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

[Not a Decepticon]

You say that like a gm who has never had a player IMMEDIATELY respond with a shameless "ok so we wait and take one tomorrow" as if even being forced to vocalize such an obvious work around was the result of an unreasonable bit of pedantry from the GM who pointlessly forced the issue.

There are no diminishing returns either because death saves and total hp recovery means that it's super efficient to heal even while scraping the bottom of the barrel & being low going into a rest doesn't mean you are starting off at the bottom of a hole that needs climbing before the PC is at "safe" levels. Toss in a short rest class like warlock& monk and the party really isn't even hurting for effectiveness.

And yes, it absolutely a pointless bit of pedantry because everyone at the table knows without a doubt that the party can ROFLstomp anything shy of Cthulhu in power armor smiting them dead with the sheer power of rocks fall lightning strikes fiat level kills. Sure the GM could murder the session and probably the campaign by actually trolling the party with endless interruptions to prevent short tests during that wait till tomorrow, but that's an epic lose epic lose scenario for the GM at that point

No, the "we will sit and do nothing for 24 hors just to rest" is stupid and I refuse to believe anyone would do that. If this is an issue, stop playing with weirdos who do this.

And really, if you have players give you up to 32 hours, while they sit idle...well, a lot can happen in that time. Baddies get reinforcemens, emptied rooms get refilled, traps get reset, ritual goes off snd now you have Cthulhu to deal with on top of the boss, or villain summon backu/bodyguards. Stop running static world that waits for pcs.

In short rest you regain only hp equal to roll of you used up hit dice +Con modifier. You only get half of the used hit dice on long rest. Regaining hp through short rest is diminishing returns.

I don't even know what is the point if last paragraph, could you explain it in a way that doesn't look like an angry rant directe more at yourself than person you are speaking to?

 

[Charlaquin]

I can make the encounter harder to challenge the party. But how do I deal with the Wizard throwing high level spells at the enemy, and the fighter just doing what he does every counter? He finally gets the one thing he's supposed to be good at, but often those fireballs or disintegrates or whatever the the attack spell of the edition/level of the day are just have so much more impact per turn...

Yep, which is probably fine if it happens once in a while, but if that’s how most days of adventure go at your table, you’ll probably want to switch to one-day short rests and one-week long rests.

 

[Micah Sweet]

No, the "we will sit and do nothing for 24 hors just to rest" is stupid and I refuse to believe anyone would do that. If this is an issue, stop playing with weirdos who do this.

And really, if you have players give you up to 32 hours, while they sit idle...well, a lot can happen in that time. Baddies get reinforcemens, emptied rooms get refilled, traps get reset, ritual goes off snd now you have Cthulhu to deal with on top of the boss, or villain summon backu/bodyguards. Stop running static world that waits for pcs.

In short rest you regain only hp equal to roll of you used up hit dice +Con modifier. You only get half of the used hit dice on long rest. Regaining hp through short rest is diminishing returns.

I don't even know what is the point if last paragraph, could you explain it in a way that doesn't look like an angry rant directe more at yourself than person you are speaking to?

I have seen more than one group try to do this; as has been said,, the game mechanics incentivise it, so by that metric it is understandable. People want to win. It's hardly being a "weirdo".

 

[Maxperson]

It’s interesting how this thread continues unfolding, because the variety of responses almost is the point. Every take here represents a different expectation of what D&D should accomplish—tactical endurance, narrative pacing, player challenge, story cohesion, social fun, power fantasy, etc. None of them are wrong, but they’re mutually incompatible if the system tries to serve them all equally.

That’s what I meant by D&D’s “self-inflicted wound.” When a single framework promises to support every style, each group inevitably defines “balance” through its own lens: one table sees it as fairness and pacing; another as freedom and flexibility; another as cinematic payoff. So the debate never resolves, because everyone’s technically playing a different game under the same banner.

I don't see this as the problem that you do. A table can enact story cohesion, social fun and narrative pacing, while ignoring player challenge and tactical endurance, because those don't fit. The table who wants player challenge can bring in tactical endurance and power fantasy, ignoring narrative pacing. And so on.

The game doesn't have to narrow itself to fit one or even a few types of tables. Being broad enables each table to take the aspects they want to use and have fun with, and ignore the rest.

Which is fine—until the rules themselves start assuming universal behavior (like a fixed adventuring-day rhythm) that doesn’t actually exist across tables. The moment that happens, design advice becomes less guidance and more illusion: it only works if everyone agrees on a foundation that the game itself refuses to define.

Until this. This is absolutely true. I still maintain that the worst mistake of 5e was balancing around the Adventuring Day and resource attrition. It's very hard to ditch it in order to have one or two encounters daily and achieve challenge, without high risk of TPK due to the monster(s) being so much higher in CR than the group.

If they had instead kept it balanced the way 1e to 3e were, the DM could easily have just put in a bunch of easier encounters to turn the game into a resource attrition/adventuring day type of balance.

 

[TiQuinn]

It’s interesting how this thread continues unfolding, because the variety of responses almost is the point. Every take here represents a different expectation of what D&D should accomplish—tactical endurance, narrative pacing, player challenge, story cohesion, social fun, power fantasy, etc. None of them are wrong, but they’re mutually incompatible if the system tries to serve them all equally.

That’s what I meant by D&D’s “self-inflicted wound.” When a single framework promises to support every style, each group inevitably defines “balance” through its own lens: one table sees it as fairness and pacing; another as freedom and flexibility; another as cinematic payoff. So the debate never resolves, because everyone’s technically playing a different game under the same banner.

Which is fine—until the rules themselves start assuming universal behavior (like a fixed adventuring-day rhythm) that doesn’t actually exist across tables. The moment that happens, design advice becomes less guidance and more illusion: it only works if everyone agrees on a foundation that the game itself refuses to define.

What I'm struck by is how much people want to re-litigate an 11 year old game based on design assumptions from even before 2014 and apply that to their ever-evolving manifesto of how D&D "should" be. According to Mearls in other posts, this was also prepped as possibly the last version of D&D that would ever exist, and not because it was evergreen...because Hasbro was considering maybe the game was approaching defunctness from their POV. And in fact, all that was really said in Mearls' posts, "Wow, we designed it thinking this, and people played it this way." Hilariously, it ended up being the most successful version of the game of all time. Also, the issues that people had started to see also started to be corrected in different ways through a new version of the game, and multiple third parties.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I have seen more than one group try to do this; as has been said,, the game mechanics incentivise it, so by that metric it is understandable. People want to win. It's hardly being a "weirdo".

Heh heh... well, * I * think someone who is more concerned with just "winning" combat encounters in an RPG than they are the stories and different adventures their characters get to go on is a weirdo myself... but I'm also an odd duck in that way.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I have seen more than one group try to do this; as has been said,, the game mechanics incentivise it, so by that metric it is understandable. People want to win. It's hardly being a "weirdo".

You can have social contract and conventions to avoid such things, but I generally feel it is awkward and bad design if the system incentivises certain things and then we just have to agree not to do it as it would not lead to fun gameplay. A well designed system incentivises doing things that result fun gameplay and then the players can just play skilfully without second guessing themselves.

 

[Stalker0]

Sure, but that people really did not like how 4e solved the issue doesn't mean that they still wouldn't like to have some solution for it. Just not that one.

There is also a baby and a bathwater scenario here. Its important to drill in on what people didn't like about the 4e solution.

1) Is it that they didn't like 4e in general, and so the fixes here (which were "good") were tossed out?
2) Is it that people like the mechanics and flavor of encounter and daily abilities? (this is often one that gets noted about fighters, why does a fighter have a "daily")
3) Is it because the solution didn't actually work? (people still feel they have to nova and rest after each encounter)

etc etc.

I think the core of what was done is the correct approach. Again, the game should be encounter based, not attrition based on a day of time. Now maybe 4e got some things with that model right and so things wrong, but that shift in the focus is what is important and should be reiterated on. 5e tossed that out the window to its determint imo.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Heh heh... well, * I * think someone who is more concerned with just "winning" combat encounters in an RPG than they are the stories and different adventures their characters get to go on is a weirdo myself... but I'm also an odd duck in that way.

I prefer the RP part too personally. But technically the G is just as important.

 

[Charlaquin]

If we're living in the recoil from the 4e period, and D&D's the most successful it has ever been, then I think it may indicate that this recoil period is a better place for it to be. Specifically, if 4e's solution to encounter balancing alienated a part of the audience, it seems likely that part of the audience is larger than the segment of the audience that is extremely frustrated with the encounter balance 5e delivers. As payn indicated above, tight encounter balance isn't why a lot of people are playing - they're playing for the power fantasy, the fun of doing things they can't normally do, the ass kicking, the fellowship around the table, whatever else that isn't always a hard fought, balanced bout every time.

Ehh, you might think so, but the people that hated 4e are a much smaller portion of 5e’s audience than people who never even played 4e. It therefore doesn’t really hold up to assume that those new players specifically appreciate the design choices that were made in reaction to 4e’s reception. Indeed, many of the things 5e players say they wish 5e did differently, are things 4e did, and appreciate in the design of 5e-adjacent systems like Draw Steel are directly inspired by 4e design.