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

[Lanefan]

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.

Interesting, in that while I've no hesitation in killing off PCs I've only actually had one TPK in my life.

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.

Narrower band of options?

One of the better features about 5e seems to be that the band of options is wider - low-level PCs/monsters can still be a threat to high/level the reverse; unlike (in particular) 3e where the options were very narrow.

 

[tetrasodium]

Deadly Encounters from the 5e DMG tables live up to their name. It might take longer than prior editions, but a Deadly Encounter will at the least require a long rest and often times it will be time for the corpse handling gloves to be used.

Waves of assaulting Shadows (the monster) will wipe out low level parties, and severely hamper and possibly take down a higher level adventurer. An oldie from 1e, worked in 3e, works in 5e still.

Wraiths are very scary in 5e...Life Drain kills other classes and makes Barbarians cry in fear, like when a barbarian punches a steely jawed camel.

Wraith

Incorporeal Movement. The wraith can move through other creatures and objects as if they were difficult terrain. It takes 5 [rollable](1d...

www.dndbeyond.com

Single mobs have always died fast under concentrated fire.

Multiple mobs are recommended to challenge in 5e. Zerg away my pretties!

First off, what exactly about the 5e wraith do you consider "scary"?

Spoiler: 3.5mm wraith

A critical part of that is incorporeal traits:

So not only does it ignore everyone's armor & shield(very partial small value exceptions aside) to almost guarantee a hit, it is also going to ignore half the attacks that do hit or require spellslots to kill and those almost certain to hit attacks are going to be dealing a d6 of con damage fairly often. Cap it off with the fact that it can deal 1d6 con damage each hit. lesser restoration only recovered 1d4 points of stat damage, and you had the vancian/spontaneous once prepped differences in casting.

Even at higher levels the wraith was dangerous because of all these reasons

Spoiler: 5e wraith

Yes you need multiple monsters to be a challenge, but the difference is that one has features that make it difficult & frighteningly dangerous in ways that make the risk calculations for other monsters shift. Throwing some monsters with save or suck/save or lose abilities didn't trigger the same kind of rocket tag as things like a beholder's disintegrate ray, but it meant that you didn't need an army of them to crush the party under a zergrush. The same is true for monsters that had notable DR or outright immunity to damage not from a +N weapon, not $DamageType, weapons made from various materials, or whatever while in 5e there's effectively two damage types "nonmagical bludgeoning piercing or slashing damage" and what amounts to well... "every cantrip, every spell, every magical weapon, & level 6+ monk strikes or level 6+ moon druid wildshape." Regenerating monsters were dangerous because it was generally a nontrivial thing to halt regeneration unless you happened to have a melee weapon that had built in fire/acid/radiant(holy?) damage wile in 5e there are more classes that are almost certain to have one or more cantrips that deal those damage types.


Exactly what about dropping a wraith into an encounter or the crawl along the way makes a wraith in 5e scary other than 4d8+3 necrotic damage?

 

[tetrasodium]

So are you complaining because the encounters have to be deadly or because they don't have to be deadly?

No It's more that both the gm & players know that encounters fall into "this really an inappropriate challenge for this group" or "rigged like losing games & sports to your toddler child/nephew/niece" it winds up feeling hollow, empty, & rote unless you inundate the party with waves of comic book level mooks & doing that does weird things to the world & strains credibility in other ways.

 

[FireLance]

Which of the following two, mutually exclusive, choices is "less challenging"?

Sorry, I'm not really keen to get into the whole "which edition is the least challenging" debate, which frankly, to me, has the unpleasant odor of, "REAL MEN play my favourite edition; the other editions are for wimps!"

I'm only pointing out that your earlier statement:

Plus, my statement stands, it was an option every character had, especially at 1st level when 1HD was a LOT of healing.

was not accurate since unlike 5E, when spending a Hit Die restores a higher proportion of hit points for a lower level character than a higher level character, using your Second Wind in 4E restored about the same proportion of hit points regardless of level.

 

[Henry]

In our 5e games, we’ve had a TPK at 3rd level, a TPK at level 6, and multiple character deaths from levels 1 through 7. Of the limited experience we’ve had above level 10, we’ve had no deaths.

if you stick strictly to the challenge guidelines in the DMG or Xanathar’s then yes, chance of character death is lower. However, more monsters is key - don’t have one or two beefy monsters unless they can take multiple actions in a round and have legendary resistance. Also, I beef up the number of monsters by about 25 to 50% of what the book says do or Cr value should be. I also don’t let them fight only one fight per day, unless they are in A very sparsely populated environmen.

 

[jayoungr]

No It's more that both the gm & players know that encounters fall into "this really an inappropriate challenge for this group" or "rigged like losing games & sports to your toddler child/nephew/niece"

If that's your players' attitude, you can fix it. There are multiple ways to do that.

In the first place, if you think your players are bored with the combats they're getting, you can make them harder or more interesting in some way! I firmly believe that keeping things interesting for the players is what a DM's job is, and blaming it on the system is (IMO) a cop-out. You just have to figure out what would hold your players' attention.

Anyway, the difficulty of 5E encounters can't be calculated as finely as in 4E. Some abilities are really swingy, and the luck of initiative or a random crit can turn an encounter from deadly to trivial or back again. For example, I instakilled a level 5 PC with a zombie beholder's disintegration ray in Ravenloft last year. No death saves. Neither the DM nor the players should assume an encounter is going to be predictable.

Or if you have a different sort of players, you could just do what the story seems to require, and to heck with the daily encounter budget. This is more or less what I do. I do try to make sure to soften the PCs up a bit before a final boss fight, but beyond that, I don't worry about it too much, and the players are fine with that because they're mostly there for the story, and they're happy if it makes sense.

Speaking purely for myself, I'm also not the sort of DM, and my players are not the sort of players, who lose interest in the game if they're not afraid of their characters dying. I know there are many DMs who insist that the game is completely void of interest if the players don't fear for their characters' lives, and I believe that's really true for them, but it's pretty low on the list of concerns at my table.

shrug

 

[Chaosmancer]

unless you inundate the party with waves of comic book level mooks & doing that does weird things to the world & strains credibility in other ways.

Not really.

For example, I had a group of 5th level characters attack a gnoll camp. They had about 20 gnolls to fight through. That doesn't strain credibility in any way, twenty people is about the size of a small camp of people.

Was in a game where we assaulted a werewolf controlled castle. We fought nearly 80 enemies as we lobbed spells and arrows and tried to break past the walls. (We had a friendly giant and mage helping, which is why we won instead of dying horribly)

The only "unrealistic" part of it is how many enemies we each killed, but in terms of how many enemies were in the location, it makes complete sense. You can't hold a castle with three people, you need a lot more than that. And, once the alarm is raised, you will be fighting some pretty consistent waves, because the enemy isn't going to just politely wait for you to make it to room 2B before attacking you.

 

[atanakar]

In short 5e is expected that you normally have 6-8 lethal fights for the party per day to challenge them. You're going to be depopulating entire towns at that rate.

I don't DM or participate in murder hobos campaigns. Characters who do that get arrested and they meet the hangman for behaviour head-justment. In a dungeon or in wilderness 6-8 encounters per day are perfectly viable.

 

[tetrasodium]

If that's your players' attitude, you can fix it. There are multiple ways to do that.

In the first place, if you think your players are bored with the combats they're getting, you can make them harder or more interesting in some way! I firmly believe that keeping things interesting for the players is what a DM's job is, and blaming it on the system is (IMO) a cop-out. You just have to figure out what would hold your players' attention.

Anyway, the difficulty of 5E encounters can't be calculated as finely as in 4E. Some abilities are really swingy, and the luck of initiative or a random crit can turn an encounter from deadly to trivial or back again. For example, I instakilled a level 5 PC with a zombie beholder's disintegration ray in Ravenloft last year. No death saves. Neither the DM nor the players should assume an encounter is going to be predictable.

Or if you have a different sort of players, you could just do what the story seems to require, and to heck with the daily encounter budget. This is more or less what I do. I do try to make sure to soften the PCs up a bit before a final boss fight, but beyond that, I don't worry about it too much, and the players are fine with that because they're mostly there for the story, and they're happy if it makes sense.

Speaking purely for myself, I'm also not the sort of DM, and my players are not the sort of players, who lose interest in the game if they're not afraid of their characters dying. I know there are many DMs who insist that the game is completely void of interest if the players don't fear for their characters' lives, and I believe that's really true for them, but it's pretty low on the list of concerns at my table.

shrug

You misunderstand. 6-8 encounters every day shifts the game into directions that are problematic to story & setting... Pointing out how someone died in your game to a save or die effect underscores rather than contradicts my point though since I've been saying those effects are the only thing that poke the fear buttons on the player's lizardbrains. Just like when I mentioned playing games & sports with a toddler, I can do things to make it interesting & adjust the difficulty but I have many more options to functionally do so than MMA reenactments like disintegrate or accidentally/intentionally tripping him to drop hp to 0 then just stomp the body a few times (knock out, first first two death saves with a repeated attack, do it again). People are not ragging on 5e because it's hard to kill a PC, that's happening because you need to use save or die monsters or homebrew & houserule in the ability to ever scare or give pause to a player unless you run a murderhobo zerghunt. Things are not helped by the fact that an overly streamlined system means lateral advancements that don't change a PC's power level are mostly off the table

 

[jayoungr]

6-8 encounters every day shifts the game into directions that are problematic to story & setting...

I have given three possible approaches in this thread to dealing with the 6-8 encounters per day recommendation:

1. Chain together encounters so that players use more resources in a single extended combat. A mini-dungeon with four rooms is potentially four encounters, for example.
2. Make the encounters harder or less predictable so that players remain interested.
3. Stop worrying about the 6-8 number and just do what makes sense for the story. This, frankly, is my preferred solution, but I get that it won't work for every table.

... But you don't seem to like any of these ideas, and I'm not sure what it is you want. You say that save-or-die is the only thing that scares your players, but you don't want to use save-or-die.

Help me out, here: what would an ideal adventuring day look like, to you? Two or three combats where the players are scared of losing characters in each one, but not because of save-or-die effects?

Pointing out how someone died in your game to a save or die effect underscores rather than contradicts my point though since I've been saying those effects are the only thing that poke the fear buttons on the player's lizardbrains.

First, why is "poking the fear button" so important? Do you have the sort of players who get bored unless they think their characters might die?

Second, why is save-or-die the only thing that scares them? What about monsters that dish out large amounts of damage, like half a PC's hitpoints per round? Would they work?

Third, my main point was that fights aren't always predictable. There are other things besides disintegration that can affect the flow of a fight; I just picked that because it was an easy and concrete example. I remember a long thread about whether a banshee's wail was OP, for example. Or take dragon breath. If the dragon goes first, that's a very different fight from one where the dragon goes last.

Just like when I mentioned playing games & sports with a toddler, I can do things to make it interesting & adjust the difficulty but I have many more options to functionally do so than MMA reenactments like disintegrate or accidentally/intentionally tripping him to drop hp to 0 then just stomp the body a few times (knock out, first first two death saves with a repeated attack, do it again).

Okay, so if you feel like you have lots of options to make things interesting and adjust the difficulty, then what's the problem? Are we back to "it's no fun if the players aren't scared"?