D&D 5E Design Debate: 13th-level PCs vs. 6- to 8-Encounter Adventuring Day

pemerton said:

In a fairly traditional dungeon crawl, where the GM has already written up the dungeon notes and is obliged to stick to them (so as not to invalidate the players' scouting, scrying, planning, etc), this isn't true, is it?

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Im 'obliged' to do no such thing.

My job is to create a challenging and fun adventure. That involves more than just simply being reactive to the players tactics and plans. It also involves forcing them to react to what the environment and the monsters are doing. It involves being proactive and having the world move around the players, as much (or more than) it does sitting back and reacting to what the players want and do.

If that means an extra unplanned encounter here or there, or doubling a monsters HP mid fight to keep it intresting or occasionally fudging rolls for or against the players, so be it.

Again; the DM is the conductor and the players are the orchestra. They make the music but I wave the stick, control the tempo, and ensure the different instruments are balanced against each other and playing in harmony.

The players plan their assaults, and whether or not they enter a particular room or not.

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And the monsters are doing the same. I might decide that as they stuff around panning how to do the next assault a goblin from the next room opens the door, or the BBEG decides to wander down to inspect this area of the dungeon.

And the GM doesn't get to decide to add wandering monsters - these are rolled for.

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Sometimes (when my players rest) I roll for a random encounter (announcing Im doing it first). As my players look at me nervously, I look down at my dice behind my screen, and then pretend to look at a chart ignoring the result on the dice, and tell they players it was close but they were lucky. I had no intention of throwing a random monster at them, but I didnt want them to know that.

Equally sometimes Ill ignore the dice and just throw one at them anyway when theyre having too easy a time of it or are abusing the rest mechanic. Sometimes I'll handwave the roll.

Random encounters (like everything in the game) are more than just mathmatical probabilities. They are dictated by the pacing of the game and player actions as mcuh as anything else, and are there to drive the story and feed into the challenge (and percieved danger by the players).

This may sound alien to you, and every DM is different, but I wouldnt do it any other way.

I don't know if Celtavian is still checking this thread out, but here is little updated Marilith I made for him. You can scale it up or down as needed for your uber PCs.



it is also posted over on this thread: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?482616-Marilith-Battlemaster&p=6864631#post6864631

MostlyDm said:

You're massively misrepresenting Hemlock here.

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You're right. I replied late last night after drinking beer all evening at a crawfish boil.
[MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION], please accept my apologies. I was conflating your posts and position with those of Celtavian. Clearly not the same.

Dave2008, I like it! I'm kind of flabberghasted actually that it still comes in at CR 16 (and it does, I double-checked) even though it's obviously much, much better-designed and more deadly. Makes me wonder just what exactly is wrong with the MM Marilith.

My one quibble: if you're going to give its weapons a 150/600 range, why are they shortbows? That seems incongruous. If I steal your Marilith stats for play (and I might) I will bump them up to 1d8+7 (+d8 poison) longbows to explain the range.

AntiStateQuixote said:

You're right. I replied late last night after drinking beer all evening at a crawfish boil.
[MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION], please accept my apologies. I was conflating your posts and position with those of Celtavian. Clearly not the same.

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All is forgiven.

Hemlock said:

Dave2008, I like it! I'm kind of flabberghasted actually that it still comes in at CR 16 (and it does, I double-checked) even though it's obviously much, much better-designed and more deadly. Makes me wonder just what exactly is wrong with the MM Marilith.

My one quibble: if you're going to give its weapons a 150/600 range, why are they shortbows? That seems incongruous. If I steal your Marilith stats for play (and I might) I will bump them up to 1d8+7 (+d8 poison) longbows to explain the range.

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They are "large" shorbows so I jumped the range up with the double damage die. They are basically the size of a longbow to a medium sized creature. I like the idea of adding poison to them.

pemerton said:

In a fairly traditional dungeon crawl, where the GM has already written up the dungeon notes and is obliged to stick to them (so as not to invalidate the players' scouting, scrying, planning, etc), this isn't true, is it? The players plan their assaults, and whether or not they enter a particular room or not. And the GM doesn't get to decide to add wandering monsters - these are rolled for.

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The dice don't decide to roll themselves.

Hemlock said:

I have no problem with large numbers of low-CR creatures. In fact, my playstyle is optimized to handle such creatures. I'm just telling you that Intellect Devourers are an outlier, especially if they teleport on top of the party with no warning as some DMs are wont to do, and if that's what you're planning to do for every encounter I'll just concede defeat now. I will not concede defeat if the enemies are kobolds or shadows.

If I wanted to DM-optimize a challenge like this I'd use a ton of low-CR stuff like drow with sleep poison, intellect devourers, banshees, and young white dragons. Oh, and goblins are very cost-effective too, especially if you give them nets and stuff. Oh yeah, and mephits are great too.

So, do we even need to do this or are you just going to declare victory?

Edit: or should we declare total war on each other and I'll fully optimize the PCs in response to your DM-side exploitation of encounter construction rules? The DM can always eventually win a conflict like that because he can customize monsters, but there are definitely player-side things I could do to at least win against huge numbers of Intellect Devourers. I wasn't planning on using them because they're pretty CAW-ey and I think this is supposed to be a CAS challenge, but if you think it would be fun I'm willing to still do it. It won't look much like a regular session though, between the illusions and the armies of intellect devourers and the hardpoints backed by Leomund's Tiny Huts and whole corridors filled with caltrops and customized demons who teleport with their bonus action and the spellcasting shadow dragons. It may look more like Old Man Henderson fighting Hastur.

If you were a real killer DM you'd be able to kill off my optimized party with a single not-even-Easy encounter and MM-only monsters.

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Nah. I won't "declare victory." It sounds like you and I are actually pretty close in our opinions of how the game works.

CAW would change the parameters from 6 - 8 encounters in one day to something very different, and potentially very fun, but would take FAR too long for me to do in an online game.

A basic rules party should be able to handle multiple medium encounters without a short rest, and should be able to handle 6 - 8 of them in a full day with 2 - 3 short rests. That's the default starting point for the game. Agreed?

Adding new archetypes, character classes, multiclassing and feats from the PHB adds significant capability and synergy to the PCs which clearly ups their punching ability a hell of a lot. You will not get the same results from a party of basic characters compared to a party of characters made from the PHB with multiclassing and feats. Still agreed?

If the players using all the PBH options are reasonably experienced/skilled they can [-]cherry-pick and min-max[/-] optimize to be even more effective than "normal" PHB characters. Still agreed?

Yeah. The DM is going to have to make some significant adjustments to keep things on a similar challenge level. Some of that adjustment can be done just in the environment and how the DM presents the challenges. Some of it will require using "dirty tricks" from the DMG to up the monsters' staying and punching power. It really cannot be argued that this is the case. So, an experienced DM with experienced optimizer players needs to optimize encounters. Cool. Good DMs will do that.

Side note and math (wheeee!):
The PCs are supposed to be the protagonists/heroes of the stories. They are SUPPOSED to win. Like by an overwhelming amount. If not, most games will end in a TPK before level 10. It takes 60 medium encounters to reach 10th level. If the PCs have only a 1% chance of losing each of those encounters then the chance of surviving to 10th level is 100 - .99^60 = ~45%. Should more than half of all games end in a TPK before reaching 10th level? If not, then the chance of the PCs "losing" any given encounter has to be REALLY small which will make each individual encounter seem REALLY easy. Game working as intended.

Radaceus said:

I cant help but feel trolled after looking over those character sheets...

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Agreed. I didn't even see character sheets, just the magic items. I'm guessing multiple 20+ stats on every character.

Celtavian is a Monty Haul DM playing with optimizers and complaining the default game doesn't support his play style without significant adjustment. I'm glad it doesn't, because if it did I'd be back to playing AD&D or doing something else entirely with my game time.

I'm not super familiar with the Basic Rules (only used them briefly, over a year ago), but yes, that starting point sounds reasonable as a performance floor. It is possible that even a Basic Rules party might be able to exceed that floor significantly. For full PHB (and especially if EE and SCAG are included) my general rule of thumb is that anything under Deadly is too easy, and that Deadly x3 or x4 is about the right setting for a "fair fight" which either side could win depending on how well the players play. To clarify what I mean here, let me say that I mostly ignore encounter construction guidelines and usually compute difficulty only after the fact--when I say that triple- or quadruple-Deadly is about right, I mean that when I construct a fight that feels about right and THEN check the difficulty, it tends to come out around triple- or quadruple- Deadly. But if I'm deliberately gaming the system in order to minimize the XP that players will gain on victory, e.g. drow warriors in the dark, a Medium or Easy encounter can be plenty deadly too.

One other point is worth emphasizing: I do not metagame my monsters, I roleplay them. I play Black Puddings as stupid monsters that just want to eat you, and orcs as cunning but still relatively straightforward glass cannons who want to win glory in battle so they can win wives, and drow as stealthy, patient killers. Non-tool-using monsters will generally just attack whichever PC is closest to them (depending on their motives for attacking) so they can eat them; they won't usually deliberately attempt to bypass the front line to attack the "squishies", because they don't like being surrounded, and usually the monsters' goals aren't so much about "kill these PCs" as "get food". Undead are an exception, since murderizing as many people as possible really is what they're interested in. Most monsters don't fight to the death if they can avoid it. Etc.

A DM who views the game as a tactical contest between himself and the players will play monsters very differently than I will. It is possible to squeeze more performance out of low-difficulty encounters with low-intelligence monsters than I generally do; but I prefer to just turn up the monster quantity and therefore the "difficulty."

Response to math: we view campaigns differently too. I don't want a 55% chance of sixty successful encounters in a row without losing no matter how well the players play. That would probably be six months to a year of play without any real tension. I like a game where every single conflict that occurs has something at stake. I'll play out low-stakes encounters if I feel like the players would benefit from the experience or if it's a dungeon crawl where ablative resources and logistics are important, but the nature of my sandbox is such that if I can't at least imagine the players losing a given combat, I think of it as more of a social encounter than a combat encounter, and I give the players the option to skip over it at a cost. "Hooray, you're in the troll cave, and there's nothing here but a single troll! If you want to skip this fight, it will cost someone 30 HP and then you can start looking for treasure. You can't see any other trolls right now. What do you want to do?" If I didn't offer them the option to skip the fight, it would be because I was trying to fake them out into thinking there was actually a troll ambush waiting for them.

Risk is about weighing probabilities. Uncertainty is not knowing exactly what the risks are. Uncertainty, not risk, is what my games are about.