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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Condiments" data-source="post: 6781037" data-attributes="member: 6802006">Yeah I tend to agree with this. 5th edition was my first PnP, and my first time DMing so I had little experience as to how to structure adventures or make interesting fights. Unfortunately, throwing a group of monsters together at the appropriate difficulty level and throwing them at the players...generally doesn't lend itself to interesting encounters unless DM really goes out of this way to push the system. Monsters are generally bags of hit points with few unique abilities, and limited tactical options compared to the players. I remember almost being bored to literal tears during some fights during the first few sessions of my campaign, and wondering what I was doing wrong. Everything else flowed so nicely outside of combat, but as soon as initiative rolled....bleh.Which was a pretty big disappointment from my end. Being mostly a videogame player before playing 5th edition, I wanted to give those pulse pounding climatic battles that I remembered from the old cRPGs that I had played years before to my players. I tried my hardest with various experiments and playing with encounter design, and it feels like there is always something missing.I've gotten significantly better at designing battles since then and straining party resources over various fights in an adventuring day. The "adventuring day" is a pretty whimsical notion though, given the open ended nature of this game and player ingenuity. My wily players usually find a way to circumvent fights or come up with an insane plan.So yeah OP, 5e from my observations is a pretty laid back game that concentrates on multiple fights draining party resources with little risk to PCs. Pushing it outside those boundaries requires more DM work and sleight of hand to make things more tactically interesting like using terrain, LOS, mages, environment hazards/boons. If you're not careful, however, the system beings to strain under pressure. The system is very swingy, and relies on things being decisive within 2-3 rounds(which means less strategic/tactically interesting fights), and if you push outside of that you're in a danger zone. Though most of my most interesting fights according to my players involve these types of situations.I've never tried 4e but the talk of how interesting the combats were makes me want to try it out, maybe with something like 13th age's escalation die mixed in to speed up combats.</blockquote>

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