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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6861991" data-attributes="member: 5834">You don't have to use them every encounter. Just at key times. These tactics will work at your table as well as mine. For example, building a character with a 26 AC using a 1st level spell will work at your table as well as mine. It isn't like that player has to use shield every round, just enough to mitigate some of your lucky rolls. On average you won't hit a high AC character very often. So he only needs to mitigate damage when you do happen to hit him.All of these tactics are assuming the players use them at key periods when they are tactically advantageous. You didn't see me use polymorph against the death slaad because it wasn't tactically advantageous.  I don't think they're easy to counter during play because monsters don't just get to zip around the battlefield picking ideal targets while the PCs just let them. I haven't found that to be the case. Monsters have about 3 to 4 rounds to execute their tactics. That's 3 to 4 rounds of actions before the PCs murder them. Not a lot of time. From what I understand, this is by design. 5E wanted much faster combats and that is what they got at the expense of complex monster tactics.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.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.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. You fix this by making a dangerous or advantageous environment and running 6 to 8 encounters. That's one way to do it and I'm not going to criticize you for it. I want something else from my monsters. I literally want a dragon to be able to land on a party at full strength and start tearing them apart even if it has to travel 600 feet in wide open territory. It's hide so thick and its bulk so massive it shrugs off arrows and blades like water. When you're looking for that type of experience, 5E isn't providing it out of the box. That seems to be by design. So I'm going to redesign some things to get what I want from the game, just like I've done every edition.So you are right, it's not the rules. It's my perception of what I want from the rules. 5E isn't satisfying my idea of a challenge.</blockquote>

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