D&D 5E [DM problem] Is the group I am leading too strong? Is the 5E system unbalanced?

[Istbor]

Yes the complaint is naturally centered around published scenarios.

That you have no problems has little relevance on that issue.

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I believe there is relevance there. Certainly if there are those pointing fingers at the game system itself, and not any connection with how it interacts with both published adventures and ones run without these suggested encounters and challenges.

This was not simply a response to the OP by itself.

 

[Jester David]

The good Captain and I don't agree too often on these forums, but he is absolutely on the money with his assessment here.

The CR system is completely borked - please see my post directly above on how I have to houserule to ensure challenge remains appropriate once high levels and magical items drop into the mix...

I wouldn't say that CR is borked. Looks pretty good actually...

The problem is the MM was written two months before the CR numbers are finalized. So anything above CR 5 is suspect and anything above CR 10 is probably wrong.
Really, the MM should have been the lsst book they did, but they rushed it to second so people could play two months sooner... Anyone around in 2014 likely remembers the complaints about having to wait three months after the PHB for the DMG.

That, and high level play is inherently broken. Because the variability of character synergies and player knowledge simply provides too much variance. The range of effectiveness varies greatly from group to group and even during the adventuring day.
There's not really a way around that without simplifying epic.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Is the 5E system unbalanced?

Short Answer: Yes, it's D&D. ;P

So, I was thinking about what I could do wrong, because my players also mentioned that fights aren't fun anymore.

It's really not that odd for straightforward fights to get less interesting at higher level. They've been playing their characters for a while, and 11th is kinda a tipping point. A lot of folks have reported that the AP in question seems to get easier at high level, too. So it may not be anything to worry about.

1.) Magic Items:
I might have handed some items to my players that are too strong. E.g. Dwarven Plate (+2), Shield +1, Armor +1, Wings of Flying ... I heard that +armor items would be game breaking, because the 5E system is not able to compensate them. Is that true?

BA 'breaks' easily enough, sure, it's not that each + AC item is problematic, it's that the same character got two of 'em, and one of 'em was plate.

2.) Spells:
To be honest, I have never spend much time to spells. It's not that I am never casting, but most of the damage I deal with my monsters is through melee/ranged damage. I always felt a bit overtaxed by the richness of spells.

If your party is using spells to devastating effect, countering them now and then with an enemy caster could help, sure.
And, yes, you do have to be quite familiar with the rules (or willing to run roughshod over them - or both) to run 5e.

I always use "hard encounters", but it still seems not enough. Might that also be a problem?

Encounter guidelines are notoriously less than dependable. A 'hard' fight will only begin to be 'hard' if the party faces at least 5 other 'hard' fights that day.

I would be very interested in tipps and answers.

Since your 'mobs' are being blown up, beef up encounters with badder monsters instead of more of the same.

Also, since it's something of a sandbox, are your players resting more often than expected? (Do you squeeze in the prescribed 6-8 medium-hard (if not deadly) encounters between long rests? Is the SorLock maybe taking multiple short rests?) If so, they could be rolling over encounters with an excess of resources. If the barbarian can rage every encounter, for instance, that's a red flag.

There's a whole debate on how to fix frequent-resting problems.

In other words WotC shouldn't get away with not taking responsibility for making a game that cannot handle it's constituent parts.

They do not say "don't use feats and magic items unless you're okay with all our adventures becoming way too easy" on the label. In fact, they say next to nothing, hoping that apologists like you will deflect and shift the blame away.

They do say that feats and MCing are optional. That should be a clue. If you weren't happy with what they did to 3.x, maybe you shouldn't use 'em. If you're completely new, maybe you shouldn't turn on all the options out the gate. Seems like a modest level of caution in the presentation.

Many DMs fall into this "trap". The blame for this should squarely rest in the lap of the designers.

I admit it's facile to present a product as a sort of DiY 'kit' and take no responsibility for how it's used - if it were a potentially dangerous activity it could even attract lawsuits - but D&D /is/ mostly targeted at long-time & returning fans who know the ins & outs of running an RPG, and even if they're not ready for the issues 5e has as presented (or with options turned on or whatever), they'll figure it out pretty quickly.
The community tends to pride itself on being relatively intelligent, a sort of gaming 'elite' who can handle a hobby that's simply not for everyone.

 

[Blue]

[MENTION=6872180]bbrown12[/MENTION], a few questions:

1. Do you regularly (say every other or every third combat) have them go against spells that can do things besides damage? Restrain, make them grant advantage, various debuffs? (And the related but less important question is if you go after the cleric with non-AC attacks.) A foe with Counterspell to stop a fireball or heal should be uncommon at best so the players don't feel like you are trying to shut them down, but having them pop up occasionally will throw their traditional plan into a bit of chaos.

2. Do you do get 6-8 encounters before they have a chance to do a long rest, and not let them short rest after every combat. When you are telling em the cleric is healing faster then damage coming in, that sounds like lots of healing spells going on - not something that can be sustained through a lot of encounters.

To be honest, regularly throwing fewer encounters at a party seems to be at least a significant part of every "my players aren't feeling challenged" post I've seen about 5e. You'll hear a lot about just increasing the difficulty, but there are still a lot of resources that are not used up at a higher rate, things that last a whole encounter, and it's still easier.

3. Do you vary up terrain - sometimes having large spaces where mass heals can't reach everyone, having ranged attackers that need the party to split or not let a fireball get them and the melee attackers, etc. Or small mazes of twisty passages, all alike where your ranged characters don't have a good line-of-sight, and also might get surprised by enemies joining the frey behind them and able to engage the rogue and the sorc/warlock.

4. Do intelligent foes fight, well, intelligently. Focus fire to bring someone down. Brutes willing to take the damage from an attack of opportunity to close with the squishier members of the team. Foes that have fought casters and don't stand right next to each other to reduce how many an AoE will catch.

5. Are your battles all wars of attrition where the only win condition is who runs out of HPs first, or do you have other goals like needing not only to beat them but also stop them from completing a ritual/kill any sacrifices, or maybe get out before reinforcements arrive, etc.

 

[jgsugden]

Redefine challenging your players.

D&D is a role playing game. In it, the players play characters in a story. The game is at its best when the characters are part of a great and heroic story.

What makes a great story? Barely surviving an encounter with a horrible beast? Sure. That is one heroic thing you might find in a book. However, not all great moments in a comic focus on a character fighting for their lives. Sometimes, the hero needs to fight for something other than survival.

5 medium level PCs are walking through the center of town when a rogue leaps from the shadows and strikes ... some random guy a block and a half down the street. Then, four more rogues shoot him from the rooftops and disappear. The guy takes several hits and falls to the ground. The rogue next to him grabs something from the fallen figure and then begins to flee down an alley. What do the PCs do? Try to capture just that rogue? All of them? Or do they try to help the fallen figure and let (some of) the rogues go? Even if the PCs are far more powerful than these rogues, this presents challenges to the PCs.

Later on, the PCs are investigating the murder on the street and realize that a local nobleman may be behind the murder. They confront him and he throws a rock to the ground - which causes four HUGE Earth elementals to burst forth from the ground. One of these things would be a challenge for the PCs in a fair fight, two would be very hard to beat... but four would be suicide. However, the evil nobleman doesn't tell the Elementals to attack the PCs - it tells them to level the town, sending each to destroy a specific landmark first. What do the PCs do? They might not even be attacked, but there is a huge challenge for them to face and best.

The PCs have discovered that the nobleman is actually a secret Master of Elemental Evil, a powerful Warlock devoted to Ogremach, Prince of Evil Earth. They follow him to his lair. He'd been collecting materials to perform a powerful ritual. He has enough to do it, but success is not guaranteed without better materials. With the PCs breathing down his neck and his secret revealed, he can no longer wait and begins the ritual. The PCs learn this as they stand outside his lair.... giving them 10 minutes to fight their way into the lair, discover the hidden ritual room and disrupt the ritual. A few reasonably tough enemies might be in the base, but a lot of the enemies the PCs will face are more of a feature than a foe - they are there to slow down the PCs.

You don't have to threaten your PC's lives to give them a proper challenge.

 

[Oofta]

Another relativizing chestnut that really says nothing.

Long before the DM even gets to open the books, there is the baseline, default, difficulty.

That is what's being discussed here. The fact you can change this to make every adventure a TPK has always been true, and doesnt change or resolve the complaints that 5e simply runs on easy mode.



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The baseline difficulty is based on a party of 4 with no feats, no magic items, 27 point buy (or roll 4d6 drop lowest no rerolls) and not otherwise optimized.

Change any one of those factors and the DM has to do some upgrades. That is what this thread should be about.

No amount of dissing people who point out the obvious is going to change that.

 

[Oofta]

The good Captain and I don't agree too often on these forums, but he is absolutely on the money with his assessment here.

The CR system is completely borked - please see my post directly above on how I have to houserule to ensure challenge remains appropriate once high levels and magical items drop into the mix...

Then explain your alternative.

Endlessly whining about an issue is pointless.

 

[Caliban]

Baseline 5e is fairly well balanced. Problem is, almost no one actually plays baseline 5e. Feats and multiclassing are optional, not part of the core system. But (almost) everyone uses them.

Magic items are explicitly not required, but most games (especially the hardcover adventure books from WOTC) hand them out like candy.

So, the game is balanced assuming little or no magic items, no feats, and no multiclassing.

Once you allow those in...well, the balance changes in favor of the PC's. Most groups of PC's are going to end up overpowered compared to the baseline opponents in the MM or hardcover books.

I personally have no problem with this - it lets me make the bad guys and monsters even weirder and more unique, or just throw hordes of lesser bad guys at them. (Why have fireball in the game if you aren't going to give the wizard a horde to use it on?)

How do you know when you have placed enough orcs on the battle map? Keep adding mini's until you hear an audible gasp from one of the players.

 

[nswanson27]

Lots of fights so the barbarian runs out of rages.
Archer rogue: no places to hide.
Fights in a room with magical silence.
Charm/dominate person/crown of madness.
Greater Invisibility.
Split the party.
Black puddings in a small room.
Encounters when they try to rest.
Counterspell.
Casters that can't be reached by melee characters.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

The baseline difficulty is based on a party of 4 with no feats, no magic items, 27 point buy (or roll 4d6 drop lowest no rerolls) and not otherwise optimized.

Change any one of those factors and the DM has to do some upgrades. That is what this thread should be about.

No amount of dissing people who point out the obvious is going to change that.

Using that as the baseline was a bad decision. I wonder how many tables use no magic items? A couple percent of the tables overall? And at my table its not feats that are putting things over the top. Its just the way the game is, monsters are very easy to hit and its pretty easy to do a lot of damage. And due to the low AC values adding in one more PC just blows things up. Seeing how my 6 man 10th level party did against a demon price I'm not sure there will be much to do once they hit 13-14th level unless they put out a new god stats book.