D&D 5E Drawbacks to Increasing Monster AC Across the Board?

[Jester David]

At low levels in earlier editions you missed a LOT more but gradually gained accuracy. In 5e, your accuracy doesn't go up nearly as much as you level.
Don't just compare accuracy at level 1 but also 4, 8, 12, and 16. See how it changes.

 

[El Gallo Negro]

It's hard to say exactly what you can do because it depends on the types of encounters. What does the party consist of and who are the enemies they've faced so far?

I'd suggest starting by bumping AC on a few enemies, but not all of them. I'm also a fan of throwing in one or two tougher enemies into the fray. This can mean a bump in AC, HP, or unique abilities (mini boss type enemies). It's all up to you. You can think of it as trying to make the enemies harder to hit, but how about making the enemies hit harder?

Start with a few and see how it goes.

 

[Awesome Adam]

I can see throwing creatures in armor if you think they are too easy, but global AC increases are just a NERF to the PCs.

Would you consider removing the PCs proficiency bonus to hit ? If not, then why apply buffs to monsters that effectively do the same thing ?

 

[Rhenny]

I can see throwing creatures in armor if you think they are too easy, but global AC increases are just a NERF to the PCs.

Would you consider removing the PCs proficiency bonus to hit ? If not, then why apply buffs to monsters that effectively do the same thing ?

Good point. One of the reasons why 5e uses static AC rather than scaling AC (augmented by level) is to represent the "real" armor and dexterity modifiers rather than artificially inflated numbers. I routinely give foes better armor to wear if I change their AC. For creatures it could just be some extra hard shell-like carapace or thicker hide.

 

[Rya.Reisender]

Drawbacks to Increasing Monster AC Across the Board?

Players getting frustrated because they miss so often.

 

[Whirlingdervish]

The monsters as they are presented are meant to be the baseline and the DM is expected to and often encouraged to modify them to their vision of what the encounter should be. It is absolutely okay if the PC's do not win all the time

 

[Coredump]

Lowish AC is one of they keys to Bounded Accuracy. Its what allows low level creatures to still be a threat to high level creatures.

 

[Iry]

75% success is about how often your players should be hitting. This can go up or down depending on the role of the monster, of course. The consequence of increasing AC across the board is unhappiness.

 

[Warmaster Horus]

This is what 4E did. And you know what people called 4e combat? A slog. And it was, I love the edition but holy heck everything is just a bucket of hit points!

While it may be more fun to hit something and deal damage, on the same note, there's no challenge in dealing damage, it's automatic. Hitting something poses a challenge, using positioning, spells, class features, etc... to boost your attack to be able to hit. But then again, this also depends on the group.

If your group is a bunch of old-school min-maxers like mine who always have at least a +4 to hit on their best ability score, then don't be afraid to up the ante. They've raised the bar, so it's only fair.

Personally, given my group I raise AC by about 2 points across the board and I lower HP by about 25% across the board. It evens out, I think but is more enjoyable to my group because they see the foes as a greater challenge.

It's only a slog if you're winning. When you're getting the stuffing pasted out of you and the monsters aren't dropping quickly, you have what's called a 'challenge'. You need to change your tactics, fall back, use powerful magic, whatever, to survive.

 

[CapnZapp]

So, our group recently got to play several sessions of D&D 5E over the past few weekends. More than we've gotten to play consistently in quite some time, so that is good. Lots of fun.

However, one of the players has noted that it's very easy to hit the monsters. It seems a lot easier than previous editions, especially easier than AD&D.

By my calculations, between the minimum +2 proficiency bonus every character gets along with usually at least a +2 ability score bonus on the attack roll along with some other things, it seems like it's probably 20% to 30% more easy to hit an average AC than it was in 1E at low level.

Now, don't get me wrong. I really like 5E and am definitely not wanting to start any sort of edition war. However, I'm wondering if it might hurt to increase the monsters' armor classes by a few points in general and how far I could go in that regard without the ACs ending up too high when our group gets some characters to high level? Would a four point bump in monster AC be too much? I'm pretty sure two points would help, but not sure about going the full 4 points (or even 5 or 6) as it would likely break bounded accuracy and make high level monsters too invulnerable to lower level groups.

Has anyone done this? What were the results?

The reason for this is that players find hitting fun and missing unfun.

Hence lower AC and more hit points.

As an added benefit of this: plus bonuses to hit aren't as essential anylonger. This goes both ways:

Players don't NEED to struggle on the treadmill for ever-better attack bonuses. On the other hand, handing out plus weapons is less of a big deal.

First you should ask yourself if you and your players are really finding the game so full of unfun it's worth it to change this. My advice is to stick to the stat blocks as written, and get used to the easier hit chances.

If you really must change it, you would lower HP to compensate for higher AC. But resist the temptation to make a maths problem out of it.

That is, instead of trying to calculate how much a +2 AC change should change the monster, just shave off a few or many hp as you see fit.

It's far from a controlled environment, so there's no need to get super-careful and spend a lot of time on calculations. Just shave off 10 hp from many monsters. Halve the hp of a particular monster but leave the hp as is for another monster.

But as I said, think hard about whether this is actually worthwhile. I myself can find several other areas I would tweak before this "low AC" aspect of the edition.