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

[Celtavian]

The party enter a large cavern illuminated by an eerie phosphoresent fungus. A large crevasse 60' across, crosses the cavern. As the party finish crossing the crevasse a band of Demons appear from one of the many passages leading into the chamber, 40' away.

Roll initiative.

The faerzess of the room interferes with spellcasting. Creatures must pass a DC 15 intelligence (arcana) check to use conjuration or divination magic of any kind. On a failure the spell slot is expended but nothing happens. The room is shrouded with dim light. Stalagmites and stalagtites litter the room, providing patches of cover, and areas of difficult terrain.

They are a demonic warband raiding, not sitting in a cavern waiting for someone to come along. That is just as much a part of fantasy as a monster sitting in a cavern.

You impose these restrictions on your monsters, yet happily run your PCs as a bunch of soulless murderhobos who only ever use optimal tactics?

No. I vary tactics according to the monster and circumstances.

From the monsters postion, whose in robes? Who looks the most like a vulnerable spellcaster to the monsters? Who have they seen casting spells? Failing that, who looks like the easiest to tear apart, or who is doing the most damage?

As I pointed out, no one is in robes. One character has a familiar. The bladesinger wizard.

That said, your players sound like they dont hold back, routinely taking the most optimal choices (regardless of character knowledge), ganing up on monsters, targetting weak saves, targetting the most optimal targets and metagaming the heck out of stuff. Looking at the battle through the eyes of the players and not the characters.

No. They choose an optimal base attack. They only attack weak saves if it is obvious. They don't know the weak saves of all creatures. Giants are a good bet weak wisdom save. Polymorph works against almost all types of brutes.

Optimizing is about choosing abilities that work against the largest number of encounters with the highest percentage chance of success. Metagaming is choosing to attack weak saves and using player knowledge. Optimizing and metagaming are very different. I generally don't allow metagaming. I can't do much about optimizing. Some abilities work better against more things than others. Players tend to choose those abilities.

They wanna do that kind of crap? Do it back to them. Pick on the PC with the lowest AC and wail on him with everything you have. If they complain about how the monsters always seem to know this, let them know the monsters are making the same complaints.

Im only being half serious here. But you as DM should know who is the weakest or most vulnerable, and you as the DM are the one that is allowed to metagame to challenge your players. If theyre having too easy a time of it, do just this. Heck; they certinaly do it themselves so they cant complain.

I do. The beholder cave I had them fight an eye tyrant in was created so the eye tyrant could move to full cover and blast with eye rays. One PC was dropped and another was nearly laid low. One of them got real pissy when he tried to drink a greater healing potion in the Death Tyrant's cone. Started arguing with me he would have known even though he had an active blink on and was in the ethereal plane when the Death Tyrant activated his cone. He wanted me to draw the cone on the board. As far as I know beholder cones aren't visible, so he didn't get to have that information. It was pretty irritating.

Great, you can have an AC of 26 with full plate, shield, defensive style and the shield spell. So only a 36 percent chance of hitting per attack at +9 with advantage. Hardly what I would call invincible.

Not against the marilith, but pretty high against the other stuff.

Your bladesinger is AC 31? Awesome. Hows his Con save looking vs several volleys of Stunning screech, poison and spores? He's bound to fail a DC 14 Con save at some point. Also - hows his Str (athletics) looking when the Hezrou shove him into the crevasse?

He has resilient Con. He gets to add his intelligence bonus to Con checks for concentration. He has Acrobatics to resist grapple checks as a Dex based character. It's possible to grapple him, but not easy. He also has misty step, so it would have to happen pretty quick and work or he'll have them dead.

These Demons are sure pretty dumb.

They are Chaotic Evil and were overconfident given they had been killing most humanoid parties in their path pretty easily. I pictured them like a roving band of savages caught up in the ecstasy of their power thinking, "These little humanoids are our meat." I have a bit more dangerous series of demon encounters coming up in the Spiral of the Horned King. The environment in there is not kind. I'm a little worried they might die. But everything can't go their way, right?

You (as DM) are letting the PCs dictate the encounter conditions. Stop it. You're the DM. You're the one in charge of where battles take place. If your battles arent challenging the PCs, this is one thing you can control to fix it.

Youre there to set challenges appropriate to your party compostion, experience and level. Set them.

This particular encounter I considered environment neutral. Neither side had an environmental advantage. They met 120 feet apart in an Underdark tunnel.

First he has to avoid getting stunned. He also has to save against being poisoned. Maybe a few saves against stench as well if the Hezrous get close. Not everyone is within 10' of the Paladin, and even then he's bound to fail one of the half dozen DC14 Con saves coming his way.

DC 14 Con save isn't very high when you have Resilient Con and a paladin aura. I think only the cleric has no proficiency on his Con save, but he has a high Con. But he is easy to grapple.

The Vrock makes an attack at +6 (with advantage) against the archers choice of strength athletics or dex acrobatics. It then uses its free object ineraction to kick the bow into the crevasse behind the archer.

If the party prove hard to hit, and hit back hard, this is most definately an option.[/FONT][/COLOR]

Disarm? We do have those optional rules. But he's an eldritch knight with that one ability...what do they call it...weapon bond? He can't be disarmed and he can call his bow back to him as a bonus action. You see how many bases they have covered? I have to think up all this stuff every battle often on the fly. That was a fun ability to learn about. The Sharpshooter is the guy with his nose in the books all the time. He's probably the top optimizer in the group. Always has something up his sleeve, though he's gotten a few rules interpretations wrongs (but so have I, it happens) fortunately. He just loves finding some tactic to make life hard on me. Keeps it to himself all week sometimes too and springs it on me on gameday. Keeps me on my toes I guess.

 

[CapnZapp]

Or I'd remove the summoning ends when summoner dies rule for demons and handwave it as it being different than standard summoning because it's innate.

Actually, I have a hard time seeing the upside of this gambling system.

Those three demons? Well, they could be three... but also six.

That wrecks the already borked CR system. And you don't get any xp for those extra demons. What's the benefit of this system, possibly except for "nostalgia".

I much rather decide beforehand if and when any extra demons are gated in. If they are, they're real combatants. They can't be defeated by focus-firing on another demon. They add to the encounter difficulty. They provide xp.

Am I missing something here?

 

[CapnZapp]

I'm really surprised that sharpshooters can be considered a problem. Per DMG 246-247, a wooden object (such as a bow) has 15 AC and 1d4 or 2d4 HP*. Even a magic bow** only has resistance to damage (DMG 141) with no changes to AC or HP. If it is possible for the monsters to get even one attack it is extremely likely that the sharpshooter is going to find themselves at a SIGNIFICANT disadvantage until they can resupply.

A CR 1/4 Goblin has a 50% chance to hit with its shortbow, with a 66.67% chance of breaking a 5 (2d4) HP bow on a hit. One out of three goblin arrows will (on average) be sufficient to put a stop to a character's ranged support unless they have a magic bow.

A CR 5 Hill Giant has a 70% chance to hit with a rock, with a 100% chance of breaking a 5 (2d4) HP bow on a hit, and a 99.60% chance of breaking a 5 (2d4) HP magic bow that resists the damage on a hit.

A CR 13 Storm Giant only misses on a 1, and can't fail to break a magic bow on a hit.

Given that PCs are remarkably resilient in 5e, why are intelligent monsters wasting time trying to kill them when they can get nearly as effective results by breaking the PCs' equipment instead?



* Using the guidelines for Tiny objects, since the thickness of a bow is more important than its length in this case
** Excluding artifacts

Nobody likes it when the DM is a dick.

We never bother checking for damage on gear, familiars etc.

 

[CapnZapp]

Even RAW, Tarrasque can throw an "improvised weapon" (rock, house, whatever) and is almost guaranteed to kill the wizard on a bike in a single hit. I had this discussion with Hemlock a couple months ago.

Still, he shouldn't have to.

I tend to assume the creature blocks are somewhat streamlined for simplicity. Not to beat a dead horse, but it's super easy to add ranged attacks to any monster.

There's zero CR adjustment for ranged attacks. So if ranged parties are that big of a problem, the cheap (in multiple senses of the word) and easy fix is to give monsters ranged attacks to match their melee ones.

So instead of the Tarrasque throwing an improvised rock, he gets Rock Throw as an ability with like 150/450 range and as much damage as his bite or claws, usable however many times his normal melee attacks are used. Or whatever.

I haven't personally encountered such ranged-cheese that I've felt this was specifically necessary. But it doesn't exactly seem like an insurmountable problem to me.

Yeah, no, that horse is dead and beaten

 

[CapnZapp]

We approach the game from a very different design space.

If I have a party that is priding itself on using optimal tactics and obliterating overwhelming threats and generally being soulless killing machines, I would have the monsters try to fight back in the most efficient way possible. I'm not going to leave something as basic as destroying a wooden bow off the table.

And note: If a sharpshooter is really this vulnerable to lockdown, is he really using an optimal strategy in the first place?

Especially if we're looking at this from the meta perspective exemplified by things like "monsters should probably be running from PCs." Why wouldn't monsters use the rules to their advantage?

On the flip side, if the players want to go on a fun romp and focus more on the story, with big dumb brutes and sickly mages and the like, then I'll probably accommodate them. And perhaps I won't break their bows.

But in general your perspective seems very alien to me. You live in a place where the DM is always wrong and the players are always right. If the players use cheese, that's a sign of player skill and optimization. If the DM uses cheese, that's denying player fun. The rules should support optimized players out of the gate, and provide challenges, but not deny any of their abilities.

It's a tall order, and not one that makes a lot of sense to me.

In your campaign the feat that allows archers to shoot Legolas style in melee is worthless, then.

In my opinion, that's not what the designers intended. It's neither rai nor raf.

As you're discovering, your suggested "fix" is completely unthinkable to many DMs. That doesn't mean I'm saying your wrong, or that you break raw

Let us simply leave it at that.

 

[CapnZapp]

This is something I find strange as well. Do you not play with characters that build to notice things? Every single party I've played with has had double proficiency bonus Stealthy scouts and double proficiency bonus Perception. Every one of them. If I want them to not notice something, I have to make it up. Which I've started doing on occasion. This adventure is about testing demons out of the book to see how they do. I'll start modifying them after I get a feel for them.

I feel your pain, Celtavian, I really do.

But might I suggest a more constructive path forward?

The game simply can't handle the combination of expert players using optimized characters. There's no way around it. It simply can't. The designers aren't designing the game for that kind of party.

So my suggestion is: don't fight the inevitable. You'll either burn out as a DM, or you'll end up redesigning the entire high level play of the edition.

Here's a vastly simpler challenge, that's hopefully fun too:

Have your players roll up a new party, consisting of the following:

• A human cleric. Use the regular human, not the variant. Possibly in exchange for a minor ribbon ability.
• A dwarf fighter. Have him voluntarily accept a Speed of 20 ft, possibly in exchange for a minor ribbon ability. Have him dump Dex.
• An elf wizard. Have her voluntarily accept Nightvision rather than Darkvision (she treats any light source as if its bright and dim ranges are doubled, but she can't see in darkness). Possibly in exchange for a minor ribbon ability.
• A halfling Rogue. Give her the challenge of only using melee and thrown weapons. Possibly in exchange for a minor ribbon ability.
• I don't know hom many players you have, but any additional party member should not have both darkvision and spells. Preferably no more full spellcasters: limit additional party members to half and third casters. And non-casters!

Then run your underdark campaign for them!

The point is, the game works much better for a significantly nerfed party. Any monster with a Speed of more than 30 ft should be faster than the group. Any monster with 120 ft darkvision should out-scout the party. Absolutely crucial is: the party should not be able to project a considerable offense at a distance of more than a single move for the monsters, that is 30 ft or so. Any strategy that prevents the mobsters from closing to melee must significantly reduce the party's own damage output; so the party too wants melee for top damage.

So, instead of doing all that work beefing up the monsters, start the players from a much lower baseline. The players can still optimize and minmax, only they can't trivially outpace the monsters.

Suggestion: make the Dwarf slow strength fighter the leader of the group. The other characters should want to stay close to their leader. The Dwarf could be streotypically headstrong, and relish melee: "nobody touches the Marilith before I've had a chance to chop her up with my Axe". That kind of roleply. This is of course to make sure the big brutes have a decent chance of being able to walk up to melee without too much interference. Why? Because that's what the game is designed to do well!

You can still allow feats, if you ask your players to voluntarily abstain from any major feats. Basically: have them not take ANY of the feats they took in the previous campaign! Tell them it's for variety...

You can still allow multiclassing, with one exception: no fighter levels unless you start as a fighter. (Dipping two fighter levels is too easy and too good for most non-full spellcasters).

Good luck!

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I think it became common because it comes on line at such a low level. One of my players made a warlock/fighter that used the Devilsight with darkness effectively while wearing heavy armor, shield, and defensive style. He was able to really hammer. At higher level the tactic is proving less effective with so many creatures having truesight.

One of the players has been experimenting with Aura of Vitality sometimes combined with Beacon of Hope for potent post combat healing. One I think 2nd or 3rd level spell averages 70 hit points and up to 120 when combined with beacon of hope. Pretty potent healing for a relatively low resource cost.

When they made it so the DM chooses the animals, Conjure Animals became a less useful spell.

Yes, but one reason this combo has been less common at my table is that there are alternate ways to accomplish basically the same thing. For example, a Life Cleric 1/Necromancer 3 can tank in plate armor + Blur. He will have one point less AC than the aforementioned fighter/warlock, and he won't have advantage on his attacks, and has 4 less HP (made up with Inspiring Leader), but otherwise he is both a full caster and a melee tank.

Inspiring Leader is also very common at my table.

Aura of Vitality heals 70 HP normally, or 140 HP with sorcerer metamagic (Extended), or 240 HP when also stacked with Disciple of Life as a cleric. Haven't seen that one in play but the 140 HP version is coming up as soon as the paladin in one campaign gains another level (he'll be Paladin of Devotion 9/Wild Sorc 4 and he's one of the party's two main healers).

RE: Conjure Animals, the DM has always chosen whether the DM chooses the animals. That isn't new, it was that way from the very beginning. Because of the way Conjure Animals is worded (they aren't real animals, they are spirits shaped into animals during the casting) I let the caster choose the form of the animals--but as a player, even at a table where the DM rolls randomly to find what animals you get, I'd still love the spell. It is top-tier for combat impact even as a level three spell, and it scales extremely well to level five. It's almost impossible to find animals which are actually bad when conjured in huge numbers by the spell. Remember, "quantity has a quality all its own." 16 CR 1/4 animals is a massive amount of HP + firepower for a single spell.

 

[hawkeyefan]

[MENTION=5834]Celtavian[/MENTION] I fully understand finding useful tactics, I find that to be a fun aspect of my game. But I am not on a search for the perfect collection of proven tactics, which is what it sounds like your group is doing. Don't they find it boring to constantly be playing the same tactics every encounter? Sure, I suppose in one campaign the devilsight warlock could be player by Mike instead of Tim, but that only changes things up so much. As a group, it sounds like at some point you guys will have a set party composition and then no one will ever deviate from that composition for any reason.

I think that's why folks are saying you need to vary up the encounters a bit. It seems to me you either need to impose some restrictions at the start of the campaign that would limit the player choices and force some different choices. I don't know if that would fly with your group, though...so if that's not an option, then you need to do something else to challenge them, which would basically mean you need to incorporate elements that take away their advantages or add more complications, or that favor the enemies.

Regarding the demon warband....I would think that any Marilith would recognize a group of powerful mortals compared to easy fodder. So even drunk on bloodlust of easy slaughter, I would see her reining in her troops rather than leading a foolish charge against the "mere mortals". Maybe have a couple of the troops charge foolishly and have the PCs slaughter them, and then have the rest of the enemies act with tact.

Your PCs never ever ever act without tact. If you limit their enemies in this way, that's a huge swing toward the PCs.

And the demonic warband is certainly a viable concept. But "demonic" is a catch all phrase covering just about every level of the game. The squad you described sounded pretty capable. But if they were not, then maybe beef it up. Have a balor and two mariliths, and then the secondary things like vrocks and hezrou and so on. There's going to be a composition you can come up with that would be an appropriate challenge for them without having to alter stats or rely on environmental aspects.

Even better, have them lay waste to the demon warband. Those demons simply get sent back to their home plane. They report what happened....and their unique demon boss then spends some time scrying the PCs and finding out about them in other more mundane ways. After some time, he sends a group of demons designed to specifically target and eliminate the PCs. Provide them with some gear that will allow them to treat the PCs the way the PCs treat every encounter.

That will likely break the game in the other direction since you have any and all tools at your disposal, while the PCs are bound by class, race, and what you choose to grant them.

Actually, I have a hard time seeing the upside of this gambling system.

Those three demons? Well, they could be three... but also six.

That wrecks the already borked CR system. And you don't get any xp for those extra demons. What's the benefit of this system, possibly except for "nostalgia".

I much rather decide beforehand if and when any extra demons are gated in. If they are, they're real combatants. They can't be defeated by focus-firing on another demon. They add to the encounter difficulty. They provide xp.

Am I missing something here?

No not really, you're probably right. However, I don't use the encounter difficulty guidelines at all, and we long ago abandoned XP in favor of a more milestone based leveling system. So it's probably easier for me to make changes like that because I don't worry about all that stuff. I just want to challenge my players.

However, I would likely plan that kind of thing ahead. Or at least the possibility of it....see how the first two rounds go, and then if it's heavily in the PCs favor, have these additional 3 demons show up. That kind of thing.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

D&D by its nature often gives the PCs the advantage because they are the proactive heroes with a much wider range of abilities than the enemies they face. They are usually dealing with reactive monsters that have to take at least a little time to figure out what is going on. Sure, you can flip this some of the time with proactive monsters or design encounters to challenge the common tactics of your PCs, but it isn't something you can do all the time. It's too hard to justify encounter after encounter after encounter.

This observation reminds me of the military truism: the attacker has the strategic advantage because he chooses where and in what quantity he attacks. The defender has the tactical advantage because he's prepared the ground.

D&D PCs in a sandbox game, by the nature of the sandbox, have the strategic advantage. But you can and occasionally should give the defender the tactical advantage: e.g. fortifications with total or partial cover surrounded by a trench inside of a cleared killing ground out to a good range (600'+ is ideal for hobgoblins because of bows), hidden caltrops or pit traps (remember that falling damage knocks you prone), doors that can be spiked, deceptive encounters that turn out to have more hidden troops that appear after the PCs tip their hand (unless the PCs have Perception high enough to spot all of the hidden troops--unless the troops are "hidden" by being behind total cover nearby or in some other way that doesn't rely on winning a Stealth contest), etc.

A group of PCs is formidable. They have a lot of abilities to call upon and usually have twice or more the number of actions as what they are facing with each action having two, three, or several options to choose from compared to monsters that are usually stuck with "I hit the PC" or cast a single spell.

Wait, what? Why? Even if you stick to the encounter guidelines, there should be several times as many low-level monsters as there are PCs. Twenty goblins vs. 4 8th level PCs is smack-dab in the middle of Medium (you have to go up to 28 goblins before it becomes Hard), giving the goblins five times as many actions as the PCs, or ten times when you count the fact that they all get bonus action Hide/Disengage with Nimble Escape.

The problem we're having is one of perception. What I consider a too easy fight may well be fine by you. I want PCs on their backs, almost dying in a deadly encounter. I want one PC standing, dealing a final death blow with the party almost dead when they fight a dragon or a balor even if that fight occurs in a wide open field. I want the PCs to need to choose an advantageous environment to defeat the dragon or the balor, not the other way around. I want to the PCs to feel like they just fought a creature so enormously powerful that it scared them and made them think they were going to die. I'm not getting that experience in 5E when the players face off against such powerful creatures.

I just last night had my first real "Oops, this fight is deadlier than I intended" experience. Four players, 2nd and 3rd level PCs, just completed a mission preventing a 9th level orc wizard medicine man (Whumpf) from staging a successful legal coup and taking over the village. The twist in the story was supposed to be, "While the orc chieftain is gloating over getting Whumpf fired, four shadow demons attack Doroga (the orc chieftain) and Whumpf, and the PCs + Doroga + Whumpf have to fight them off. Doroga and PCs become allies-of-necessity with Whumpf against He Who Sent The Shadows and cannot dispose of him the way they were expecting to because they need him to fight off the greater threat that wants them both dead." The plan probably would have worked too, except... I gave control of the Whumpf to a player whose PC had died, and when the fight started, instead of joining the fight he instead Dimension Door'ed himself straight up (Feather Fall back down). I hadn't counted on Whumpf being too villainous and cowardly to even join the fight (because I had expected to be running him myself, and it never occurred to me that the player would play him this way) and there was a definite moment of "Oops, I think despite their successes, the party is about to get TPK'ed here, and it's my fault for giving Whumpf away to someone else." That hasn't quite happened yet, partly because I declared a stopping point in the middle of that combat, but Doroga is almost dead now (he's one of the two targets of the assassination) and TPK still could happen depending on what the shadows do after killing Doroga. What was intended to be "former foes unite by necessity" looks like it's going to turn into "tragedy strikes! and the players hate Whumpf now more than ever."

Anyway, my point is that whichever way things turn out, it's still a better story than "four PCs fought a level-appropriate encounter with one Shadow Demon and killed it inside of three rounds."

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Actually, I have a hard time seeing the upside of this gambling system.

Those three demons? Well, they could be three... but also six.

That wrecks the already borked CR system. And you don't get any xp for those extra demons. What's the benefit of this system, possibly except for "nostalgia".

I much rather decide beforehand if and when any extra demons are gated in. If they are, they're real combatants. They can't be defeated by focus-firing on another demon. They add to the encounter difficulty. They provide xp.

Am I missing something here?

You do get kill XP for those demons, just like all creatures, summoned or otherwise. Although if three powerful demons suddenly turns into six I recommend that you strongly consider whether you ought not to be running away instead of attacking.

The benefit of the random summoning system is "chaos", if you like chaos and a living world that is unpredictable even to the DM. I do, because I'm a simulationist more than a narrativist--systems interest me more than stories. If you like narrative pacing and plots, I recommend deciding in advance whether the demon is going to succeed on its roll, and what reinforcements it summons, so you can factor that into your story's plot.