D&D General Taking the "Dungeons" out of D&D

[Ancalagon]

I know where it came from. I don't know why it's still even being said. An encounter a day is 100% fine and it can be fun and interesting to every class involved while also being balanced amongst themselves.

do you mean an encounter per long rest?

I must strongly disagree. I ran a game with a cleric, a paladin, a warlock and a monk, and for a time I had usually encounter a day - but often those were big fights. The paladin was utterly dominating, could smite every round, an the cleric would toss around their most powerful spells. The monk and warlock paled.

So I changed the pace a bit, had multiple combats per day. Suddenly the paladin had to hold back and felt more reasonable.

 

[Asisreo]

The game’s systems are built around that assumption. Yes, you can run a game with one encounter a day and it can still be a lot of fun, but a lot of the rules systems will be superfluous (hit dice, for example, would be useless in a one encounter a day campaign), and depending on the party composition, the difficulty could become trivial, or much harder than expected. I hear all the time that 5e is “easy mode D&D” from people who don’t observe the 6-8 encounter day guideline. I never hear that from people who do observe it.

Exactly. Now, let me ask if there's anything wrong with D&D combats being easy?

I'm not saying uninteresting, I'm saying easy. Every and all combat encounters can be fun, different, engaging, and even scary to the players yet they never are in any real danger of a TPK through normal means. All combats are in these massive set pieces with moving terrain, various objectives outside "kill scary monster," and the enemies are roleplaying alongside fighting yet the chance of failure for any given PC is low. It's still possible for them to fail if they aren't engaging or quite unlucky but they know victory often. This can be fun for a wide margin of players. So many players feel awful with frequent failure, why not make failure infrequent?

What if you want to play a resource management game? Embrace it. Resource management games almost always require a time limit put in place. It's the nature of resource management. Change to gritty realism or add random tables. Whatever you do, know that this doesn't mean your game is more balanced than the other, it's just different.

Want to be ultra-hard? Embrace it. Make sure the brutes in your combat can kill an average wizard in one action, create terrain where the enemy is at a severe advantage, introduce insta-kills into your campaign.

Reinforce the themes you're set to establish in your campaign. Don't try making a resource management game but avoid forcing the players to manage their resources carefully. Don't promise an easy game and panic when players are whistling their way through encounters. Make sure you know the game you run.

The game was not created to be systematically balanced, the game was created to be fun through a cooperative experience with your DM and fellow players; be it to tell a story, face challenging quests, or experience and explore a world that your character is invested in.

In short, you don’t need to conform to that guideline, but if you don’t, your gameplay experience will be very different than the one the game is written to accommodate.

That's good. Embrace the difference. In easy campaigns, the spellcaster might not even need charm spells since everyone's so friendly that even the low charisma barbarian can autosucceed in their speech ability. In hard campaigns, the spellcasters have to think if they can afford using a spell slot for a high-level spell that might fail on a OOC situation or use a low-level spell but not be as convenient or conserve both so they have them for an upcoming fight. In medium campaigns, it might be a mix.

But diversity between tables is good.

 

[Weiley31]

Well the title doesn't exactly end up being too kosher if you replace Dungeon with a d-term that is found in Book of Erotic Fantasy.

 

[Asisreo]

do you mean an encounter per long rest?

I must strongly disagree. I ran a game with a cleric, a paladin, a warlock and a monk, and for a time I had usually encounter a day - but often those were big fights. The paladin was utterly dominating, could smite every round, an the cleric would toss around their most powerful spells. The monk and warlock paled.

So I changed the pace a bit, had multiple combats per day. Suddenly the paladin had to hold back and felt more reasonable.

What type of game were you trying to run? Did you want them to NOVA in every fight or did you want them to manage resources?

If you wanted a NOVA opportunity, I don't quite think it's unbalanced.

The paladin is doing damage and only damage. They're spending their action for it. Good, that's one of the things paladins are good for.

The cleric is either doing damage with their spiritual weapon and spirit guardians or providing support by buffing and healing the party. Good, clerics do that.

The warlock is debuffing the enemies with hypnotic pattern, slow, hex while also doing decent at-will damage for a caster.

The monk is consistently searching for a stun if it's feasible or kiting the enemy with their movement speed, causing smaller damage but often out of harm's way and can deflect incoming ranged attacks that try to hit them.

They're all doing something different because their characters aren't all built for damage. While the warlock and monk doesn't shine damage-wise, they have useful roles to keep them relevant in the game. The problem is when players are constantly having a damage-measuring contest. Some classes are built for better damage than others, but that doesn't mean they're being better.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I know where it came from. I don't know why it's still even being said. An encounter a day is 100% fine and it can be fun and interesting to every class involved while also being balanced amongst themselves.

Well, no. The game was never intended to be balanced under those conditions, and indeed it is not. A class with many long-rest resources, such as a paladin or wizard, is much more powerful under those circumstances than a class that can only access a third of their power at a time. Both theory and experience are in perfect accord on that.

 

[Charlaquin]

Exactly. Now, let me ask if there's anything wrong with D&D combats being easy?

Nothing wrong with it, just, you know, know what you’re setting yourself up for. I very often see DMs disregard the guidelines in the rulebook and then express frustration with problems that occur as a result of ignoring those guidelines. Having fewer than the recommended encounters per day and then complaining the game is too easy is just one example, but a fairly common one in my experience.

 

[Charlaquin]

They're all doing something different because their characters aren't all built for damage. While the warlock and monk doesn't shine damage-wise, they have useful roles to keep them relevant in the game. The problem is when players are constantly having a damage-measuring contest. Some classes are built for better damage than others, but that doesn't mean they're being better.

Actually, all classes are built to have rough parity in terms of damage output... if you follow the encounters per adventuring day guidelines. If you can find other ways to contribute, great, but it isn’t accurate to say that the classes are built to output significantly different amounts of damage.

 

[jayoungr]

So, what does D&D look like if you presume that you will be emulating not dungeon crawls but (...) Lord of the Rings?

That one's pretty easy to answer: it looks like Adventures in Middle-Earth.

 

[Reynard]

That one's pretty easy to answer: it looks like Adventures in Middle-Earth.

For a very specific example, that's somewhat true. AiME still keeps a lot of D&D that lends itself toward D&D fantasy, tho.

 

[robus]

I think something missing from dungeon crawls (and the rest of the game) is a good method for tracking time in way that the players can respond to. It's amazing that 5e provides no mechanism for tracking game world time apart from some vague advice on how long things might take.

The time pool system proposed by the Angry GM (and ably supported by this excellent DMs Guild product: Time Tracker - Dungeon Masters Guild | Dungeon Masters Guild ) is a perfect example of some additional rules enhancing the game and making any exploration of a dangerous place feel more perilous and exciting. The Time Tracker also adds the ability to track days and weeks which is nice.

In a similar manner we need some mechanism to make visible progress toward a social interaction goal. The players need to know where they are they start a high-stakes encounter. Basically how many "successes" do they need to gain victory. I don't believe in the skill check approach from earlier editions because a fixed number of failures means that more attempts (from a larger party for example) will make failure more likely than successful. Something more like a scale where the DM can put a marker to indicate the starting condition. Hostile, wary, skeptical etc. And then indicate where the players need to get to achieve victory and as the back and forth proceeds use those as inputs to move the marker forward or backward so that the players can clearly see whether they're making progress or not. And of course if they make too many failures they fail outright and the interaction is over. Something like that anyway.