D&D 5E (2024) Mike Mearls explains why your boss monsters die too easily

[Charlaquin]

The biggest problem to me is that they are a tool of limited usefulness. I don't send my players to monster-infested dungeons and wilderness all the time. If they are, say, in a city and investating some murder mystery or something, they aren't running into bandits or roving ogres every hour!
So I prefer a game system that can handle it if I throw just one combat encounter a day at me, without making some characters overshadow others because they picked a class that performs better if it has just one fight a day.
And sometimes, when the players do enter a dungeon, I don't really expect a long rest to happen at all, because the players know they can't really afford the let the enemy shore up their defenses or move away while they rest, so the game should also handle a series of encounters or a single encounter with waves, without favoring particular classes because they have more or less daily resources.

If you’re doing one-encounter days in a city setting you can just crank the difficulty of that one encounter way up. Alternatively, you can switch to a one day short rest, one week long rest model so your “adventuring day” happens over the course of a week of one-encounter days.

 

[payn]

You’re right—D&D’s flexibility wasn’t accidental. It was a deliberate choice to stay ambiguously neutral, refusing to pick a lane so it could appeal to the widest possible audience. The result is a self-inflicted wound that never heals.

The problem isn’t that the game supports multiple playstyles—it’s that it tries to do so within one universal expression of D&D. There’s no real reason the brand couldn’t sustain parallel versions: a lighter, narrative-focused mode alongside a crunchier, tactical one. The counterargument is always market fragmentation—splitting one big audience into smaller, incompatible groups. But the alternative isn’t any better: a large audience that can’t agree on what the game should be, perpetually cycling through frustration no matter what’s released.

Of course, the moment you suggest parallel versions, people point to TSR’s 2E era as the cautionary tale. The company flooded the market with settings and styles, assuming players would buy everything simply because it all carried the D&D name. That misread the audience. Not every approach appealed to every player, and not everyone could afford (or even wanted) the full product line.

So from a business perspective, it’s easy to see why Wizards prefers a single, unified audience they can market every product to. It’s safer, cleaner, and more predictable. But that safety comes at a cost—the inability to truly commit to a defined identity for the game itself.

And that’s really the core of it. The decision to remain flexible and broadly accommodating is exactly what prevents D&D from ever resolving its encounter balance issues. Any real fix would require enforcing structure—prescribing pacing, resource limits, and rest constraints. But the designers treat that kind of prescription as antithetical to D&D’s identity. They see too much authority as stripping away the freedom that supposedly defines the game.

4E was the closest they ever came to breaking that pattern. It offered DMs genuine control and predictability—encounter budgets, transparent math, and mechanical consistency that made the “adventuring day” an actual, testable framework. But for many players, that clarity felt like overreach. It pulled the curtain back too far, revealing that the fantasy wasn’t just a story—it was a game with visible machinery. The reaction was loud enough that the pendulum swung back, and we’re still living in that recoil.

The result is a design philosophy trapped by its own success: a game that wants to be everything to everyone, but can’t fix its foundational problems without alienating part of its audience. Encounter balance will always be an illusion so long as D&D refuses to define what it’s actually balancing for.

Thing is, that nut that cant be cracked doesn't really matter to the masses. Its a problem for the hardcore .0001% of players who will argue it all day on forums and reddit. D&D's ambiguous hack it if it dont play right to you, seemingly oberoni design, is something folks expect from the brand. It's like monopoly. Its less about being the best game and more about being a traditional right of passage.

 

[SkidAce]

And that’s really the core of it. The decision to remain flexible and broadly accommodating is exactly what prevents D&D from ever resolving its encounter balance issues. Any real fix would require enforcing structure—prescribing pacing, resource limits, and rest constraints. But the designers treat that kind of prescription as antithetical to D&D’s identity. They see too much authority as stripping away the freedom that supposedly defines the game.

I feel the designers are/were right. DM designs adventures based on their party/group.

The pacing that works in your game, may not work in mine.

As far as encounter balance, its more of an art than a science.

If players are habitually going alpha on goblins and ogres, then a dragon shows up later? Well...

 

[SkidAce]

You don't. You mainly don't have strategic magic like that except as class features or magic items. For example, a 3rd level (out of 10) Void elementalist gets:
View attachment 419263
Conduits (~clerics) with the Nature domain can gain this at level 4:
View attachment 419264

But that sort of thing is separate from your combat powers.

Thank you.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Yes. Just ban it. I however find a lot of GMs are for some reason reluctant to ban problematic spells and features. And regardless, it is ludicrous that they included in the first place at least in the invincible bunker from it exists in 5e.

i wouldn't ban it wholesale personally, but i'd remove the fact it keeps enemies and attacks out as a base feature and let it be an additional bonus if you upcast it to 5th level, otherwise it just serves as climate controlled bubble to protect from the weather and suchlike,

 

[BenjaminPey]

I'll add a caveat to this 6-8 encounters thingie. The advice is 6-8 medium to hard encounters. If you go with deadly encounters, the number drops. In fact, something like one deadly battle, short rest, one deadly battle, short rest, one epic battle (deadly+), long rest, works perfectly fine.

That's why there's a third table in the DMG14. The adventuring day, as in: the XP budget for a whole day, one that you can spread around however how many battles you wish. The trouble is, the regular party will not be able to confront a daily budget in one-go — you'll have to spread this budget out a little —, but it will totally be able to withstand a deadlier than deadly encounter.

And that's why the DMG24, rather than having three different tables (encounter difficulty, number multiplier, adventuring day), went for a simpler, one table only solution: by letting the multiplier go, the high difficulty is now very much closer to the real deadly threshold of the average party and will make for challenging encounters even at full force. The real balancing out then became something like this: low difficulty encounters won't tax your ressources, moderate ones will tax your ressource, but a short rest should patch you up, high difficulty encounters will tax your ressources, it may even finish with a TPK, and short rest won't generally be enough to patch you up (wizards won't have all their high level slots back, for instance).

 

[DEFCON 1]

This thread is a perfect example of why having the board game take precedence over the narrative is the wrong way to go for a lot people. And in truth goes completely against the whole main premise of this thread in the first place. That of the existence of a so-called "Boss Monster".

Why is there a "Boss Monster" at all? Why is it a "Boss" and not just merely a more powerful monster amongst all the other monsters in the fight? It's because our STORY of the adventurers getting up to face this creature has been denoted in the NARRATIVE that this more powerful monster is "in charge" over all the others. But being "in charge" is a NARRATIVE distinction and reasoning, and NOT a mechanical one. And this is the entire reason why people do not want their "Boss Monster" dying so quickly... because it makes for a BAD STORY. Not for a bad "winning of the combat", but a BAD STORY. This story and narrative we have in all our heads about how a fight like this should go based upon the years and decades of other stories and books and movies and shows we have experienced and enjoyed that do just that.

The DM wants to keep the "Boss Monster" alive for as long as possible because they want the STORY of the guy in charge being the last one to fall after all the other waves of henchmen and mooks before them have been killed. But this idea or concept is a NARRATIVE conceit. It has NOTHING to do with just "winning the combat" or "winning the game"-- that would be the board game talking. If all that really mattered to everyone at the table was following the combat rules to win the combat such that one side survived and the other side didn't... then the order of which creatures on one of the sides died WOULD NOT MATTER. Because a win is a win. The game rules say one side wins when the other side is eliminated, then just eliminate them in whatever way makes the most tactical board game sense. If that's what you want (and that's fine if you do)... then this whole concern about "the Boss Monster dies too quickly" would not actually be a concern at all because there would not be a "Boss".

But if you as a DM have indeed created a "Boss Monster" and you hope/want that creature to only die at a specific point in the fight (or maybe not even die at all) because that's how you think the "Boss Monster" trope is the best way for the fight to go... then you HAVE to stop being so concerned about trying to use the combat game rules "the right way" or "As Written" in order to try and create that result. Because you can't. At least not consistently. The combat rules of D&D are not designed with drama and narrative being the prime function and result of having a fight. To actually get to that result... you have to use NARRATIVE techniques to let your narrative boss monster survive till the end. You have to use whatever narrative reasoning or non-rule (dare I say it) "fudging" you want... because in this case the story of the fight... the story of the characters "overcoming the odds" (again, another NARRATIVE technique) and fighting through all the mooks to finally engage and kill the "Boss Monster" last... is a more satisfying conclusion to us than trying to create or jerry-rig some sort of "combat rule system" one can use "As Written" in order to FORCE that order of death to occur. I mean if the game actually wanted one creature to be killed last, then the rules of the "tactical miniatures combat board game" version of Dungeons & Dragons would have been designed and written such that every combat occurred in "waves" so that you as the players couldn't ever actually face the "final creature" until you killed all the mooks in front first. Mechanically and artificially create that "end game boss" for you. The game could have been designed that way. But it wasn't. Instead, it gave us "waves of monsters" as a suggestion for a potential narrative technique to get the results we hoped for, but they are not a written requirement of the combat rules. Which means the game itself does not believe in the concept of the "Boss Monster" as a mechanical thing. So if you still want to use it, you have to give up trying to only use the written-down game rules to accomplish it.

We've had over 30 years of this issue. It's something we should have all come to terms with years ago and not something that should still be bothering us. The "Boss Monster" phenomenon should not still be a thing to get mad at the rules for after all this time.

 

[SkidAce]

I had a game where I asked the players if they wanted to ban Tiny hut in this short series of adventurers I was doing. They decided to play it straight up. Even used it once for a pretty solid ambush.

Then I used it against them....and asked them again if they wanted to keep it. Slight change in their answer


There are always spells that are a bit over the top, and I can understand how that makes it through the process. But when you see something as jaw droppingly powerful as Tiny hut at just 3rd level, I cannot fathom how actual playtesting was done on that spell, and no one went "um....isn't this a bit crazy?"

We called "Tiny Hut" Leomund's Tiny Bunker.

They use it in combat. (we have a lot of military folks playing) And in 2024 you can cast 4th level spells out of it!

 

[Maxperson]

Thing is, that nut that cant be cracked doesn't really matter to the masses. Its a problem for the hardcore .0001% of players who will argue it all day on forums and reddit. D&D's ambiguous hack it if it dont play right to you, seemingly oberoni design, is something folks expect from the brand. It's like monopoly. Its less about being the best game and more about being a traditional right of passage.

Right. For the typical player, since there are so many of them, they just find a group of like minded folks and play the game the way they want to play it. It doesn't matter if group A plays tactically, Group B plays more thespian, and Group C a different way. They aren't affecting one another and are all having fun playing their own way, so WotC has no incentive to fragment the player base by making a bunch of different D&D games.

 

[Epic Meepo]

The game is designed to have 6-8 encounters per Long Rest, and (at low to mid levels), it takes 6-8 max difficulty encounters to level up. So... eliminate Long Rests, and apply the benefits of a Long Rest whenever the PCs gain a level?