D&D General Why Unbalanced Combat Encounters Can Enhance Your Dungeons & Dragons Experience

[EzekielRaiden]

I've seen a lot of those threads, and I never understood it. Unfortunately it's not unique to this edition; I remember people asking for help in 3.5, and almost inevitably someone would say "follow wealth by level and you won't have any problems!".

Followed by the inevitable "well I've been playing and/or running this game for X years and I've never seen this problem you are talking about" (left unsaid, but heavily implied: "so it cannot exist").

The subtle but major difference, IMO, is that the 3.x replies were (effectively) saying "just use the rules as is and it will work," while the 5e replies are (often explicitly) saying, "literally do whatever." The former were often wrong, but at least trying to be helpful or directing toward some kind of useful guidance. The latter are not even wrong; they are rejecting the very idea of giving advice and, worse, of learning DMing as an actual, trainable skill. It goes beyond the already suspect notion of the auteur designer and into the idea that DMing is exclusively intuition, either you have it or you don't and no one could ever teach or guide or even loosely direct you toward it. You just have to spontaneously develop it yourself.

That's why I so strongly oppose this culture of play. In trying to embrace something objectively valuable (creative spontaneity, not sweating the small problems, making clear and definitive answers), and which these DMs have felt has been neglected (a position I disagree with, but which is rational and understandable), they have instead made the already high hyper-dependence on DM skill that much more of a problem by treating DM skill as something almost...mystic. As if it were a form of TTRPG enlightenment, accessible only through ice cream koans and never, ever, through education, theory, or advice.

 

[James Gasik]

The subtle but major difference, IMO, is that the 3.x replies were (effectively) saying "just use the rules as is and it will work," while the 5e replies are (often explicitly) saying, "literally do whatever." The former were often wrong, but at least trying to be helpful or directing toward some kind of useful guidance. The latter are not even wrong; they are rejecting the very idea of giving advice and, worse, of learning DMing as an actual, trainable skill. It goes beyond the already suspect notion of the auteur designer and into the idea that DMing is exclusively intuition, either you have it or you don't and no one could ever teach or guide or even loosely direct you toward it. You just have to spontaneously develop it yourself.

That's why I so strongly oppose this culture of play. In trying to embrace something objectively valuable (creative spontaneity, not sweating the small problems, making clear and definitive answers), and which these DMs have felt has been neglected (a position I disagree with, but which is rational and understandable), they have instead made the already high hyper-dependence on DM skill that much more of s problem by treating DM skill as something almost...mystic. As if it were a form of TTRPG enlightenment, accessible only through ice cream koans and never, ever, through education, theory, or advice.

Ah, now it makes sense. 5e DM's are Monks.

 

[NotAYakk]

But with 5e, not only have they never been really clear about what the baseline assumptions were (other than, "we balance around hit points and damage"*), they continued to make some of the same old mistakes, and, again, when they do figure out what the baseline is, they didn't come out and say what their assumptions were- they just adjusted them for new products they could sell us.

*I could rant about this one point for hours. So don't balance for super high AC's. Or strange accuracy boosting. Or hard control effects. Nope! Can some imaginary party we made up in our heads take X damage and deal Y damage back? Great!

And what does that party consist of, at this point? Are we assuming that everyone has switched to playing Tasha's subclasses? Is the Twilight Cleric the benchmark for design now? What happens to people who are still playing older subclasses? Are they considered subpar?

Or if you make a weak subclass, are you saying that the older ones are too good? Like, say every Barbarian subclass is weaker than Totem Warrior (this is an example, if you don't believe this, I'm not trying to start a fight over it. I've never played a Barbarian in 5e, and I've only ever DM'd for one of them, and he was a Totem Warrior, so I have no basis of comparison). It Totem Warrior OP? Does it need to be nerfed?

Are they just expecting the DM's and player base to figure that out on their own?

No, they are expected a DM to learn how well their party handles easy/medium/hard/deadly encounters. And then adjust based on that.

If your party is 50% better than it should be? The DM starts out with medium encounters, and you wipe them out without spending resources. The DM is supposed to learn from that. They should start creeping up the difficulty until it matches their expectations of how hard a fight should be.

The CR rating and encounter building rules just helps you work out how deadly an encounter is compared to other encounters, roughly. And to warn DMs that if they start to push into the deadly region that things could get, well, deadly for the PCs.

This holds for magic items, it holds for subclasses, it holds for tactical optimization, it holds for build optimization of all sorts.

If you follow the advised XP rewards and leveling speed, by the time your PCs are level 11 you'll have more than a year of experience DMing that exact party! You'll have a great idea of what they can and cannot handle and what is going wrong. You'll know that the Ranger is not doing very good damage, that the Wizard is OP, or that the Barbarian cannot be killed. And ... you are free to do what you want with that information.

Maybe you'll provide a ranger-only magic item that closes the gap for the Ranger. You'll introduce a psychic BBEG that makes the barbarian melt and shows up once a month to taunt the party. Or whatever.

Probably you'll have worked out that "the party can handle 6 deadly encounters in a row" so you'll keep on doing that (having slowly ramped up from 6 medium as they gained levels and kept on being bored by fights).

 

[Pedantic]

No, they are expected a DM to learn how well their party handles easy/medium/hard/deadly encounters. And then adjust based on that.

If your party is 50% better than it should be? The DM starts out with medium encounters, and you wipe them out without spending resources. The DM is supposed to learn from that. They should start creeping up the difficulty until it matches their expectations of how hard a fight should be.

The CR rating and encounter building rules just helps you work out how deadly an encounter is compared to other encounters, roughly. And to warn DMs that if they start to push into the deadly region that things could get, well, deadly for the PCs.

This holds for magic items, it holds for subclasses, it holds for tactical optimization, it holds for build optimization of all sorts.

If you follow the advised XP rewards and leveling speed, by the time your PCs are level 11 you'll have more than a year of experience DMing that exact party! You'll have a great idea of what they can and cannot handle and what is going wrong. You'll know that the Ranger is not doing very good damage, that the Wizard is OP, or that the Barbarian cannot be killed. And ... you are free to do what you want with that information.

Maybe you'll provide a ranger-only magic item that closes the gap for the Ranger. You'll introduce a psychic BBEG that makes the barbarian melt and shows up once a month to taunt the party. Or whatever.

Probably you'll have worked out that "the party can handle 6 deadly encounters in a row" so you'll keep on doing that (having slowly ramped up from 6 medium as they gained levels and kept on being bored by fights).

This all sounds like quite reasonable DM advice. Perhaps it could be put into some kind of DM's Guide.

I could see a series of guided questions that could be used to evaluate relative party strength compared to a general baseline, and then a menu of suggestions (including things like magic item placement, homebrew abilities, encounter design and so on) could be made to tweak how it all plays out.

 

[NotAYakk]

...Except all of that only matters after you have played for 3 to 12 months of time.

The DMG is aimed at either people new to DMing or new to DMing 5e.

None of that advice is useful to either group? Not until they are playing for months if not years.

And if they are successful DMs of other games, they will have had to have done those things already. So teaching how 5e is different matters.

If they are new to DMing entirely, then that is teaching stuff that you don't need until you've mastered other skills. Teaching how to start matters.

And are you really claiming "adjust things based on your party" isn't anywhere in the DMG? That is all I said. Adjust things based on your experience with your party.