D&D General 5e System Redesign through New Classes and Setting. A Thought Experiment.

[mamba]

Fair enough, but these big-tent conventions do serve as a pretty good bellwether for how popular a game is likely to be or become

not if the game is not even there because it was not released / finished yet, as someone mentioned…

and - like it or not - popularity leads directly to a) sales and b) a larger player base.

that is obviously true

 

[mamba]

Better idea: throw out the whole notion of CR.

There's just too many variables that the designers can't account for to allow any such system to work well enough to bother with

CR represents the relative power of the monster, no need to throw that out. Your examples all are about encounter building, not CR.

I would not throw that out either, it’s still a baseline. Having a baseline is better than not having anything, even if individual DMs will have to tweak the result.

 

[mamba]

I don't think it's a stretch to say that the majority of D&D players want to play D&D as a game of Big Darn Heroes, doing Big Darn Heroic things.

you are not a big darn hero when you beat up the (relatively) weak and steal their stuff. You are a hero when you stand for what is right and do not back down even when the odds are against you

Doing Big Darn Heroic Things usually means getting to unload your cool abilities during a fight - most of the time, during almost every fight

nah, that has nothing at all to do with it, villains do that too

With that in mind, I'm definitely in favour of @Steampunkette's considering per-encounter pacing for player character combat abilities.

given that the attrition loop is pretty broken to begin with, I am open to alternatives to the current design. I’d rather go the Draw Steel route though than a consequence free per encounter system. That, or bring attrition back for good

 

[Remathilis]

You give the DM practical advice on how to build encounters. Less encounters more/bigger critters.

Less encounters merge several small ones add a bit more to account for AoEs.

You still aren't addressing how a DM determines strength relative to size. I'm making a dungeon for third level PCs. Can I put an ogre in room one without a TPK? How about two? What about a troll? What about a troll and six goblins? What about a mummy? A drider? A shambling mound?

Id rather have a CR system that breaks over nothing but hoping every DM will study the Monster Manual and learn how to eyeball encounters.

 

[AnotherGuy]

The idea is to take some of the lessons from 4e's encounter pacing and bring it to 5e. Because 5e is designed for 6-7 encounters per day, but Mearls and the rest of the team dropped the ball on pacing out abilities.

So players just dump all their most powerful abilities in round 1 to try and end fights way more quickly than is intended, which trivializes the game in a lot of ways and winds up with the "I need a long rest" right before the BBEG encounter.
He talked about it on Blue Sky and you can read about it here: D&D 5E (2024) - Mike Mearls explains why your boss monsters die too easily

Players are supposed to deal with 20 rounds of combat and typically handle 5 before taking a long rest. He does say "You can just give your bosses way more HP" but also acknowledges that it both breaks the CR structure and introduces the fatal flaw that you're -expected- to get a long rest before every boss fight so you can alpha strike and then have a reasonable duration encounter beyond the alpha.

By shifting something like, say, exertion from A5e to recover at the end of an Encounter, rather than a Short Rest, and reducing the total amount of exertion you have access to at a time, you can help to offset the nova problem. And then apply similar, but not identical, limits to each power source, you can better balance the game.

So, like, maybe Occult characters get 2 spells per encounter rather than short rest, but their spells hit a smaller area and weaken the target so other people hit them harder, and their invocations provide a boost to their at-wills so they get a similar total throughput bonus spread differently. Martial characters get 4 exertion per encounter for their combat maneuvers, and Psychics get 4 Psi Dice, but both Martials and Psychics get to spend up to 2 exertion or 2 psi dice on their encounter powers to boost their effectiveness. Arcane characters get 3 spells per encounter but their spells deal low damage in a bigger area. Divines get 2 Spells and a Channel Divinity that all apply some healing. Natures get 3 spells which always have a slight healing and control component.

And all of these things are independent of role.

Things like that.

Two Things.

1. The problem with 5e can be easily solved by
(a) Introducing a Travel Rest and converting the Long Rest to a 24-or-48 hour safe and comfortable rest period; and
(b) Toughening up opponents (5 min work days is too short and 7-8 encounters is ridiculous the ideal is somewhere in between as it caters for most types of adventures)

2. If you want the Sim Crowd to accept an AEDU philosophy you need to tie it to an exhaustion track (5e should also be tied to the track but I feel it is more prevalent when you're taking on an AEDU engine as it is presents itself as more game-y which is a problem for the those that enjoy Sim).

 

[DEFCON 1]

Id rather have a CR system that breaks over nothing but hoping every DM will study the Monster Manual and learn how to eyeball encounters.

Heh heh... if one wants to become a competent DM, one should be able to use and do both.

The problem oftentimes is too many DMs who want to "build" every single fight they put together using all the CR math and the different levels of "Easy, Hard, Deadly" etc... thinking that they are going to put together a lovely night of board game-like, five straight encounters of HeroQuest group battle fighting... only to discover that the players did all kinds of odd things during those five encounters with how they used their abilities, when they used their abilities, when they took rests to regain abilities to change up how that final fight ends up looking. To basically blow the DM's perfectly designed and arranged series of combat scenarios to bits... and leaving a DM who is incapable of jerry-rigging on the fly to compensate for all those actions to regain a semblance of how they wanted that string of encounters to work because they never learned the art of "Eyeballing".

I personally don't think there's any problem with having the game give a "Challenge Rating" to a monster to get a basic idea of what level of a single PC or party of PCs (whichever way one wishes to create their CR system) can fight in a default, non-extreme scenario. Tell me an Ogre is an okay basic opponent for a 3rd level party of 5 PCs? Fine. But trying to get into even more weeds by trying to design a system that will recalculate the Ogre's CR when you've added 2 more PCs-- both of which have healing spells and thus the party now has four competent healers rather than just two... but this Ogre encounter also taking place after three previous encounters where the party may or may not have used certain abilities or spells and may or may not have had a chance to take any rests to regain abilities or spend hit dice. And then recalculate things again when you add in a half-dozen kobolds to the fight that might get one-shotted by the great weapon warriors on the field and thus be no real speedbump for the encounter... but also might not if the party doesn't have any great weapon wielders or the ones they do have go down after a single hit because they were low on hit points. And now these 6 kobolds with Pack Tactics surround the one or more healers the party may or may not have, quickly removing that important recovery potential capable of getting other PCs back on their feet... resulting in a quicker death spiral than the DM was expecting. Trying to just rely on a convoluted CR encounter builder system like that to create a "fun night of D&D" is a disaster waiting to happen.

That's when a DM should know both their party's capabilities and the abilities of all the potential monsters on and off the field to be able to eyeball when it's time to add or remove extra creatures as necessary either to start the fight, or several rounds in as reinforcements or retreating morale casualties... in order to make the fight work out more or less in the manner they were originally hoping to see when they spent 20 minutes building and then calculating the CR of the encounter they were making the night before during their prep. But if you don't learn that as a DM and instead try to rely strictly on the "spreadsheet calculations" of any potential "Encounter Builder"... invariably you are going to wind up disappointed. Because no encounter builder can accurately take every potential oddball thing in party make-up and player action into account.