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Bag of Beans killed 2 PCs, solo bosses suck, and where to go from here....
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<blockquote data-quote="Lyxen" data-source="post: 8406102" data-attributes="member: 7032025"><p>Honestly, before complaining about the CR values of monsters, you should be checking the actual power level of your PCs. The fact that, at 5th level, they already have "powerful artifact weapon made in part by the gawd of the dead" makes me suppose that they are all optimised, using all options like feats and possibly multiclassing. Is that the case ?</p><p></p><p>Moreover, the mummy lord is a very well known case of a delicate monster, because of its vulnerability to fire. So if the PCs know about it and exploit it, it makes the monster much weaker. Was it the case ? Did your PCs use fire ? Was there any reason these 5th level character would know that fire would be effective against that monster ?</p><p></p><p>In any case, by its very nature, 5e is fairly swingy, the combination of a d20 and of bounded accuracy which limits the range of differences between a powerful monster and a weaker one inherently makes it so.</p><p></p><p>But if you boost the offensive capabilities of PCs (artefacts, powerful builds through feats), you will have PCs that are offensively very powerful but defensively weak (few hit points). When you combine this with a solo monster that is also very unbalanced (it's a well known fact about the mummy lord, CR 15 but only 97 HP and an easy to exploit vulnerability) you have an extremely swingy situation, like you noted yourself.</p><p></p><p>Try that with another CR 15 monsters like a green abishai (187 hp and many resistances, no vulnerability and a DC 17 confusion) or any of the CR 15 dragons (flying, breath, etc.) and you will not get the same result at all.</p><p></p><p>So if there is something to be learned here, is that you have to be careful in designing encounters. 5e is not 4e which was designed with restrictions but with balance in mind. 5e's objective is NOT to be balanced, for once, so if you introduce further imbalance, you will get very swingy situations, and it's not really fair to say that the design sucks, when the problem is the unbalanced way you are using it, not even correcting for the imbalances that you are introducing (overly powerful PCs for their levels but therefore weak defensively, imbalanced monsters).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Lyxen, post: 8406102, member: 7032025"] Honestly, before complaining about the CR values of monsters, you should be checking the actual power level of your PCs. The fact that, at 5th level, they already have "powerful artifact weapon made in part by the gawd of the dead" makes me suppose that they are all optimised, using all options like feats and possibly multiclassing. Is that the case ? Moreover, the mummy lord is a very well known case of a delicate monster, because of its vulnerability to fire. So if the PCs know about it and exploit it, it makes the monster much weaker. Was it the case ? Did your PCs use fire ? Was there any reason these 5th level character would know that fire would be effective against that monster ? In any case, by its very nature, 5e is fairly swingy, the combination of a d20 and of bounded accuracy which limits the range of differences between a powerful monster and a weaker one inherently makes it so. But if you boost the offensive capabilities of PCs (artefacts, powerful builds through feats), you will have PCs that are offensively very powerful but defensively weak (few hit points). When you combine this with a solo monster that is also very unbalanced (it's a well known fact about the mummy lord, CR 15 but only 97 HP and an easy to exploit vulnerability) you have an extremely swingy situation, like you noted yourself. Try that with another CR 15 monsters like a green abishai (187 hp and many resistances, no vulnerability and a DC 17 confusion) or any of the CR 15 dragons (flying, breath, etc.) and you will not get the same result at all. So if there is something to be learned here, is that you have to be careful in designing encounters. 5e is not 4e which was designed with restrictions but with balance in mind. 5e's objective is NOT to be balanced, for once, so if you introduce further imbalance, you will get very swingy situations, and it's not really fair to say that the design sucks, when the problem is the unbalanced way you are using it, not even correcting for the imbalances that you are introducing (overly powerful PCs for their levels but therefore weak defensively, imbalanced monsters). [/QUOTE]
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Bag of Beans killed 2 PCs, solo bosses suck, and where to go from here....
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