D&D 5E Concentration mechanic can ruin plots in adventures

[Oofta]

While charm person is not concentration, I also find it lacking for the purpose of this bad guy. Charm person just makes you as a friendly acquaintance. It's not enough IMHO to convince otherwise good NPCs to attack the PCs on sight unless there's something else going on.

So I think you need something a lot more powerful, along the lines of Geas, Dominate Person, Suggestion and so on, each of which has other issues.

 

[Helldritch]

In 3e he was a 10th level wizard. That is a god compared to a 5e 18th level wizard.

A 10th level wizard is a CR 10 foe by RAW. But 3e wizard are tougher than other classes by level 10. So call it CR 13.

Which is 2^7=128 times stronger than a CR 1/2 foe (a simple grunt).

In 5e, a CR 12 creature is roughly equivalent to 15-20 guards (CR 1/8).

The reason why the level 10 enchanter all by themselves can cause chaos in an entire city is that they are ridiculously powerful. A level 10 enchanter in 5e is not that ridiculously powerful. Treating a level 10 wizard as a not a big power is what makes no sense in 3e; someone who by themselves is worth 100 trained and geared soldiers is a very strong being.

If you want to port this to 5e, the power scale involved is post-20 for PCs. Inventing level 10 spells that let you mass mind control over near unlimited periods of time without concentration would be appropriate. And then this enchanter would be following PC rules.

Just... no way...
Again, Excapode is a whimp and he must stay a whimp. Your theory crafting is fine but will not work here. The goal is not to make Excapode a worthwhile opponent all by himself. It is his wall of charmed NPC that the group must overcome and that wall of NPC has quite a few victims forced by charm to fight for the crazy, mad enchanter.

When you adapt an adventure from an earlier edition you do not simply look at this monster and say like you did. You must also muse on the intent and the reasoning behind some foes. You assumed 3.x edition, he's from the 2ed. A world of difference just right there.

2ed difficulty is closer to 5ed than the difficulty of 3.xEd is. While that adventure translated easily to 3.5 it has some difficulty to translate into 5ed because of the concentration mechanic, the save every round mechanic and the shorter duration of spells in general. It was not impossible but doing so with respect to RAI was not that easy.

In an other situation, your method has its merits, but I do not think that putting an 18th level wizard in place of a 10th level one is an acceptable solution.

 

[NotAYakk]

I am claiming the idea of a wizard who can mind control a small army of people being called a "wimp" is a serious hole in the adventure.

The 3e thing was just an illustration of the power scale of a being who can do that.

You cannot build a 5e wimp character who can do that, and that is not the fault of the concentration mechanic, but rather because 5e is just less gonzo than most previous editions of D&D.

 

[Salthorae]

because of the concentration mechanic, the save every round mechanic and the shorter duration of spells in general

Charm Person doesn't have either concentration OR every round save mechanic. Neither does Mass Suggestion.

Keep him at 10th level, give him a staff of charming and watch him charm more than enough people all day long. Give him 1 more level with Mass Suggestion which is not concentration, affects up to 12 targets, and lasts 24 hours.

Since he keeps the Mass Suggestion up each day, he is effectively no different at 11th than he was at 10th. Literally, the only difference in a 10th level 5e wizard and an 11th level 5e wizard is 1 6th level spell slot, and 2 6th level spells in their spellbook.

Charm them, ask them as friends (and lie through your teeth) to so kindly to let you cast another spell on them that will "help them". Then mass suggestion: "stay here and defend this place and me from any intruders".

All it takes to set the adventure up is to assume that he's managed to get these people to fail the appropriate saves.

You can, as the DM, say that it worked and this is the situation that the PC's find when they arrive, that these adventurer's and monsters are all charmed. Mechanically it works, you just have to say it's the scenario.

If you're worried about the PC's getting their hands on a Staff of Charming, you can say in his madness and desperation at their approach he used the final charge, rolled a 1 and the staff became nonmagical. When they search his corpse, he's got an unremarkable, nonmagical staff on his person.

 

[Helldritch]

Please, reread the earlier posts.

Charm does not have concentration neither a save every round but does have a too short duration.
Dominate has all the "problematic" mechanics.
Geas is the only solution in RAW. But the reintroduced mechanic I talked about earlier will do. That is charm's duration tied to intelligence as in previous editions but only because of Excapode's madness and ties with the Far Realm.

In the second edition, an enchanter, level 10 could have dozens of charmed minions and quite a few monsters. The duration was tied to the intelligence of the target. Excapode was mad, but not idiot. He would charm persons/monsters with the lowest possible intelligence. Charmed people were not about to die for him but they would definately defend him/themselves with the same force that would attack him/them.

AS for fudging results. I never did that and never will. Nor can I do it or wish to do it. All rolls are made in the open right in front of the players. If the staff rolls a one, it will be because I truly rolled it. And 12 targets would not be enough. I know it is hard to envision the adventure without the adventure itself. But it would do most people here no good as the adventure was written in French. Maybe I'll translate it someday (after I adapted it to 5ed that is).

I play a in a very gritty, hard and difficult setting for gaming. No fudging at all in any case. If a player dies, so be it. If a player falls unconscious and the enemy is of average intelligence, the player will be slain right off the bat. No pitty given, no quarters asked. If the players surrenders they will stay alive (if the enemy can hope to hold them for ransom) or they might get tortured or killed anyway depending on the group's reputation. If the players tend to capture and let live, so will their enemies. If they slay everything in sight, so will their enemies (if they know of the player's reputation).

 

[Chaosmancer]

Since we have mostly moved from helping the OP to arguing with them that their way is wrong, I want to take a moment to offer a line of thought I haven't seen yet.

Yes, you do not have to be bound by PC generation and rules when making NPCs and Monsters.

But sometimes it is really, really good to follow them. Like, making an Ogre that wears armor and has the rage ability. Or noting that the Archmage has far more spells available than the list suggests, and swapping their spell list to be more appropriate to the challenge you want, because wizards can do that thing.


As for how I would have solved the problem. Ritual Magic. I don't think there is a "symbol of charming" in the game yet, but I would have worked something like that, where the Mad Wizard built an enchanted sigil into the room that the "good party" was in and was utilizing that to empower his magic. I also like the idea of a recipe for an incense or potion that would have made the targets more vulnerable to the mage's power.

But, I also would have had no issue in letting the players find and use these methods too. I actually do have a way for people to concentrate on two spells at once in my game, for example, and the players know how to achieve it. But that didn't reduce the "oh crap" moment when they realized that the one villain they were going to fight had the appropriate requirements to gain the ability themselves.


And, to rant on a bit, I think that is a big proponent, for making sure that anything your NPCs can do your players can do. Especially for bigger abilities that are epic in scope, it allows you to drop hints about what the villain is capable of without it seeming like you are just making things up. For an example, I had a group of NPCs that had some completely made up abilities. They were goons who drank a potion and hulked out (gaining the basic Barbarian suite of abilities), but some of them ended up randomly combusting during the fight. Turns out there was some sick and twisted dark alchemy going on, and one of the players pocketed two of the potions. They could gain the same power, with the same risk, and they new exactly what had been done to make the potions, and could have even tried to gather the same "materials" and make it themselves. And now, if I choose to do something similiar in a later game, they are now aware this is a possibility, and they could see the hint and predict the moves of their enemy. Which makes them feel clever and raises the tension if they can't think of a good counter.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The thing is, if you decide to impose rigid rules on your game world, such as "NPCs must follow the same rules as PCs" then your adventures need to be designed to reflect that. If X isn't possible under the rules the DM has decided to impose, then you can't do X. Run a different adventure that does work within your self-imposed rules.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

A 10th level wizard is a CR 10 foe by RAW.

This is wrong. A CR 10 creature is supposed to be an equal challenge for four 10th level characters.

You can use the tables in Xanathar's to do a rough conversion. A single 10th level character is equivalent to a CR 4 monster. A single 20th level character is about a CR 10 monster.

Of course, it really depends on what abilities the NPC has, some are far more useful against PCs than others. If you look in Volo's, a 15th level Diviner is CR 8, but a 12th level Evoker is CR 9. Th Evoker can dish out more damage, so by CR calculations is a bigger threat.

 

[NotAYakk]

This is wrong. A CR 10 creature is supposed to be an equal challenge for four 10th level characters.

You quoted a bit where I was working out the power of a 10th level wizard in 3e compared to a 1st level warrior in 3e. Talking about 5e CR of a 10th level wizard means you misunderstood.

Second, CR has never in any edition meant "equal challenge". Which means it isn't just me you are misunderstanding.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

"you can see that a CR 1/2 monster is equivalent to one 3rd level character..."
-Xanathar's Guide to Everything, P91.