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

[Maxperson]

You have badly misinterpreted the rule. Nothing in it suggests 24 hours of real world table time.

You only have to sit for up to 16 in the game, depending on when the encounter happened. It doesn't change @Not a Decepticon's point. You still don't wake up in the real world, engage in 18-24 seconds of activity, and then rest for up to 16 hours.

And he wasn't suggesting that players have to sit for that long. He's saying that it doesn't make a lot of sense to just sit around after so little activity.

 

[Maxperson]

Yeah its a rare combo but you could stumble into it without trying.

Druid + natural spell was not a rare combo. It was a basic PHB feat that every player who was playing a druid and actually read the feats took, because it made sense to take it.

The Druid player was the bigger problem than the class.

It was a very powerful class on its own, yes.

Nothing you cast while wildshaped couldn't be cast if you weren't wildshaped, and you weren't using your wildshape to rip people apart that round if you were casting a spell.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

You don't want to oppress the play styles of others so that yours' become the one catered to most by WOTC???

I get the joke, but that's actually driving it home for me. Nobody actually wants to “oppress” other playstyles, yet the structure of D&D creates that perception by default. Any time someone advocates for their preferred approach—whether tighter balance, more freedom, deeper story, or greater challenge—it’s interpreted as trying to claim ownership over the shared space. But that tension only exists because everyone is forced to share the same rule framework.

Speaking personally, I’m not trying to take anything away from anyone. I don’t want my preferences to replace anyone else’s—I just want space for the kind of game I enjoy. The reality, though, is that I’ll probably never get that within the official D&D ecosystem. 5E is a solid and enjoyable game, but it doesn’t offer the structural or mechanical support for the kind of D&D experience that most appeals to me. And that’s fine—but it’s also the point. The system can’t be everything to everyone.

In a universal design, balance itself becomes performative. The rules present an illusion of neutrality, but every omission or abstraction implicitly takes a side. It’s not a moral failing—it’s an unavoidable consequence of trying to serve all audiences with one toolset.

And yes, I know the easy response is “then play a different game.” I do, and I have. But that isn’t really the point. The discussion isn’t about personal satisfaction—it’s about how D&D defines itself as the central game of the hobby while remaining deliberately noncommittal about its own design priorities. That approach keeps the audience unified under one brand but ensures that a large portion of that audience will always be partially unsatisfied. It’s not about wanting to leave D&D—it’s about recognizing that the design philosophy itself guarantees this constant tension will never go away.

 

[DEFCON 1]

If that is the case, then why do we need to stick to a system, despite its flaws?

Why wouldn't we just go freeform, and ditch the problematic system entirely, just keeping the cool ideas?

It's not like that's that hard--nor is it alien to TTRPGing, since that's what the Free Kriegsspiel folks are all on about.

Yet folks do not do that. They specifically preserve the system, even when they know the system is getting in the way, even when they know something could be done. DSP's Spheres system is the only attempt I've ever seen at actually fixing 3e's structure, and while it has its defenders, it isn't the primary way folks play 3e (that is, PF1e), and (to the best of my knowledge) wasn't such even before 5e came along. It was just a fairly popular alternative, like psionics or Bo9S stuff--niche, but a relatively large niche.

I imagine its because for most people the energy required to move to and learn a new system and find other participants also willing to do that is more of a pain than just glossing over the problem issues in the game they are currently playing. If the flaws can be worked around, why bother switching?

Or even more to the point... if the story is way more important than the board game... then the issues with the board game are never so important that a person ever feels like they need to change things over it. They're just minor speed bumps. Nothing to get worked up over.

Personally, I just think a lot of folks around here who truly get bent out of shape over the board game rules of RPGs are at the ends of the playerbase, and thus don't have their wants and needs hit by games designers nearly as often as the extreme large middle who really just don't care. Just my opinion.

 

[Maxperson]

I get the joke, but that's actually driving it home for me. Nobody actually wants to “oppress” other playstyles, yet the structure of D&D creates that perception by default. Any time someone advocates for their preferred approach—whether tighter balance, more freedom, deeper story, or greater challenge—it’s interpreted as trying to claim ownership over the shared space. But that tension only exists because everyone is forced to share the same rule framework.

Speaking personally, I’m not trying to take anything away from anyone. I don’t want my preferences to replace anyone else’s—I just want space for the kind of game I enjoy. The reality, though, is that I’ll probably never get that within the official D&D ecosystem. 5E is a solid and enjoyable game, but it doesn’t offer the structural or mechanical support for the kind of D&D experience that most appeals to me. And that’s fine—but it’s also the point. The system can’t be everything to everyone.

What you are talking about is what I consider to be D&D's greatest strength. D&D will never be great at any playstyle, but with no tweaking to minimal tweaking, it can do pretty much every playstyle decently well to pretty good. If you want better than pretty good, you'll need to go to a different system that is focused on the playstyle you enjoy.

For most groups, though, the broad ability of D&D to playstyles decently well to pretty good means that in a group with a mix of playstyles, you can often run the game so that it appeals to everyone playing. Some playstyle preferences are mutually exclusive, but often they are not. And when it's a group of friends playing, they want everyone to enjoy themselves.

 

[Parmandur]

I’ve never seen a single person ever claim that 5e is perfectly balanced. I’ve rarely seen anyone claim that it is even fairly well balanced.

It is well balanced if the Advenfure Day maximum is pushed...but if it's not pushed, it works out OK.

 

[Parmandur]

I’m counting both under the 5e umbrella.

My understanding was that TSR editions had no real notion of game balance, at least in the sense we’re talking about here, of level-appropriate combat difficulty.

Traditional wargaming was interested in simulating realistic scenarios...and the Prussian and French armies in 1769, for instance, were not necessarily "balanced".

That attitude was carried into early D&D. Gygax was trying to simulate a particular narrative scenario, and balance was not a given.

 

[tetrasodium]

LBut if the characcters are hurt, exhausted and missing some magic, the attrition did its job. Tension is there. Resting is fine as soon as it will be narratively possible. Things can come up, though.

Trouble is that the bold bits ignore the relevant mechanics. At no point yet has "attrition [done] its job", that point is after hitting seven to nine medium to hard encounters when players have been making tough choices and needed to start really working together as a team to minimize resource consumption/losses and maximize party effectiveness.

• "Hurt": let's be real here on this one. There is one value of "hurt" that has an actual impact on play in 5e. That's a change from past editions where you had linear HP recovery and death at zero/neg10 with the need to heal all lost up between current and a safe level
  Spoiler: this one

  [*][*]
  
  [*]
• "Exhausted":this is an absurd inclusion given the impact . 2024 improved it a little, but the mechanical books once present in past editions to make room for nuanced concerns like "do we $do/ExpendThing to clear this problem at the cost of using that resource/wasting our buffs and such or whatever are no longer present in 5e. This is a straight choice between "why? It doesn't matter at all yet and probably can't get to a level where it would quickly enough to matter" vrs "yes of course. Obviously we should"
• "Missing some magic': again it's not a matter of "some" magic and abilities. It's a matter of restoring NOVA magic & abilities. Short rest classes like monk and warlock are particularly egregious on this point because the mechanics of rest recovery and those classes themselves are designed to allow players to force a 5mwd nova loop unless their own party says no for the disempowered GM and declares they will continue on or actively disturb the SR class PC's attempt to take yet another lunch break. I IME don't think I've ever seen a party veto a monk/warlock/action surging fighter's attempt to regularly restore nova capability after being bullied into acceptance through claims of things like "come ong uys I need those rests to keep up because of how my class is designed"; but the other way around is self restrained because 5mwd long rest class long rest fueled nova loop results in an embarrassing level of power

Soooo... The characters are not likely forcing a rest less than 24 hours after the last one for any of those reasons. They are rolling their eyes and saying they will wait because worc has failed to support their meat computer gm on the idea that anything shy of all nova all the time can be fun reasonable or even intended & the players involved have often made character build/action choices that aim to prove that all nova all the time is the only functional way of playing.

You only have to sit for up to 16 in the game, depending on when the encounter happened. It doesn't change @Not a Decepticon's point. You still don't wake up in the real world, engage in 18-24 seconds of activity, and then rest for up to 16 hours.

And he wasn't suggesting that players have to sit for that long. He's saying that it doesn't make a lot of sense to just sit around after so little activity.

[Gus Fring]No... That is not the same tangent
[/Gus Fring]
I quote how this all started:
"Long Rest rules themselves fix this issue as they state:
A character can't benefit from more than one long rest in a 24-hour period"
Multiple aspects of the rules related to the original problem are actively harmful to play in how so many of them bend over backwards to enshrine a toxic video game mentality as a blessed thing in need of shielding from any other play style no matter how disruptive that video game mentality becomes. The line in question that he held up as a solution does nothing to address the related gameplay problems caused by so many of the design choices 5e made.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I’m counting both under the 5e umbrella.

My understanding was that TSR editions had no real notion of game balance, at least in the sense we’re talking about here, of level-appropriate combat difficulty.

Pretty much true, and IMO the game was better for it. This kind of balance concern interests me not at all. TSR's method of using its danger curve to compensate is much more appealing to me.

 

[BenjaminPey]

Soooo... The characters are not likely forcing a rest less than 24 hours after the last one for any of those reasons. They are rolling their eyes and saying they will wait because worc has failed to support their meat computer gm on the idea that anything shy of all nova all the time can be fun reasonable or even intended & the players involved have often made character build/action choices that aim to prove that all nova all the time is the only functional way of playing.

I'm sorry, you seem very angry at the game, and possibily at your players. I hope you'll soon find some suitable game for you.

I'd rather not engage with you more on this topic if you don't mind, first because I have a lot of trouble understanding what you write, second because I have not encountered any of the problems you seem to be speaking of (not being frightened to be at 5 HP or less before an encounter without access to your high spell slots, not caring about exhaustion, "5 mwd nova loop", disempowered GM — that last one is especially alien to my perspective).