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

[mamba]

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?

I would never tell them whether a rest (1 hour or 8) is safe, let them find out and worry about setting up guards etc., so not everyone is actually resting.

I would however make sure that they get harassed a lot more during their rests, so they get depleted.

 

[iserith]

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?

I prefer to give the guidelines under which a rest is possible, then let the players decide whether, when, and how often they rest. This makes it a meaningful decision for them. This will always involve a timer of some kind and limitations on how long you can adventure in a given day.

For example, in a current dungeon crawl I'm running, you can adventure for 8 hours. Anything beyond that comes at the risk of exhaustion. You can take a short rest, but there's a high chance of a random encounter inside the dungeon. Outside the dungeon is "safe," but if a random encounter is indicated, those monsters or whatever appear in a place the PCs have already explored and are now a thing. For long rests, you can only take those back in town (a "safe haven"), and as with a short rest, the dungeon repopulates a bit. Finally, the villain they're after who is lurking in the dungeon gets a bit stronger every time the PCs long rest. So the more long rests you take, the tougher the final confrontation will be.

Once that's all clear to the players, they decide what to do.

 

[Clint_L]

Xanathar's "guidance" for magic item prices is woefully under baked. The amount of gold given out (even in standard, official 5e adventures) makes purchasing even the most potent magic items possible with pocket change.

Does it?

You said that your party is level 6, yes? So, I checked a bunch of standard, official 5e adventures and if a party of seven hits 6th level with enough gold per character that "makes purchasing even the most potent magic items possible with pocket change," that is completely DM's choice, because none of the adventures that I am scanning have anything like that amount of treasure.

The "most potent magic items possible," i.e. legendary items, should cost an average of 175,000 gold each. But let's assume that you were exaggerating and take that down a few notches, to just rare items. They should cost, per Xanathar's, 11,000 gold each on average. And your players have that as "pocket change"? At level 6? And this is 5e's fault? Okay, well if you have chosen to inflate the economy that much, why not just inflate the cost of magic items to go with it?

I happen to have a level 6 campaign going at the moment, and no one in the party has over a thousand gold; most have much less.

Edit: Okay, so I checked Forge of Fury, which is a conversion from an older module in TftYP, and the biggest treasure I found was this dragon hoard:
Nightscale has accumulated considerable wealth from her plunder of Khundrukar. Her hoard contains 6,200 sp, 1,430 gp, two garnets worth 20 gp each, a black pearl worth 50 gp, a wand of magic missiles, a +2 greataxe bearing Durgeddin’s smith-mark, a +1 shield, a potion of healing, and a potion of flying.

And you can sell the axe for 6k! Nothing else in the module comes close, though a roper is the second best piñata, with about 2k worth of loot. 7 players could probably finish that adventure with about 1.5 in their pockets if they find/sell everything they can. That seems like a lot to me, but I don't see how we get from there to the "pocket change" scenario above.

 

[DEFCON 1]

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?

Because you want the fights to be harder without having to invent story and plot out of whole cloth? It's pretty self-explanatory.

I mean yeah, it'd be nice if every published adventured just worked exactly as we needed it to right out of the book... but that's not statistically possible. Thousands of tables using it means that there will be thousands of different class and item combinations with thousands of different requirements of the adventure. The writers can't make it work for everyone.

So the question for you is the same as it's always been... what is going to be easier and more successful for you to use? A published adventure for plot, NPCs, and baseline encounters that you will have to adjust a few statblocks for and throwing in a couple extra monsters every encounter... or writing up entire adventures for yourself from scratch that has encounters built by you to suit your needs? Only you know the answer to that.

But at some point you have to just suck it up and play the hand you've been given. You already made your thread about not wanting to play 5E but are only doing so because all the other players you have really want to. So just buckle down and do the work to make it work. Or if that's too much fiddly stuff that you want to deal with... then take the easy route out by just completely doubling the monsters in each encounter that the book gives and then let the chips fall where they may and just see what happens. Go all-in on what seems like a massive over-correction just to find out the results and you can then pull it back in further encounters if it was too much. But that's easier than trying to nickle-and-dime the difficulty slowly up bit by bit to find some sweet spot.

Nah. Forget all that noise. Just next time throw two 8th level rogues, two 8th level clerics, two 8th level mages, and 26 CR 1/2 bandits at them and see what happens. And if it turns out they suffer a TPK? Then just have them all wake up in the bandit camp tied up and bound rather than dead and let them try and escape. But at least that one fight'll give you better intel on what the party can truly handle for the future.

 

[dave2008]

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

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.

I don't know why you keep ignoring the advice you are getting, because it works. Make the encounters tougher.

As I posted before, if you wanted to make that type of encounter a challenge with just 1-2 encounters in a day - it needs to be a lot harder, like 3x the XP and that is by the book for daily XP and not even considering heavy amounts of magic items. So your options are:

1. Make custom encounters. Best method, but time consuming.
2. Replace monsters with higher CR monsters
3. Buff monsters (2x HP + recovery mechanic).
4. Add more monsters.

However, you continue to not do these things, and then complain that things are not working. You keep trying to run weak encounters and then complain when they don't work. Use challenging encounters. and don't look at the title (deadly) look at the XP!

 

[Retreater]

Do you think theatre of the mind would help me spread out enemies? Have waves of reinforcements?
I think a big issue is not having enough targets, but there's a limit on the space of the grid and available tokens.
It also stretches believability for me to draw out a kitchen that's 100 ft across, for example. With the number of players and the number of opponents, most areas are too small.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Alternatively, he could make the PCs weaker. I'm sure they won't mind lowering all their stats by four each in the name of challenge.

I don't know why you keep ignoring the advice you are getting, because it works. Make the encounters tougher.

As I posted before, if you wanted to make that type of encounter a challenge with just 1-2 encounters in a day - it needs to be a lot harder, like 3x the XP and that is by the book for daily XP and not even considering heavy amounts of magic items. So your options are:

1. Make custom encounters. Best method, but time consuming.
2. Replace monsters with higher CR monsters
3. Buff monsters (2x HP + recovery mechanic).
4. Add more monsters.

However, you continue to not do these things, and then complain that things are not working. You keep trying to run weak encounters and then complain when they don't work. Use challenging encounters. and don't look at the title (deadly) look at the XP!

 

[Retreater]

Edit: Okay, so I checked Forge of Fury, which is a conversion from an older module in TftYP, and the biggest treasure I found was this dragon hoard: [snip]

Right. So treasure awards are very inconsistent. There was very little in Saltmarsh. There was a ridiculous hoard of wealth in the 5e Isle of Dread conversion - as well as great magic items (some legendary.) The 5e conversion of Necropolis is also pretty overloaded too.
So I'm not saying you're wrong. But what I am saying is that there is not much guidance for what items to award, how much a character should have, etc. Clearly there is variance in official adventures, conversions of past adventures, and 3PP content.

 

[Retreater]

Alternatively, he could make the PCs weaker. I'm sure they won't mind lowering all their stats by four each in the name of challenge.

Well some of it will be the honor system - asking if the sorcerer can tone it down. Or seeing if the party will do gritty rest mechanics.
If not, my wife suggests just telling the group "congrats, you won D&D - let's retire these characters and start over."

 

[Mort]

Well some of it will be the honor system - asking if the sorcerer can tone it down.

Or maybe just play by the rules - Quickening ANY 2 spells in 1 round is actually HUGE, no wonder he can NOVA so well.
Also, find adventures that emphasize the other pillars over combat. A big weakness of sorcerers is the limited spell selection. A sorcerer geared up for combat isn't going to be nearly as effective in exploration or the social tier (though their CHA will compensate a bit for the social tier).

Or seeing if the party will do gritty rest mechanics.
If not, my wife suggests just telling the group "congrats, you won D&D - let's retire these characters and start over."

That's A thought, but that's not going to change much right? They'll make new characters with similar issues. Besides 6th level is NOT the end of effective D&D. I think most people find the "sweet spot" around 7-11th level - so right where the PCs are about to be. And done right, High level D&D play is a blast - BUT (at least in IMO) it's quite a bit more work for the DM. Though A LOT less than 3e was (I will gladly play high level 3e, I will absolutely refuse to DM high level 3e - totally burned me out!)