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

[Flamestrike]

Side note and math (wheeee!):
The PCs are supposed to be the protagonists/heroes of the stories. They are SUPPOSED to win. Like by an overwhelming amount. If not, most games will end in a TPK before level 10. It takes 60 medium encounters to reach 10th level. If the PCs have only a 1% chance of losing each of those encounters then the chance of surviving to 10th level is 100 - .99^60 = ~45%. Should more than half of all games end in a TPK before reaching 10th level? If not, then the chance of the PCs "losing" any given encounter has to be REALLY small which will make each individual encounter seem REALLY easy. Game working as intended.

Exactly. If even once per level you run a deadly encounter where the party face a 20 percent chance of a TPK, then odds are they wont hit 5th level.

Response to math: we view campaigns differently too. I don't want a 55% chance of sixty successful encounters in a row without losing no matter how well the players play. That would probably be six months to a year of play without any real tension. I like a game where every single conflict that occurs has something at stake. I'll play out low-stakes encounters if I feel like the players would benefit from the experience or if it's a dungeon crawl where ablative resources and logistics are important, but the nature of my sandbox is such that if I can't at least imagine the players losing a given combat, I think of it as more of a social encounter than a combat encounter, and I give the players the option to skip over it at a cost. "Hooray, you're in the troll cave, and there's nothing here but a single troll! If you want to skip this fight, it will cost someone 30 HP and then you can start looking for treasure. You can't see any other trolls right now. What do you want to do?" If I didn't offer them the option to skip the fight, it would be because I was trying to fake them out into thinking there was actually a troll ambush waiting for them.

Risk is about weighing probabilities. Uncertainty is not knowing exactly what the risks are. Uncertainty, not risk, is what my games are about.

Were talking about a 55 percent chance of a TPK - start over or campaign ends.

The reason 5E goes with smoothed difficulty (slightly less difficult encounters, but more of them between rests) is to reduce the chance of a TPK. It also uses a negative HP and save or die death mechanic that is far more generous on instakills that any other edition. The game becomes less of a game of rocket tag and repetitive nova strikes from a fixed and predictable combo of abilities, and more of a game of resource management over the course of an entire adventure and meaningful player choice.

Yes you can be knocked down to 0 HP or knocked about for a few rounds, but unless the whole party goes down, an actual TPK is rare after the first 3 or so levels (and a lenient DM can use the whole 'you all wake up in a cell' hook to prevent the rare time it does happen without having to overuse such a contrivance). Raise dead and revivify also come online from mid levels to give another leg up, and the diamond cost of those spells is 1/10 of its previous price.

TPKs are still possible, just rarer. PCs regularly get knocked down to 0 HP but can get back up their feet and contribute to another few encounters in the AD in short order. Unless the whole party gets knocked down to 0 HP, youre generally golden though.

Ive had one death in my current campaign, and the party are all 7-8th level.

 

[AntiStateQuixote]

[MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION], interesting. Many similarities, but the differences are huge.

We play out the five minute (or less) combat against the solo troll. It gives the players a chance to quickly use their kewl p0werz and wreck the poor bastard and it costs practically nothing.

We're definitely not a Combat as War group. The other players' heads would explode if we started playing that way. I'd probably have fun with it for a while, but then it would start to feel like work (as DM or player). No thanks.

We like to sit around the table, throw dice, kill bad guys, and take their stuff. We have some reasonable story and RP elements going on to make it all hang together, but it's really just a chance to do some butt-kicking power fantasy while we forget about real life for a few hours every week. We're definitely not trying to learn any life lessons or anything as heady as that.

I'd be interested to see an example of the 3x and 4x deadly encounters you set up to challenge your PCs and what the PC builds are. Are you finding this is necessary because you only run a couple of encounters per day? It blows my mind that you are using such encounters on a regular basis.

[MENTION=6788736]Flamestrike[/MENTION], re: PC deaths
My current campaign (3 DMs rotating duty from adventure to adventure): 39 sessions, 3 - 6 characters played in each session, total of 32 characters (each player has at least 3 characters), we've had 4 character deaths and 1 character petrified by a medusa. PCs range from level 3 to level 7. Only about half a dozen characters are level 6 or 7, and those are also the only characters that have been played in 10 or more sessions.

Side note: I've DM'd 14 of the 39 sessions, and I've been the DM every time a PC has died and when the medusa petrified a PC. Apparently I'm the "killer DM" in our group.

 

[AntiStateQuixote]

DOH: forgot about a TPK that I hand-waved
In Out of the Abyss the PCs (five of them, all 3rd level) were on a raft going across the Darklake. They rolled on the random encounter table (all of my dice rolls are in front of the screen, and I let the players roll almost everything). The random encounter was 2d4 darkmantles which resulted in 5 darkmantles . . . hanging from the roof, in the dark, while they paddled by. One surprise round later and most of the party had darkmantles attached the their faces. One PC used misty step to "get away," but ended up in the lake and later died (taking Dawnbringer with him to the depths). The other PCs all dropped to zero hit points, but instead of running a TPK I ruled that they were later found, floating on the lake, by the new Duergar PC from Graklstugh.

That's encounter was nominally medium-hard but clearly deadly in execution:
Five level 3 PCs = 750 xp medium; 1,125 xp hard
Five CR 1/2 darkmantles = 100 xp each * 2 (multiplier for 5 monsters) = 1,000 xp

Surprise matters. Low level characters are squishy.

 

[AntiStateQuixote]

I like a game where every single conflict that occurs has something at stake.

So . . . why not play 4e? It's encounter balance mechanics sound like it's exactly what you're looking for. That's not meant as a poke or anything. We played 4e for 3+ years and had fun with it. I prefer the quicker (easier) combats of 5e that let's us tell more story in a single session, but if I was looking for edge of the seat combat in every encounter, 4e (or maybe 13th Age) is where I'd go.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

So . . . why not play 4e? It's encounter balance mechanics sound like it's exactly what you're looking for. That's not meant as a poke or anything. We played 4e for 3+ years and had fun with it. I prefer the quicker (easier) combats of 5e that let's us tell more story in a single session, but if I was looking for edge of the seat combat in every encounter, 4e (or maybe 13th Age) is where I'd go.

(1) Because 5E works just fine for my playstyle.

(2) Because from what I know about 4E (including a grand total of about five hours of playing it), I believe that it's pretty much the exact opposite of what I want. All the stuff I hate most in 5E such as boring predictable encounters that are just pure combat slogs come out of 4E. (There are some things that I kind of like which come out of 3E/4E as well, such as reactions.) I also hate magic item dependency (which thankfully is not a thing in 5E) and gamist class mechanics. 5E is nicely reminiscent of 2nd edition, and while it has problems, so far I've been able to patch all of those problems. I don't think I could patch 4E into something I'd want to play.

Everything I know about 4E tells me that it's a terrible edition in which to attempt Combat As War.

I'd be interested to see an example of the 3x and 4x deadly encounters you set up to challenge your PCs and what the PC builds are. Are you finding this is necessary because you only run a couple of encounters per day? It blows my mind that you are using such encounters on a regular basis.

Sort of. It has a lot to do with my approach to the game, which is fundamentally simulationist rather than gamist. Providing a good experience to the players is a part of the DM's obligations, so I have gamist obligations and I take them seriously enough, and for this reason I don't mind designating PCs as "weirdness magnets" in the metagame... but fundamentally, the things that you need to do in order to force players through 6-8 Medium discretized encounters per day stick in my craw as exactly the kind of stuff that I loathe and which destroy my suspension of disbelief as a player. "Oooo, suddenly a vampire jumps out of a closet and attacks you! Roll initiative! No, I don't know why that vampire was just waiting in there the whole time you were fighting the ghouls in the next room fifteen feet away." I exaggerate out of disdain.

Probably the single deadliest encounter my players have had, which took place over the course of about two sessions (the last half of one session and the first half or so of the next) is when their spelljamming ship was returning from exploring potential sites for a colony they wanted to establish, and they ran into neogi slavers in a Death Spider. Since they were in fact flying a stolen neogi hammership with the flag from the (neogi-affiliated) Temple of Might, the neogi ship immediately accelerated towards them. There was an elvish Man-o-War in the distance too which also accelerated towards them. I expected this to be a case of flight, maneuver, maybe even combat if they neogi overtook them and attempted to destroy and/or board their ship and the players would have to fight a holding action until the elves caught up and broke up the fight. (The Elvish Imperial Navy plays a role similar to the British navy circa 1900 in keeping the peace and preventing piracy.) Then it might turn into a legal battle of some sort, or the PCs might be forced to pay kresim (10,000 gold ransom) to get the neogi to leave them alone. What I did not expect was that the PCs would ram and attempt to board the Death Spider. I don't remember exactly what the PC levels were at this point, but it was something like an 11th level Necromancer and twenty or so skeleton archers, a 12th level Barbarian, and an 8th level Death Cleric, and a friendly NPC Grey Slaad (who was there because he thought it would be fun to "slay evil" like a paladin, without having much real conception of what evil really is) who was working with them at the time, plus their crew who were there to fly the ship and work the heavy weapons. Opposing them were 24 umber hulks, another 20 or so neogi, a neogi cleric flying the ship, and an 8th level neogi wizard who was the captain, plus about three times as many heavy weapons as the PCs and human slaves to work the weapons. A quick BOTE says that's approximately 20x Deadly, and despite the fact that the elves were coming and that I roleplay enemies rather than metagame (e.g. umber hulks would emerge naturally onto deck at a random rate, 1d4 per round to represent their varying distances from the exterior exits at the time when ramming commenced and varying decision processes, instead of perfectly and seamlessly coordinating to emerge unrealistically all onto deck in the space of six or twelve seconds, even though it is technically possible by 5E rules to get 24 umber hulks through two 10' wide doors in less than two rounds by perfectly coordinating motion)--despite all that, I fully expected the players to TPK themselves.

I'm reluctant to go into unnecessary detail, because I generally find that there's nothing more boring than hearing about someone else's game, but let's just say that to my surprise and due in part to Evard's Black Tentacles and Spike Growth and good use of ship's geometry and good player tactics such as clearing the heavy weapons first and liberating the slaves, and in part to a wild magic zone which made Evard's Black Tentacles twice as big as usual [i.e. my player misread the description of EBT and I didn't double-check; so when I figured out next session what had happened, instead of nullifying a whole session's combat I just charged them a karma point and retconned it as a fluke wild magic zone which doubled spell radii and would also have affected the neogi wizard's Fireball at them, if not for the fact that the PCs had Counterspelled the Fireball]--because of that and the failed morale checks from Umber Hulks who were half-dead from withering missile fire and EBT and Spike Growth before they even made it onto the PC ship, the PCs were able to repel the initial assault. Then they actually launched a counteroffensive (!!!) onto the enemy ship, trying to invade the interior of the ship. That didn't go so well for them, and in fact that Grey Slaad "paladin" leading the charge got turned into chunks of flying hamburger as soon as it ran inside, at which point the players smartly pulled back and regrouped. But they still wanted to take over the whole ship, and they rejected the 10,000 gp kresim the neogi offered them to leave them alone (mostly out of ignorance as to what offering gold actually meant--I expected them to stop and try to find out what was going on with this gold, but they didn't--but they took the gold and kept attacking) and here's the part where I went easy on them in some ways:

The logical next reaction for the neogi, if they thought the ship was actually going to be captured, would be to blow the ship. That means that continuing to assault the neogi could have no good outcome: either the PCs get slaughtered just like the Slaad did, or they are on the verge of success when suddenly everything gets snatched away from them by a ship exploding under them. I have mechanisms in place whereby that would not necessarily destroy the campaign per se--both the existence of character trees and my metagame rules for karma could have saved them, but I knew that either way it would have felt unfair, like a DM cheating to "punish" players for doing well against his pet villains, so I wanted to avoid that outcome. Since the pilot of the PC ship was an (ex-PC) NPC under my control, after they got the gold I had him start frantically shouting for the PCs to get back on the ship, and when the neogi and umber hulks renewed their counter-counteroffensive, the PCs got back on... and the pilot took off. At least one of the players was disgruntled when the pilot chose to disengage and fly away from the neogi ship instead of just strafing it with heavy weapons and then ramming again in a new location, because he really wanted to take over the whole neogi ship, but as explained above I knew that could have no good outcome even if they "won"... so instead the encounter ended, and the next encounter was with the elven Man-o-War, where the player inadvertently set in motion the events which eventually ended up getting their planet invaded from outer space and their home kingdom dismantled.

So, most "days" have zero encounters, and some days have one or two or three, but it would be a rare day indeed where you had EIGHT encounters in a single twenty-four hour period. That's, like, something that might happen in the middle of a siegebreak, or a planar invasion from Baator, or something. It's not something you'd expect to see on a single day. Sometimes the encounters are trivial (not even Easy). Sometimes they're not. There was a short span of time in which the players had multiple encounters per day (they were trying to clear their floating island of ropers and phase spiders, while avoiding the rocs, so they could land colonists on it) but there were about 70 of each kind of monster on the island, and I really didn't want to play out 35-70 combats which were slightly different from each other but mostly the same, I instead made the players a deal: "if you choose to do a combat where every roll the enemies make is at advantage, and every roll you yourself make is at disadvantage, we'll call that your unluckiest combat of the day and handwave nine more similar combats, so you'll actually clear ten times as many enemies as you actually fight, and you'll get ten times the XP." That first encounter, when I computed the deadliness afterward, was Deadly even before accounting for the bizarro advantage rules in place. The one thing I remember clearly is that the ship lost its pilot to phase spider venom, and someone thought fast and barely made an initiative roll to jump onto the helm and replace the pilot before the ship fell out of the sky, and then something happened that pilot and they nearly died again. The party was this close to a campaign-ending catastrophe (everyone including the 0th level crew takes 20d6 falling damage and the ship is probably destroyed) but it didn't happen, and instead the players got this awesome story, a ton of XP, and a site for their space colony.

You can tell me all you want that even 1% chance of TPK too much for a combat in a "safe" campaign, but I'd rather stab out my own eyeballs with a pen every week than play a game with dozens of "safe" combats every week. If my players want to play that kind of game, I'd rather invest that time in writing them a 5E CRPG instead of running a CRPG manually. Abnegation is great fun for CRPGs but it's not something that actually needs a live DM.

 

[Jaelommiss]

Side note and math (wheeee!):
The PCs are supposed to be the protagonists/heroes of the stories. They are SUPPOSED to win. Like by an overwhelming amount. If not, most games will end in a TPK before level 10. It takes 60 medium encounters to reach 10th level. If the PCs have only a 1% chance of losing each of those encounters then the chance of surviving to 10th level is 100 - .99^60 = ~45%. Should more than half of all games end in a TPK before reaching 10th level? If not, then the chance of the PCs "losing" any given encounter has to be REALLY small which will make each individual encounter seem REALLY easy. Game working as intended.

I agree with everything you said, except this.

Losing an encounter is not the same as a TPK. A TPK is one way to lose an encounter, but it is not the only way. Even if the party kills all of the enemies, they still lose if the primary objective is not achieved (protect/rescue NPC, capture item, collect intel, etc.). The party could also manage to run away from a battle that they lose before all of them are slain, or even before ANY of them are slain. Winning an encounter has more to do with accomplishing goals than it does surviving. Surviving is a nice bonus, but not necessary. There are even times when a TPK can result despite winning an encounter. For example, if the party sacrifices themselves to ensure that the ship carrying the Dread Lich's phylactery gets.

I'm playing in a campaign where we lose roughly 10% of encounters, and that's after we choose our battles carefully and use significant strategy to shape the battle to our advantage. After six months of play we have not yet had a TPK, although we've been close a couple of times and have lost some PCs along the way. Often we end up running away before the battle can turn against us or before an impossible enemy can engage us. Despite having lost multiple encounters, we haven't had a TPK.

 

[Celtavian]

I don't know if Celtavian is still checking this thread out, but here is little updated Marilith I made for him. You can scale it up or down as needed for your uber PCs.

I remade the marilith. I went in a little different direction. I might give that one a try some time. Always room to boost them a bit more.

 

[Celtavian]

I'm going to challenge your statement regarding a neutral environment. From the scenario you explained, the environment was anything but neutral. Featureless, perhaps, but not neutral. It was HEAVILY biased towards the PCs.

I'm having trouble finding the post where you outlined the battle, but going from memory you gave the party a significant terrain advantage: they were able to make a full rounds worth of attacks in total safety before the enemies were able to move into a position to counterattack. The fact that terrain (yes, 120 feet of empty space is terrain) prevented one side from effectively acting for a whole round was a HUGE advantage to the party.

Or you could ask why a high CR marilith has no means to quickly traverse that space and attack immediately in a game featuring high mobility.

Consider how your party would do against a group of spell-sniper warlock/sorcerers using Distant Spell to Eldritch Blast them from 720 feet on a featureless plain. The party is only 120 feet from their effective range, but the time it takes to get there grants a clear advantage to the other side.

The fact that it would require monsters built in such a fashion to equal creatures being 120 feet apart is exactly the absurd player versus environment advantage I am speaking of. All the Pcs have to be is 120 feet apart, the limit of their vision. For the PCs to put in an equal situation, it would require a bunch of warlocks built specifically for shooting 720 feet in a wide open field.

Consider how they would do if they were ambushed at night (because magic made their guard sleep) and required to spend their first round getting up before attacking.

Well, first the magic would have to be able to make their guard sleep. They play a lot of elves. Second, they would be in a Leomund's Tiny Hut which would have to be brought down first. So I'd have to have a sufficiently high level caster do this, hope they didn't play a bunch of elves or use some kind of nasty poison to get their guard asleep, and then I could ambush them at night as long as they didn't take any other teams to prevent that.

Consider how they would do if they were magically incapacitated (no save) for a round while the enemies got a free round to attack them however they would like.

This has happened. They did fine. They took some damage and then reacted in a much more varied fashion than monsters can react, winning the day.

The latter two cases are mechanically identical (one round wasted before acting offensively), yet grant one side a clear advantage. Costing one side a round to cross empty terrain is no less biased.

They've wasted plenty of rounds. The difference is when they do get ahold of something, they rag doll it. Whereas the reverse is not true.

If I had to guess, I would assume your stated aversion to creating complex terrain leads you to believe that empty terrain is inherently unbiased. This could not be further from the truth. Terrain is just one more factor of combat that must be considered. In your given situation you accidentally gave a massive terrain bonus to one side, and it made the fight incredibly one sided.

I have no aversion to creating complex terrain. I don't understand the confusion. My stance is that I don't think complex terrain should be required for a monster to be a challenge.

I create complex terrain all the time. I expect complex terrain to make a monster much more challenging. I also want the base monster to be challenging all by itself in a neutral environment.

 

[Celtavian]

Why are you using their passive Perceptions? What are all 15 demons doing that they're too busy to be making Perception rolls to notice something? Wasn't there a demon scouting party? Shouldn't the demons be aware that there are adventurers looking for them? Why aren't the demons actively looking for the adventurers?

No the demons were not aware adventurers were looking for them. They were a random marauding group of demons in the Underdark.

Why do I use their Passive Perception? Because that is what the rules say to use.

You had 15 demons, many of whom could fly. Why didn't they flank the PCs or cut off their retreat? Why didn't they surround the PCs? Why didn't they grapple them?

Cut off their retreat? No one retreated. They didn't need to. What do you think flanking does? We're not using that optional rule. Grapple? Who cares if you grapple. They just take damage for spending an action doing nothing. I am never sure why people demons would spend their action grappling while getting hammered. Almost everyone in my group takes Athletics or Acrobatics to resist grapples.

No, you're telling us it's not enough to challenge them. We're taking your word for that and trying to try to tell you why that might be the case.

Well, my 5E experience as both player and DM is that the game isn't very challenging compared to previous editions. The only people I've heard from that I agree with are the ones who say that is because the designers intended it that way. From what I've read from the designers, that seems to be the case.

Because you're allowing your PCs extra power that isn't contemplated by the encounter guidelines and then running your monsters with poor tactics.

This campaign is a bad example because I built it a certain way. Though I did think 2 or 3 times deadly would be a more serious challenge I have to admit.

I don't know. WotC module designers aren't the same people as the game designers. WotC module designers are the gateway through which most people will play their first games. WotC's incentive is for people to feel like they win and do cool stuff so that they come back and hand WotC more money. That's why LMoP is such a treasure fest, for example. If those games work for people, that's great. And if those games work for people, WotC will keep putting them out there.

Don't act like every WotC module is like that, though. Even Expeditions modules I've run enough of to know that's not the case. I cut encounters out of those not to make the adventuring day easier but because the store isn't going to stay open all night for us.

So far all the big published ones have been this way.

 

[Celtavian]

I disagree. Setting up "the dungeon" is absolutely a necessary part of making D&D interesting and the environment should play a part. Flamestrike went further than I typically go, but I absolutely use the environment. PC adventurers invading a kobold lair (for example) will have to deal with the fact that kobolds have maze-like warrens of small tunnels filled with traps as part of their defenses.


Not quite. Every option you add to the PC toolbox increases their power. Those options are not additive; they compound. If they're not countered by similar tweaks for the monsters, then yes, fights will become much, much easier.

With regard to the 2x and 3x deadly encounters: I don't see how it's possible. If I recall you had several monsters with save-or-suck abilities. Did every PC really make every single save against the hezrou stench (within 10'; DC 14 CON save or poisoned), chasme drone (within 30'; DC 12 CON save or fall unconscious), and vrock screech (within 20'; DC 14 CON save or stunned)? Failing any one of those several saves takes the PC out for at least a round (well, poisoned doesn't take him out, but does suck for him). The demon horde should have chewed them up. If the DM didn't use those abilities then s/he didn't get much punch out of what those monsters bring to the table.

The concentration house rule is a huge factor for the PCs, and it's yet another of the bits that is multiplicative, not additive, to the PCs' power. The misplay of banish also had a big impact if it took 4 monsters out of the fight with a total of 4 actions and no concentration.

No, they didn't all make their saves. But they get to make them every round. Even with disadvantage, they made them with good Con saves and paladin auras. It's just not hard to make a Con save with +4 proficiency +2 to 3 ability and +4 to 5 from an aura even with disadvantage. A few misses on those abilities don't end the PC. Their ACs against the attack rolls of the monsters was definitely advantage PCs.

Yep. The misplay of banishment definitely had an effect. That was my bad. Glad I know how that works now because there are a lot demon battles to come.