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<blockquote data-quote="Gradine" data-source="post: 7742170" data-attributes="member: 57112"><p>D&D is a big game. The range of player skill between the absolute worst D&D player and the absolutely best is vast. Any monster design that is wholly appropriate for the top 10% of players (and to be honest, I think that's an overexaggeration of the ratio of pure optimizers to everyone else) would be wholly <em>inappropriate</em> for literally everyone else playing the game, who, among other things, are busy spending half of their 4th level ASI to bump their Con up from 9 to 10, or the ones choosing feats such Athlete and Linguist (all done by players in my current game). That extreme level of difficulty <em>might</em> have flown in the highly niche early days of the game, and certainly does in the OSR, but it sure as hell won't in a modern game, especially not with the broad player base that D&D 5e has.</p><p></p><p>I'd have thought by now that most DMs finding themselves in the situation of their players being too good for the baseline encounter design would have figured out what tweaks they have to make to their encounters to actually challenge their players. It's been almost four years now.</p><p></p><p>Edit: It occurs to me that you're more referring to the idea that monster design is based on PCs without feats. And yeah, the decision to make Feats optional (which I've always been kind of on the fence on) did hamstring them a little bit in that regard. Of course, it's not nearly the magnitutde as some are making it out to be. WotC had to choose a baseline somewhere, and why shouldn't they land on the line where the vast majority of the players (low-to-average skill, no feats) are going to fall? </p><p></p><p>Again, making adjustments to challenges to account for outlier player skill (whether too low or too high) is a basic necessity in all but the most basic or story-driven TTRPGs that exist. Thread-crapping anything even remotely related to 5e monster design to publicly shame WotC (and any who would dare defend them, it seems) strikes me as thunderously unhelpful and utterly unnecessary.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Gradine, post: 7742170, member: 57112"] D&D is a big game. The range of player skill between the absolute worst D&D player and the absolutely best is vast. Any monster design that is wholly appropriate for the top 10% of players (and to be honest, I think that's an overexaggeration of the ratio of pure optimizers to everyone else) would be wholly [I]inappropriate[/I] for literally everyone else playing the game, who, among other things, are busy spending half of their 4th level ASI to bump their Con up from 9 to 10, or the ones choosing feats such Athlete and Linguist (all done by players in my current game). That extreme level of difficulty [I]might[/I] have flown in the highly niche early days of the game, and certainly does in the OSR, but it sure as hell won't in a modern game, especially not with the broad player base that D&D 5e has. I'd have thought by now that most DMs finding themselves in the situation of their players being too good for the baseline encounter design would have figured out what tweaks they have to make to their encounters to actually challenge their players. It's been almost four years now. Edit: It occurs to me that you're more referring to the idea that monster design is based on PCs without feats. And yeah, the decision to make Feats optional (which I've always been kind of on the fence on) did hamstring them a little bit in that regard. Of course, it's not nearly the magnitutde as some are making it out to be. WotC had to choose a baseline somewhere, and why shouldn't they land on the line where the vast majority of the players (low-to-average skill, no feats) are going to fall? Again, making adjustments to challenges to account for outlier player skill (whether too low or too high) is a basic necessity in all but the most basic or story-driven TTRPGs that exist. Thread-crapping anything even remotely related to 5e monster design to publicly shame WotC (and any who would dare defend them, it seems) strikes me as thunderously unhelpful and utterly unnecessary. [/QUOTE]
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