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

[Crimson Longinus]

So, one of the big issues from my perspective is that the narrative consequence for resting feel fuzzy. One way to deal with this is to have player facing clocks with explicit consequences like this is when reinforcements arrive. That way it becomes a part of the game experience rather than a GM stick that feels like random punishment.

Yeah, some sort of fronts. GM can decide things, but it would be super helpful if there actually was some sort of scaffolding for the GM to build upon and it would set the expectation to the players of such things progressing due the rests being a normal part of the game. Lacking that indeed makes things "fuzzy" as you say. How this is handled (or rather how it is not) is part of the typical 5e pattern which is my biggest issue with the game. I like the GM having authority and leeway, but I think the designers too often use that as an excuse for lazy design, where instead of there being some rules or at least guidelines the solution just is "the GM can figure it out somehow."

 

[Micah Sweet]

what about the Death Domain Cleric then?

To me they are in the DMG because the DM can decide to not allow them as they are villain class options (per their header).

Yeah, they were pretty clear about that at the time.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Quite.

I disagree. My players have had enough constant pressure all day at work. They play D&D to relax.

Fair enough. Does that mean that you haven't experienced the problems others have enumerated in this thread, or that you just aren't bothered by them?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Except there aren't any in that adventure...*

And saying "well the DM has to modify the adventure" is all well and good, but why does the DM have to do that, anyways, exactly? If the game is built around this attrition model, why does it have things like Tiny Hut that you have to work around to enforce it?

Why do I have to seed NPC's with access to a specific spell just to foil the players options? And yes, of course, I could ban or alter the proud nails- but there are so many of them!

Let's be very honest here. 5e doesn't work the way it's supposed to out of the box. Saying "well, I, as an experienced DM can wrangle it into submission" is all well and good, but not every DM has that experience, and really, it's counterproductive to have a game that doesn't work unless you fix it yourself.

In this modern age where a major video game studio can release a game full of bugs and reap the benefits of having a modding community fix it for them, this may seem normal, but I assure you, it's not! Imagine if you bought a car and discovered in order to get it to work as advertised, you had to put in your own time and labor!

I don't think anyone would be happy with that, and yet it's ok for D&D to be that way?

*When I ran the 5e version, in fact, I couldn't modify the adventure in large ways, since I was running it for our local Adventure League. This is where I ran afoul of Crawford's "a hemisphere has a floor" comment.

Which I still contend is BS- that's only true if it's a solid sphere, and last I checked, LTH isn't.

I know I've said this before, but so long as enough people keep buying it, WotC isn't motivated to make changes.

 

[BenjaminPey]

I know I've said this before, but so long as enough people keep buying it, WotC isn't motivated to make changes.

Might it be that many people like it like that?
Being that playing with characters always on full health, disregarding any narrative constraints is purely a choice, akin to select the easy mode or cheesing saves in a video game, and an entirely valid preference, why should we add hard coded tools in the game to prevent that, exactly?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Fair enough. Does that mean that you haven't experienced the problems others have enumerated in this thread, or that you just aren't bothered by them?

Not bothered, haven’t noticed any problems. Having learned to play on 1st edition, I never payed any attention to CR when planning encounters in any case. And I don’t think my players would enjoy a more difficult game.

 

[Parmandur]

Not bothered, haven’t noticed any problems. Having learned to play on 1st edition, I never payed any attention to CR when planning encounters in any case. And I don’t think my players would enjoy a more difficult game.

The point is to have fun, after all.

 

[Minigiant]

You don’t generally need to clear the area for Diablo clones. Your abilities are on cooldowns that recharge during combat, and your health and mana recovery should match the rate at which you are depleting them. Also, you can run away.

The point was that you aren't expected to manage your resources from the time you leave down until the time you got back.

Also not until later Diablos was mana and health regeneration fast enough to spam. You usually had a weak low mana spell/attack (equivalent to a cantrip) you'd use while you bigger spell consumed most of your mana unless you popped a potion.

So it wasn't exactly 100% power at every fight.

 

[tetrasodium]

One difference between 5e and 4E experience would be that even if the players in the 4e game were acting "wimpy" and demanding regular rests, it would impact the power level of all characters the same, because they all have dailies and encounter powers, and they aren't overtly different in strength. Combats would be easier, obviously, but no one really gains from it. (I would say that such a strategy might still cause some different build choices - for example, you don't really want a lot of Daily powers that need to be sustained in such a game, since the action ecomony wouldn't work out, it's easier if you can focus to sustain only one spell per encounter. Not that different from concentration spells in 5E in that regard, I suppose)
In 5e, it's clear that a Wizard or Cleric has a ton more to gain from spending a night of rest compared to a Fighter, and they will shine a lot more in a singular encounter where rest before and afterwards is possible without further or only easy combats. (and it is not just the Wizard or Cleric that gains from this - obviously the Fighter likes his Cleric to be fighting alongside him and healing him, or the Wizard taking down a group of mooks with a well-placed fireball that would take the Fighter several turns to take out one by one, giving him the chance to focus on the bigger threats. But if the Wizard then also debilitates the bigger singular threats in the next turn because he can afford to cast more of his powerful spells, it might leave the fighter asking what he was needed for...)

I think that bolded bit is really central to the root of the problem. You can see how obviously responsible it is by looking at how often people defending the system provided gm toolset available drift back to 8hr long rest & long rest classes while 1hr short rests & short rest classes come up over & over again on the other side of the discussion.

Every edition prior to 5e had PCs on the same rest/recovery schedule & it resulted in a scenario where players quickly noticed that excessive resting could result in the GM simply adjusting encounters a bit in ways that impacted everyone pretty much equally. That shared pain made it feel like solid logic to pay some heed when the GM said "resting here would be a bad idea because [reason]" no matter how flimsy or contrived they personally feel [reason] is as a risk even if they all felt the shared pain in different ways (higher tohit higher saves higher damage etc).
With 5e though the idea that the party was all in it together when it came to resting went out the window & some classes got a full recovery option that could really only be limited when time pressure got cranked to active pursuit levels certain to cause burnout & other problems over time

The fact that defenders of the status quo have so regularly shifted to 8 hrs long rests & long rest classes while defending the dusk recovery cycle design that short rest nova loop classes exist in is pretty solid evidence of a serious problem. That breakdown of incentives becomes even more extreme now that the defense has shifted to @Maxperson's assertion that the problem should be solved using tools like telling the long rest class cleric & long rest class paladin that they have been shifted to being oathbreaker paladin and death domain cleric for not taking on the role of fun police at the table to stop the warlock/monk/maybe fighter+"sure why not moon druid/barbarian/etc from excessively short resting.

At least the meme worthy no win morality choices paladins occasionally faced under old school enforced absolute morality Lawful Good chains were generally a consequence of choices made by the players of those classes. It's absurd to even humor the idea of punishing Dave & Cindy because Alice &Bob are certain that their classes are designed to expect excessively regular short rests to fuel nova loops as the default state they were designed for when Dave and Cindy barely even benefit from those rests. Max has put forward such an extreme and toxic solution that even fans of the most arbitrary of OSR games are likely to cry foul at the idea of such a punishment for Dave & Cindy while Alice and Bob are reaping such huge rewards from those rests. I refuse to even pretend that the idea is workable until such point that wotc comes out explicitly describing those two subclasses as intended for the GM to use as punishment of long rest clerics and long rest paladins who don't fun police their short rest class party members into line. St least then I could be the reasonable one when I do some horrible to short rest classes.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Might it be that many people like it like that?
Being that playing with characters always on full health, disregarding any narrative constraints is purely a choice, akin to select the easy mode or cheesing saves in a video game, and an entirely valid preference, why should we add hard coded tools in the game to prevent that, exactly?

I was more thinking options. Unfortunately 5.5 was designed without any.