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

[Maxperson]

That's my point. Not admitting it and not trying to fix it for nearly a decade is their fault.

What fix?! It can't be fixed. They either do their best to mitigate it a bit, or they scrap the most popular edition they've ever had and hope the next edition is as good. Which do you think the corporate choice is going to be?

 

[Maxperson]

But is it an issue for WotC...? They didn't intend for people to play on easy mode, but if a fairly significant percentage is happy doing so, there might nit be anything to mitigate as far as theybare concerned.

See my post above. It covers this.

 

[Parmandur]

So this all goes back to the OP. Where one of the original 5e designers is saying "yes our assumptions about how players play was wrong".

If we are taking the OP at their word (and if we are not, then there is nothing to debate in this thread) that implies that a significant portion of the playerbase (if not the vast majority) play the game in a way that WOTC did not design for. High enough that one of the head designers of the system is saying "we did it wrong".

But if the majority are still playing below the guidelines and having fun...what is WotC motive to change anything? If they change the attrition based maximum, they will alienate the Dungeoncrawl fans, and ghe "playing well below the threshold but still happy fans" will be, at best, indifferent to the change.

Is the "I want shorter days to be intense challenges so I am frustrated crowd" significant enough to warrant a redesign?

2024 rules suggest not.

 

[GrimCo]

When milestones mean leveling. Far too many DMs these days just use Milestones to brake the leveling.

Braking in sense that they use it to slow down? Sure. But on the other hand, it removes rewards of going murderhobo just to squeeze few extra xp.

I think one of the culprits is that much of the playtest was done with the Caves of Chaos dungeon, which feature almost no interesting tactical situations (e.g. archers on balconies, fire pits into which to push foes) or monsters with interesting abilities. It's all pretty much just "charge in and make attack rolls". And that kind of stuff is fairly low effort, particularly if you play it without a grid, so it moves fast, and you can quickly move on to the next fight. In an environment like that, sure, I can see 6-8 fights per day.

This. It's not hard to cram trash encounters. But DM knows they are trash, players know they are trash and all they do is serve to chip away some of expendable resources. Problem comes when it just doesn't make sense setting and story wise to have those encounters. Also, if you make trash encounters too easy, players can take out few with almost no resources expended, except most valuable one, game time.

But if you're putting some effort in? Give some of the creatures bows and put them in a defensible position, have some other ones form a shield wall, have a boss that's either got some spells or some other cool abilities to use, and suddenly we have a much more interesting fight on our hands. But that's not going to be over in 10 minutes of dice rolling – it takes more effort both for the actual characters and for the players. And you might not want to deal with 6-8 of that kind of fight.

Yup. If you use multiple opponents, opponents that come in waves, terrain features, environment hazards etc to make combat interesting, it takes time. How many combats like that can one cram into a 3-4 hours long session? On the other hand, if you have 1 big monster in empty room, it's focus fire and kill it fast. Solo monsters are bad, they loose to action economy and players ability to focus fire, even if they don't go nova, just using basic attacks. Higher the level, worse it gets.

 

[Parmandur]

What fix?! It can't be fixed. They either do their best to mitigate it a bit, or they scrap the most popular edition they've ever had and hope the next edition is as good. Which do you think the corporate choice is going to be?

And maybe get simplt shouldn't. D&D is the Dungeon crawl smash and grab game: would it make sense by any metric to change it's D&D-bess just because the Cosmere RPG us rocking an excellent Encounter-centric design?

Does Checkers beedlueces that move differently just because chess is great?

 

[mamba]

What fix?! It can't be fixed. They either do their best to mitigate it a bit, or they scrap the most popular edition they've ever had and hope the next edition is as good. Which do you think the corporate choice is going to be?

it’s not like we have to guess this…

 

[tetrasodium]

What fix?! It can't be fixed. They either do their best to mitigate it a bit, or they scrap the most popular edition they've ever had and hope the next edition is as good. Which do you think the corporate choice is going to be?

They were not even willing to supply UA variant subsystems a gm could point to and say "no I'm not an EvilKillerGM and reject your assertions that I'm 'afraid of losing'. I'm using this this and this and expect it to be observed without complaints about'too many changes' or hearing 'i can't keep up with all your house rules'. You can GM yourself if you don't like it, but I'm not changing it back to munchkin baselines because you want to run roughshod through an acknowledged design mistake"

 

[Zardnaar]

it’s not like we have to guess this…

Yeah revised 5E not my ideal choice.

I'm a WotC suit? Bet your ass its a revised 5E.

 

[overgeeked]

The other way to go with this is not fight it, rather embrace it.

I've mentioned it a few times, but here goes again.

Short rests are a free action. You can only take 2 short rests per long rest.

Long rests take 5 minutes.

This takes the fantasy superhero vibe of 5E and cranks it up to 11.

Then, if you're the type to build encounters, you build one encounter around the budget for the entire adventuring day according to the DMG.

Good luck.

 

[Minigiant]

In any case, long rests resetting everything is at the core of the problem. All or nothing nature of them makes it really tricky to balance. It sorta works if you use them to bookmark the narrative "chapters", like gritty rests that are extended downtime at the end of an adventure arc, but sometimes that does not flow so neatly either.

Rests restoring things more incrementally would be in a lot of ways be much better, and then we would not need to have two types of rests either. But with so many separate things and how spell slots work easy and simple incremental restoration is a bit awkward to implement. It would be easier if characters had just hit points, spell points, and, eh, prowess points (for martial powers and things) and those would be the only attritional resources to track and then a rest would restore some increment of them.

Perhaps doubling the amount of rests is a solution

A 5 minute
A 1 hour
A multiple hour rest
A multiple day rest

Then some resources could only be restored in downtime, meaning bosses have downtime as well.