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ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 9873315" data-attributes="member: 6988941">I think hit point bloat is one of the original sins of 5e, and sadly undermines the bounded accuracy which is one of my favorite design intentions of 5e. Yes, it feels cool to graduate to more advanced enemies, but it doesn't serve the simulationist side of things well. And since 5e doesn't want to come right out and do the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th tier versions of every enemy (most of the time) it means lots of casting about for what enemy types to use by the DM only to find that "nope, we'll have to save that for 10 levels down the line" or whatever.Tangentially related, I just find the stat blocks too complicated as a DM. It's not like they confuse me when I read them at my leisure, it's just too much to flip through and cross-reference when actually running the game, especially when there's multiple different enemy types in one combat (and some NPC the party decided to bring along, and whatever). Sure I could probably benefit from using cards or something, but that's a whole extra prep step, and really the combat runs smoothest when I've got the stats half memorized. I kind of suspect we'll get a techy solution for this in the not too distant future, but for now it's a lot of extra mental load, and very frustrating if I'm at a table where I don't have a lot of extra physical space to organize stat blocks in. I'm torn on this because I love the simulationist potential of having the enemies use the same rules as the PCs, but without a way to simplify it radically at the table it just becomes too fiddly for me as is.Spells are in some ways a similar complicating factor to monster stat blocks, where special rules, abilities, etc. have been compartmentalized into a separate compendium that needs to be cross-referenced. Basically a new DM should just avoid running monsters with more than a handful of spells at all, it really only gets easy when you have effectively committed the important spells to memory and learned which ones aren't worth casting. Meanwhile spells have (and increasingly with 5.5) been leaned on way too heavily to effectively replace many characters' class and racial abilities. This makes it easier to (roughly) balance things but it also makes the character options way too samey.</blockquote>

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