D&D 5E A Mess of OP Characters (magic items, rest mechanics, etc.)

[Celebrim]

Encounter Example 1: Bandit Attack

Party comes upon a group of 13 CR 1/2 bandits, 1 CR 8 Fighter/Rogue, 1 CR 8 Cleric, and 1 CR 8 Wizard. (According to the Encounter Calculator, that's a Deadly encounter at 23 Challenge Rating.) The party was moving silently and taking cover, approaching the bandit camp. On one side of the road were 7 bandits and the Fighter/Rogue captain; the other side was the wizard, cleric, and 6 additional bandits.

OK fine. We know the party is over geared, over-powered, under challenged and exists in strength greater than the 4 presumed characters. The above fight barely looks challenging to me even before we are talking about a strong party. It's also set up completely to favor the players.

Let's redo this. Add to the above an addition 13 CR 1/2 bandits as well as 6 CR 1/2 dogs.

The bandits additionally have a wagon with four horses that serves their logistics. The bandits camp behind a screen of heavy brush and young pine trees in a circle about 80 feet in diameter. You can see the lights of three campfires and hear them from about three times that, but not clearly enough to make out details. You can't see any campfire circle from the vantage of the road until you enter the camp. At all times, about 1/3rd of the bandits (10) are acting as sentries ringing the encampment at a distance of about 60 feet. Four of them are posted concealed in tall trees in a ring around the camp and have good vision both around them and into the camp, while four others have hides hidden in the brush, while two watch the road from a carefully constructed blind/ that gives them 90% cover and concealment. Sentries have horns as well as weapons and can give an alarm. Additionally, the bandits have constructed a variety of simple traps (bear traps, and the like) on the likely approaches to their encampment (as if someone steps off the road in the dark), and the wizard has cast some sort of alarm spell on the road leading up to the encampment. The wizard also has Absorb Elements and Featherfall prepared.

If the party claims to be moving silently but talks or exchanges information in or out of character, the sentries and dogs hear them. Don't let them plan and claim to be silent.

The remaining bandits are in three groups with 5 bandits, and 2 dogs in each group, each group about 40' apart with one near the cook wagon. The last bandit is in the wagon with 100% cover. The dogs are alert and can effectively see in the dark and make perception checks to smell or hear approaching PC's as well. Barking dogs will investigate disturbances after one round.

In combat, the bandits disperse and take cover amongst the surrounding trees or behind the wagon. They only go to melee if the PC's are close. Sentries not directly engaged will make their way to the combat as stealthily as possible, trying to attack the party from flanks or rear.

What makes combat challenging is fog of war. Even more so than numbers, limiting the PC's information is what makes things difficult for them. If they have perfect information they'll easily make a perfect plan.

 

[Retreater]

While I agree, it's a bit more than that.

If players are allowed to dictate the pace of play (as in rest whenever they want) it doesn't really matter if they take 1 hour, 8 hours or 1 week. There has to be time pressure preventing the players from dictating the pace all the time. I'm not talking about constant doom clocks (you have 4 hours until the world ends) just real time pressure that encourages PCs to not take forever and always be on their own time table.

Well the adventure assumes that the encounters are spaced out: the bandit camp is three miles from town, etc. And to be fair, the party is speed running this adventure as it is.
I'm hesitant to change to gritty rest - we're 21 sessions into the campaign at this point. I'd definitely need to get buy-in before making a big change like that.
It's just wild that I have to change so much to make this "deadly" adventure challenging for a group of lesser experienced players, running at a lower level (they're supposed to be 8-9th level currently).

 

[Celebrim]

what's the point of using something published if I'm changing everything?

I say that to myself almost every day. 99% of the published material out there is junk.

I just bought about $60 worth of interesting sounding pdfs because it was GM's day and there was a sale. I regret every single purchase as likely useless to me.

 

[iserith]

I've killed 3rd level characters before. The game stops being challenging around 5th level, IMO.

Killed loads at 5th level and above, too. Not that I'm bragging. (Though maybe I am.)

The thing is, I can't run a string of 8 encounters in a day. It's impossible to have any sort of verisimilitude in the game world (and gets exhausting spending all of our gametime on pointless fights). If we were in a dungeon, sure, that's possible. But in an open wilderness or in a small town, you just can't do it. You can't be walking around a town, trying to find the evil wizard, and get attacked by 7 encounters of wyverns in a row, then find the guy at the end of the day, and have a fight.

That's not how D&D works. And frankly I'm amazed that the design team thought that was acceptable game design.

It's how my D&D works and, not surprisingly, the game itself seems to perform better under that approach. When we set up these hard lines like "it's impossible to have any sort of versimilitude" or most fights are "pointless" that we run into trouble in my view. So if you just delete those concerns, you might notice things working better.

 

[J-H]

I think the suggestions made so far have covered the issues pretty well. You have everything you need to address this going forward. It'll take a few tries to get it nailed down, so don't get discouraged.

 

[gorice]

Well the adventure assumes that the encounters are spaced out: the bandit camp is three miles from town, etc. And to be fair, the party is speed running this adventure as it is.
I'm hesitant to change to gritty rest - we're 21 sessions into the campaign at this point. I'd definitely need to get buy-in before making a big change like that.
It's just wild that I have to change so much to make this "deadly" adventure challenging for a group of lesser experienced players, running at a lower level (they're supposed to be 8-9th level currently).

In my experience, 'deadly' is the floor, not the ceiling, even with multiple encounters per long rest. The problem is, we don't know where the ceiling actually is...

This is why I don't think most advice about how to increase difficulty is actually helpful, because 'keep making things arbitrarily harder until TPK, then dial it back a bit' isn't really much use.

As I and others have said, do try and make it difficult to rest (should be easier in the dungeon, where a long rest means getting attacked for sure). If that doesn't work, use alternate statblocks (I mentioned Giffyglyph's monsters before; I also thing the Star Spawn are really nasty and surprisingly interesting).

 

[Retreater]

Do you think an approach of "you get a rest when I say you get a rest" would be good to take? We already do milestone levelling. Treasure is at the discretion of the DM. What about recharging abilities?
Does that seem like a bad idea? Any of you do that?
Gritty rest - maybe?

 

[Oofta]

Second fight of the day.
It was a combined CR 16 encounter. None of the individual monsters had more than 44 hp. They were killed because they each failed at least 1 save. And it was two fireballs, because I made an error about the Quickened spell metamagic feat.
They came from a couple of directions, designed to make an imposing entrance in a crowded interior. That's how the module presents it. I guess I can redesign every room in the entire adventure, but in the end, what's the point of using something published if I'm changing everything?
In case you're curious, I'm putting in examples of the art from the adventure so you have a better indication of the terrain of the bandit attack and lycanthrope ambush. Once you show art like this to your players and describe using the boxed text, you're sort of not able to change the descriptions to make the combats more challenging. That's why I'm trying to prep now before I DM myself into another hole.

View attachment 277519

If the scenario doesn't allow for enemies to come from multiple directions, there's still the option of sending in waves. Personally I'd just change the setup. A picture may tell a thousand words, but it doesn't have to tell the players everything there is to know. I'm also kinda mean when it comes to fireball, I actually use the rule that it sets unattended items on fire. Not knowing the lycanthrope scenario, If I were to do something like that I'd either still have the lycanthropes attack from multiple directions or have the lycanthropes appear to be harmless until they effectively have the party surrounded. I usually max out HP for lycanthropes (at least) and similar creatures with damage immunity if the entire party has at least magic weapons. The CR for those creatures seems to assume that at least some of the party will be ineffective because they don't have a magical or silvered weapon. Creatures with 44 HP is quite low for PCs level 6, even a CR 3 werewolf has 58 HP. Not sure how you're getting your CR levels.

In the desert picture, I go back to the question of how the PCs snuck up on the bandit camp. If it's truly barren (and again, that's actually pretty rare) there was nothing for the PCs to hide behind. I quoted the DMG a few posts back, but the bandits are so much lower CR than the rest of the enemies I'm not even sure I'd consider them in the calculation.

Then there's the 1-2 encounters per day and an overpowered wand. The former has multiple fixes, I use the alternate short rest rules I know plenty of people just rule that you have to be in a safe and secure location to benefit from a long rest. I've told you what I would do with the latter, you could also just make it an old school wand that only has X charges ever.

I rarely use modules because I would likely end up rewriting the encounters anyway. When I do use them it's for the general descriptions and plot, NPCs, etc. But one of the big issues that there's no easy answer for is that D&D is a game for dungeon crawls and exploration/travel scenarios with everything in between. I've managed to solve that issue for me by narrating a lot of travel time unless there's a really tough fight along with using the gritty rest rules. I don't do dungeon crawls, instead my games are typically "everything is going fine, what do you do during your downtime" followed by the excrement hitting the fan for a few days.

I think you need to chat with the players and explain what the issues are. There's a multiple ways of addressing this but you have to be willing to change things if you want to fix it. Good luck.

 

[mamba]

Well, at least now they are indoors, so that wand becomes less useful

 

[Mort]

Do you think an approach of "you get a rest when I say you get a rest" would be good to take? We already do milestone levelling. Treasure is at the discretion of the DM. What about recharging abilities?
Does that seem like a bad idea? Any of you do that?
Gritty rest - maybe?

Kind of, though it doesn't have to be that blatant. I make sure the PCs recognize the resting "wherever they want," is problematic. If the PCs insist on hunkering down in enemy territory, chances are they won't get a complete rest and will expend more resources trying to then just pushing forward or back.

Or on a more "soft pressure" approach, if the PCs don't feel like pushing forward, well ok, but someone else might - and they'll get to the good loot first. Rival adventuring parties can be a good source of fun, if not overused (and they provide for a nice change of pace when the PCs stumble upon their mangled remains and the session turns into a bit of a murder mystery or a dire warning of things to come).