D&D 5E Difficulty Settings for Advanced Players

[Larnievc]

The purpose is to increase the need for CharOp, Party Synergy and individual and group tactics in encounters.

What for?

 

[Oofta]

Small hint.
Remove rope trick and leomund’s tiny hut from spell lists.

Or just don't have stupid monsters. Adventurers in the area? Lock down for the next 24 hours and double patrols. Leomund's tiny hut? Bury it.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Go back to basics
Use encumbrance, remove +x magical items, use attack waves, play monsters intelligently, sunder weapons/equipment, have monsters use potions, lingering injuries, madness, gritty rest mechanic rules, nix easy and medium encounters, remove ASI...

..Ok, but, I seem to remember some other basics...

Spells can be disrupted. If the casters are hit, the spell stops working (if they were concentrating) or the spell is not cast if they were in the act of casting I that round but someone acted prior to their action and hit them. The spell is lost.

Fighters, Barbarians, Rangers, and Paladins (along with Dwarves who are NOT spellcasters) who are not multi-classed are proficient in ALL saves.
Monsters are ALSO proficient in ALL saves.

...ah, there's a couple.

There's been very few suggestions on this thread to make casting harder, even though 5e has such stunningly carefree magic rules compared to the back-in-the-day 'harder' otherwise seems inclined to emulate.

 

[Oofta]

For hard mode I wouldn't change much.

• Use intelligent monsters that are prepared.
• Give all monsters 1 legendary save. If monsters already have legendary saves, double them.
• Give all monsters advantage on attack. Give them +5 to attack if they would have advantage.
• Hit people when they're down. Show no mercy, every hit will be a crit, crits count as 2 death saves.
• Send monsters in waves.
• Don't let the PCs get anywhere safe to rest.
• A bit counter-intuitive, but I'll sometimes double the number of monsters but make their HP 1/4. Easy to kill which is more fun for the players, but lots of attacks.

Killing PCs is easy at any level. Just throw more stuff. Knowing when you've pushed them too hard is the difficulty.

EDIT Forgot to add max monster's damage.
Basically you don't necessarily want to make monsters harder to kill, because killing monsters is part of the fun. You do want your monsters to hit hard and often.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

I usually find that the biggest difficulty to challenging players is the poor amount of damage monsters do. While the special attacks can hard, the base attacks don't seem to have the same danger to them. I think the best way to increase difficulty is keep everything the same but amp up the danger of the monsters in general

Hard Mode:
1. Increase the damage of "base attacks" (Up to the GM to decide what is a base attack, but it usually obvious when a monster has multiple attacks to choose from) of monsters by their challenge rating (Min 1).

Harder Mode:
1. Increase the damage of "base attacks" of monsters by their challenge rating (Min 1).
2. If monster beats player AC by 5, double the increase from 1.

Hardest Mode
1. Increase the damage of "base attacks" of monsters by their challenge rating (Min 1).
2. If monster beats player AC by 5, double the increase from 1.
3. If monster beats player AC by 10, triple the increase from 1.

This scales well with all levels of play.
This makes centerpiece monsters have useful non-special-power turns.
This plays nicely with crits.
This allows advantage to convert to not only more frequent hits, but also more damaging ones.
When using the harder modes...this makes characters with very low defense really sweat.

 

[cmad1977]

Don’t challenge players with HPs.

 

[Sadras]

..Ok, but, I seem to remember some other basics...

There's been very few suggestions on this thread to make casting harder, even though 5e has such stunningly carefree magic rules compared to the back-in-the-day 'harder' otherwise seems inclined to emulate.

Sure, there are many ways to skin a cat, but in this instance when I meant 'back to basics' I was coming from the direction of using the rules/options within the books without having to adopt rules from previous editions.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Sure, there are many ways to skin a cat, but in this instance when I meant 'back to basics' I was coming from the direction of using the rules/options within the books without having to adopt rules from previous editions.

GreyLord's suggestions were in terms of 5e rules.

You don't need to bring back d6 initiative to enable spells being interrupted, for instance.

 

[dave2008]

I usually find that the biggest difficulty to challenging players is the poor amount of damage monsters do. While the special attacks can hard, the base attacks don't seem to have the same danger to them. I think the best way to increase difficulty is keep everything the same but amp up the danger of the monsters in general

Hard Mode:
1. Increase the damage of "base attacks" (Up to the GM to decide what is a base attack, but it usually obvious when a monster has multiple attacks to choose from) of monsters by their challenge rating (Min 1).

Harder Mode:
1. Increase the damage of "base attacks" of monsters by their challenge rating (Min 1).
2. If monster beats player AC by 5, double the increase from 1.

Hardest Mode
1. Increase the damage of "base attacks" of monsters by their challenge rating (Min 1).
2. If monster beats player AC by 5, double the increase from 1.
3. If monster beats player AC by 10, triple the increase from 1.

This scales well with all levels of play.
This makes centerpiece monsters have useful non-special-power turns.
This plays nicely with crits.
This allows advantage to convert to not only more frequent hits, but also more damaging ones.
When using the harder modes...this makes characters with very low defense really sweat.

I like the general thought, but I would probably go about it differently. As you have it now the base attacks could easily out damage the special attacks. It might be simpler to just do max damage. Or maybe at proficiency bonus to all damage.

 

[Horwath]

no +X items for attack/AC/saves above +1

cap abilities at 18.

And just add more mobs to encounter.

Do not run solo mobs except some filler encounter. CCs just steamroll over a single mook.