D&D 5E FeeFiFoFum *splat* goes the giants

[Stalker0]

Threat of what ? Bad luck at dice ? Because that's a bit the source of the problem with making 5e more deadly. Death will come because of randomness, not because of "bad play" (I'm using quotation marks because I don't think that playing tactically badly is playing the game wrong) tactically speaking. That should have its own consequences, but it's another story.

I'm not generally talking about 1 crit takes a player from max hitpoints to dead level of degree. I am talking about changing players approach to difficulty.

1) Pulling back when really hurt or changing tactics (normally even a crit at this point isn't a real problem, but a "super crit" could be).
2) Staying wary even if the fight is totally going there way, as one big hit could shake things up.

Such a change allows me to generate more "threat" from standard encounters, meaning I don't have to work as hard as I have been (aka designing 2x deadly encounters all the time).

 

[Stalker0]

Do you run out of dragons after 4th level?

I'm going to quote myself from another thread.

"That’s not exactly true, for we have to remember the narrative of combat.

for example, sake of argument let’s say a 1st level party could “easily” kill an adult red dragon. Mechanically that’s no problem, we could always add a second dragon.

but it changes the narrative of the game. No longer are dragons considered major threats in the world, they are merely speed bumps. Only a horde of dragons could be considered “a real kingdom threat”.

again, we could adjust our narrative to fit that mold….but do we want to? I think this is where we can say there are true mechanical issues with difficulty, when the ease or difficulty of something no longer fits the standard narrative."


To give this a more specific example, at one point my group of 6 9th level characters and 1 11th level cleric npc faced against a CR 30 warparty of Githyanki....hundreds of enemies. It was a real deal fight, I even used excel just so I could accurately track all of the damage from the horde of archers and such. This was designed to be truly lethal, the players had messed up big time and fallen right into their clutches...and frankly I expected a TPK. As I told the party "the gloves have come off".... which I know is probably funny me saying when I talking about throwing deadly x2 encounters at my party as "standard" but there you have it.

And....of course my party managed to defeat the entire encounter without losing a single person (but the fear was absolutely there, no one questioned that a TPK was not an absolute possibility at the slightest mistake) It was a game changing event, the Githyanki swore vengeance against their home city, it changed the power structure of this region of the multiverse, etc. And that was fine, as a veteran DM I can handle that....once in a while.

The issue becomes when its common. When your throwing dragons at your players like candy because you have to generate real threat, at some point its "where the heck are all of these dragons coming from?" aka your encounters start shifting the narrative of the game. That to me is where I really have an issue with 5e encounters. I feel like a group of "relatively low level people" can take on such an incredible amount of threat that it becomes narrative warping.

I have had to get used to it as I run my games and change my narratives in ways I don't really like, but its what I've had to do to keep the combats relevant.

 

[Lyxen]

I'm not generally talking about 1 crit takes a player from max hitpoints to dead level of degree. I am talking about changing players approach to difficulty.

1) Pulling back when really hurt or changing tactics (normally even a crit at this point isn't a real problem, but a "super crit" could be).
2) Staying wary even if the fight is totally going there way, as one big hit could shake things up.

Such a change allows me to generate more "threat" from standard encounters, meaning I don't have to work as hard as I have been (aka designing 2x deadly encounters all the time).

Again, it's just a threat to fun due to swinginess and bad luck at dice, I'm not sure how that contributes to the overall fun of the game. Threatening and challenging the players is not the intent of 5e, and it permeates the whole design....

 

[Oofta]

I'm going to quote myself from another thread.

"That’s not exactly true, for we have to remember the narrative of combat.

for example, sake of argument let’s say a 1st level party could “easily” kill an adult red dragon. Mechanically that’s no problem, we could always add a second dragon.

but it changes the narrative of the game. No longer are dragons considered major threats in the world, they are merely speed bumps. Only a horde of dragons could be considered “a real kingdom threat”.

again, we could adjust our narrative to fit that mold….but do we want to? I think this is where we can say there are true mechanical issues with difficulty, when the ease or difficulty of something no longer fits the standard narrative."


To give this a more specific example, at one point my group of 6 9th level characters and 1 11th level cleric npc faced against a CR 30 warparty of Githyanki....hundreds of enemies. It was a real deal fight, I even used excel just so I could accurately track all of the damage from the horde of archers and such. This was designed to be truly lethal, the players had messed up big time and fallen right into their clutches...and frankly I expected a TPK. As I told the party "the gloves have come off".... which I know is probably funny me saying when I talking about throwing deadly x2 encounters at my party as "standard" but there you have it.

And....of course my party managed to defeat the entire encounter without losing a single person (but the fear was absolutely there, no one questioned that a TPK was not an absolute possibility at the slightest mistake) It was a game changing event, the Githyanki swore vengeance against their home city, it changed the power structure of this region of the multiverse, etc. And that was fine, as a veteran DM I can handle that....once in a while.

The issue becomes when its common. When your throwing dragons at your players like candy because you have to generate real threat, at some point its "where the heck are all of these dragons coming from?" aka your encounters start shifting the narrative of the game. That to me is where I really have an issue with 5e encounters. I feel like a group of "relatively low level people" can take on such an incredible amount of threat that it becomes narrative warping.

I have had to get used to it as I run my games and change my narratives in ways I don't really like, but its what I've had to do to keep the combats relevant.

All I can say is that I've been able to challenge parties up to level 20. Maybe I just don't hand out that many magic items, I use point buy, I have between 5 and 10 encounters between long rests, I come up with custom monsters if I need to while also setting up environments that help team monster, or maybe I just have different expectations.

I have no idea what your standard narrative is other than to say that I think it should be obvious that the narrative will change as the PCs gain levels. That's just a function of how the game plays for me.

 

[Mort]

All I can say is that I've been able to challenge parties up to level 20. Maybe I just don't hand out that many magic items, I use point buy, I have between 5 and 10 encounters between long rests, I come up with custom monsters if I need to while also setting up environments that help team monster, or maybe I just have different expectations.

I have no idea what your standard narrative is other than to say that I think it should be obvious that the narrative will change as the PCs gain levels. That's just a function of how the game plays for me.

I'm with you. I hear stories of parties besting encounters 10, 20 above their level and that just hasn't been my experience. My group knows to start looking for the exits when they suspect an encounter is 4 or so above their CR (they obviously can't tell for sure, but I like to telegraph difficult encounters).

 

[Stalker0]

Threatening and challenging the players is not the intent of 5e, and it permeates the whole design....

And I think that is perhaps my most fundamental issue with the game and the source of much of my critique. In 3.5 it was, and it was in 4e... hard was....you know....hard. But as someone said before, 5e has been changed to "easy mode".

Like many things, players seek fun through different means. My players prefer fewer encounters, but like those encounters to be challenging and threatening. They want to get creative to solve them, not just roll dice and win. Regular old encounters with no stakes has no appeal to them, they are a "waste of time". The game system used to help me with this, providing simple means to adjust threat. That doesn't seem to work in 5e, it takes just much more effort to get to that point... and it is part of my lament.

Not only does 5e forego that challenge as its baseline (which I can respect to accommodate a wider player base) it doesn't even help a DM get there. Again no lethal or terminal levels to help DMs who want to go "hard mode" get to that place..... or a default template to transform monsters into a "higher difficulty version"... no optional rules like the crit idea I mentioned early to help you generate more threat with the standard monsters. It feels like 5e has abandoned the players that actually want challenging fights, and provided no life raft to help them find there way. Its simply "well good luck".

 

[Stalker0]

I'm with you. I hear stories of parties besting encounters 10, 20 above their level and that just hasn't been my experience.

Someday I really would like to nail down what is causing these massive discrepancies, as neither of us are singular in their experience. There are DMs that have sided with me saying challenging players is "impossible", and others saying they have had zero issue. So what is the real difference here?

Again I do use feats and I use magic items....but rarely are the magic items major changes to the fight (I might have a +1 sword or +1 armor....but that is a small impact at best, the luck of the d20 plays much stronger into an encounter than that small a bonus). I use point buy, standard races (I don't even use the flex ability options). I don't allow multclassing, so no cheese there....my partys are usually a good mix, so its not a bunch of casters wreck shop or an army of all fighters. I have a few people that know how to min/max a bit but I also have players that are more roleplay oriented and really don't optimize characters.

Is it all about the encounters per day, again my players do prefer fewer per day, so is that while I'm having to do 2x deadly while others do medium? Is it just player perception, maybe other groups are blowing through those mediums and hard but it still "feels challenging" to them so they don't mind? Is my party all tactical geniuses? Is it the fact that I generally run 6 players, and the encounter guidelines to adjust for 6 players are just broken beyond belief? Did I have a psychotic break 10 years ago and I have actually been rolling a d12 for monsters instead of a d20?

Again if it was a single encounter or even a campaign I could just chalk it up luck and strange probability, but after 3 campaigns it has been a rock solid consistency. So what is causing such a massive gap that on DM's 2x deadly is another's medium?

 

[Lyxen]

And I think that is perhaps my most fundamental issue with the game and the source of much of my critique. In 3.5 it was, and it was in 4e... hard was....you know....hard. But as someone said before, 5e has been changed to "easy mode".

I know. Personally, I'm happy with it, and at the same time I understand that there are some DMs/Tables who like their game to be more challenging to players. I'm not saying that's bad, I'm just saying that it's harder to do in 5e because the game has simply been designed with easy mode in mind.

Like many things, players seek fun through different means. My players prefer fewer encounters, but like those encounters to be challenging and threatening. They want to get creative to solve them, not just roll dice and win. Regular old encounters with no stakes has no appeal to them, they are a "waste of time". The game system used to help me with this, providing simple means to adjust threat. That doesn't seem to work in 5e, it takes just much more effort to get to that point... and it is part of my lament.

And I understand this. The players at our tables also like very few encounters, and want these to be meaningful, the difference being that it does not have to be through combat difficulty and challenge, there are many ways to achieve this for us:

• Cakewalk: well, we are heroes after all !
• Flee in Panic: always a lot of fun !
• Complex multi-part boss fight, exactly like in the movies/books, these need special care but are the best.

Not only does 5e forego that challenge as its baseline (which I can respect to accommodate a wider player base) it doesn't even help a DM get there. Again no lethal or terminal levels to help DMs who want to go "hard mode" get to that place..... or a default template to transform monsters into a "higher difficulty version"... no optional rules like the crit idea I mentioned early to help you generate more threat with the standard monsters. It feels like 5e has abandoned the players that actually want challenging fights, and provided no life raft to help them find there way. Its simply "well good luck".

This is not entirely true, you can use legendary monsters from level 1, as well as monsters with lair, and the mythic option is also a recent but very good one that I've used to complement the multi-part designs which have been on the net from day one. Basically, this allows you to pack multiple encounters into only one, which still streamlines the process and makes the challenge harder.

I know, it's not the same thing as what was in the previous editions, but it's been satisfactory for us, and it's still in line with the overall design. Because the problem is that (and there are tons of posts about this), there are a number of people complaining about specific aspects of the game, but not really understanding that their problem is actually much wider than a single issue, and cannot be solved by looking only at that facet of the game...

 

[Lyxen]

Is it all about the encounters per day, again my players do prefer fewer per day, so is that while I'm having to do 2x deadly while others do medium?

From your other post, I really think that's the source of your frustration. SInce your groups since to like few encounters per day, it's probably the most critical factor (even more than feats / multiclass / magic items / rolled stats, etc.) because this wrecks the class design and in particular the recovery capabilities and the possibility to go nova.

In our Odyssey of the Dragonlords campaign, I play a paladin and have always been very careful about my smites because I want to play cautiously and not act as if I could always reste before the next combat. But during a boss fight, we were really in danger of losing and could not afford it, so I let loose, and the boss was an undead to boot. It was still tough, but I did more than half the damage of the whole party combined and still protected and healed the others. A clear imbalance, that I discussed with the DM later, he had not realised how much damage I could do. In the end we agreed to continue as designed with me being careful, but I know that now he is preparing his fights more carefully because of this.

In the end, I don't think that there is a general solution, I think it's for you to have a look at what single fights do to your particular party mix and find specific fight elements that will challenge that nova capability, amongst other problems. Mythic monsters might be a good solution at least for some fights....

 

[Ancalagon]

I don't accept this sentence, and I don't respect critique that is not constructive and sounds like a complaint. What I accept is constructive criticism, which is not the same thing as critique.



And once more, as many people are telling you, what might be a "better" path for you might not be better for everyone else. So please accept that your wishes might just be your own, and that complaint is just pointless, all the more when it has been demonstrated to you that your wishes go against the very design intent of 5e.



3e's system was designed in accordance with 3e overall design, which was that of a competitive game with many options. As a result, the reason the EL computation could be "simple" (honestly, it was not more simple than that of 5e), was because it relied on a huge core of other rules about monster design. These rules were extremely bulky, extremely constraining and, in the end, exactly as chancy as those of 5e. One simple example was that, in 3e, buffs had a huge influence, and an encounter could go totally one way if one side was allowed to buff and not the other, and the other way around.

So not only was it not better (I ran and played huge campaigns under 3e as well), but it required extremely complex rules which caused me to spend 3 hours designing a single high level monster, but with no more chance of getting an encounter right than under 5e.



Then I don't see how that could cause you a problem in 5e.



And this is because you are not using 5e in the spirit in which it is intended. 5e is designed for standard characters with no options, whereas 3e was built with already partly optimised characters in mind. 3e was a geek game, 5e is a casual game.

Please accept that, if you are running optimised characters using options and probably dice-rolled stats instead of a standard array, you need to up the difficulty by 2 grades or consider your adventurers at least 1-2 levels higher. Then the maths will work much better.

But as long as you continue using 5e and its tools as 3e, you will need adaptation.

But the characters weren't optimized. They didn't get to pre-buff, they didn't get to set up an ambush or situation advantageous to them.

And again, this encounter would rate as deadly for level 11 characters, FOUR levels higher than us.