D&D 5E Is 5e "Easy Mode?"

[dave2008]

It's not that simple. Back in prior editions there were tools available to the gm that allowed them to force the players to rethink the standard strategies and balsnyce the costs of quickly shifting themselves into new ones.

OK, what were these tools you speak of? It is hard to discuss if we don't know what we are discussing / comparing too.

I started with D&D / AD&D back in the 80s and I personally find I have more tools available to me in 5e. I have no problem making my players rethink strategies. In fact, we play 5e pretty much like we did in D&D / 1e AD&D

 

[DND_Reborn]

Actually, that statement tells you nothing about the game. Why shouldn't a party (4-6) players blow out a CR 12 monster?

FWIW, his is something I have been looking into a lot lately!

A party (5th-level) of 4 should have pretty much no chance against CR 12 barring unbelievable luck and skill on the players' side.

A party of 5 is still in "beyond deadly" range against CR 12 but they can do it with some good thinking and a bit of luck.

A party of 6 characters could have this range mostly from a moderate to hard encounter depending on the set up.

Now, @Monayuris does state that their group "optimizes hard core" and IME that is more of the issue in game balance. There are a lot of synergies out there as we all know that can be heavily abused. My analysis so far is that for more min/maxed groups, you can basically treat them as if they had one more character (or even two in some cases) to determine their "effective size".

In such instances, IMO, the game is only "broken" because it allows such optimization. For such groups, challenges have to be reconfigured to match their great-than-typical power levels. Other tables that play high-power parties will defeat greater CR opponents more easily, which is why a lot of DMs complain about how weak solo BBEGs are in 5E. It was an issue in earlier editions, I know, but seems more prevalent in 5E.

Just my two copper pieces.

 

[dave2008]

It's not that simple. Back in prior editions there were tools available to the gm that allowed them to force the players to rethink the standard strategies and balsnyce the costs of quickly shifting themselves into new ones. 5e lacks those kinds of narrowly focused tools leaving the gm with much more crude and unfocused options that poorly fill the need. I put together a post earlier giving several examples when someone kept simply claiming that 5e has such tools but was unsurprised when there was no willingness to expand and support that argument in defense of 5e beyond "this is wrong".

To start I will give several "out of the box" dials 5e provides for adjusting difficulty. I will also admit 5e has done a poor job of explaining (by WotC) how you can adjust these dials.

1. First you need to understand your groups baseline vs. the baseline assumption of the MM, which is: limited magic items, not feats, no multiclassing, and limited experience (ie. not optimizers and/or limited tactical & strategic skills). I pretty firmly believe if you play with those assumptions, the MM and encounter guidelines work well (I know they have for one of my groups that fits that description). However, if you find that not to be the case, you can use some of the following options to increase difficulty as needed.
2. Make monsters more difficult: increase HP. There is a range provided for a reason, use it. If your group mows through monsters, give them max HP so they last longer. (PS I did this back in 1e too)
3. Use tougher monsters: if the encounter guidelines don't work for your group, ignore them. Using higher CR monsters is like #2, except with the added benefit that the monsters should have higher AC/ attack bonus and DPR. The enounter guidelines are just a baseline, they don't work for most advanced groups and that is OK. They are not rules to be broken, but suggestions for new DMs with new groups.
4. Use more monsters. Did this in 1e and it works in 5e too.
5. Use more encounters. Using up more resources makes it more dangerous.
6. Using more dangerous encounters. I only use 2-3 encounters per "day," so I tend to make them tougher. Using waves of monsters is good for this. The same basic idea as #5.
7. Variant & Optional rules.
   1. Healing kit requirement
   2. Lingering injuries
   3. Slow Natural healing (combining that with healing kit requirement can be a game changer)
8. Homebrew
   1. Make monsters tougher: +1 to AC per tier
   2. Make monsters tougher, more damage: double strength bonus or +2 damage per tier, or max damage on a hit.
   3. Death and dying:
      1. death at 0 hp
      2. death at -10 hp
      3. 1 level of exhaustion each time you go to 0 hp

OK, that is just a few. If you have more specific things your are looking for we can tailor our response to what you need.

 

[dave2008]

FWIW, his is something I have been looking into a lot lately!

A party (5th-level) of 4 should have pretty much no chance against CR 12 barring unbelievable luck and skill on the players' side.

A party of 5 is still in "beyond deadly" range against CR 12 but they can do it with some good thinking and a bit of luck.

A party of 6 characters could have this range mostly from a moderate to hard encounter depending on the set up.

I disagree see my post expanding on my views here (directly above this post). The encounter guidelines are for very basic players. Pretty much anyone on these forums should use them only as a tool to measure their group against and recalculate as needed.

 

[dave2008]

A party (5th-level) of 4 should have pretty much no chance against CR 12 barring unbelievable luck and skill on the players' side.

Based on what? The encounter guidelines? That is a guide for a specific type of player. You need to adjust to your players (wish they made it clear in the DMG, but I would think that is obvious old timers like us). Personally, I don't use the encounter guidelines at all and I have no issue with through much "deadlier" combats at my group. What is deadly is what happens at the table, not in a guideline.

 

[tetrasodium]

5e still has tools available. Nastier monsters, or more of them, more encounters per long rest or changing the schedule of recovery. Inflicting conditions like exhaustion or reduced HP maximum. Terrain or objective adjustments.

That is before you get into actual house rules like the extended short rest, or slower healing variants.

5e isn't as tunable as 4e, but probably better than the pre 3e versions.

3/3.5 is a version of d&d prior to 5e making it a prior edition. You don't mention which monsters, so lets compare some of the scariest ones of 3.5 with their 5e counterparts?

• Wraith: With undead & incorporeal traits, they were immune to sneak attack, had a 50% chance of ignoring any attack or spell directed at them all while ignoring armor natural armor & shields , the 5e version does none of those & that's before you even get into the shift from con damage to max hp damage. A creature attacking a stat that a very high value might be around or slightly above 20 is very different than a creature attacking maxhp... That wasn't enough though & it went from prepared lesser restoration recovering 1d4 points plus 1 point/day of recovery to sleep it off & be fine in the morning.
  
  Spoiler: 3.5/5e wraith

  3.5
  

  

  
  5e
  

  
  It's absurd to even pretend these two are in the same league of scary when the 5e wraith needs to roll a 14 to even hit a character in mundane plate+shield before that weaker more trivialized effect even gets of save chance
• Ghoul/ghast: These went from being one of the most terrifying creatures that could scare characters by simply existing to a rather sad slightly improved zombie.
  
  Spoiler: "da ghouls

  3.5
  

  

  
  

  

  
  5e
  

  
  They both have paralysis yes, but the 5e version lost an attack & thatparalysis gets a save every round o top of differences between how paralysis works
• Spoiler: paralysis

  5e
  

  

  
  Don' forget you die at 3 failed death saves and one attack in 5e with any damage below zero going away as soon as you get healed.
  3.5
  

  
  There is no contest on which is more scary.
• Rust monster: the 5e version does nothing to magic armor & weapons while the 3.5 version was still freaking dangerous to have them exposed with it near. That's a pretty gigantic difference before you even get into the fact that the rust was a touch attack so was almost certain to connect with anyone wearing or wielding metal.
  
  Spoiler: rust monsters

  3.5
  

  

  
  5e
  

  
• It's not all just the things that can make players wet themselves scary creatures though.
• Trogs:
  
  Spoiler: 5e/3.5 trogs

  

  
  

  

  3.5
  

  

  
  

  

  
  

  
  tossing a few trogs into the mix didn't change much directly after a few levels as they are only cr1 creatures with aac15 & 13hp, but being within 30 feet of any trog means that pretty quickly you are likely to be doing pretty much everything at -2 for the rest of the fight & then some compared to 5e where you need to be within 5feet, only get the penalty till your next turn, & are immune to that effect from all trog stench effects for the next hour if you save.
• Physical DR: Yes 5e has resistance to nonmagical piercing bludgeoning, or slashing damage... but cantrips are unaffected by that, some classes get a level 6 ability to treat their attacks as magic, and any +1 weapon is good enough. A creature that had dr5/bludgeoning like the humble skeleton or dr5/slash like a mere zombie meant that putting away your hypothetical +1 bursting rapier & pulling out a mace, longsword, or whatever is something that needs to be strongly considered or your damage might be entirely nullified unless you are able to hit it like a truck. Resistance pretty much goes away once you have a magic weapon and penalizes hit it hard once approaches compared to hit it often & play the averages because you add half your strength/dex each attack. DR had the added advantage of allowing weapons like a flaming rapier to be a possibly not optimal but ok choice in both those examples while in 5e it just means you get extra dice & are still unaffected by resistance to nonmagical piercing slashing & bludgeoning.
• Spell Resistance: Yes 5e has some creatures that claim to have it, but targeting a weak save with advantage/disadvantage in your favor is very much not even close to needing to make a caster level check vrs SR or do nothing with a prepared spell slot before you even get to maybe beat a weak save
  
  Spoiler: SR and caster level checks

  

So yes... to which 5e monsters do you refer to?
@dave2008 These are some examples, given my earlier examples of them in play and the sound of silence accompanying claims that such narrowly focused tools exist in 5e I think it's more than enough of a selection to start with. There is also the shift from weapons & armor having subjective criteria in 3.5/4e like asf acp crit range crit mod brutal# defensive & so on that allowed the gm to create magic items & other treasures that are better in some ways and worse equal or similar in other ways that make it a tough choice to decide between continuing to one nice weapon/armor or switching to a different nice weapon/armor. in 5e that choice is a flatly objective boolian selection that boils down to "does it use the right stat? if I need heavy weapons is it heavy? is the damage better than what I have?". Coupled with things like DR as noted above, this allowed for very nice treasures that did not significantly change the power level of the group. Maybe Alice takes the new shiny as her main weapon & gives her old one to Bob leaving both feeling like they got something nice, maybe Everyone agrees that bob should just get it. Whatever the case is you don't need to constantly give out stuff that is going to be objectively better in ways that either raise the power scale of the group or unquestionably get sold.

As to the rest of your post @dave2008 , I actually commented on most of that earlier.

 

[DND_Reborn]

I disagree see my post expanding on my views here (directly above this post). The encounter guidelines are for very basic players. Pretty much anyone on these forums should use them only as a tool to measure their group against and recalculate as needed.

LOL, you snipped out the part of my post that agrees with your POV (for the most part). Did you read all of it? If you did I don't see how you can really "disagree".

Now, @Monayuris does state that their group "optimizes hard core" and IME that is more of the issue in game balance. There are a lot of synergies out there as we all know that can be heavily abused. My analysis so far is that for more min/maxed groups, you can basically treat them as if they had one more character (or even two in some cases) to determine their "effective size".

In such instances, IMO, the game is only "broken" because it allows such optimization. For such groups, challenges have to be reconfigured to match their great-than-typical power levels. Other tables that play high-power parties will defeat greater CR opponents more easily, which is why a lot of DMs complain about how weak solo BBEGs are in 5E. It was an issue in earlier editions, I know, but seems more prevalent in 5E.

Otherwise, a lot of DMs have complained about how bad solo BBEGs run because of the power-level most parties play at. IME they either hand out too much gold, magic, etc., use MCing, feats, etc., compared to the "base-level" design of the game.

Like you, I have found the easiest way is to use higher HP, bump AC a bit, etc. if I see the group wants more high-power PCs. Using terrain and other factors helps, too.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I gave up trying to compute encounter CRs long, long ago. I just kinda wing it now, get a feel for what the party can do with some easy encounters, ramp up the difficulty, see what they can handle...at the same time, this process helps them figure out which monsters to Leroy Jenkins and which ones to flee.

 

[DND_Reborn]

I gave up trying to compute encounter CRs long, long ago. I just kinda wing it now, get a feel for what the party can do with some easy encounters, ramp up the difficulty, see what they can handle...at the same time, this process helps them figure out which monsters to Leroy Jenkins and which ones to flee.

Yeah, you can calculate the baseline so to say the non-feat, non-MC, low-magic level, and then treat the party number or average level a bit higher for the effective power. That value can be used to determine CR.

Our DM and I have developed our spreadsheet to determine if a party against the CRs of opponents would be easy, moderate, hard, or deadly as an encounter.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

Tiny Hut is only problematic if you dont put temporal constraints on your quests/ adventures.

Which you should be doing 90 percent of the time.

Temporal constraints in what way? You mean that there's some sort of deadline that they can't miss? That just doesn't apply in most of the adventures my players get involved in. Most of them time we're a much more laid-back exploration type of campaign driven by the choices and actions of the PCs, rather than a plot- or event-driven adventure that compels them to do something.

So no, 90 percent of the time I don't have temporal constraints, and for the most part I don't have quests either. And no, I "shouldn't be doing them 90 percent of the time" because we've loved doing what we've been doing for over 30 years.

My objection to the new version of the spell is that it implies that I have to change my campaign to fit their changes. It's not a big deal for us, we just didn't go along with the new ritual spell rules. We like when the spellcasters have to choose non-combat oriented spells for whatever it is they have decided to do that day.

That's not to say that others can't do that or it's bad. It's just not our style.