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

[Sunseeker]

The errata does not show this. The XP-related errata is a short list of creatures above CR20 that had the wrong XP assigned for their CR as an editing error.

The CR works as an indicator of general attack and defense ranges.

As characters get more opportunities to synergize abilities, specialize, and develop teamwork they have more ability to punch above their weightclass. And the dice can still wreck their plans.

Gaming style makes a big difference as well, a group playing dedicated 'whack-a-mole' can defeat almost anything.

It seems to me that when a group is dedicated to eliminating challenge that it is pretty pointless to negate that by continuing to try to provide challenge.

How do you assign the "wrong XP"? Either you screwed up or you did it on purpose and realized it was wrong. When you consistently make the same mistake, chances are you didn't think it was a mistake.

The range is far to wide at higher CRs to be a useful indicator.

Then this should have been accounted for in CRs. If players can consistently punch above their weight class, then the "weight classes", aka: the CRs should have been adjusted. Statistically, the dice "wrecking their plans" is rare. D&D uses dice for a moderate level of randomization. The sort of string of failures that you'd need at higher level in order to not succeed is statistically unlikely.

Maybe that should have been considered when designing a system using a "catch all number". Perhaps it would have been better to use a "strong party" as a measure of where difficulty should be set, rather than a "deadly fight" against an assumed poor-to-average group.

I'm getting your summary point as "If the group is really good at something, don't bother trying to challenge them in that thing."

To quote Rick and Morty: That's planning for failure, even dumber than regular planning.

I've had groups that were so well balanced they were literally good at everything. Should I just close up the game and say "you win"? Sounds like a fun game to me.

 

[CapnZapp]

Without the legendary template on dragons they'd only have three attacks per turn. Its a fair number, but at the levels we're talking about not that impressive. There are other equally high level foes that aren't legendary, the Pit Fiend for example, that really does rely on having other demons around to help fight effectively. High level demons and devils are individually dangerous but they aren't quite on par with an entire group that are equally as a dangerous as they are.

My dragon example isn't a suggestion that you toss a CR17+ dragon at a level 7 party, that's just ridiculous. What I'm suggesting is that a CR17+ dragon is a reasonably dangerous challenge to a party of roughly equivalent level. Most monsters in the MM aren't meant to be used entirely by their lonesome, they're meant to be used in small mixed groups, even single monsters don't mean they are found alone but that you only find one of that specific creature. Again, my ogre example has a direwolf pet or two, maybe it has a mate. Either way it isn't a terribly challenging to a 2nd level party all by itself, other than the fact that it has a reasonable pool of hit points.

Lets take a look a hill giant. By itself it has a pretty good pool of HP, but only has two moderately damaging attacks per round. Against a 5th level party that isn't too much of a challenge, since the party can quickly drop the giant in a few rounds. If you want a more challenging giant encounter you should probably add a few more creatures. If nothing else the encounter rules basically setup that a fifth level party of five members facing a lone hill giant accounts for 10% of their total experience budget.

In comparison if you look at the Ancient Red Dragon (CR 24, 62000 XP for those playing at home) you're looking at 31% of 20th level party of five total XP budget for one day. A deadly encounter for level 20 is 63500 XP total, the dragon there fills that more or less completely. Its a deadly frigging encounter, which seems pretty accurate given what the dragon's can do.

Other creatures require a few more options to get dangerous, but its not true there are no monsters that are dangerous entirely on their own. Or more importantly the ones that are setup for single creature encounters aren't dangerous on their own.

Sorry but there's a factor you couldn't possibly know: I consider the encounter guidelines worthless, and so arguing an encounter is 31% of the daily total is meaningless to me. (In fact, I consider the way this gives the encounter guidelines a faux scientific sheen actively harmful in how it deceives the newbie DM, but let's not go there)

In short I expect a party to eat a dragon with CR equal to their level for lunch.

In order to challenge a minimally minmaxed party on its own, I expect the creature to need probably 10 levels/CRs above the party's.

Legendary template notwithstanding.

 

[CapnZapp]

Woah dude, that's taking things way too far. My suggesting maybe you forgot something is not insulting your intelligence. If you have an issue with me, please message me privately, or report it to a mod. Regardless, you didn't reply to my point. If you didn't forget, then why did you say Legendary creatures don't break the in-game restrictions when they do, and why did you say they don't get to act several times to balance the action economy when they do?

Why would I respond on-topic to someone whose argument is "perhaps you forgot your case"?

 

[CapnZapp]

Not to contradict that opinion, but 5e came to the drawing board with a mandate for faster combat. Faster combat will mean that things die faster, and 'faster' conflates to 'easier' pretty, well, easily. So, yeah, boss monsters are 'easier' to kill in 5e (they die faster in service to faster combat). But, so are regular monsters. So are popcorn monsters. So, for that matter, are PCs.

That's true, but I too agree that should not hide the other fact, that the way monsters really can't be constructed as true solos is the main reason people get disappointed they can't fulfil that role (unless you jack up the CR considerably)

 

[CapnZapp]

Agreed. If 5E can't provide "solo monsters" that pose a real challenge, then the game is failing to deliver on an important element of the high fantasy genre. A dragon should be able to take on a party of PCs, without relying on lair defenses or a bunch of minions to do it.

Obviously, such a monster's CR will be way higher than any individual PC's level. There is no way around this. The problem is that CR is trying to do two things at once - measure a monster's power, and determine what level the party should be to face it - and those goals are not compatible, since a monster designed to go one-against-five at Level X will be much more powerful than a monster designed to go five-against-five at Level X. This is why 4E had minions, standard monsters, elites, and solos; trying to merge everything back into a single number was dumb, but there it is.

I have so far fought only one solo combat in 5E, and it's hard to say whether it "worked" - it was a gang of 15th-level PCs with a lot of weird custom magic items against an ancient black dragon. We eventually killed it using clever tricks and some of those weird items rather than our regular class mechanics. As a final battle for the campaign, it was a rousing success; but I wouldn't say it could be used as evidence that the rules are working, since the rules made up a rather small part of it.

I think it works well.

Of course, I completely ignore any mention of CR and don't bother with xp calculations, instead looking at the monster's actual stats.

But there you have it.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

Orc, Bugbear, Ogre, Troll, Hill Giant would be solos I would choose.

Great. I can start with those. It's been so long since I've looked at first and second edition that it's taking me a bit longer to put together the default group.

I'll use the pregens as a starting point for each group, but I'll also do a round with everybody equipped identically.

Ilbranteloth

 

[Mistwell]

Why would I respond on-topic to someone whose argument is "perhaps you forgot your case"?

Because it still appears you did? What other explanation is there for you saying it does the opposite that it does? I guess I can think of a few. Maybe you hadn't ever read those rules to begin with? Maybe you misread them? Maybe your entire reply was subtle sarcasm I didn't get? I dunno, you tell me, why did you think the legendary rules don't do two things they do? Sure seems relevant to the conversation, and not in any way rude to ask why you're saying X doesn't do X but instead does A. Maybe there is an explanation I have not thought of, so here is your opportunity to correct me on that. So what did you mean? Please clarify, because I am not understanding your argument that legendary rules don't do those two things which to me they very clearly do.

 

[jodyjohnson]

How do you assign the "wrong XP"? Either you screwed up or you did it on purpose and realized it was wrong. When you consistently make the same mistake, chances are you didn't think it was a mistake.

'Errata' is by definition a more dignified word for 'screwed up'. Not sure what the point is here.

There is an 'CR to XP' table on page 9 of the Monster Manual. There was an earlier version of that table that they used on the earlier drafts (the wrong XP values were consistent). The production document was not updated to match the new table for 11 entries, all of which where above CR 21. Not a single CR change was made.

The DMG and MM errata has no bearing at all on whether the Challenge Rating system is useful or 'worthless' since they did not change a single Challenge Rating.

Perhaps it would have been better to use a "strong party" as a measure of where difficulty should be set, rather than a "deadly fight" against an assumed poor-to-average group.

Purely a design choice here. The target audience is new and casual players. Seriously engaged players and DMs have the motivation to make adjustments. New and casual players just walk away.

I'm getting your summary point as "If the group is really good at something, don't bother trying to challenge them in that thing."
...
I've had groups that were so well balanced they were literally good at everything. Should I just close up the game and say "you win"? Sounds like a fun game to me.

I'm just saying that at my table, I prioritize fun over challenge. I consider that maybe if a group is building their characters such that nothing bad ever happens to them - it may be because they don't want bad stuff to happen to their characters.

However, it may be that for that group the fun is being challenged and maximizing their character - and for those tables trying to run it by the book is going to fail because "challenge" was not one of the core design principals.
"Not running it by the book" was a core design principal.
"Empowering DMs to make the changes needed to match their table's goals" was a core design principal.

At the end of every game, my goal is to say, "You win (we had fun)." Whether a character died or not.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

So, this is to move an off-topic discussion to its own thread.

I have seen a number of threads, and a number of possible solutions created to fix this 'problem' elsewhere. Usually it's related to 'boss' monsters, but the situation applies with any solo monster. I have also seen it suggested that the problem is worse at higher levels.

So here's what is stated as the problem:

Solo monsters in 5e are too easy to kill in 5e and don't present a challenge equal to their CR.

I'd like to test and see if that's true, and also if it's a new thing.

The idea is to create a standard party (fighter, cleric, rogue/thief, wizard/magic-user) and test them against various solo monsters in each edition.

For example, is a single ogre against said party of 1st level characters a different encounter in 1st/2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th editions? If somebody wants to test OD&D that's fine too.

What about 2nd or 3rd level characters?

What about 9th level characters against a vampire?

I get that it's going to be difficult to get a definitive answer. Something like a vampire has options available to them to ensure that they escape, and even the terrain is going to come into play. Tactics vary, etc.

But I think it would be interesting in any event. So what I'm looking for is a build for the standard party at 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 9th levels in each edition. We can go higher if we want.

Then we need to pick the solo monsters, and run some mock combats.

Anybody willing to help? No sense in duplicating efforts if we don't have to. Do we think it's even possible or are their too many variables?

Ilbranteloth

I'm generally interested in this topic of running mock combats, but more from a tooling side: I'm working on something to make it easy to run mock combats, view them as an animation, and share that animation with other people.

I do have this to say about solos: the key advantage that a lone adversary has in 5E over a group of creatures is that a lone creature is more mobile, more stealthy, and can do hit-and-run. This is true for high-level PCs as well as for monsters. A solo character, even a vampire, who fails to exploit that fact is asking to get creamed. You're a hammer, not an anvil.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

The number of variables in the system, not only in 5th but also in 3rd, 2nd and 1st, make calculating the 'average' difficulty a truly ludicrously difficult task. The CR for creating an effective CR system is 30+. Keep in mind, 5th is way simplified from 3rd, and also from 2nd and 1st.

The biggest problem is this: since different PCs do things in different ways, each monster is easier or harder based entirely on party comp. A critter that's weak to radiant damage is pure stomp zone for party full of paladins, while a monster with a portable 40 ft dead magic zone and WINGS! could theoretically eat an infinite number of wizards.

Not quite an infinite number--even wizards can use weapons. SOP against a Rakshasa is to cast Magic Weapon on a crossbow and commence plinking, on a Phantom Steed if necessary.