D&D 5E How much magic do you have in your game?

[Laurefindel]

Ya, that has nothing to do with magic item design which was the discussion I was referring too.

However, I would argue an increase in HP =/= bloat. I fully concede that some HP increase, but that isn't the same as "bloat"

Ok, some math for you, red dragons:

3.5e ancient red dragon: 527 HP
3.5e GW red dragon (the most powerful): 660 HP
4e ancient red dragon (the most powerful): 1,390 HP
5e ancient red dragon (the most powerful): 546 HP

5e has the least HP for its most powerful dragon. That is HP contraction, the math supports my assessment.

EDIT: Since you mentioned Zombies

3,5e Medium zombie: 16 - 29 HP
4e Medium zombie: 40-71 HP
5e Medium zombie: 22

Hmm, seems like less HP escalation and more cherry picking on your part

5e has "flatten the curve" of monsters hp compared to 3e; many low-CR creature have more hp than older editions, the bulk of creature are within 5%, and upper-CR monsters have less. The math cannot be comparable in a linear fashion all across the game.

But we're getting far from the magic item point indeed...

 

[DND_Reborn]

I don't now how much 5e you have played, but that hasn't been my experience and based on most comments on these forums, others as well. Most people claim 5e monsters a too easy, the fall to quickly, and they are not a slug fest. Obviously you experience could be different, but that is not the consensus.

A little over two years now. One campaign went from 1-20 levels.

I don't disagree but the in 3e the same dragon has 527 HP (and of course they go up to 660 HP because there are more age categories) and in 4e it has 1,390 HP! So you can see why people who came from 4e find the idea the 5e has HP bloat a little odd.

Almost 1400 HP??? That is f'ing stupid crazy. What they hell were they thinking??? Yeah, I could see coming from 3E and 4E the concept of bloat isn't as "in your face" compared to my experiences with 1E and 2E...

I agree the hit roll comes up good bit more often. If that is not what you want, RAW 5e is not tuned to your preferences and that is OK. WotC believes most people prefer to hit more and find missing frustrating. The sales of this edition seem to agree. My own experience at least partially agrees.

My old group (we've played together since HS) didn't seem to notice a difference, or a least didn't complain or praise the more frequent hitting.

However, my new group (my sons and their friends that I taught 4e too) definitely noticed the change and much preferred the more frequent hitting in 5e vs 4e. They hated missing 4e and I guess the basically still do in 5e, but it happens less often now.

In prior editions, hitting was about 35-50% typically. In 5E it is about 65-70%, which I find boring. It is like watching a baseball game game and players hit most of the time--it removes some of the excitement of hitting IMO. I have found either imposing disadvantage or boosting AC, both work well.

I am not certain their sales are related to this aspect of the game. Personally I think there are a lot of other factors that contribute to it more than just hitting more.

We don't have any issue with monsters dropping quickly, but I agree the excite meet has shifted a bit from just hitting so seeing how much damage you do and whether or not you take the beast down with said damage.

Valid point. I was almost to the point where I would just have players roll damage since they were hitting SO often. If you build a PC to hit, you can increase your chance to 80% most of the time. Personally, just rolling damage would be less exciting for me.

How quickly monsters "drop" seems to vary IME from others. Much of it depends on the numbers encountered. IME when PCs outnumber the foes, the foes drop quickly. If foes are equal (or greater) then it takes much longer.

Since your old school, why not cap bonuses a bit. In 1e attribute bonuses capped at +3. why don't you make a 16 the max stat? Also, what I find in 5e is that since magic items are not required, you can remove the attack bonus from magic items if you want. That can be as much as a +5 difference in your attack bonus.

I've considered capping at 16 and 18. I don't hand out magic items much anymore to help make the game harder. 5E is "easy" IMO compared to AD&D, but the changes I make with house-rules are designed for maximum impact with fewest rules.

I have also found adding +1 AC per tier for monsters works for some and still allows PCs to have all of their RAW bonuses.

We did this for our long campaign to make higher tiered monsters more powerful.

I personally hear more about monsters having to few hit points (some use max HP since 5e monsters fall so quickly) so I don't normally recommend reducing monster HP, but you could do that if your experience is different.

I only do max HP with solo encounters. Otherwise the damage potential of the PCs vastly outstrips a single monster's HP.

I prefer to leave the monster HP the same but increase monster damage. Either use max damage or flat increase per tier or CR. I has the bonus of effectively reducing character HP, without having to actually reduce character HP

Sure, that would work as well, it has the same net effect. My preference is to reduce HP instead, making the math easier for some of the our players (even simple subtraction is not their strong point LOL).

Sounds like your trying to make 5e look more like 1e, which is completely fine. I think 5e is extremely malleable. We have several house rules to HP, HD, and rest and recovery that make the game more like we want to play.

We've thought about removing HD and CON bonus after 10th level, but with our other house rules it would probably make PCs to squishy for high level monsters.

Precisely. 5E (as designed, mind you) is easy-mode by comparison to AD&D. I have found that with the four house-rules the game dynamic changes greatly--which I am happier about. A while ago I posted a thread on the very topic of making 5E a game I want to play.

It's getting there...

 

[TwoSix]

But, if hitting is more difficult, creatures deal less damage per round, and combat takes longer. To compensate, I decrease HP, also uniformly, by halving it across the board for monsters. PCs no longer get CON bonuses each level and stop getting HD at 10th level, gaining only a small increase per level afterwards based on their HD.

That makes sense to me. You don't want to change the difficulty of the game by impacting any monster's ETL (Expected Time to Live), but you want to change the flow of the game by making successful attacks the outlier rather than missed attacks. Lower overall hit bonuses by +4-5, either by changing the attack modifier calculation or raising all enemies AC by 4-5, and then either lower hit points by a third or raise damage by about 50%.

It has some interesting knock off effects; it makes numerical bonuses to attack more valuable than they were, and it makes GWM/SS pretty suboptimal.

 

[DND_Reborn]

That makes sense to me. You don't want to change the difficulty of the game by impacting any monster's ETL (Expected Time to Live), but you want to change the flow of the game by making successful attacks the outlier rather than missed attacks. Lower overall hit bonuses by +4-5, either by changing the attack modifier calculation or raising all enemies AC by 4-5, and then either lower hit points by a third or raise damage by about 50%.

It has some interesting knock off effects; it makes numerical bonuses to attack more valuable than they were, and it makes GWM/SS pretty suboptimal.

Yeah, it works well IMO for what I want. I still think about imposing disadvantage instead of boosting AC, but for now the AC bump (4-5 IS ideal FWIW).

Anyway, yes the number of rounds or ETL is roughly the same (maybe a bit less, but that's ok).

Lowering HP also has the impact of making spells more effective. Ogres and Sleep is the perfect example.

In AD&D, you have a 50/50 chance of sleep affecting one ogre.
In 5E, with 59 HP, an Ogre cannot be affected by sleep (caps at 40) unless "injured".
With my house-rules, ogres have 29 hp (rounded down), so with 5d8 you have about a 1 in 8 chance of affecting an ogre. Not the 50/50 of AD&D, but at least there is a chance!

Orcs in 5E (with 15 hp) can make a DEX save and maybe survive a fireball, which would average 14 hp on a save.
Orcs in AD&D (with 5 hp), even saving would not likely survive (5d6 fireball average 17, save for 8 hp) unless you roll horrible damage.

Now, the nice thing is orcs still hit really hard, so they are a danger to PCs (who also have less HP) when they get hit by them.

 

[dave2008]

Almost 1400 HP??? That is f'ing stupid crazy. What they hell were they thinking??? Yeah, I could see coming from 3E and 4E the concept of bloat isn't as "in your face" compared to my experiences with 1E and 2E...

Well at that level (level 30), a party could dish out 300-500 damage per round. PS PCs went up to level 30 in 4e.

In prior editions, hitting was about 35-50% typically. In 5E it is about 65-70%, which I find boring. It is like watching a baseball game game and players hit most of the time--it removes some of the excitement of hitting IMO. I have found either imposing disadvantage or boosting AC, both work well.

I am not certain their sales are related to this aspect of the game. Personally I think there are a lot of other factors that contribute to it more than just hitting more.

I agree, there are many factors to the success of 5e.

I've considered capping at 16 and 18. I don't hand out magic items much anymore to help make the game harder. 5E is "easy" IMO compared to AD&D, but the changes I make with house-rules are designed for maximum impact with fewest rules.

We are considering capping at 18 for our next campaign (with max 20 if you have racial boost). I also don't give a lot of magic items, which is something I like about 5e since it isn't baked into the math of the game that I have too for players to be effective.

Sure, that would work as well, it has the same net effect. My preference is to reduce HP instead, making the math easier for some of the our players (even simple subtraction is not their strong point LOL).

How does that change the difficulty? Or are you saying it is more difficult to subtract 23 instead of 13 or something similar?

Precisely. 5E (as designed, mind you) is easy-mode by comparison to AD&D. I have found that with the four house-rules the game dynamic changes greatly--which I am happier about. A while ago I posted a thread on the very topic of making 5E a game I want to play.

It's getting there...

I remember that thread, just not well enough to remember the specifics of what was discussed!

 

[DND_Reborn]

Well at that level (level 30), a party could dish out 300-500 damage per round. PS PCs went up to level 30 in 4e.

LOL, of course they did... Sorry, but that kind of design it was turned me off from D&D during 3E. I like the concept of prestige classes, but "epic" level never had any appeal to me--just not my style of game. shrug

We are considering capping at 18 for our next campaign (with max 20 if you have racial boost). I also don't give a lot of magic items, which is something I like about 5e since it isn't baked into the math of the game that I have too for players to be effective.

That is what we did for a while. Ultimately I dropped the rule because 90% of the time, the players picked races with +2 in their main ability score anyway... so the rule ended up being unnecessary.

One thing that I would prefer is a great discrepancy in proficiency bonus: +2 to +6 is not enough of a swing IMO to represent all the experience and abilities a tier 4 PC would have over a tier 1 PC. We shifted to +2 to +8, and thought about making it +1 to +9 even.

The overall intent was to keep the combined proficiency + ability modifier capped around +11 so it was close to RAW. For a while, ours was +12. Expertise added half proficiency (rounded up), not full proficiency. So, even with +8 proficiency, expertise capped at +12 (same as RAW).

How does that change the difficulty? Or are you saying it is more difficult to subtract 23 instead of 13 or something similar?

Sadly, yes. I have two players who are horrible (and I mean horrible!!!) at math. Making them roll more for damage (e.g. a rogue with a rapier and +3d6 sneak attack would become 2d8+6d6) would be a nightmare while they add up all the dice. Even just doubling the damage (e.g. 17 to 34 or something) would be bad enough.

As DM, I only track monster HP. The players might have to track an animal companion or something in addition to their PC. By making the rule just removing CON mod per level, PC HP is reduced slightly (keeping their survivability at least close to RAW), and it keeps the numbers smaller so, yes, the math is easier for them.

With one player, I almost defaulted to a "hits-to-kill" (HTK) system instead. The idea was PCs could take 1 HTK per level plus their CON mod. So, a level 1 PC with CON 16 could take 4 HTK. At level 10 with CON 16, it would be 13 HTK. Each successful attack (two on a crit) would remove 1 HTK, etc. The math and idea was simply enough, but implementing it in 5E was too much to tweak so I abandoned it.

 

[tetrasodium]

@6ENow! I have a player like that with math. The other benefit of just halving the hp is that the gm has more room to round things for expediency than players.

Ya, that has nothing to do with magic item design which was the discussion I was referring too.

However, I would argue an increase in HP =/= bloat. I fully concede that some HP increase, but that isn't the same as "bloat" That is the conclusion I am saying is wrong, not that 22 is greater than 16.

If you have an encounter with several monsters, your probably going to be using weaker monsters than extreme high CR solo boss monster type creatures. Coupled with 5e's math being tuned to assume a hit rate somewhere north of 50-60% you wind up with a drawn out slugfest where a lot of time is wasted rolling damage for every monster & each player(including the one who is awful at math) rather than just quickly missing about half or more of those first attacks & nearly all of the second/third/etc ones. Having all of those attacks assumed to hit there is less headroom in the system's math for magic items.

Ok, some math for you, red dragons:

3.5e ancient red dragon: 527 HP
3.5e GW red dragon (the most powerful): 660 HP
4e ancient red dragon (the most powerful): 1,390 HP
5e ancient red dragon (the most powerful): 546 HP

5e has the least HP for its most powerful dragon. That is HP contraction, the math supports my assessment.

Spoiler: All the red dragons by age

• 5e is lacking a lot of those* with just cr4 wyrmling, cr10 young, cr17 adult & cr24 ancient. Conveniently cr4 wyrmling matches the cr4 wyrmling , cr10 young matches the cr10 juvenile, with cr13 young red shadow & cr13 young adult being close, & cr24 ancient matches the cr24 wyrm leaving only the cr17 adult the odd drake out falling between the cr 15 & cr18 adult/mature adult so I'll denote that in bold to avoid obfuscation & provide clarity
• Again 3.5 version | 5e version
• Wyrmling cr4 59hp 16ac | wyrmling 75hp ac17 That gives 5e 16hp & surprisingly a point of ac
• very young cr5 95hp 18ac | --
• young cr7 123hp 21ac | --
• Juvenile cr 10 168 hp 24ac | cr10 young red dragon 178hp 18ac That gives 5e 10hp & drops the ac by 8
• young adult cr13 218 hp 26ac | 178hp 18ac That gives a 40 point hp drop with an 8 point ac drop.
• adult cr15 253hp 29ac | 256hp 19ac If you put the nearest comparison here that gives a 6 point hp jump & 10 point ac drop.
• mature adult cr18 312hp 32ac | 256hp 19ac If you put the nearest comparison here that gives a 56 point hp drop & an even larger 13 point ac drop.
• old cr20 378hp 33ac | --
• very old cr21 449hp 36ac | --
• ancient cr23 527hp 39ac | --
• wyrm cr24 610hp 42ac | 546hp 22ac That gives a 64 point hp drop & 20 point ac drop.
• great wyrm cr2 660hp 41ac | --

4e is too different on a system level for useful comparisons & your the pretty much only one who wants to keep bringing it up. There is an extreme variety of red dragons in 3.5 but a system difference is critical to the high end. 5e's survivability & the assumed to hit result of BA is tuned to the point that the sort of ultra deadly beyond lethal encounters a 5e party can just snooze through whike such encounters in 3.5 would be a one sided slaughter. Those high CR dragons were plot devices with statblocks on par with literal deity statblocks & provide examples of why I'm pretty sure there was at least one magic items to control or command dragons.

What you do notice is that things start to invert around cr10 where the 3.5 versions display how magic items being assumed or not plays out & why you can't just bolt them onto a system that assumes none. CR10 & up is fairly beefy tier of monster & aside from extremely high level games is probably not a great choice to use for a bunch of mooks as xge90 will confirm. It doesn't matter if your mooks are throughout the stereotypical dungeon or fighting alongside the bbeg in the sterotypical throne room battle with the bbeg. Those mooks with all that extra hp are going to be a slog due to hit rates where everyone is assumed to mostly hit & hp pools that are quite large in light of how much damage players & monsters dish out in any given round.

EDIT: Since you mentioned Zombies

3,5e Medium zombie: 16 - 29 HP
4e Medium zombie: 40-71 HP
5e Medium zombie: 22

Hmm, seems like less HP escalation and more like cherry picking on your part

Your zombie note is why I included the CR of every monster on the list. The cr 1/2 zombies with fewer hp & higher ac than the cr 1/4 5e one are much closer in power & role a GM will use them for than the cr1 cr2 cr3 or cr4 ones & those higher cr zombies either don't exist or are split off into other more discrete creatures like the ogre zombie that 5e had an equivalent version of . I didn't include a 3.5 creature if 5e had no clear equivalent in the mm. There could be an equivalent to that cr1 29hp 16ac troglodyte zombie in one of the 5e books but it didn't seem to be in the 5e mm where 352 of monsters by name has

Spoiler: this

My list was made by making a list of common monsters & then going through to find their statblocks even in the cases where a creature didn't fit the pattern like one of the giants. I guess if you consider common monsters cherry picking then sure, but common & especially lower cr monsters are precisely the ones that will be fighting the players in notable monsters. An extra 64hp on a cr24 monster is a bit of a rounding error for a monster that doesn't even fit on the xge90 tables for player:monster ratios by level & cr.

PS. I will agree right now that some 3e monsters have less HP than their 5e equivalents. But I will also emphatically state that does not mean the increase in HP is "bloat."

In terms of 5e monsters feeling like giant bloated bags of hp, which monsters is an important detail. If a GM is throwing waves of adult or ancient dragons at their party it's probably because they want to kill them or is using them as an invisible wall in the world making those dragons something that certainly won't be 't considered mooks by most reasonable standards. XgE has some useful tables on page 90 for good ratio of players to monsters by player level & CR Above CR10 you don't even get more than one maybe two till extreme high levels.

* which is fine & the reasons both systems made those choices to include or omit various specific monsters that are probably unimportant for reasons other being hard to make direct comparisons when no equivalent exists.

 

[dave2008]

The overall intent was to keep the combined proficiency + ability modifier capped around +11 so it was close to RAW. For a while, ours was +12. Expertise added half proficiency (rounded up), not full proficiency. So, even with +8 proficiency, expertise capped at +12 (same as RAW).

I had a discussion in another thread with a person that had similar desires. He settled on capping at 16 (for the classic +3) and then increasing proficiency as you suggest to +8.

I could also see just adding ability modifiers to damage and not attack. Then you could have proficiency go up to +11 without changing the game math.

 

[DND_Reborn]

@6ENow! I have a player like that with math. The other benefit of just halving the hp is that the gm has more room to round things for expediency than players.

Yeah, you do the best you can. The good side is such players often make up for it with other things that make them great players still.

And FWIW, the average hit is closer to 60-70% in 5E across all tiers than 50-60%, assuming typical bonuses and opponent ACs.

I had a discussion in another thread with a person that had similar desires. He settled on capping at 16 (for the classic +3) and then increasing proficiency as you suggest to +8.

I think it is a nice balance. When you consider creatures like Ogres (STR 19) are large and supposed to be much stronger than a human could hope to be, a STR 16 cap (18 for "strong" races such as Half-Orc) makes sense and keeps it so items like Gauntlets of Ogre power would still be attractive to a human fighter with STR 16.

I could also see just adding ability modifiers to damage and not attack. Then you could have proficiency go up to +11 without changing the game math.

I've been tempted to go the route of DEX to attack rolls, and STR to damage, as others have suggested in other threads. It forces players to chose their balance point between the two.

 

[tetrasodium]

Yeah, you do the best you can. The good side is such players often make up for it with other things that make them great players still.

Yea how someone handles math is unrelated to their worth at a table. I've had great players who are incredibly awful at math I've had horrible players who could rainman their way through anyone's math at the table that I still hear "remember that guy who used to..." stories about the bad. Unexpectedly my current awful at math player is big on charop.

And FWIW, the average hit is closer to 60-70% in 5E across all tiers than 50-60%, assuming typical bonuses and opponent ACs.

I agree but lowballed it to avoid fighting over how excessively high is excessively high if I overshot

I think it is a nice balance. When you consider creatures like Ogres (STR 19) are large and supposed to be much stronger than a human could hope to be, a STR 16 cap (18 for "strong" races such as Half-Orc) makes sense and keeps it so items like Gauntlets of Ogre power would still be attractive to a human fighter with STR 16.

Without having tried it, I think it's probably a good starting point & would probably try it if I were still gm'ing 5e right now.