Bashing bags of hitpoints

[Nevvur]

How long do you give players to decide on the character's 6-second action, and to what extend do you allow out-of-character conversations during that decision time?

Those are topics I touch on during session 0, and no two tables have been exactly the same. I treat the latter question as a simple majority preference. The former, I simply tell people I expect them to be planning their actions in advance and hope for the best. I might remind them of this before an intricate fight, or after one that felt more sluggish than it should have. If someone is seriously taking forever on a given turn, I'll suggest they take the dodge action, but across 150ish sessions, I've never penalized a player for taking too long.

I'm not running a timer in the back of my head or anything, but indecisiveness begins to irritate me around 10 or 15 seconds. I'll probably say something at 30 seconds if the player's intent remains obscure. Ideally their entire turn will take no more than 1 minute to fully resolve, but there's nothing unusual about spending extra time examining a spell description or asking for a ruling on a niche situation. Doubly so when the combat arithmetic changes right before your turn comes up!

For the record, my "15 second turns" remark above was borderline hyperbole. I appreciate it when my players handle their business quickly, but keeping up that rapid pace for an entire combat would be, to me, the equivalent of doing a speed run of a video game as opposed to playing it normally. My main point was just that rapid pacing on a meatbag fight can make up for the lack of interesting tactical options.

My current group is meeting online on Roll20. It's a combination of long time gaming buddies and some players I met through LFG venues who are quickly becoming friends. They're all very experienced with 5e. They've been focused and responsive, so lacking body language/other visual cues, I assume they're engaged when I run combats. No noticeable problems with player indecisiveness. During session 0 they agreed that OOC strategizing would be permitted for the first few sessions as everyone got to know one another and people settled into their roles. These days they're limited to IC strategizing while in initiative, but I'm not draconian about enforcing the limitation, and pretty generous about how much they can say in a turn. It's mostly just gut feelings, not hard and fast rules. No one has questioned me cutting them off the few times it's happened. Tier 1 DM power: cast Silence at will.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

This was particularly noticeable in a fight vs 3 gibbering mouthers (AC 9, HP 67) and a living wall (HP 207 (!) AC 12). The living wall at least was interesting because it could cast spells at them. The gibbering mouther fight was just a chore.

Has anyone else noted this?

To be fair, oozes and things like the living wall have always been pretty low-AC with just HP as defence. Likewise trolls aren't very high AC but can soak up a lot of damage unless you shut down their regeneration.

But as others have said, 5e tends to go for fairly low ACs, partly because bounded accuracy means that to-hit bonuses are much lower, and partly because of quality-of-life design decisions. Taking 3 rounds to kill something feels better on a round-by-round basis if you're hitting more often than not and so appear to be making progress than whiffing most of the time and only dropping it with a lucky hit.

 

[Aldarc]

For all the crap that 4e got, 4e did monsters well by giving them interesting mechanics, triggers, tactics, and conditions.

 

[Coroc]

Ah the impatient youth,

A bag of hit Points with lousy armor class is fair game from time to time. As is a glass Canon heavy hitter.

It sounds like your Party is a bit optimized on damage. Against These i recommend: Strong melee heavy hitters with medium defense and hitpoints. At least 2 of them for a fight. Barlgura demons are an excellent example. Put out 1 per Party member and you got a deadly challenge.
The other opponent is something which can control the a Player by some means (Magic or mundane hold spells grapple etc.) These type of Encounter will challenge your Group best and be fun no matter how many rounds the combat lasts.

200 Points are not that much imho for a living wall, i would have stated it with 500-600 health instead, and made it dish out small but feelable amounts of damage all the time.

 

[Ancalagon]

The gibbering mouthers have a lot of "controlish" powers - they modify terrain and their insane gibbering can momentarily confuse people. Now the DC of the will save is easy (10) - but there was *3* of them, so someone kept missing their save. The party decided to retreat, one got left behind, went back to save them, screw it let's kill them... the fight dragged.

The living wall had some control (a slow spell) but the party did amazing on their saves vs that (only an NPC who's mostly a non-combatant failed). I think they "enjoyed" it when they lined up and the wall blasted 3 of the 4 PCs with a lightning bolt though

The next fight won't be like this (it's one that is "foretold" and thus can be avoided) but the one after that (which can't be avoided if the PCs want to progress) is... vs another monster with tons of HP. (The Neh-thalggu , with 133 hp and AC 14 - ha they might miss a bit more then)

 

[Rya.Reisender]

My level 5 4-PC group can actually defeat a 70 HP monster in a single round. Sometimes even without spending any resources!

Anyway I kind of like high HP and low AC because my players seem to have a lot more fun if they hit most of the time compared to missing half the time.

Edit: Oh yeah, keeping combat interesting is also a lot in the hand of the DM. I might play certain enemies particularly smart and try to outsmart my players. Or I make them do something unexpected, which might not be the optimal move but makes combat a bit more interesting.

 

[ccs]

If you're unhappy with creatures hp/AC? Then change them.

 

[Maxperson]

It's better to see the bar move a fraction than watch it not move at all.

I remember in 1st edition a roll of 17 or 18 was often required for an attack to hit, or natural 20 if it was a tough enemy.

I disagree. I'd rather hit with 1 attack out of 4 and have that one attack wreck the creature, than to see 4 attacks hit and have them all shrugged off. In 3e I never had anyone come to me after a fight and say, "Man, I really loved the low AC and DR 10 on that creature. It was great to hit a lot and do almost nothing!"

 

[delericho]

I disagree. I'd rather hit with 1 attack out of 4 and have that one attack wreck the creature, than to see 4 attacks hit and have them all shrugged off.

Not me. I seem to be prone to bouts of bad luck, which in my last-ever* 4e game saw me lose all of my limited-use powers (daily and per-encounter) to misses. When I finally managed a hit, it was with a piddly at-will power.

I'd much rather the deck was stacked assuming most attacks hit, even if that meant a lower average damage per hit. Indeed, a couple of bad experiences like the above have left me almost wishing for the remove of attack rolls altogether!

* Incidentally, it's a coincidence that that was the last-ever 4e game - it wasn't a conscious decision, never mind being one motivated by that bad experience.

In 3e I never had anyone come to me after a fight and say, "Man, I really loved the low AC and DR 10 on that creature. It was great to hit a lot and do almost nothing!"

3e's DR wasn't hugely fun either. IME, players hate seeing their successes negated (see also 3e's confirmation roll for critical hits, or the miss-percentage for displacement).

Consider two cases: one where an average hit does 15 damage, but the creature has DR10 and 18 hit points; versus one where an average hit does 15 damage, the creature has no DR but 58 hit points.

The maths suggest that these two cases are effectively the same - the creature dies on the fourth hit. However, the latter is much more likely to give a more satisfying game experience, because the PCs aren't "losing" 40 hit points of damage.

TL;DR: game design isn't purely about the maths.

 

[Patrick McGill]

I think the solution to misses not being fun shouldn't have been having HP scaling being the main factor of increasing CR. It should have been to make the hitting/missing mechanics more fun.

I have no possible idea how one would do this and fully admit I am a member of the peanut gallery on this one. I feel like connecting a hit should have more impact and be a big deal in a dance of attacks, blocks, parries, and dodges.