D&D 5E 5e on Hard difficulty

[Jester David]

I think making 5e more challenging has to happen to the monsters not the encounters: more hp, more damage, more actions.
Maybe some more reaction powers, so monsters can surprise people between turns.

Terrain is another good way. A few good examples of that help.

 

[Shiroiken]

How are worlds not teaming with level 20 characters, especially long lived races like elves?

Because most creatures die in their first encounter, and most NPCs know this. Thus VERY few choose a career where violence happens regularly, and most of those that survive retire once they have enough money to live comfortably for the rest of their lives. Only crazy people (aka PCs, Adventurers, "Heroes") do this long enough to become powerful.

 

[dave2008]

I think making 5e more challenging has to happen to the monsters not the encounters: more hp, more damage, more actions.
Maybe some more reaction powers, so monsters can surprise people between turns.

Oh I agree completely; however, I think you need both. My thought is that you define a suitable XP budget for challenging encounters / adventuring day and then create monsters to fill that void. Of course I already have a thread for those monsters (a bit neglected at the moment).

If we can defined, with some accuracy, what a challenging encounter / day is a "hardcore" group, we can then determine how many MM monsters are needed, or how many "hardcore" monsters are needed.

 

[Harzel]

The “Daily” column provides an XP budget per PC per adventuring “day”, for planning a series of encounters that characters might face between long rests. (For example, a group of might face a dozen small attritional encounters.) Increased encounter budgets are likely to result in characters gaining XP faster, so a DM might choose to increase the XP needed to gain each level to that suggested in the Advancement column.

This is a bit of a nit, but IMO it would be clearer and correspond better to your description if in the Advancement column the value in row N were the incremental XP needed to advance from level N to level N+1 (rather than the cumulative XP needed to reach level N). Providing the cumulative values in another column would be fine, but the incremental values are more directly connected to what you have done, and the incremental N->N+1 value is connected to the Daily value in row N, not to anything in row N+1​ (IIRC).

 

[Harzel]

How are worlds not teaming with level 20 characters, especially long lived races like elves?

This is a good question, but since the OP's suggestion involves making advancement harder and slower, I don't understand why you would ask this question in this thread.

 

[snickersnax]

This is a good question, but since the OP's suggestion involves making advancement harder and slower, I don't understand why you would ask this question in this thread.

Mostly responding to the shock of the realization that the current RAW suggests 33 full adventuring days to go from level 1 to level 20. With 5-7 ASI from level 1 to 20. I starting seeing advertisements for professional adventuring companies in my mind.

TIER4 ADVENTURING

"I joined TIER4 AVENTURING and in 30 days all my once-a-day wishes come true now" Rosencrantz the Wish Master, level 17 Wizard

"A little over a month ago, I was called the Runt of the North-12 strength, 10 constitution, now thanks to TIER4 ADVENTURING, I'm rocking a 20 strength and over 250 hitpoints" Bullwinkle the Barbarian

"Because I was a single mom raising 8 kids, I joined TIER4's once a week program. It took me a little longer... but after 33-39 weeks of training I've met so many new friends, and we're all level 20. Most importantly, when I talk to my god, he talks back. TIER4 even offered me a part time job doing rezzes. All my children will be doing the fast program" Sarah, High Priestess of Light

I'm not sure 39 days instead of 33 is noticeably harder and slower for TIER4 graduates. It just means TIER4 charges 20% more for their program.

 

[CapnZapp]

I think making 5e more challenging has to happen to the monsters not the encounters: more hp, more damage, more actions.
Maybe some more reaction powers, so monsters can surprise people between turns.

Terrain is another good way. A few good examples of that help.

Agreed. Challenge Ratings and Encounter budgets are not part of the real game, and I see little use in focusing on them.



Sent from my C6603 using EN World mobile app

 

[Jester David]

Agreed. Challenge Ratings and Encounter budgets are not part of the real game, and I see little use in focusing on them.

If you don't have anything to actually add to the discussion but edition warring at shots and 5th Edition, you really don't need to post. Attacking the game just makes people defensive.

Do you have any actual suggestions to offer on making 5e harder? Things we as the community can add and make? Would you like to contribute anything?

 

[Jester David]

Oh I agree completely; however, I think you need both. My thought is that you define a suitable XP budget for challenging encounters / adventuring day and then create monsters to fill that void. Of course I already have a thread for those monsters (a bit neglected at the moment).

If we can defined, with some accuracy, what a challenging encounter / day is a "hardcore" group, we can then determine how many MM monsters are needed, or how many "hardcore" monsters are needed.

The regular guidelines are probably fine. Changing both the monsters and the encounter rules adds two variables to the equation. Two points of failure. It's probably easier to just increase the potency of monsters to match the power increase of PCs optimised with feats.

5e already shows you can add abilities to monsters without technically increasing their challenge. So it's not even *really* bending the rules.

Thinking on what I wrote earlier, alternate abilities - what 4e labelled Monster Themes - that grant reactions and bonus action abilities might work nicely. Few monsters use either because it's hard on DMs. Especially newer ones. But when facing a high level or experienced group, the DM likely has some skills.

More abilities that let monsters do feat style things, like block attacks on allies, take extra attacks, push PCs, and the like.

 

[clearstream]

Since it seems the biggest complaint with encounter difficult is at high level, I'm going to start at the top. At level 20 you are saying 90,000 XP for a daily budget. That is way to low for what I would call "hardcore" gamers. It is less than 4 pit fiends for the whole day. I don't think 4 pit fiends (straight out of the book) would provide much of a challenge as it is only 3-5 rounds of combat for such groups.

So that begs the question, who (what type of group) is your table for? It may be more accurate for the basic or standard (from my previous post) group, but the hardcore group will laugh at it.

That's 90,000 per PC! Each Pit Fiend is 25,000 so for a typical party (four PCs) that would be 14 Pit Fiends.