D&D 5E (2014) Design Debate: 13th-level PCs vs. 6- to 8-Encounter Adventuring Day

[BoldItalic]

You are advancing along a 5ft wide passage and come to a side door. Ahead is a dead end. The side door opens to reveal a 10ft square room with an exit on the far side. The room is occupied by a Marilith. Seeing you, it flourishes several wicked-looking scimitars and hisses evilly.

Roll for initiative.

 

[Flamestrike]

You are advancing along a 5ft wide passage and come to a side door. Ahead is a dead end. The side door opens to reveal a 10ft square room with an exit on the far side. The room is occupied by a Marilith. Seeing you, it flourishes several wicked-looking scimitars and hisses evilly.

Roll for initiative.

Exactly. Also; the thing has truesight and immunity to poison.

'Suddenly a 30' wide secret door (DC: Passive perception of highest PC +1) opens next to you, briefly revealing a 30 x 30' space behind with a large multiarmed snake like creature within. Simulatanously, a porticullus drops both behind and in front of you in the corridor you cutting you off from retreat, and a cloud of magical darkness drops over you all blacking out all sight. You all smell a foul stink of gas. Also, an evil hissing eminates from within the room (Warlock, you can see it). Roll initiative'

I'm struggling to see how this is particularly hard to do as a DM.

The marilith has truseight so magical darkness and invisibility dont bother it. Also, a poisonous fog encloses the area forcing con saves from everyone or be poisoned and take 4d6 poison damage (save for half and no condition). Mariliths are immune to poison (and the condition). A PC who specifically states they hold their breath gets advantage on the saves.

A Marilith is CR16 so its a decent 'hard' challenge (15 percent of resources blown) for a party of 5 x 11th level PCs. The addition of the darkness and poison bumps that encounter up to 'deadly' however. The monster hasnt been touched.

On turn 1 it slithers over to the archer, and rips his face off (7 attacks at +9 with advantage, inclduing restraining him with the tail). It parries melee attacks at AC 23, cant be targeted with AoO or most spells (unless you can see it) and if it does get caught in an effect, makes saves at Str +9, Dex +5, Con +10, Wis +8, Int +4, Cha +10 with advantage due to magic resistance. You cant trap in a wall of force because it can teleport.

If 'uber optimised tactical PC's are a thing, so are 'uber nasty optimised encounters'.

 

[Flamestrike]

double post

 

[Radaceus]

It's nice to see some healthy discussion coming out of this, regardless of differences

May I ask a favor of either [MENTION=6777052]BoldItalic[/MENTION] , or @iserith
could one of you please post the posts with the maps on the first page for prosperity?

Encounter 1
Encounter 2
Encounter 3
Encounter 4a & 4b
Encounter 5, 6, & Black Razor's Lair

I've still to update the Lair post with Encounter 5 & 6, life is unforgiving when it comes to making time to do these things. I will also add some demi-plane corridor maps in case of a need for random encounter 7 or 8.

 

[BoldItalic]

It's nice to see some healthy discussion coming out of this, regardless of differences

May I ask a favor of either [MENTION=6777052]BoldItalic[/MENTION] , or @iserith
could one of you please post the posts with the maps on the first page for prosperity?

Encounter 1
Encounter 2
Encounter 3
Encounter 4a & 4b
Encounter 5, 6, & Black Razor's Lair

I've still to update the Lair post with Encounter 5 & 6, life is unforgiving when it comes to making time to do these things. I will also add some demi-plane corridor maps in case of a need for random encounter 7 or 8.

I could edit your links in, but I can't actually read your maps. I don't have anything that reads .pdn files. I'd mean meaning to ask, could you post jpeg versions or something?

 

[iserith]

It doesn't matter when she dies in three rounds. She's still not going to challenge the party.

It'll be a challenge, only the difficulty may be low. I would expect that to be so when you give what appears to be no thought to the other important elements of the challenge.

 

[Maxperson]

I couldnt disagree with this advice more. The trick is to use more encounters, not ridiculously difficult ones.

Throwing ultra deadly encounters at the party is lazy DMing, and leads to an escalation of the very problem that leads to to the issue in the first place (generally Nova tactics by the party).

I disagree. One encounter using up 100% of the party's resources is achieving the same result as 8 encounters using 100% of the party's resources. Nova doesn't matter if nova is required to survive. A nova only matters if it makes the encounter easy and there are no further encounters, so the party can then rest and repeat the next encounter.

I reject your notion that it's lazy DMing. It's simply a different playstyle for those who don't want to go through the ridiculous format of PCs getting into 6-8 encounters a day. That's an excessive number of encounters. Perhaps on some days the PCs will be in such an area that 6-8 encounters makes sense, but not on most days.

Edit: It can also be argued that 6-8 encounters is the lazy DMing. Any rube can pick up the books and build 6-8 encounters by using the 5e guidelines. It takes a very skilled DM quite a bit of work to build an encounter that takes all the abilities of the PCs into consideration and rides the line of being too hard or too easy.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

You are advancing along a 5ft wide passage and come to a side door. Ahead is a dead end. The side door opens to reveal a 10ft square room with an exit on the far side. The room is occupied by a Marilith. Seeing you, it flourishes several wicked-looking scimitars and hisses evilly.

Roll for initiative.

The Foreward to Curse of Strahd reveals that this is pretty much why Strahd was invented: because Tracy Hickman, as a player, encountered a random vampire in a dungeon, and it offended him. He thought the vampire deserved more foreshadowing and narrative weight, so he wrote I6: Ravenloft where Strahd the (bog-standard) vampire is central to the story.

That being said, I agree with Celtavian that Mariliths are more impressive/fun if they are spellcasters. I would like it if the white-room scenario you describe above were likely to actually be challenging to a 10th level party instead of trivial. The way it's written, the Marilith can't even effectively pursue you into the 5' wide corridor! She can squeeze in using the "Squeezing into small spaces" rules, which gives her disadvantage on attacks (and IIRC ability checks) and gives her attackers advantage on their own attacks, and that's enough to render her basically ineffective. So the party can basically just potshot her to death with cantrips and she's essentially helpless--I'd prefer it if she started launching Chain Lightning back at them.

And, I miss demons that had built-in Teleport Without Error at will. I think they need to get that back.

 

[dave2008]

The players are supposed to be facing fearsome monsters. I will state it this way: a marilith that has survived for likely thousands of years fighting her way up the ranks of demonkind should not be a melee only monster. When the game designs monsters in such an inappropriate manner that they are trivial when they should not be, that is a HUGE problem in my opinion.

Yes. The players are supposed to win. But no, they are not supposed to win easily because the monster is badly designed and requires a more powerful environmental challenge to make them difficult because of it. A dangerous environment can be fun to design and implement, but it should never be the main reason a creature is challenging.

Maybe it is not the monsters that are poorly designed, but the rules for ranged combat? Probably somewhere in between.

Also, if you want a Marilith to be good in ranged combat, give it ranged weapons. The MM is not intended to represent every Marilith, they will have different weapons. Heck, I would expect a Marilith that has lived for thousands of years to have magical weapons of many types. I do not, however, expect that these be listed in the MM. I do agree they should have innate spellcasting.

 

[dave2008]

Admitting there are problem combinations or weakly designed creatures doesn't mean 5E is a bad game. It just means certain design decisions don't work very well or cause problems with gameplay. This type of analysis has also been a part of every edition of D&D since it was made. As long as you know which combinations are causing the problem and what the problem is, you can modify to get the result you want. That's what I'm doing.

I also want to point out that the solutions to the issue are not mutually exclusive. You can have stronger monsters to solve the problem and more complex or specific encounter design.

However, I generally agree with Celtavian and think monsters in general, and higher CR monsters in particular, are designed a little to low on the power curve. Monster CR and PC power do not scale at the same rate and that is an issue IMO. Now that can be overcome with creative encounter design, but I don't think that should be required for every encounter. You will always need to adjust monsters or encounters for the ends of the PC power/optimizing spectrum and I except that, I just wish it was quite so extreme.
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