Level Up (A5E) Removing Pointless Death (+)

I didn't design that encounter. It was in a published adventure, and I ran it as-is, with the details provided, and the tactics the author gave.
From my experience, many encounters in official 5e adventures suck, big time.
In RoTFM for instance there's an encounter with an alleged CR6 Frost Giant Skeleton that can oneshot crit any character at the level when the encounter happens, and it can come with a hag.
That's only the last one outrageously bad encounter I experienced, a year back, as a player.

I do run published adventures for many of the same reasons you're mentioning, but I do significantly change encounters (either when prepping or during play) because by experience just by looking at numbers I can see all the pitfalls. It's surprising sometimes that older adventures (pre 5e) were much better designed for their own edition than current ones, in my experience.
3PP adventures may be way better though.
 

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It may just be certain monsters that cause issues when doing this.
If you're running A5E characters with A5E monsters, it shouldn't be an issue. The A5E characters are, overall, more powerful than 5e- especially the martial characters (and especially the berserker and fighter). Obviously there could be some edge cases, but not in my experience... if the players have some level of "system mastery," A5E martial maneuvers are nasty.

My happiest balance of PC v Monster power was running 5e14 characters with A5E monsters!
 



I didn't design that encounter. It was in a published adventure, and I ran it as-is, with the details provided, and the tactics the author gave.
I was running a published adventure because of the following...

1) A weekly game that runs 3+ hours
2) A full-time job
3) Household responsibilities
4) Working on my Masters degree
5) A lack of trust in my abilities to design encounters
6) Inability to get everyone on board with original plots
7) A bookshelf stuffed of gaming stuff I've already bought
Life these days is busy. Busy for everyone. I really think the biggest impact at your table would add little to no time to your life: strategize with each other.
 

From my experience, many encounters in official 5e adventures suck, big time.
In RoTFM for instance there's an encounter with an alleged CR6 Frost Giant Skeleton that can oneshot crit any character at the level when the encounter happens, and it can come with a hag.
That's only the last one outrageously bad encounter I experienced, a year back, as a player.

I do run published adventures for many of the same reasons you're mentioning, but I do significantly change encounters (either when prepping or during play) because by experience just by looking at numbers I can see all the pitfalls. It's surprising sometimes that older adventures (pre 5e) were much better designed for their own edition than current ones, in my experience.
3PP adventures may be way better though.

The 1st question might be, just how much stronger in terms of hp and ac are level 3 characters in a5e? (I suspect not much). Then maybe also in damage and control? (I suspect this is where most of the increased power is located).

IMO. 4 5e-style wererats shouldn’t have been that hard of an encounter even for a 5e party.

I think often in 5e adventures they knew the 5e encounter guidelines could be too easy so they increased the difficulty. When you have material that already increased the difficulty beyond recommendations, converting those monsters to be even stronger (along the damage axis), especially since ac and hp of PCs probably stays similar then I think that’s what’s leading to tpks especially around low initiative rolls or bad positioning (like streaming in 1 at a time).

Possible Solution.
I’d do a quick check for what the published encounter difficulty would be for regular 5e and if it’s way outside wncoubter guidelines then I’d adjust downward in some way before converting to a5e monsters. In this case going to 2 or 2 and some lower cr rats would have been about right IMO.

If the party handled was semi optimized annd encounter perfectly I think they could have probably beaten 3, but would be a very difficult encounter.
 
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If you're running A5E characters with A5E monsters, it shouldn't be an issue. The A5E characters are, overall, more powerful than 5e- especially the martial characters (and especially the berserker and fighter). Obviously there could be some edge cases, but not in my experience... if the players have some level of "system mastery," A5E martial maneuvers are nasty.

My happiest balance of PC v Monster power was running 5e14 characters with A5E monsters!

The question there might be are you converting modules or making your own encounter guidelines with a5e or even 2014 encounter building guidelines?

Also I believe you that PCs are more powerful, but in what dimensions does that extra lower exist? I really doubt it’s ac and hp, but I could be wrong.
 
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Changing monsters can always change things. I remember WotC's "oopsies" when one of the enemies was massively strengthened between the time the first adventure was written and when the rules were finally published. This led to a challenging roadside encounter becoming a potential death trap.

Or take the official solution to the removal of the D24 orc: "use the stats for Tough":
Both are CR 1/2 but the Tough has almost double the hp, does less damage in melee but more at range and adds advantage to attacks by pack tactics (but fortunately no other effects like with the wererats in the example above).
If the party keeps at range they will have way different experiences with the D14 orc and the D24 "orc/tough" than if they get into melee. Especially if they go really tactical and send enough toughs into melee to grant pack tactics to everyone still at range.
 

Theoretically, we were the right level and right number of players. As I wrote upthread, the adventure was written for 5E and I converted it to A5E, so maybe that was part of the issue.
However, this is just one example in a long, long series of TPKs. We're talking around a dozen occurrences with more than a score of players since the year 2000. There's a larger root cause than one poorly planned wererat encounter.
So I passed the torch to another DM after this TPK. Already, about two months later, the rest of the group is already wanting me to take back the reigns. Therefore, I'm wanting to work on this TPK thing.
It's a fairly major issue in this particular case, since wererats in A5E are hellaciously punishing compared to 2014 wererats.

I mean, it's right in the stat block that they average 12 damage a hit if they have advantage, and they have 2 attacks (3 if bloodied), and they have pack tactics, which means easy advantage. That tells me that one wererat by itself is easy pickings, but 2 or more is going to be a nightmare for a Tier 1 party. A level 3 character averages in the low 20s for HP, so one wererat can drop a PC from full in one round on decent rolls, and 2 teaming up is almost certainly going to drop a PC barring extremely high defense or extreme bad luck on the GM rolls.

Without having some form of hard CC (not common in Tier 1), or having a lot of ranged magical damage and good kiting (remembering that they have nonmagical weapon resistance, so that 33 HP is actually 66 for most Tier 1 parties), 4 level 3 PCs against 4 wererats is like walking into a Cuisinart.

To me, the core issue is if you can't look at a fairly simple stat block like the wererat, run that simulation in your head and realize that this fight is going to wreck the PCs, you're going to have issues running a combat-heavy game without the crutch of a perfectly designed adventure (which doesn't exist).

This is especially relevant since the party does not seem to want to play anything close to an old-school style, wherein they "feel out" the encounter and run if its too hard. They're expecting to play in modern neotrad style where encounters are interesting but ultimately winnable challenges.
 

Maybe the best solution, instead of forcing no-die mechanics into a game, is to encourage them to play a game that has them already? Maybe I should just tell them we're going to try something more narrative like Daggerheart?
 

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