D&D 5E Is 5e the Least-Challenging Edition of D&D?

[prabe]

That's fine, different games have different goals and design concepts. Not really sure what that has to do with this thread topic so I was confused. Which honestly isn't all that difficult.

Was answering @Chaosmancer about the appeal of games with lethal combat mechanics. No worries, and apologies for any confusion.

 

[Garthanos]

** - thus making combat something to be avoided if possible

Fighting bad guys is bad better to be non-heroic just look at the fiasco of non-wars we had going on back in those days... /js

 

[Blue]

My advice, if you want to embrace 5e’s attrition model of difficulty without having to cram 6-8 encounters into one day, is to change up the rest and recovery mechanics. Some folks have had good results with using the one day short rest and one week long rest. Personally I’m not a big fan, but it seems to be a pretty popular option. Alternatively, you could leave short rests as-is and change long rests to require downtime.

Solid advice, I was planning that for my next campaign. Not doing exactly the DMG variant of day/week for short/long, instead taking inspiration from Adventures in Middle Earth (Tolkien 5e). Short rests are overnight. Long rests are overnight in safety and comfort. So if on your journey you get to a sanctuary like Elrond's, you get a long rest.

My favorite solution for this issue is not for everyone. 13th Age, a d20 game that came out before 5e, has at-will, encounter, and long-heal-up as their recovery options for features and spells. (Yes, some spells are encounter or at-will.)

A long heal up happens after four encounters. Could be a three week jungle trek, could be a morning (mourning?) of dungeon crawling. DM can give it sooner if the encounters are particularly hard. Players can take it early at the cost of a campaign setback. (A currency they use in a few other places, like a guaranteed successful retreat.) A campaign setback is just that. Maybe the cultists completed another stage of their ritual, or another caravan was taken by bandits, or the werewolves infected another rancher. Whatever makes sense for delaying.

 

[Charlaquin]

Solid advice, I was planning that for my next campaign. Not doing exactly the DMG variant of day/week for short/long, instead taking inspiration from Adventures in Middle Earth (Tolkien 5e). Short rests are overnight. Long rests are overnight in safety and comfort. So if on your journey you get to a sanctuary like Elrond's, you get a long rest.

My favorite solution for this issue is not for everyone. 13th Age, a d20 game that came out before 5e, has at-will, encounter, and long-heal-up as their recovery options for features and spells. (Yes, some spells are encounter or at-will.)

A long heal up happens after four encounters. Could be a three week jungle trek, could be a morning (mourning?) of dungeon crawling. DM can give it sooner if the encounters are particularly hard. Players can take it early at the cost of a campaign setback. (A currency they use in a few other places, like a guaranteed successful retreat.) A campaign setback is just that. Maybe the cultists completed another stage of their ritual, or another caravan was taken by bandits, or the werewolves infected another rancher. Whatever makes sense for delaying.

AiME and 13A both have pretty good solutions. You might try hybridizing them - short rest is a minute (functionally one can be taken after every encounter) and long rest is overnight in safety and comfort.

 

[Blue]

AiME and 13A both have pretty good solutions. You might try hybridizing them - short rest is a minute (functionally one can be taken after every encounter) and long rest is overnight in safety and comfort.

My concern with that is that the ratio of short rests to long rest will change drastically, which will unbalance in favor of classes with short rest recover mechanics. Picture a standard caster who is only refilling spells every few days, and a warlock who is refilled after every encounter or after casting any long-lasting spell.

Actually, it would also unbalance the at-wills to short rest ratio, if short rest was every encounter.

I am trying to avoid rebalancing classes. If I was going to do that, I could just rework them for say 3 encounters per day and live with it, since i'd have days and days with less, which is good for showcasing different characters.

 

[jgsugden]

This is an odd topic. The challenge is set by the DM when they design encounters. In any edition of the game you can create cake-walk encounters, or overwhelmingly deadly encounters. All editions have the same range of difficulty, effectively.

In terms of how hard the encounters in published adventures are: 5E tends to be quite reasonable, but there are a lot of members of the Phandelver Bugbear Support Society that lost their PC on the first day they played 5E. I've had TPKs in every edition, including 5E (including one in the past month) when tactics were a bit off the beaten path.

In the end, this is a very balanced yet flexible edition that has avoided problems by keeping a narrower band of options. It works very well and does what it is supposed to do. Enjoy it.

 

[Charlaquin]

My concern with that is that the ratio of short rests to long rest will change drastically, which will unbalance in favor of classes with short rest recover mechanics. Picture a standard caster who is only refilling spells every few days, and a warlock who is refilled after every encounter or after casting any long-lasting spell.

Actually, it would also unbalance the at-wills to short rest ratio, if short rest was every encounter.

I am trying to avoid rebalancing classes. If I was going to do that, I could just rework them for say 3 encounters per day and live with it, since i'd have days and days with less, which is good for showcasing different characters.

Makes sense.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

AiME and 13A both have pretty good solutions. You might try hybridizing them - short rest is a minute (functionally one can be taken after every encounter) and long rest is overnight in safety and comfort.

This is my new homebrew as well.
5 minute short rest (2 max per day), so playersare not forced to take them all at the same time. The fighter can short rest while the cleric go scouting a little ahead. If HD are to be spend during that pause, 1 use of Healer's Kit needs to be depleted.

Long rest are 6 hours of uninterrupted rest (1 single fight, even if it lasts only 30 seconds, ruins void the rest). The place must be comfortable and secured by watches, light sources and spell if possible. This means no resting on the side of road without tents or means to make fire. Strong winds and rains can make it difficult to long rest. Long rest only recover half your HD, no auto-recovery; you can spend your HD with Healer's Kit to regain health.

 

[Chaosmancer]

In the games I've played where the combat mechanics allowed for quick kills, we usually played the games to avoid combat as much as possible, and set as many ambushes as possible. If you were in a straight-up fight, chances were something had gone substantially awry. The appeal was seeing your plans (setting the ambush) work. The downside, of course, was what could happen if they didn't. Obviously, not everyone is going to derive pleasure from that.

I get that, my first thought is much like Oofta's was.

Eventually everything working the same would get boring to me. Either the plan goes off and there is no challenge in the actual encounter (which should be at least mildly dramatic [in a literary sense] most of the time) or the plan goes wrong and everyone is in it deep.

But, if you are rotating in other games, I could see it averaging out over time.

 

[Lanefan]

Because the spells aren't their HP pool. The spells belong to the spellcasters.

But that doesn't matter: between existing h.p. and available spells there's still only so many h.p. to go around; and once the spells are depleted for the day (or if your party doesn't have a healer!) the resource becomes a) finite and b) hard to recover.

And long term attrition works in any version of D&D where you sufficiently pressure the players.

When 4e-5e allow complete overnight h.p. and ability recovery by RAW, long-term attrition doesn't look very feasible.

There may be an exception for 3.5 with 8 hour rope tricks.

Yep, and some other options in various editions which more or less amount to the same thing.

As someone whose first two RPGs were GURPS and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, any game in which you can take a crossbow bolt to the face for max damage and not suffer long term consequences or shock and wound penalties you're treating combat as a sport in which the enemy are wielding nerf weapons rather than actual weaponry. MMA is no less of a sport than boxing just because the gloves are thinner and kicks are allowed. Indeed, with the longest recovery times being about as long as long term fatigue, and literally no long term consequences for things that should be fatal other than in the rare case of an accident the D&D hit point model isn't so close to MMA as it is to Professional Wrestling.

Point taken, but we have to work with what we have; and comparing the various editions of D&D to each other is far more apples-to-apples than comparing any version of D&D to reality, at least when it comes to toughness and resilience.

Now please stop with that smug and insulting edition warring analogy in the near consequence-free combat-as-professional-wrestling game.

I think this might make me the first person in history to be accused of promoting a 0e-v-4e edition war!