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

[tetrasodium]

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 too have seen far more than one group do it, often with a dramatic sigh and rolling of the eyes as the group piles on agreeing with the course of action. Perhaps your own experience with players outside your personal social group of players is not as broad as you think & could stand to be widened before deciding with such certainty what "anyone" would do

Case in point, the 3e cure light wound wand.

Playing 3e without access to that wand (or some equivalent of it) is a NIGHT AND DAY different experience.

It was not uncommon for GM's to simply declare that there were no more of those wands for sale right now or that some of the critical components required to craft them were out of stock/season due to overconsumption

Going beyond that, I reject the idea that healing consumables started with 3.x and would further add that by needing to heal all lost hit points without being able to wish damage out into the cornfield via death save yoyo healing made those charges too precious to fritter away recklessly in actual play. The ad&d2e DMG has a line that read something like "healing potions should be readily available" while suggesting 200gp.

 

[Charlaquin]

But removal of the multiplier is a huge deal. In horde encounters you can have four times the amount of same monsters for the same budget.

Well yes, but actually no. The 2024 encounter building guidelines specifically advise against encounters with more than two monsters per PC, and says that if you do use that many monsters, to use monsters that have low enough HP relative to the PCs’ damage output that they can be one-shotted and/or taken out in large numbers with AoE damage. So, they’re basically just writing off encounters with swarms of weak monsters as outside the bounds the system is built to account for, same as they did with the Xanathar’s Guide alternate encounter building guidelines. If you crunch the numbers, the 5.24 DMG seems to be presenting the same math as the Xanathar’s encounter building, rendered more like the 5.14 DMG guidelines.

And especially on higher levels the budgets have gone up a lot too; level 20 medium on 5.5 has more than twice the budget of level 20 moderate in 5.0, so about nine times as many monsters than previously.

Yes, they did increase the thresholds at higher levels. This is likely because 5.14 significantly lowballed high level encounter difficulty, probably because it was under-playtested. The thresholds for low leveles haven’t changed, and in the mid levels they’re pretty close, with the budgets for High difficulty increasing more than the budgets for Low and Moderate.

Oh, and then many monsters have boosted too so probably at least ten times as tough encounter than before, probably more.

Well, that’s the backend adjustment around the one monster per PC baseline I was talking about. Monsters actually have to be stronger under this model for the system not to overestimate the difficulty of encounters with fewer than one monster per PC.

These are utterly colossal changes. They also reflect my observations that 5.0 suggested encounters were a total joke.

They aren’t insignificant changes at high level. They’re almost nonexistent changes at low level, and real but relatively small changes at mid level. More so than a change to the underlying math, they’re made subtle but impactful changes to the way they’re presenting that math, to account for the common misunderstandings of the 5.14 guidelines.

 

[Maxperson]

Having started with 3E, it was pretty shocking the first tine I checked out what came before, and how 3E muddied the waters IMO.

I think perhaps diluted might be a better word than muddied. 3e took the 2e systems and expanded them. Relatively few proficiencies became a lot of skills with a lot of skill points. Spellcasters got more spell slots and spell levels for non-magic users were expanded to 9. Many more spells were out there. The dangers were present, but there were ways to mitigate them if you had advance warning. Energy drain was there, but now you not only got a saving throw, you got TWO! And so on.

That said, 3e is still my favorite edition of the game.

 

[Stalker0]

It was not uncommon for GM's to simply declare that there were no more of those wands for sale right now or that some of the critical components required to craft them were out of stock/season due to overconsumption

Sure but that was my point. That one tweak had a massive impact on the experience of the game went for different groups.

 

[Maxperson]

Yeah, I'm not convinced. "Let's remove attrition but then if we want the fights not to be meaningless we can add it back case-by-case basis," does not to me seem like particularly functional or desirable design.

I think that's not the correct sentence. It's more...

"Let's remove attrition as the default method of balance, so that individual fights are more dangerous and have meaning. If DMs want fights to have meaning through attrition, they can add it back in on a case-by-case basis."

It's FAR easier to add in attrition than it is to take it out when the game is balanced around it.

 

[Scribe]

Interesting. Exactly how compatible can 5.0 encounters be with that big a difference?

The main thrust of this thread is outlining how 5.0 is not even played as intended, and it has not really mattered, and certainly did not slow its growth.

How compatible is 5.5 to 5.0? "Enough."

 

[Stalker0]

No it does not, it handles it way worse. Because in attrition model how well you do in the "warmup fights" actually matters. Yes, you are almost certain to win, but you might need to burn more resources than you wanted to do so. Then you no longer have those in the "boss fight," so it matters. But in encounter model the easy fights that you are almost certain to win are literally pointless. You might as well just skip them saying that you encountered some goons and a guard monsters and then you fought them an won and go directly to the boss fight.

Right....which is basically what is happening right now. Instead of the 6 or so fights and then the boss fight, people are doing one warmup and then a boss, or just going straight into high challenge encounters. They are skipping all of the warmup.

The attrition model isn't creating the experience that its supposed to, so its cleaner just to abandon it for an encounter model. And then you provide the DM some levers on how to add it back in WHEN THEY want it, not when the rules demand it for balance.

 

[Stalker0]

my only real exposure to 4e is here on Enworld, and honestly it sounds pretty great all around apart from a personal bugbear against tactical combat/abilities that i just struggle with.

So just to ensure I'm being fair, there are things about 4e that I think were great, but it had plenty of flaws as well.


The number one issue was presentation. 4e reads like a textbook, not a player's guide. It is clinical, replacing flavor with cold, hyper formatted keywords. It really feels so starkly different from other editions in that way.

Beyond that, monster design took a while to get right. The magic items were so flavorless my party stopped caring about them (that was teh moment when I knew 4e wasn't going to work for my group).

So there were good reasons to get off that edition. Its just again, baby and the bathwater. 4e had some SOLID mechanical improvements, ones I would have loved to have kept in 5e, but alas all of that was tossed by the wayside.

 

[Eric V]

Ford's Model T once made a lot of money. I'm glad they never fixed anything or improved upon it.

Sorry, I thought the sarcasm was obvious. My apologies.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Well yes, but actually no. The 2024 encounter building guidelines specifically advise against encounters with more than two monsters per PC, and says that if you do use that many monsters, to use monsters that have low enough HP relative to the PCs’ damage output that they can be one-shotted and/or taken out in large numbers with AoE damage. So, they’re basically just writing off encounters with swarms of weak monsters as outside the bounds the system is built to account for, same as they did with the Xanathar’s Guide alternate encounter building guidelines. If you crunch the numbers, the 5.24 DMG seems to be presenting the same math as the Xanathar’s encounter building, rendered more like the 5.14 DMG guidelines.

Yes, they did increase the thresholds at higher levels. This is likely because 5.14 significantly lowballed high level encounter difficulty, probably because it was under-playtested. The thresholds for low leveles haven’t changed, and in the mid levels they’re pretty close, with the budgets for High difficulty increasing more than the budgets for Low and Moderate.

Well, that’s the backend adjustment around the one monster per PC baseline I was talking about. Monsters actually have to be stronger under this model for the system not to overestimate the difficulty of encounters with fewer than one monster per PC.

They aren’t insignificant changes at high level. They’re almost nonexistent changes at low level, and real but relatively small changes at mid level. More so than a change to the underlying math, they’re made subtle but impactful changes to the way they’re presenting that math, to account for the common misunderstandings of the 5.14 guidelines.

I think you're still low balling the impact quite a bit. Even if we have only two monsters per character the impact is still huge. That's probably 8-10 monsters, so would have had difficulty modifies of 2.5. And tow monsters already had a modifier of 1.5, three qualifying of 2. Suddenly having twice the amount of monsters for most encounters is not a small change. And budget start to diverge earlier too. Now 5.0 having four difficulty classes whilst 5.5 has only three muddies things bit, but easy in 5.5 starts form twice the 5.0 budget. 5.5 moderate is higher than 5.0 medium from the get go and overtakes hard at seventh level and high overtakes deadly at tenth level.

For example in 5.0 easy encounter for four level two characters would be four kobolds, in 5.5 it would be four gnolls. I would say that this is a pretty steep increase in difficulty!