, but you can (in theory) always pay a high-level NPC to cast it on you next time you're in town.

 

[Lanefan]

Third, in 1e, what was an adventuring day? How many encounters were its baseline? Was it six, two, twenty compared to 5e 6-8? Without knowing what the expected baseline was for a 1e game - how can any conclusion about the merits of the data to lethality based on an adventuring day be made?

Part of the point is that 1e didn't have any such baseline, and IMO was better for not having it.

It was on the PCs/players to decide how long to keep going and to - when possible - do their own assessments of threats/foes vs available resources and health, and on the DM to present the threats and foes in a neutral and impartial manner. With its built-in expectations of what an adventuring day should look like 5e does nothing but place (real or imagined) additional restraints and requirements on the DM which really shouldn't be there.

 

[Lanefan]

Yes, HD was how hard a monster was in 1e. It was a rating that determined how challenging it was. Monsters with HD and a star where extra hard for their HD.

Nitpick, but the HD-and-star mechanic was from Basic/BECMI. 1e didn't use it.

There is correlation between HD and HP, and correlation between HP and CR, and correlation between CR and ATK bonus and Damage. Comparing 5e HD to 1e HD is an absolutely horrible comparison method, as someone who has played both 5e and 1e.

The monster building guidelines of 5e have you derive HD from how many HP you want it to have, its size, and its constitution bonus. Larger monsters use larger HD and hence have fewer of them, smaller monsters have smaller HD and hence have more of them.

Perhaps worthy of its own thread, but there's an argument to be made that designing monsters with all these factors divorced from each other gives a much more unpredictable - and thus interesting - range of monsters to throw at parties.

In all editions HD/level, h.p., combat capability, saving throws, and general degree of threat have all more or less been tied together.

Should they be, particularly for monsters not native to the PCs' world or setting? (e.g. outsiders, aberrations, demons and devils, etc.)

Why can't I have, for example, a defense-first monster that fights like a 2HD, saves like a 12HD, and has 200 hit points?

It looks like 5e may have started this, by divorcing threat level from HD a little (e.g. the example of the 2HD Kobold being a 1/8 CR threat). Its hit dice and hit points are still tied together...which for a "normal" creature in the setting makes sense, in the name of internal consistency...but this tie doesn't need to be maintained for creatures not of the setting, does it?

Just a rambling thought or two.....

 

[Lanefan]

Mimic Gazebo sounds like a delightful boss encounter.

Boss, schmoss - the Mimic Gazebo is just a guard you could meet while crossing the castle garden!

 

[Tony Vargas]

It was on the PCs/players to decide how long to keep going and to - when possible - do their own assessments of threats/foes vs available resources and health, and on the DM to present the threats and foes in a neutral and impartial manner. With its built-in expectations of what an adventuring day should look like 5e does nothing but place (real or imagined) additional restraints and requirements on the DM which really shouldn't be there.

The same constraint was always on the classic game - the game would break if it wasn't paced correctly, and very often did - there was just no helpful guidance on what pacing was meant to work, and DMs found their own way of coping, whether it was forcing a workable pacing or tweaking the game in myriad other ways to keep it remotely playable. (There was a lot of Gygax preaching about what'd happen in the dungeon when players left to re-charge or make preparations, though, so clearly it was a consideration. And, really, the focus on the dungeon and on random encounters also made it clear that 1e was trying to avoid having too-few encounters in a day of dungeon-crawling.)

 

[Lanefan]

The same constraint was always on the classic game - the game would break if it wasn't paced correctly, and very often did - there was just no helpful guidance on what pacing was meant to work, and DMs found their own way of coping, whether it was forcing a workable pacing or tweaking the game in myriad other ways to keep it remotely playable. (There was a lot of Gygax preaching about what'd happen in the dungeon when players left to re-charge or make preparations, though, so clearly it was a consideration. And, really, the focus on the dungeon and on random encounters also made it clear that 1e was trying to avoid having too-few encounters in a day of dungeon-crawling.)

In a typical dungeon crawl the pacing, most of the time, is and realistically should be in the hands of the players/PCs.

Gygax realized this, and thus came his 'preaching' you refer to, but unless you somehow trap the PCs in the dungeon there's no real way to stop them from setting their own pace. Sure you can throw wandering monsters at 'em till you're blue in the face, but all that ensures is that the party will just back off further until they find a safe place to camp/rest/recover.

Sometimes I'll set up a dungeon this way - trap 'em in it, or throw on a really harsh and unforgiving time-crunch factor - but for the most part I've given up trying to force short-term pacing: it's a fool's errand.

Forcing long-term pacing - i.e. making sure background developments don't stop if the PCs dawdle or go off and do something else - is easier; but even then the PCs/players still have the choice of whether to act on those developments or not.

 

[Tony Vargas]

In a typical dungeon crawl the pacing, most of the time, is and realistically should be in the hands of the players/PCs.

I thought the point was that there was no such typical pacing?

Sure you can throw wandering monsters at 'em till you're blue in the face, but all that ensures is that the party will just back off further until they find a safe place to camp/rest/recover.

Y'know, wandering monsters do kinda dictate a default pacing. They were tied to (10 min) turns, the spell-re-memorization cycle was also tied to specific numbers of hours. Corelate the two, and you have a sort of de-facto, minimum, default pacing for 1e.

 

[Lanefan]

I thought the point was that there was no such typical pacing?

By overall design, there isn't.

By table, a 'typical pacing' will tend to evolve over time based on a bunch of factors: risk tolerance, PC toughness/fragility, level of co-operation, etc.

Y'know, wandering monsters do kinda dictate a default pacing. They were tied to (10 min) turns, the spell-re-memorization cycle was also tied to specific numbers of hours. Corelate the two, and you have a sort of de-facto, minimum, default pacing for 1e.

Maybe...but I've yet to see any DM (incuding me!) who uses wandering monster rules as written; for two reasons:

In-game: unless there's a spawner somewhere, where do they all keep coming from; and why haven't they all eaten each other?
Meta-game: by RAW, a party would spend most of its time slogging through wandering monsters; and while this is fine in some specific cases or adventures, in general it gets to be too much after a while.

 

[5ekyu]

Part of the point is that 1e didn't have any such baseline, and IMO was better for not having it.

It was on the PCs/players to decide how long to keep going and to - when possible - do their own assessments of threats/foes vs available resources and health, and on the DM to present the threats and foes in a neutral and impartial manner. With its built-in expectations of what an adventuring day should look like 5e does nothing but place (real or imagined) additional restraints and requirements on the DM which really shouldn't be there.

Regardless of how one feels about the "adventuring day" presented in 5e, which is not a prescription just a competitive baseline, the fact that 1e did not have one and 5e does makes claiming anything about a comparison of lethality in "adventuring day" between those two sonething very much unlike "evidence."

To me, the " it's on the PCs to assess" is still very much true in 5e.