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

[fuindordm]

I think it's OK for you to give grunts a minor bump to AC or saving throws. It will make a fight a little more difficult, but 5E gives you a lot of wiggle room in encounter difficulty vs. PC survival.

For solos/boss monsters, take a close look at the legendary monsters in the MM. I've tried a couple out in my game, and I like how they work. It's more important to give solos more actions than more AC or HP; and if you want a minor boss you can just let them act twice per turn, or give them a couple of bonus actions (to move or make a single weapon attack) that can be taken out of turn. The move action is particularly important since it helps them get out of situations where the whole party is in position to attack.

Cheers,
Ben

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Now you're justifying your opinion by the good old "if a billion chinese..." argument.

ENWorld is frequented by all sorts of players.

For the purpose of the following slightly ridiculous thought-experiment, I will consider that half are "carebears" and half are "minmaxers".

Furthermore, I will assume only "minmaxers" have actually stress-tested the GWM/SS feats, and therefore, for the purpose of this hypothetical, their opinion is the only one that counts.

With this I give you a scenario where even if only 26% of all ENWorld visitors find these feats overpowered, that is enough for me to state that they are indeed overpowered.

Hey, hey, hey. I didn't say there's something wrong with you thinking they're overpowered. I was responding to a factual assertion that "everyone is okay" with a nerf to Sharpshooter/GWM, with a factual observation that empirically shows that there exists a sizable number of people who think they're just fine as is. (Feynman says: showing that they're okay with status quo isn't necessarily a proof that they wouldn't be okay with a nerf. Some people are just chill and might be okay with anything.)

If, arguendo, 26% of Enworld feels that Sharpshooter/GWM are fine and 74% think it needs to be nerfed, that is still a clear case of "everyone" not having the same preference. That is all.

I never said you couldn't play any way you want to. I just said in passing that not everyone is on the same page.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I have come to accept that the default is the players hitting the monsters, while the opposite is true for the enemies hitting the players. And it does work. What I not always like ia the high hp fefault for enemy casters. Some are too high. I expect more glass cannons there.

 

[Hrothgar Rannúlfr]

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.

Good point, Jester.

The expectation and range of accuracy definitely varies across the editions. 5E's expected range seems a lot different than OD&D, BECMI, AD&D, 2E, or 3E.

I also recently realized that the player who brought up that it was too easy to hit may not have realized that I wasn't throwing the toughest monsters that I could have against the group. It was more of a sandbox adventure and not really geared to the level of the characters, just geared toward what was there. Some hard encounters and several easier ones.

 

[Hrothgar Rannúlfr]

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.

I agree, El Gallo Negro.

I'm probably going to leave the ACs alone, for now.

I've offered to play some 1E with the player in question rather than houserule 5E so quickly without more experience with it.

Right now, I think any change in AC would need to be from an in game perspective of better armor on enemies or perhaps expendable magic items (to avoid permanent items falling into the hands of the players before I'm comfortable with them).

 

[Hrothgar Rannúlfr]

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 ?

I hear what you're saying, Awesome Adam.

One thing I'd actually considered was removing proficiency bonus from attack rolls and replacing it with class-based attack matrices like in 1E. But, it wouldn't be just for the PCs, it would be for the monsters too.

 

[Awesome Adam]

At some point it's just going to be easier to play 3E with whatever 5E rules added in.

 

[Lehrbuch]

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...

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?

Rather than mucking about with AC and HPs etc, just add one more monster to the encounter.

 

[Hrothgar Rannúlfr]

At some point it's just going to be easier to play 3E with whatever 5E rules added in.

It's been a while since I've looked at this thread, but you're right.

We've actually went about using the rules we like from B/X, BECMI, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 3.5, AE, PF, TB, DCC RPG, and 5E and combined them all while jettisoning what we dislike. I thought about which to use as a base and 5E won, but we're still using classes and monsters from all of the editions (converting where necessary).

Ultimately, I didn't end up increasing AC across the board. What I did, instead, was change the XP system that we use (including the XP charts of XP needed to advance), awarding lower or zero XP if the fight is too easy and awarding more if the fight is harder than average or close to a TPK (which has only happened when we were trying out DCC RPG using Gygax's random dungeon from the 1E DMG— really deadly for zero level DCC RPG characters).

 

[Uchawi]

I am more about consistency, so if everything is easy to hit, then every spell should be easy to save, and every skill roll should be reasonable to make. Once you have that baseline, then it is incumbent on the DM to mix things up, as that adds challenge and excitement to the game. Hit points are great as handling exceptions, but if it covers too much ground, then you start to see the weakness of hit points as a general tool when describing different types of damage and what it means.