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

[Minigiant]

The problem isn't the encounter math though.

The problem is the session assumptions.

 

[Maxperson]

I have played games and sessions in PF2 and ICON where the the underlying world just didn't matter to my enjoyment; playtest sessions, pure 'run through this gauntlet of fights', locking in for a hard boss fight.

Sure, you can play D&D like a boardgame, but of all the playstyles you can engage with D&D, boardgame is the one D&D is the worst at. It's just not good. If I want to play a boardgame, I'm going to pull out a real boardgame that is designed to be a lot of fun, not D&D.

 

[Maxperson]

And? Skip to the part going into why it matters after she's dead?

Unless the party is evil, it's going to matter to them some way, some how. If the party is evil, the hero(not villain) getting away is going to matter to them in a different way, because an evil party has different priorities.

 

[SkidAce]

I agree that there are issues and I agree that a day of time passing often is not a meaningful cost, but I also do not think that any RPG can function if the players do not care about the fiction at all.

Quoted for truth!

 

[SkidAce]

There is also the blatant disregard for Rules as Intended and exploiting vageuness in Rules as Written. If the rule say you cannot take more than one long rest in less than 24 hours, it is obvious to me that the rule was put in to ensure you are not long resting after every single encounter, further supported by existence of short rest. which would not be necessary if the game wanted you to spam the long rest. Players who want to disregard that need to be talked to about the spirit of the rules vs the text, and if that is not enough, be told to leave the table.

The concern may be that some groups after an encounter would/could wait 24 hours and THEN take a long rest.

Perfectly valid gameplay if you want/like that, but with narrative or time story constraints it becomes problematic.


(I could't resist translating that concept into my "long rests are after a work day" theory.)

"Hey boss, I'm kinda tired and not feeling 100%, I cant work (adventure) two days in a row"*




*of course, it would be nice to work every other day, or anything other than a 40-50 hour week, but lets not go there

 

[Micah Sweet]

Probably not if they come at such consistency that it prevents them from getting their long rests in, oh no, the bounty hunters who are out to capture those now-illegal adventurers specifically carry around scrolls of anti-tiny hut dispell magic? It’s the consequences of your inactions!

Sure, but for such players that's the GM's fault for intentionally making the game less fun for them.

 

[SkidAce]

Sure, you can play D&D like a boardgame, but of all the playstyles you can engage with D&D, boardgame is the one D&D is the worst at. It's just not good. If I want to play a boardgame, I'm going to pull out a real boardgame that is designed to be a lot of fun, not D&D.

Talisman? Heroquest?

 

[Micah Sweet]

One other thing I believe that is a major change in the culture of D&D today is that many of the players and DMS are gamers from the era when dungeons in video games are different.

Floor clear to rest dungeons.

Basically you come to every floor of the dungeon with full resour.

You travel from the city to the forest fighting the monsters on the way. Before you get to the forest you rest.
You travel through the forest to the cave area fighting all the monsters on the way. Before you go to the cave you rest.
You get to the cave. You kill the goblin guards. You rest
Enter the cave and killed the goblins on the first level of the cave. You rest
You go down to the second level of the cave to find the goblin boss fully rested and you unload on whatever cheesy abilities you have and it has.

And this model you enter every fight with all of your resources.

This is different from the traditional attrition model because you host to fight the entire quest with only 1 reset rest. So you're supposed to be able to fight the goblin boss at 20% power.

A goblin boss designed to be fought at 20% power is different from a goblin boss designed to be fought at 50% power which is different from a goboin boss designed to be fought at 100% power.

Video game pacing is another thing that is piled upon the other aspects session time, character complexity, and character tracking which makes it difficult to run attrition gameplay.

I think the truth issue is that attrition gameplay might require simple characters and monsters which isn't profitable for a large company.

So my hot take is:

Attrition-based dungeon gameplay cannot be a major companies main gameplay Style unless they engage in heavy marketing and rely on alternative streams of profits. Attrition based gunplay is probably best left for the kickstarters and smaller companies who intend to make all their money up front and then invest into another game afterwards

So, everyone except WotC then?

 

[James Gasik]

Interesting. If we were to adjust the dials on encounter creation so that every fight (especially boss fights) assumes the PCs are at 100% power, what should we do differently?

Is there anything you can do differently?

Consider that there is no "reduced power" statblock for any creature. Or that the CR system doesn't take anything like reduced party resources into account. If an encounter is ECL 7, it stays ECL 7 whether it's the first or last fight of the day. There's no way the DM can know, in advance, what state the party will be in when they reach the final encounter of an adventuring day. They could be down a man and struggling to survive. They could be at 50% power, 75% power, or hey, even 100% if they found a way to sneak a long rest in somehow.

The only way a DM can adjust for this is with quantum ogres, fudging die rolls, or other "behind the scenes" manipulation- if you're a "living world" DM, ie, you believe the campaign world is set in stone and shouldn't change for players, then inevitably the party will just fail due to bad luck (conversely, they might trivialize the adventure's challenge due to good luck, but whether or not this is as problematic depends on your point of view).

There is no guideline for the DM for how to do this, really, it's pretty much play it by ear. Conversely, it's the same for the players. There is no advice saying "don't use Action Surge in this fight" or "try to only cast one spell per encounter". You use the resources you have to in order to win. If this means that an encounter implodes because nobody can save against Hypnotic Pattern or that you waste a Fireball on resistant enemies, you'll have more or less resources for the upcoming encounters.

It's perfectly believable that a party could suffer misfortune so significant that they cannot proceed and are stuck on encounter 4 out of 7. Of course they want to rest, they have to! But if "long rest" is a naughty word in the adventure's design, then what?

The problem with resting really is that the DM wants to control when it happens, and it's not really a decision they should get to make- they can discourage it, but if the party believes they cannot face another tough encounter, they're going to attempt to rest (or retreat).

And it's not like monsters are designed to have reduced resources when you encounter them either. Ask yourself when the last time you saw a monster in a fight have reduced hit points or a spellcaster is down a few spell slot. I'm guessing that chances are, this is a rare occurrence, since doing this should lower the difficulty of the encounter, and it's not clear by how much. The CR system isn't built that way!

Let's say you decide a second level party is going to fight three Wights in the broad daylight, so that all their attacks are rolled at disadvantage. Does this make the encounter appropriate? Some would say yes, some would say no, the truth is, nobody knows, because it all depends on the roll of the dice. You can attempt to use statistics, but statistical anomalies happen. Anything you do is an educated guess.

Encounter design has always been borked, as the closest anyone has ever come to answering this was loose advice like "adjust the xp award if a fight is too easy or too hard". The impact on player resources, the ability for them to actually face 6-8 encounters between long rests, none of this is taken into account.

What's also missing is any real incentive for players to push their luck. If you don't have to face a dragon at 75% power, why would you? Why would anyone, that just sounds suicidal! And yet the game is designed with the idea that of course people will do that, and what guidance is there for the DM about how to handle that issue?

There's a culture of disdain for players who try to rest whenever they can, but the fact is, if the party goes into a fight at 50% power and the Cleric takes a breath weapon to the face and is dropped to 0 hit points in the first turn, how many people would say "the players were dumb to not rest first"?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

One other thing I believe that is a major change in the culture of D&D today is that many of the players and DMS are gamers from the era when dungeons in video games are different.

Floor clear to rest dungeons.

Which games? I can't think of any that work quite how you describe.

But I came from the era of Pong and Space Invaders, and we always rested whenever we ran low on resources back then.