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

[Maxperson]

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.

Yeah. You CAN start with 1 creature that equals a medium encounter. Or you can start with one that make up an easy encounter and then bump up the numbers. The experience budget is the experience budget. In fact, the examples for easy to deadly all included multiple creatures, so if anything it encourages groups.

My issue is that the experience multiplier chart is broken as hell. I mean, 1 500xp monster is a medium encounter for a 5th level group. 2 is hard. 3 is still hard. Then I can DOUBLE it to 6..........................still hard! But if I add a 7th, THAT'S deadly. Then for some reason, even though it doesn't get harder than deadly, I get not one, but three more multipliers, including one that is 15 or more. So 15 creatures is x4 exp, but so is 500.

 

[Oofta]

The multiplier chart is just borked, though.

I just ignore it completely.

 

[James Gasik]

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.

Funny how they backpedal on the "you don't need anyone to play a specific class to play the game" here. Or how they point out that it's absolutely intended that casters use spells to buff the martials.

Both things I've gotten a lot of pushback about from 5e players when I bring it up. And yeah, Feats too. A game without Feats doesn't hurt a Wizard all that much- what was he going to take? Resilient (Con)? Armor proficiency?

Hell, Resilient is the #1 reason that I think saying Feats are optional is completely insane. There are 6 saving throws. 3 that come up often. Each class is proficient in one common save and one uncommon save.

Natural 20's don't always succeed on saves, and at high levels, save DC's can reach 21. Without a caster or a Paladin, your character will inevitably run into an effect they won't save from.

EDIT: unless your character is a Monk.

 

[Oofta]

It would be nice if the anniversary edition included more discussion on how to adjust encounters, but I wouldn't hold my breath. There's some things you can only learn by doing, and there's plenty of advice out there (or here) for making your encounters more difficult. I really enjoy my current group and I'm having a lot of fun but I keep having to scale back how much I throw at them, unlike my group from before I moved.

It's like the other sort-of-related thread The Problem with Talking About D&D. There's just so much variation of options, house rules, type of player, style of campaign that there will never be a simple way to calculate things. It even varies by encounters. Let's say you have a group of 4 and they're all 5th level. So you go to the handy dandy calculation and decide that a half dozen harpies sounds like a lot of fun and fits what you're doing.

Except ... what's the party build? Do they have effective ranged attack to get these flying opponents? Do the harpies come flying in group formation in such a way that the wizard can fireball them before they get close? Can the cleric cast silence? Can or do the harpies take advantage of their songs, can they lure the party into difficult terrain or is this a tunnel with 10 foot ceilings? How do you interpret their charm ability? If you save vs harpy A, does harpy B's song still affect you? Do they all sing at once? Take turns? Do you have to make multiple saves against each song and if you fail multiple times do you have to succeed multiple times?

That's just one encounter. Multiply the number of possible mixes, say the harpies know there's a gelatinous cube that they could lure their prey into. How is any system supposed to account for that?

 

[Maxperson]

I just ignore it completely.

Me, too. I have to since as I pointed out, it's so incredibly borked as to be nearly useless.

 

[Maxperson]

Both things I've gotten a lot of pushback about from 5e players when I bring it up. And yeah, Feats too. A game without Feats doesn't hurt a Wizard all that much- what was he going to take? Resilient (Con)? Armor proficiency?

Warcaster. Advantage on concentration saves and the ability to cast a spell as an OA is fantastic. Elemental Adept is another good one.

 

[James Gasik]

I would argue Elemental Adept is somewhat necessary. And yeah, while I rarely see the OA aspect used, Warcaster is one a lot of casters would want.

I think though it remains clear that most Feats are intended for non-casters to use?

 

[Maxperson]

I would argue Elemental Adept is somewhat necessary. And yeah, while I rarely see the OA aspect used, Warcaster is one a lot of casters would want.

I think though it remains clear that most Feats are intended for non-casters to use?

I'd have to go through in detail which is more effort than I want to put in, but the impression I get is that is correct. A lot of feats are good for everyone, though. Observant, resilient, keen mind, durable, dungeon delver, and more are all good for any class.

 

[jasper]

A fight was not going well for the party but they would have won probably without any deaths.

A Ranger cast Rope trick in the middle of combat with the intent of evacuating the party and taking a short rest. It is not the first time he did this. The Ranger cast it and climbed up the Rope (taking an AOO). Two Orogs and 3 Orcs followed the Ranger up the rope. The last Orc pulled up the rope behind him and they attacked the Ranger 5 to 1 inside the extra dimensional space and followed that with a short rest themselves. Meanwhile the rest of the party beat the remaining guys on the ground and beat the Orogs and Orcs when the spell ended.

In the end the Ranger who cast it died.

The Ranger cried foul and claims I cheated, but I think that was RAW. The player tried a metagaming power move and was taken to the woodshed.

Am I wrong?

Nicely EVIL. Have an internet Chocolate chip cookie.

 

[Mistwell]

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.

That has nothing to do with the topic and I've never mentioned it in this thread.

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.”

I don't know where this quote is from, but DND Beyond cannot find it in not just the DMG, but in any 5e D&D book in it's database. I even cut up the quote into parts to try and find it that way, and nothing. It does not appear in the current 5e DMG as far as DND Beyond is concerned. The guidelines also never mention a party of four. They explain that the guidelines assume a party of 3-5, and give rules for less than three or more than five PCs, but never say four is assumed to be the standard and I did an extensive DND Beyond search for any variation I could think of on that phrase and never found it appearing.

Now maybe this was subject to errata and you never picked up the errata? I don't know. I just know none of that paragraph appears in the current official rules on DND Beyond.

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.

I am, again, looking at the official text in DND Beyond for creating encounters and that is not how the formula works out. I can quote it for you if you don't have access?

Again, I never mentioned number of combat encounters and I don't know why you keep bringing it up? We were talking about how I think the game encourages groups of foes and you think the game encourages solo encounters. Neither of us had mentioned encounters per day.

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.

See above.

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.

Why would an animal not try to kill the thing it just knocked down that was hurting it? Why would the foe have to be more intelligent to kill its prey? I was using as an example Tomb of Annihilation and that adventure has lots of undead and dinosaurs. Both tend to want to kill the things they knock down, either because the description says they want to snuff out life (undead) or they are carnivores attacking prey (a T-Rex). In either case, their opponent being knocked unconscious doesn't seem like it would be the end of their attacks on that target. Particularly in the few seconds of their round. If a dinosaur claws you and you go down, they will still tend to claw and then bite your still breathing form that's right in front of them because you pissed them off and are squishy and vulnerable to their claws and bite.

It sounds like your DM is just trying to spare your PCs?