D&D 5E Are solo monsters weaker in 5e?

[CapnZapp]

Really, it's more a 3e thing to have single, lone monsters be a challenge for the party. Earlier editions, this certainly wasn't true. Very, very few monsters straight from the AD&D MM would be much of a challenge for a group, unless you went really far over the party's heads (bombing Ancient Huge Dragons on 1st level parties for example). Heck, the first Dragonlance Module had an Ancient Black dragon as a challenge for a 5th level party. And, even then, the party was expected to win that fight with minimal losses, after having traveled all the way through an enemy city.

3e changed that by having one creature be balanced against a party of 4, where CR=Level. It led to a system without a lot of granularity. As was mentioned, as soon as you went up into six plus baddies, the baddies had to be so weak individually that they stopped being a challenge. Then we have 4e which rejects 3e's baseline in favour of where a given baddie was equal to a single PC. The advantage of this is a lot more granularity. You could jump up a single monster into a Solo and have it be a fair challenge for the group, or use multiple elites, or normals or minions (which split out about 4 or 5:1)

5e has adopted a balance similar to AD&D and 4e where a single monster isn't really meant to challenge the entire group. Where 5e is a bit more fun, IMO, is that the combats are much, much faster than 4e. Four rounds or so usually catches most combats. A 5e monster by itself just can't do enough damage in 4 rounds to really be much of a threat. But, where the balancing factor comes in is in the number of encounters. You're supposed to have two or three encounters between short rests.

That first troll you meet when you're fully rested is going to be a pushover. It really is. But, that second one you meet twenty minutes later is a lot more challenging because now the fighter's can't Action Surge and it's possible that the casters have blown out some of their bigger spells. That third troll you meet shortly later though. Now that one's going to put the beating on the party. All the short rest recharge characters are out of gas and the casters may very well have blown all their big guns already. Now you have to deal with that challenge using nothing but normal attacks and at wills and then you get the real challenge.

I think that people are not pacing encounters often enough and that's why we're seeing this idea that lone monsters are so weak. Against a fully rested party that can blow all its resources? Sure, you can punch WAY over your weight class. Against a party that's gone through a couple of encounters first? Now the fight gets a lot more interesting.

That's because your theory leads to at least one boring utterly trivial encounter each day, guaranteed.

Of course the system must be able to support the fundamental trope of "BBEG single-handedly trouncing the merry band of heroes", anything else is most definitely a bug, not a feature!

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Hang on.

If the mount is Dashing, it takes some kind of action (normal, bonus, reaction, object interaction) and therefore a turn (independent mounts). Otherwise, the Wizard would need to take the Dash action for the mount (controlled mounts).

In the first case, the Tarrasque would have 2 legendaries, for 80 ft of movement total. Correct?

No, when you have a controlled mount, the wizard doesn't need to take the Dash action in order to make his mount Dash: you get to make your mount Dash, Dodge, or Disengage for free (in action economy terms, from your perspective). That's why mounts and the Mounted Combatant feat and the Phantom Steed spell are so terrific for mobility: 10' of speed on a mount is worth twice as much as 10' of speed on yourself.

You can use Phantom Steed to do crazy tricks like extend the effective range of Otto's Irresistable Dance from 30' to 130', just by having your steed Dash 200' during your turn. Occasionally useful when fighting ancient dragons, since you want to hit them with Otto's without ending your turn without breath weapon range, which won't happen if you rely on your own movement.

 

[NotActuallyTim]

No, when you have a controlled mount, the wizard doesn't need to take the Dash action in order to make his mount Dash: you get to make your mount Dash, Dodge, or Disengage for free (in action economy terms, from your perspective). That's why mounts and the Mounted Combatant feat and the Phantom Steed spell are so terrific for mobility: 10' of speed on a mount is worth twice as much as 10' of speed on yourself.

You can use Phantom Steed to do crazy tricks like extend the effective range of Otto's Irresistable Dance from 30' to 130', just by having your steed Dash 200' during your turn. Occasionally useful when fighting ancient dragons, since you want to hit them with Otto's without ending your turn without breath weapon range, which won't happen if you rely on your own movement.

Woah.

No wonder its so hard to get high hit point mounts. That kind of mobility is an insane advantage.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Woah.

No wonder its so hard to get high hit point mounts. That kind of mobility is an insane advantage.

Just watch out for things that Push you off your mount. Especially a flying mount.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

If your 6th or 7th level fighter is capable of grappling a troll successfully, regularly, you're running a game that is VERY different from mine. Note, that while grappling, your fighter can't use his shield. Additionally, if the troll simply gives up a single attack to grapple back, your speed drops to zero and you lose your dodge benefit. Meanwhile, your fighter has a best AC of 18 (plate mail and no shield) and the troll has a +7 attack bonus. Even with disadvantage, how are you getting 12% hits? He's got three attacks per round, each dealing either 7 or 11 points of damage per hit. Again, how are you getting 3 hp/round of damage?

You're wrong about the shield, unless you've houseruled that. All you need is one free hand, and your shield can be in the other.

As spectacle points out, a mid-level fighter has an excellent chance of grappling a troll, and that's before you even throw in Hex. I have a paladin/sorcerer who serves as the party tank, and even with only Str 16 he's very, very effective at grappling enemies such as trolls when he wants to be. (At level 5 he had +7 on Athletics and would have had a (1-0.43^2) = 81% chance of grappling a troll successfully with one of his two attacks, and a 0.57^2 = 32% chance of grappling the troll AND knocking it prone, since d20+7 beats d20+5 by at least 1 57% of the time. If someone Hexes the troll, 43% becomes 74%, leading to a 1-(1-0.74)^2 = 93% chance of successful grapple and 0.74^2=54% chance of grappling it AND knocking it prone in the same round. And once it's prone, the combat is basically over for the troll unless it has buddies around.

Your AC 18 is simply wrong. Plate armor + defense style + shield is AC 21, and the troll has +7, so it will hit a Dodging target (7/20)^2=12.25% of the time. You're correct that the troll can give up a round of attacks to try to grapple the paladin (and many DMs including me would allow it to use grapple in a Multiattack, even though it's not RAI), which has a 38% chance of success when un-Hexed and a 22% chance of success when Hexed. Even if it works, you've already blown at least one attack on grappling, even under the most generous DM interpretation of troll grappling, and the fighter is just going to slam you to the ground next round, so you'll have disadvantage next turn, same as before.

3-ish damage per round comes from plugging the troll's attacks into my DPR calculator on Github. (http://maxwilson.github.io/RollWeb/Roll/)

avg.14d?2d6+4 = 1.36
avg.2.14d?d6+4 = 1.85

Internally what it's doing is computing the weighted average of hits, crits, and misses according to the to-hit number needed. In this case that would be 12% hits, 0.25% crits, and 87.75% misses.

Your AC 18 fighter would take about twice as much damage, roughly 6 HP per round, and about twice that on the initial round if he loses initiative and the troll is already within melee range. However, I'm not responsible for the way you choose to build your fighters; I'm only responsible for the PCs I make and the ones that I see players run at my table. Therefore, I'm not using your assumptions about fighter AC and equipment, because they're suboptimal.

Edit: and don't get too hung up on grappling. Grappling is one way to end a fight with a single monster efficiently, but a 1st level Wrathful Smite spell works too, and Fog Cloud + Cunning Action + Booming Blade can do basically the same thing in a different way, and so can a number of other tactics. I'm not going to argue them all with you, because the point is just this: without a certain critical mass of attackers or a very favorable (ambush) starting position, a combat doesn't force any significant resource expenditure at all. Attrition is not the answer to the 5E difficulty conundrum against a well-built party; it only works against a sloppy party relying wholly on nova tactics.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Large creatures not having adantage on grapple checks vs smaller creatures is a glaring problem in the rules. And the grappler feat could have negated that advatage.
Actually the rules allow the DM to award advatage or disadvatage on such checks, because the troll is really at advatage versus the smaller PC.

Solo creatures nevertheless are usually at disadvatage vs PCs, especially when you have a brute. On the other hand piling on a single PC will make him trouble. It is however the creature's responsibility and the PCs responsibility not to be caught alone.

 

[Hussar]

Meh, if you are grappling the troll with a shield in hand, why would the troll bother attacking you at all? You can't hurt the troll - well, I suppose you could start whacking away with your shield I suppose. Ready an action for when the monk comes in range and take three attacks on the monk.

Edit: and don't get too hung up on grappling. Grappling is one way to end a fight with a single monster efficiently, but a 1st level Wrathful Smite spell works too, and Fog Cloud + Cunning Action + Booming Blade can do basically the same thing in a different way, and so can a number of other tactics. I'm not going to argue them all with you, because the point is just this: without a certain critical mass of attackers or a very favorable (ambush) starting position, a combat doesn't force any significant resource expenditure at all. Attrition is not the answer to the 5E difficulty conundrum against a well-built party; it only works against a sloppy party relying wholly on nova tactics.

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...lo-monsters-weaker-in-5e/page11#ixzz3xPRX2RVV

Your definition of "well built party" and mine are pretty far apart. The presumption that you automatically have a fighter with defense style for example instead of a great weapon fighter or a defender fighter and the presumption of a warlock makes most of these discussions pointless. Heck, even the presumption of a 20 Str fighter by 6th level is a stretch. He's only had two stat bumps/feats. Might have a 20, might not. Never minding your presumption that the fighter goes before the troll. If the troll wins initiative, why would he not attack the warlock?

But, all this rather misses the point. My point was that you need to have multiple encounters in order to make lone monsters work. For example:

That's because your theory leads to at least one boring utterly trivial encounter each day, guaranteed.

Of course the system must be able to support the fundamental trope of "BBEG single-handedly trouncing the merry band of heroes", anything else is most definitely a bug, not a feature!

the solution to this is to really not worry about it. The only way you make that first encounter trivial is to burn resources. That's the whole point of that first encounter. There's nothing wrong with letting the heroes be big damn heroes. But, I guarantee that if you let them smoke that first encounter, and then start bringing the pressure afterwards, you'll see the group start getting serious about pacing themselves and not dropping the big guns unless it really matters. It's all about longer term strategy.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Yes. Heroes should be heroes. If every fight is death or glory you will have a dead party very soon. If you have only trivial fights it is your problem not the system's fault.
A big difference between 4e and 5e is combat as sport or combat as war. Your aim in 5e is usually winning with as few resources spent as possible. In 4e it was usually winning by expending your ressources at the right time.

 

[Hussar]

[MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] - I think it was you in another thread talking about Out of the Abyss and specifically how after a few levels the random encounters in the escape from the Underdark become pretty much a non-issue. I think this was you, but, if I'm wrong, sorry.

I think this illustrates what I'm getting at quite nicely. I don't know the specifics of that module, but, I would assume it's 1 in X chance of encounter every Y hours. Let's assume 4 checks per day. Thing is, that usually results in 1 or maybe 2 encounters in a day and they will be spaced hours apart. The party is always fresh going into an encounter that isn't really meant to be a seriously difficult fight in the first place. Random encounters rarely are.

Why not switch things up a bit though. Keep the 1 in X chance of encounter, and keep the idea of 4/day, but, all checks are made within 1 hour. Pick a random hour of the day/night, and then roll 4 random encounter checks. First check is on the hour, and each subsequent check is 15 minutes later (or something close to that). Make all 4 rolls first, before proceeding to the first encounter. Take a minute to string some sort of narrative between the encounters. If the first encounter is an insane monster and the next one is a drow patrol, then the drow patrol is hunting that monster. Party deals with the monster, fairly easily probably, but, before they can regain any resources, they get bumped by the Drow patrol. Even though the Drow patrol is no more difficult than the single monster in terms of XP budget, because the party has already burned a few resources - they're down an action surge and maybe a couple of superiority dice, the warlock has spent a spell, leaving him with only one spell slot, the monk has burned a few Ki points. That sort of thing.

5e works a LOT better when you don't treat encounters as completely discrete and allow the party to regain resources between each encounter.

 

[Celtavian]

Really, it's more a 3e thing to have single, lone monsters be a challenge for the party. Earlier editions, this certainly wasn't true. Very, very few monsters straight from the AD&D MM would be much of a challenge for a group, unless you went really far over the party's heads (bombing Ancient Huge Dragons on 1st level parties for example). Heck, the first Dragonlance Module had an Ancient Black dragon as a challenge for a 5th level party. And, even then, the party was expected to win that fight with minimal losses, after having traveled all the way through an enemy city.

3e changed that by having one creature be balanced against a party of 4, where CR=Level. It led to a system without a lot of granularity. As was mentioned, as soon as you went up into six plus baddies, the baddies had to be so weak individually that they stopped being a challenge. Then we have 4e which rejects 3e's baseline in favour of where a given baddie was equal to a single PC. The advantage of this is a lot more granularity. You could jump up a single monster into a Solo and have it be a fair challenge for the group, or use multiple elites, or normals or minions (which split out about 4 or 5:1)

5e has adopted a balance similar to AD&D and 4e where a single monster isn't really meant to challenge the entire group. Where 5e is a bit more fun, IMO, is that the combats are much, much faster than 4e. Four rounds or so usually catches most combats. A 5e monster by itself just can't do enough damage in 4 rounds to really be much of a threat. But, where the balancing factor comes in is in the number of encounters. You're supposed to have two or three encounters between short rests.

That first troll you meet when you're fully rested is going to be a pushover. It really is. But, that second one you meet twenty minutes later is a lot more challenging because now the fighter's can't Action Surge and it's possible that the casters have blown out some of their bigger spells. That third troll you meet shortly later though. Now that one's going to put the beating on the party. All the short rest recharge characters are out of gas and the casters may very well have blown all their big guns already. Now you have to deal with that challenge using nothing but normal attacks and at wills and then you get the real challenge.

I think that people are not pacing encounters often enough and that's why we're seeing this idea that lone monsters are so weak. Against a fully rested party that can blow all its resources? Sure, you can punch WAY over your weight class. Against a party that's gone through a couple of encounters first? Now the fight gets a lot more interesting.

The reason 3E adopted the trope if a single powerful monster taking on a party is because people didn't like 5th level parties defeating ancient black dragons. 3E boosted the power of creatures because players asked for it. Many players don't like easy encounters, especially ancient dragons that die in a short, easy fight. It makes for very anticlimactic encounters.