D&D General 5.5 and making the game easier for players and harder for DMs

[TiQuinn]

I don’t think the issue is one of the DM being an adversary. The DM is supposed to provide challenges, however. I see the real problem area is in the published adventures. If I have to spend time re-tuning encounters because 5e adventure designers don’t give them enough attention (and several people with knowledge, including Mike Shea, have remarked that WotC does not play test the adventures), then that’s time wasted as well as not getting value for your money. So I am hopeful that they give the Monster Manual an overhaul and give players something to actually fight.

 

[Scribe]

I wonder why it's anything more detailed than "Describe To Me How Awesome You Are As You Win" the RPG.

I'll have my detailed character tragic back story on your desk by end of day.

 

[mamba]

Yeah they said they are adjusting monsters to match their CR most accurately so I 100% expect monsters to hit harder and at will.

I sure hope so, they have been underpowered for a while now

Players will need dem bonus action potion chugs.

I doubt they do, but this change is not my main concern

 

[Stormonu]

Been using the "potion as bonus action" for years (and bonus feat at 1st for everyone!) as well too.

But the teleport/push/pull stuff is eyeroll inducing annoying, and healing/temp hp is already plenty enough it doesn't need to be further enhanced.

Players are not going to willingly curb their character power and just giving them more in 2024 edition I think is going to be a big mistake. But bring power levels to center doesn't sell books. They needed something to entice people to buy the books, so...

 

[mamba]

They needed something to entice people to buy the books, so...

it is not doing that for me.... I can see using the MM and ignoring the PHB

 

[Reynard]

The GM can always challenge the PCs. They control the encounters. There is no mechanism that forces the GM to "go easy" on the PCs. The GM can have every encounter end in a TPK if they desire.

That said: the real question is the purpose of play. If the purpose of play I'd to create a challenging experience that the players have to work hard to overcome, softening rules does in fact make the GM's job harder. But if the purpose of play is to engage in a story in which the PCs are cool AF protagonists, then softening the rules makes that easier.

IMO WotC view the purpose of play from the latter perspective. They see the GM as a necessary evil in getting the players to those awesome moments. For now. Most WotC adventures could be run by not especially advanced chat bots.

Personally, I think the purpose of play is to explore an imagined scenario and see what story emerges. The GM facilitates that but doesn't control it. From that perspective, how hard or soft the rules are is informative but not particularly important.

 

[DarkCrisis]

A lot will also depend on what each DM is looking for in terms of what their interests are in choosing to DM.

If you are a DM looking to "kill off" the players whenever you can... that's your focus-- the fights and how much you care about making combat the focus of your game and making them hard enough that the players all have to really work at keeping their characters alive... I would agree that 5E14 or 5E24 are not probably the best editions that allow you to do that.

But if you are a DM who is more interested in long-term storytelling and putting narrative arcs and story roadblocks in front of players and seeing how they can get their characters to navigate these things... the new PHB giving players an easier time to use their combat widgets doesn't really matter. A PC can drink a potion with a bonus action and thus make it a bit easier to survive? Well... since this type of DM doesn't really care about PC survival and instead is more interested in having reasons why the characters have to get into fights in the first place and what the results of these fights are (or arguments are, or quests are, or social engagements are, or discovered information are etc. etc. etc.)... a PC surviving easier is not much of a concern. Because the game isn't about PCs surviving, it's about all that other stuff.

And quite frankly... the fact that all our Actual Play RPG shows have taken off as well as they have and have brought and/or inspired so many old and new players nowadays-- and almost all of them are about the stories the character get into and not just "winning the board game by staying alive"-- these newest versions of D&D play into that and allow players to follow those shows along and that focus of the game.

Sure... all the old school players and DMs who are still harkening back to their teens years back in the 80s are all raising their eyebrows at all these modern players caring more about story than survival... but that's just the way things have evolved. And if those old school players and DMs don't like or appreciate the new normal... they need to decide whether to move on from the game in its current form. No harm no foul if they do... but they are going to nothing if not annoyed all the time with the game if they don't.

Can there not be a middle ground between “cakewalk ” and “TPK”. Should the players not want to be challenged?

Why do these discussions always have people saying “A DM just wants to kill them.”

How about the DM wants to challenge them without having to bend and break the base game and it’s published adventures?

 

[DEFCON 1]

Can there not be a middle ground between “cakewalk ” and “TPK”. Should the players not want to be challenged?

Why do these discussions always have people saying “A DM just wants to kill them.”

How about the DM wants to challenge them without having to bend and break the base game and it’s published adventures?

Well, the middle ground is how every DM runs their combats. The way you might build encounters will be different than how I build encounters, and that means combat might be a certain difficulty for your players, while my players might find them easier/harder. Or indeed even if we both ran the same encounter that was designed for us... your tactics in running it might result in the fight going one way and my tactics with the monsters might see it go differently.

So the point is that there are just too many variables to try and parse out any standard of what "too hard for DMs" actually is. Because for some DMs, sure the new rules might make it harder for them based on how they run combats and what tactics and strategies they use when running their monsters. But for other DMs it might be less. How much less? Absolutely no idea. We just can't put numbers to something like that. So as a result, when talking about the different "types" of DMs and their particular styles and methods of DMing, we usually will use the extreme ends merely for illustration. If we have two DMs, then we could describe them as "Survival DM" on one side and "Story DM" on the other. And those terms are used just to make it as clear as we can what side of the coin each one is on (even though we all know this is not ONLY what they are.) Describing one as black and one as white is clearer and easier for people to understand that trying to describe one shade of grey versus another slightly lighter shade of grey.

 

[payn]

Can there not be a middle ground between “cakewalk ” and “TPK”. Should the players not want to be challenged?

Why do these discussions always have people saying “A DM just wants to kill them.”

How about the DM wants to challenge them without having to bend and break the base game and it’s published adventures?

To be fair, your opening post calls 5E "too young to die" with super heroes who cant be killed. If those parameters are adjusted, then the discussion might not get written off so easily.

 

[overgeeked]

I think you have to ask yourself what your goal is as a DM. The 5e DMG makes a few statements about what it believes the DM's goals are.

"weave legendary stories" -front cover

"tell fantastic stories about heroes, villains, monsters, and magic"

and

"create the world where those stories live"

as well as-

"The Dungeon Master is the creative force behind a D&D game. The DM creates a world for other players to explore, and also creates and runs adventures that drive the story. An adventure typically hinges on the successful completion of a quest, and can be as short as a single game session...when strung together, these adventures form an ongoing campaign...the Dungeon Master gets to wear many hats. As the architect of the game, the DM creates adventures by placing monsters, traps, and treasures for the other players' characters to discover. As a storyteller, the DM helps the other players visualize what's happening around them, improvising when the adventurers do something or go somewhere unexpected. As an actor the DM plays the roles of monsters and supporting characters, breathing life into them." -introduction

Taken in total, it's the DM's job to create the world and everything in it that the players discover, and to create a narrative where the players complete many adventures over the course of the campaign.

You'll note that it never says the goal of the game is to make the players lose, in fact, the DMG further says "The D&D rules help you and other players have a good time...it helps to remember that Dungeons & Dragons is a hobby, and being the DM should be fun".

So what is your objective as a DM? What is fun for the players and you? If "fun" is wanting the players to survive to see more of the world you've created, then these little tweaks to make characters more likely to survive really don't matter.

If "fun" is trying to make every adventure include a brush with death and a real risk of failure, then yeah, maybe these have an impact. Maybe it means you would need to use more and more deadly encounters to achieve that effect than the game advises you to- it's worth noting the DMG also says "as a referee, the DM interprets the rules and decides when to abide by them and when to change them".

Perhaps the default version of the game isn't balanced to the liking of you and your group. This may mean that the game is easier on players and requires more work on the part of the DM to make the game suit you and your group. This is as it should be- no game is perfectly suitable for everyone as-is, after all.

And it may be that this version of the game is not suitable for you and your group's needs- that's ok, there's many different games and versions of D&D out there. Each has it's own benefits.

Certainly, 5e is more survivable than say, 3e, but 5e characters do not have the same potential in power as 3e ones, who could have ability scores far in excess of 20 and the ability to crack worlds in half with a sufficiently large rock, lol.

Increasing player survivability speaks to the goals of the system, and that may seem like "easy mode" for you, if you prefer a harsher version of fantasy role playing. This is not, however, part of some conspiracy to make being a DM harder- if you're the kind of DM who merely wants to create worlds, tell stories, and complete a game with 20th-level characters and have your campaign be spoken of for years to come by your players, these modifications to player survivability support the DM, not the opposite!

It's only if your goals as a DM are different than the goals the game pre-supposes that requires you to make adjustments, up to and including removing the offending character benefits.

In this case, yes, it's making your job harder, but only if you expect base 5e to be a different beast than it actually is. The good news is that there are many levers and dials you can adjust to make the game more to your liking.

If there’s no challenge, no risk of failure, then there’s no point in playing. All you’re left with is what I said above. “Tell me how awesome you are as you win” is the only rule you need.