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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9394335" data-attributes="member: 6877472">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." -introductionTaken 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.</blockquote>

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