D&D 5E Player angry about enemies climbing rope with Rope Trick

[Oofta]

You obviously can challenge players. You just keep raising the difficulty of encounters until you find the breakpoint. Sooner or later you will get dead PCs. That part's not difficult.

I feel that there is a problem here, but the way it's being stated obviously doesn't really get at the roots of it. A lot of people have the experience that 5e isn't particularly hard so there's clearly something behind it, but it's clearly not because it's impossible to challenge the PCs.

Clearly it has something to do with the nature of the challenges on a different axis to whether or not a PC actually risks death. I have some thoughts on this, but I'm not sure it's worth it in a thread not specifically devoted to this topic.

It is a recurrent theme though, one I honestly don't understand. It's like the (probably apocryphal) story of the Army trying save money by having only 1 uniform size. They took the average of all the soldiers and mad the new uniforms to fit that average. The uniforms ended up not fitting anyone.

There is no simple formula for encounter design, there are simply too many variables. Are the default encounters targeted to the lower end of difficulty? Wouldn't surprise me at all. After all if you're new to D&D and every encounter is a slaughter-fest, you probably aren't going to come back. The game would not be nearly as successful as it is if you had to be a system expert for your PCs to survive.

I think there should have been more discussion of adjusting the challenge level of encounters in the DMG, but no one set of rules will ever work for everyone.

 

[overgeeked]

You keep repeating this. But, it's not what I've seen. I just re-read the "Building Combat Encounters" section, and that's not what it says. You get an XP budget and build encounters using that with a formula presented which in no way encourages solos. No encounter builder tools do it the way you mentioned either.

Mike Mearls has stated they designed the game around 6-8 combat encounters per adventuring day. I’ve quoted it. The Adventuring Day section clearly states that’s how things work.

The line about four PCs to one on-level monster is from another section of the DMG. Page 274.

“A single monster with a challenge rating equal to the adventurers' level is, by itself, a fair challenge for a group of four characters. If the monster is meant to be fought in pairs or groups, its expected challenge rating should be lower than the party's level. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that your monster must have a challenge rating equal to the level of the characters to be a worthy challenge. Keep in mind that monsters with a lower challenge rating can be a threat to higher-level characters when encountered in groups.”

Looking at the XP value of monsters compared to a medium encounter for a party of four…almost always yields exactly one on-level monster. You can break that up however you want, increase it, decrease it, etc. But the game is designed around 6-8 combat encounters per adventuring day and defaults to one on-level monster as a medium encounter. The DMG also explicitly warns about using monsters with a CR higher than the party’s level, especially for low-level PCs. The text is clear and the devs have explicitly said as much. If you refuse to acknowledge that, it’s your choice, of course.

To be clear. There’s a world of difference between what the default assumptions of the game are and how people actually play it. Me talking about the default assumptions isn’t me saying this is how I run it or how the DMs I’ve played with run it.

I guess maybe we found the source for why your experience differs so much from many others here: 1) your DM is building more non-legendary solo encounters the the rules suggest and

See above.

2) your DM is not playing foes in a manner that the foes are actually trying to kill the adventurers that are trying to kill them. There is noting wrong with either issue, but it does skew things towards, as you say, easy mode.

No, as I said, some monsters do, some don’t. If the monster is trying to kill the PCs and is smart enough to realize what’s going on, then they double tap. But it’s not the default for all monsters all the time in all situations.

 

[Krachek]

But don’t forget that the encounter building guideline don’t consider Feat, MC, magic items, players experience, additional material from newer books.

 

[James Gasik]

I've always felt that not considering magic items is a bit dubious when Fighters, Rogues, and Barbarians, are expected to fight creatures with resistance to non-magical weapons.

 

[overgeeked]

But don’t forget that the encounter building guideline don’t consider Feat, MC, magic items, players experience, additional material from newer books.

Which is why they’re basically useless. That and they offer up mostly bland, cakewalk fights by default. You have to push things into deadly and above and/or fiddle with adventuring days (encounter stacking) before they get interesting.

 

[Maxperson]

You keep repeating this. But, it's not what I've seen. I just re-read the "Building Combat Encounters" section, and that's not what it says. You get an XP budget and build encounters using that with a formula presented which in no way encourages solos. No encounter builder tools do it the way you mentioned either.

The multiplier chart is just borked, though.

 

[FrozenNorth]

There is no simple formula for encounter design, there are simply too many variables. Are the default encounters targeted to the lower end of difficulty? Wouldn't surprise me at all. After all if you're new to D&D and every encounter is a slaughter-fest, you probably aren't going to come back. The game would not be nearly as successful as it is if you had to be a system expert for your PCs to survive.

I agree and I will go further. A game that is at in part marketed to new players will err on the side of easier rather than harder, because it is easier for experienced players and DMs to tune the difficulty up than it is for new DMs to tune the difficulty down.

One difference that I find compared to when I started playing in the 90s is that due to technology advance, you get more new players that have just cribbed a build from the internet, and this can be a challenge to newbie DMs. However, this has nothing to do with system you use, and my impression is that even now, most new players are coming to the table with Treatmonk’s God wizard.

 

[James Gasik]

If so, Frozen North, that's not what I've seen. When I was involved in AL, most casters wanted to blow stuff up. It wasn't until I joined with my "old man gaming style" that I was throwing down spells that didn't do damage at all, like sleet storm, to confound the other DM's.

At first the players were annoyed because their melee couldn't just run up and kill the monsters I'd crowd controlled, but it came to a head when we had to fight a bunch of ogres, and I kept half of them pinned down, and the Druid said "hey, I have this staff of swarming insects, do you think using it so those ogres who are trying to get to us will have to take damage is a good idea?"

I wanted to pat him on the head and give him a gold star! That's when everyone looked at what I was doing and a light bulb went off in their heads.

 

[Irlo]

Looking at the XP value of monsters compared to a medium encounter for a party of four…almost always yields exactly one on-level monster. You can break that up however you want, increase it, decrease it, etc. But the game is designed around 6-8 combat encounters per adventuring day and defaults to one on-level monster as a medium encounter.

Stange way to look at it, from my perspective. It's designed around 6-8 medium to hard encounters per adventuring day. Medium to hard encounters CAN be single monsters, but that's not expected or encouraged. The guidelines for evaluating an encounter's difficulty are explicit that encounters can include multiple monsters.

 

[tetrasodium]

I've always felt that not considering magic items is a bit dubious when Fighters, Rogues, and Barbarians, are expected to fight creatures with resistance to non-magical weapons.

Which is why they’re basically useless. That and they offer up mostly bland, cakewalk fights by default. You have to push things into deadly and above and/or fiddle with adventuring days (encounter stacking) before they get interesting.

In addition to how it makes the guidelines useless it creates more & more problems however you solve it. Feats are very much things that generally deliver much more punch to martials than casters & the same holds true of weapon using martials getting a magic weapon compared to casters who don't really get the same bump with a +1 wand that a +1 weapon gives. Magic weapons & armor were a good adjustable lever that could bring up martials who could use them round after round all day long to stand with limited resource pool casters who had very powerful but limited spells. Classes like moon druid/monk that have attacks count as magic weapon class features get those instead of some other feature that might multiply with a magic weapon. Casters obviously have limited resource pools for spells & are much harder to elevate with a magic item in ways that doesn't risk becoming problematic.

Spoiler: XgE136 even has a sidebar about it

ARE MAGIC ITEMS NECESSARY IN A CAMPAIGN?
The D&.D game is built on the assumption that magic items appear sporadically and that they are always a boon, unless an item bears a curse. Characters and monsters are built to face each other without the help of magic items, which means that having a magic item always makes a character more powerful or versatile than a generic char acter of the same level. As DM, you never have to worry about awarding magic items just so the characters can keep up with the campaign’s threats. Magic items are truly prizes. Are they useful? Absolutely. Are they necessary? No.

Magic items can go from nice to necessary in the rare group that has no spellcasters, no monk, and no NPCs capable of casting magic weapon. Having no magic makes it extremely difficult for a party to overcome monsters that have resistances or immunity to nonmagical damage. In such a game, you’ll want to be generous with magic weapons or else avoid using such monsters.

That bolded bit covers an awful lot of classes to be played at the same table as all of the other PCs that "boon." with no easy way for the gm to start cleaning up the compounded mess that results from trying to fix the failure to consider feats & magic items in encounter/monster math.