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

[Oofta]

Well, we simply disagree.

You have no idea how our players play, what our characters are like, or anything g else. If your experience differs, fine, but I stand by my statement that 5E is the easiest and least deadly D&D (disregarding 4th, which I never played) IME, especially when using the guidelines in the DMG. Others have agreed 5E is the least-challenging in the aspect of survival (especially past tier I), so I am hardly alone in that assessment.

To give you an example, our party of 5 10-12th level characters, had these encounters in our session yesterday:

2 Frost Giants (DIFFICULT)
1 Frost Giant (EASY)
2 Young Adult White Dragons (EASY)
1 Frost Giant (EASY)
1 Cloud Giant, 1 Oni, 4 Ogres (DEADLY)
8 Ogres (MODERATE)
3 Frost Giants (DEADLY)
2 Fire Giants, 4 Ogres (DIFFICULT)

SHORT REST

1 Drow Wizard, 1 Drow Elite Warrior (EASY)
2 Cloud Giants, 2 Winter Wolves (DEADLY)
3 Frost Giants (DEADLY)

LONG REST (end of session)

In summary: 4 EASY, 1 MODERATE, 2 DIFFICULT, 4 DEADLY. If you do any XP tally we earned a bit more than what the calculated 4 moderate + 4 difficult (max of the 6-8 recommended) would give.

While the deadly encounters most certainly had their exciting moments and a couple characters dropped to 0 HP in different fights, we were able to finish the battles and no one died, despite 4 "deadly" encounters before we got a long rest. In other words, the game played pretty much as designed IMO and I would day we had a lot of fun and excitement. Was I ever really concerned when those character went unconscious? Nope, be we had the upper hand at those points and saving them was easy enough. Now, if you play with a hard-ass DM who has monsters target fallen characters (which ours does at times depending on the monster and encounter), THAT makes the game more challenging.

A deadly encounter just means there's a decent chance you'll kill off a PC. It's never been meant as a guarantee.

As it states in the DMG

Deadly. A deadly encounter could be lethal for one or more player characters. Survival often requires good tactics and quick thinking, and the party risks defeat.​

That and the default rules are aimed at the low end of the PC capability scale. Do you use feats? Have ability scores better than standard array? Use magic items? Not playing with novices? Have a well balanced party that works well together? If you answer Yes to one or more of those you're above the curve.

But to each their own. I'll just continue on making encounters as deadly as the group wants them to be without the random "I know you're at full strength and did everything right but if you randomly roll low on this save your PC is dead" crap that older editions pulled.

 

[DND_Reborn]

A deadly encounter just means there's a decent chance you'll kill off a PC. It's never been meant as a guarantee.

As it states in the DMG

Deadly. A deadly encounter could be lethal for one or more player characters. Survival often requires good tactics and quick thinking, and the party risks defeat.​

That and the default rules are aimed at the low end of the PC capability scale. Do you use feats? Have ability scores better than standard array? Use magic items? Not playing with novices? Have a well balanced party that works well together? If you answer Yes to one or more of those you're above the curve.

But to each their own. I'll just continue on making encounters as deadly as the group wants them to be without the random "I know you're at full strength and did everything right but if you randomly roll low on this save your PC is dead" crap that older editions pulled.

Did I ever say someone should have died? No. The deadly encounters were exciting and we felt some risk, and as I said a character fell to 0 HP (in two different encounters), and once we even had to use Revivify because a character did die. But, because of such spells as Revivify, and because it is so easy to recover HP, 5E is the easiest edition IMO as I had stated.

While you are correct those default rules were the way the game was designed, no one IME plays that way and from the evidence of the several threads few tables do.

Do we use feats? Sure, most tables do IME and seems to be the case anecdotally.
Do we have better than standard array? Some yes, some no. You can point-buy or roll. And FWIW rolling is the default method the game was designed for. The standard-array and point-buy are secondary.
Use magic items? A few, but not many and nothing powerful. Again, most tables have some magic items, and you can buy potions of healing off of the standard equipment list.
Not playing with novices? LOL I WISH! Myself and our DM are the only experienced players (with years of gaming, I mean). Our other players have anywhere from about 9-15 months, so not exactly "newbies" but hardly really experienced as they miss and or forget abilities they often could use.

Are we "above the curve"? No, not IME and hardly more so than than most tables I know of.

Does 5E make survival easier than in prior editions due to easy death-recovery, easy HP recovery, denying most monsters save proficiencies, no save-or-die, harder surprise requirements, short-rest ability recovery for many features, etc., etc.? Yep. It sure does!

Now, as we both know this is all personal experience and such, so if your mileage differs, good for you. IME after level 5 or so, the game becomes a matter of just going through the motions and most likely you will make it out ok in the long run. I don't see any point in debating it further (after all, my initial post was #6 and until quoted, I had no interest in even watching the thread...). At this point I have stated my experiences sufficiently and made my case. Agree with it or not, I really don't care, I have better things to do.

See ya in another thread!

 

[slobster]

On the one hand, I do agree that 5E was written such that a by-the-book, standard encounter is ASSUMED to be something that a group of PCs will eventually defeat, even allowing for bad luck or poor decisions. There is a lot of slack given to basically guarantee the PCs win. Posing a serious threat just wasn't a design goal when crafting the monsters and the challenge system. Posing the APPEARANCE of a threat was the goal.

That said, in terms of the actual experience of how threatening a given "level appropriate encounter" actually ends up being, I actually feel that 3.x D&D was similarly toothless in providing actual threat of PCs being killed or seriously injured, at least if the party was above level 3 or so and any good at optimization. I clearly recall spending a lot of time building encounters for my parties back in the 3.x era, choosing a CR 20 monster to throw up against my level 11 party thinking it would be something that they'd have to flee from after a big epic fight, then watching it go down in 2 rounds without inflicting a single point of damage. For that party, from what I recall I would typically build an encounter for EL about 6 levels above the PCs actual level, and then double the number of cannon fodder, and they would STILL sail past most of them as barely more than a speedbump.

So yeah, like other posters have said, 3.x and other editions had more scary monster mechanics like level drain etc. which could shake things up. But if you are specifically just following the encounter design suggestions given in the DMG, like most people seem to be saying in this thread for 5E, then 3.x encounter assumptions were quickly far outstripped by actual PC power level, to a vastly greater extent than is true in 5E given bounded accuracy etc.

So I'd say that 5E is definitely less deadly at low levels than any other edition of D&D I've played, with 3.x being comically unchallenging as-written for the mid to highish levels. Again, assuming you just follow the encounter planning rules as-written, which no DM worth their salt will do IMO.

 

[JeffB]

A deadly encounter just means there's a decent chance you'll kill off a PC. It's never been meant as a guarantee.

As it states in the DMG

Deadly. A deadly encounter could be lethal for one or more player characters. Survival often requires good tactics and quick thinking, and the party risks defeat.​

​

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For my tastes they should have just made this a "normal" or "default" encounter.​

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:mostly rhetorical: What's the point of combat if it's not deadly? Why bother with encounters that are there just for XP boosters or to fit the "minimum # of encounters per day". It's fine in OD&D where you can roll through 6 -8 encounters in an hour of play in your 70s style dungeon of 100 rooms. It's a poor fit for any modern versions of the game.​

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[Undrave]

I've finally put the words to what bugs me about these so-called 'challenges' that are basically 'You need this spell to remove this condition' or 'you need a weapon made of X metal to hit this creature'... The problem is that it's basically the game dictating you how to solve a problem.

Got hit by an ability drain? Greater Restauration. Werewolf? Silver weapon.

I think it's a lot more interesting to overcome challenges with what you have rather than to always have the perfect solution the designer wanted you to have. So anything that's basically a video game door with only ONE key irks me greatly.


Also, of note... is there ANY fiction out there with a hero with a golf-bag of magic swords with different property like you were apparently supposed to have as 1e-2e Fighter? Was that a thing before DnD? Yes, there is stories where you need to find the ONE legendary weapon to defeat the bad guy, but those stories don't end up with the hero then going to collect the legendary weapon from OTHER stories. They have ONE and that's it.

 

[JeffB]

I've finally put the words to what bugs me about these so-called 'challenges' that are basically 'You need this spell to remove this condition' or 'you need a weapon made of X metal to hit this creature'... The problem is that it's basically the game dictating you how to solve a problem.

Got hit by an ability drain? Greater Restauration. Werewolf? Silver weapon.

I think it's a lot more interesting to overcome challenges with what you have rather than to always have the perfect solution the designer wanted you to have. So anything that's basically a video game door with only ONE key irks me greatly.


Also, of note... is there ANY fiction out there with a hero with a golf-bag of magic swords with different property like you were apparently supposed to have as 1e-2e Fighter? Was that a thing before DnD? Yes, there is stories where you need to find the ONE legendary weapon to defeat the bad guy, but those stories don't end up with the hero then going to collect the legendary weapon from OTHER stories. They have ONE and that's it.

books are books, games are games.

I agree with your sentiment though. When gaming the system is the design intent- story and verisimilitude suffer. This is an area where D&D has made little progress.Add any limitation, a new subsystem is created to curtail it. 3.5 is the prime example. No cold forged adamantine abyssal banes? Let me rack up some more xp and gold and I'll have my good buddy wizard pick the right feats and then he can craft me one.

 

[Undrave]

books are books, games are games.

I agree with your sentiment though. When gaming the system is the design intent- story and verisimilitude suffer. This is an area where D&D has made little progress.Add any limitation, a new subsystem is created to curtail it. 3.5 is the prime example. No cold forged adamantine abyssal banes? Let me rack up some more xp and gold and I'll have my good buddy wizard pick the right feats and then he can craft me one.

I'm the kind of guy who like to do mono-type run of Pokémon I don't go looking for a Pokémon of the optimal type to face a challenge, I pull through with what I have and usually use neutral moves if I don't have super effectives one and make do.

So the golf-bag philosophy just doesn't interest me much. I'd rather see solutions being brought forth through combination of multiple character's abilities or at least have multiple paths to it.

 

[tetrasodium]

I've finally put the words to what bugs me about these so-called 'challenges' that are basically 'You need this spell to remove this condition' or 'you need a weapon made of X metal to hit this creature'... The problem is that it's basically the game dictating you how to solve a problem.

Got hit by an ability drain? Greater Restauration. Werewolf? Silver weapon.

I think it's a lot more interesting to overcome challenges with what you have rather than to always have the perfect solution the designer wanted you to have. So anything that's basically a video game door with only ONE key irks me greatly.


Also, of note... is there ANY fiction out there with a hero with a golf-bag of magic swords with different property like you were apparently supposed to have as 1e-2e Fighter? Was that a thing before DnD? Yes, there is stories where you need to find the ONE legendary weapon to defeat the bad guy, but those stories don't end up with the hero then going to collect the legendary weapon from OTHER stories. They have ONE and that's it.

It's not that simple though. You don't need the spell/weapon to solve a problem, you need it to ignore the problem. Things like SR/the old interrupt mechanics/ability damage/incorporeal traits/rust monsters/oozes/etc were not the norm default, they were things that made stuff other than over nine thousand hp slogs dangerous things that needed more strategy & care than they would normally need.

In 5e the problem is removed irrelivant or self resolving all too often.

Greater restoration was a freaking seventh level spell, you keep throwing it out like people were casually casting it to erase ability damage instead of recovering 1 point/day or maybe 1+somespell slot number of 1d4 points from lesser restoration as was the norm.

You are also ignoring the extreme that 5e did with getting rid of DR & using"nonmagical bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage." You no longer need to use a bludgeoning weapon against skeletons or a slashing weapon for zombies to avoid dr5.
5e werewolf

You also had things like axiomatic, anarchic, holy, & so on that were often either catchall bypass (lots of things were dr x/$material, good & similar)or gave a bonus against many things it wouldn't bypass dr on while not giving that bonus against everything... it might be gangbusters against the BBEG, but the soldiers & bodyguards just guarding the castle & most of not all of his upper level folks with no idea what the bbeg does on the weekend not so much.

 

[Undrave]

Greater restoration was a freaking seventh level spell, you keep throwing it out like people were casually casting it to erase ability damage instead of recovering 1 point/day or maybe 1+somespell slot number of 1d4 points from lesser restoration as was the norm.

I don't really care what they did in previous editions...A lot of it feel like book keeping minutiae and a motivation for the golf-bag style I'm not a fan of. Unless you were a caser and you just ignored that stuff (with different book keeping).

I use Greater Restoration (which is 5th level in 5e) because it's specifically the ONLY thing that can remove the max HP drain of the 5e Clay Golem. I think it's a dumb design, but it's the kind of thing you want more of in the game and I oppose the idea.

 

[Chaosmancer]

It's not that simple though. You don't need the spell/weapon to solve a problem, you need it to ignore the problem. Things like SR/the old interrupt mechanics/ability damage/incorporeal traits/rust monsters/oozes/etc were not the norm default, they were things that made stuff other than over nine thousand hp slogs dangerous things that needed more strategy & care than they would normally need.

In 5e the problem is removed irrelivant or self resolving all too often.


You are also ignoring the extreme that 5e did with getting rid of DR & using"nonmagical bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage." You no longer need to use a bludgeoning weapon against skeletons or a slashing weapon for zombies to avoid dr5.


You also had things like axiomatic, anarchic, holy, & so on that were often either catchall bypass (lots of things were dr x/$material, good & similar)or gave a bonus against many things it wouldn't bypass dr on while not giving that bonus against everything... it might be gangbusters against the BBEG, but the soldiers & bodyguards just guarding the castle & most of not all of his upper level folks with no idea what the bbeg does on the weekend not so much.

You seem to be missing the point Tetrasodium.

"Ignore 5 points of damage from any source that isn't an axiomatic slashing weapon" isn't an interesting challenge. Either you went out and got weapons to cover every single thing, or you just did less damage.

Doing less damage on every strike does turn the fight into a slog against endless hp, because all it is doing is reducing the damage, and therefore increasing the effective hp.

This monster ignores your armor and and your attacks unless both pieces of equipment have X enchantment isn't a tactical challenge. It is a check-list. Do you have the proper equipment? Fight proceeds as normal. Do you not have the proper equipment? Lose fight.

And 5e does have some specific rules. Yes, Skeletons don't take less damage from piercing, but they take more damage from bludgeoning. Mechanically, that is no different thant giving them DR against every damage type except bludgeoning, but it is much easier to read and remember. And there are creatures like some oozes that are straight immune to certain damage types, if memory serves.

They are just much less common, which reduces the bookkeeping and lets people just play the game instead of going against the checklist and realizing that they forgot their Cold Iron Chaos Forged Longsword, and since they only have their Cold Iron Spear they are going to lose the fight