D&D 5E Is 5e the Least-Challenging Edition of D&D?

[Zardnaar]

By 'Getting you saves up', you mean having good stats? That's not a challenge: you either have the stats or you don't. How are you avoiding it because you never know when its coming. If DnD had a system where you could anticipate enemy action better (like the Beholder always does X the turn before he uses Y) then it would be the sort of challenge you get in a platform game... but you usally have to get hit once to see the pattern so it doesn't work with insta-death.

If you mean avoiding the fight then it all boils down to a single dice roll again.

Stats didn't impact saves much. Rings of protection were common so aiming for them as your share of the treasure, multi classing, buff spells etc.

Talking about 2E not 3E.

 

[Don Durito]

I get the argument. You can make 5E dangerous by throwing more monsters, increasing attrition, having more than the recommended encounter etc - but that's largely the only dial you have.

And it resets very easily. It's why I instituted partial rests rules for overland travel (get back 1 hit die or exhaustion level, get back spell slots = to arcane recovery, get back one other daily resource eg. rage, recover 1/2 hit points) because I wanted the PCs to feel that the pressure didn't necessarily let off.

The other issue is that a lot of the variant dials offered are just poorly thought out. Rest variants, as stated earlier in the thread, mess with a whole lot of other things. Changing spell recovery times messes with things like Arcane recovery (I'd considered making it one spell slot per hour per level of the slot at one point). There's exhaustion rules, but they're so punitive they're hard to use, start throwing them on players and they'll run for the hills to rest up as soon as they can.

The game really isn't as modular, or as easy to house rule as is often claimed, and the modular elements we have been given are poorly conceived and clearly afterthoughts.

It's one reason why I'm thinking of using Castles and Crusades with some elements of 13th age for my next campaign (both of these games are much easier to hack than 5e).

 

[Lanefan]

I also have adventure days regularly span a couple of sessions. As far as putting the fear of god into them, I don't think it's always necessary to have the players on the brink of a TPK. Having it happen every once in a while is a lot more fun.

Agree completely.

The problem is, recent editions have taken out the other things that often put the fear of god into players, those being a) level drain and b) catastrophic magic item loss via failing a save vs AoE damage.

Thus, death - and TPK - are about all you've got left.

 

[Lanefan]

I think this simply points out how different people morph the game to suit their play style. Back in ye olden days the game didn't really play much different than it does now for me.

Combat may have been a last resort in your games, it certainly was not in mine.

It isn't in mine either, and I've the death count to prove it.

But then again we have people arguing that only a jerk DM targets downed characters but (if I understand correctly) using save or die is perfectly kosher and not a jerk DM move.

Yeah, doesn't make sense. SoD and targeting downed characters are both quite OK.

The game is what you make out of it. I don't want every save to be potentially deadly, I don't want every fight or session to be life-or-death. Much like ice cream for breakfast every morning would become just, well, breakfast, I like that some fights are deadlier than others.

Agreed.

I think the point is not that every save or fight has to be potentially lethal, it's more that in 5e people would like to see the occasional instance of those things be more easily achieved without having to do too much kitbashing to the system.

That doesn't read well, so I'll try again. In 0-1-2-3e you can fairly easily put together a combat that lands on the difficulty scale anywhere from 1 (complete party cakewalk) to 10 (guaranteed TPK); with the average being 5 or 6 (a typical normal combat that the party should win nearly every time), and the occasional 8 (razor's edge) thrown in to make 'em sweat a bit.

In 5e it seems very possible to do the 1-6 range and also to do 10, but for some reason it's hard to reliably get a combat into the 7-9 razor's edge range, where it's sweat-bullets time but not necessarily a guaranteed TPK.

 

[tetrasodium]

Agree completely.

The problem is, recent editions have taken out the other things that often put the fear of god into players, those being a) level drain and b) catastrophic magic item loss via failing a save vs AoE damage.

Thus, death - and TPK - are about all you've got left.

It's not just level drain from weights and such, and disjunction/things like rust monsters capable of being scary after you have magic armor and weapons. Weapon dissolvingoozes... Pretty much anything that used to have save or suck/save and suck/save or lose like trog stench, ability score damage, the horror of anything that could incapacitate paralyze or make helpless were either removed or massively defanged.

Look at rust monsters... in 5e "everyone got magic armor? ">"yea who cares about it' 3.5 ?... >mommy tell Merlin to protect me and thank it! I'm using my sling !"
Incorporeal traits, prevelant dr and meaningful damage types, etc. Getting acid/fire/holy damage to stop regeneration used to take effort but in 5e it takes effort to somehow not accomplish by default each round.

 

[MNblockhead]

Personally, I find that the rules matter less the lethality than the changing expectations of adventure design.

5e campaigns tend to be story driven with the expectation that there is a good chance that most characters will survive to the end giving a satisfying story arc. Sure there is a chance of death, which keeps the stakes high enough to care, but character death just becomes part of the party's story arc. TPKs are less common and less accepted it seems.

But run your 5e game in a sandboxy or old-school dungeon crawl manner and it can very deadly.

My players have been playing D&D and other games for decades. So even though I'm running them through Rappan Athuk, they have had a high survival rate. But that is more to running away from and avoiding threats than encounters being too easy.

When I play with newer players, I realize very quickly that I tend to run 5e very deadly. Not because I'm running it with "gritty" alternative rules, but just because I (1) let players encounter threats well beyond their ability to defeat and (2) play my intelligent monsters like beings who care about their lives and who have fought in battles before. Not every encounter. There are easy wins. But you the party always needs to be on its toes.

But newer players, esp. those who've only played organized play games, expect encounters to be scaled to their level and party size. They also are used to DMs who pull punches and get upset when the bad guys gang up on the cleric, or when an unconscious player gets hit again taking auto death-save fails, or when weaker creatures like goblins or kobolds rely on ambushes from areas with lots of cover and traps or environmental hazards.

If 5e is less deadly is because of the way the official adventures and organized-play modules are written.

One exception is Curse of Strahd. That could be very deadly for most of the levels the party would play in.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I get the argument. You can make 5E dangerous by throwing more monsters, increasing attrition, having more than the recommended encounter etc - but that's largely the only dial you have.

And it resets very easily. It's why I instituted partial rests rules for overland travel (get back 1 hit die or exhaustion level, get back spell slots = to arcane recovery, get back one other daily resource eg. rage, recover 1/2 hit points) because I wanted the PCs to feel that the pressure didn't necessarily let off.

The other issue is that a lot of the variant dials offered are just poorly thought out. Rest variants, as stated earlier in the thread, mess with a whole lot of other things. Changing spell recovery times messes with things like Arcane recovery (I'd considered making it one spell slot per hour per level of the slot at one point). There's exhaustion rules, but they're so punitive they're hard to use, start throwing them on players and they'll run for the hills to rest up as soon as they can.

The game really isn't as modular, or as easy to house rule as is often claimed, and the modular elements we have been given are poorly conceived and clearly afterthoughts.

I think it is a little more modular than you give it credit for.

As a personal example, I've houseruled that you do not recover all your hp after a long rest. You just get to spend hit dice, same as a short rest, and recover half your hit dice.

This has had a pretty big impact on the attrition, because you need 2 days of no fighting to full recover everything, and in a scenario where the players are under constant threat, like wilderness travel or the apocalypse like my current game, that means they are usually starting the day with fewer resources.

Then there are simple dials. My players attacked a "stronghold" of a mindflayer, but retreated from the guards before finishing the job, leaving the NPCs they had found to continue being converted.

They went back the next day, and there were more guards, but what they didn't know (and still don't know because they retreated again) is that the Mindflayer picked up shop and moved to a different building. Leaving the building guarded as a distraction and trapping the place to hell and back with magic/psionic seals. There are no "official" spells I'm using for this, I'm essentially jacking Phantasmal Force up to 13 and running it like a psychic mindscape trap.

I've also been introducing a psionic ooze that the Mindflayer is using, fail a save when exposed to it, get a mark. The marks cause bad things if you fail the saves again during a long rest, or if a psychic entity utilizes them. It could be as nasty as giving the player disadvantage on a dominate person save, or just an extra d8 damage per point.

These are all things you can do, and if you attrition the players into retreating, or hit them with a nasty status effect and cause them leave for healing.... then you can really start changing the location in response to them. The call upon more guards, alter the defenses to better combat these players. Think of all the magical crap that takes less than 24 hours to cast, and let your evil cult leader start using it, because they know the party is coming back, because the party did not accomplish their goal.

Alter spells, add new stats to track, change equipment loadouts, give feats and magic items, there is a lot you can do to alter 5e.

 

[Minigiant]

That doesn't read well, so I'll try again. In 0-1-2-3e you can fairly easily put together a combat that lands on the difficulty scale anywhere from 1 (complete party cakewalk) to 10 (guaranteed TPK); with the average being 5 or 6 (a typical normal combat that the party should win nearly every time), and the occasional 8 (razor's edge) thrown in to make 'em sweat a bit.

In 5e it seems very possible to do the 1-6 range and also to do 10, but for some reason it's hard to reliably get a combat into the 7-9 razor's edge range, where it's sweat-bullets time but not necessarily a guaranteed TPK.

Most of that is on how the systems differed.

In 0e-2e, a PC dies if they take ~1 normal hits per level. Half as many big hits. And 2 damage spells and 1 kill spell remained constant for killing. More for fighter and high CON PCs. Less for mages and low CON PCs.
A level 2 PC can take 2 stabs, 1 chop, 2 zaps, or 1 bang before dying.
A level 6 PC can take 6 stabs, 3 chops 2 zaps, or 1 bang before dying.
So it was easy to gauge.

In 3e, big hits grew in damage. Especially if your monsters used feat. But it was easier increase base HP.
So your hits and big hits per level before dying doubled but the magic stayed the same.

Everything changed in 4e. Everything got adjusted. A hit did little damage at took out less that a surge-worth of damage. A big hit was a surge of damage. And an a resource using "spell" took out more than a surge. And the swing save or die/suck effects were removed. How every fight played out in difficulty per level remained the same regardless of level..

But in 5e, nothing is standardized. You can't gauge a hit or spell's damage according to level. The "1 fail and you're half dead or full dead" are gone. So DMs tend to play nicer.

 

[Todd Roybark]

First off, what exactly about the 5e wraith do you consider "scary"?

The Life Drain ability of course. In an edition where most most effects do Hit Point damage and some status effect that usually translates to Disadvantage, reducing maximum hit points is a large impact to survivability.

The 3e Wraith played the same role, CON ability score damage in combination with damage ‘twas very potent. Many a PC and monster succumbed to the combo in my experience.

In either edition the Wraith was something that typically hit above it’s CR, due to sucking the life out of a PC.

Now If you feel the 5e Wraith is weak compared to the 3e Wraith in reference to their place in their respective systems, I would be interested in your thoughts.

 

[tetrasodium]

The Life Drain ability of course. In an edition where most most effects do Hit Point damage and some status effect that usually translates to Disadvantage, reducing maximum hit points is a large impact to survivability.

The 3e Wraith played the same role, CON ability score damage in combination with damage ‘twas very potent. Many a PC and monster succumbed to the combo in my experience.

In either edition the Wraith was something that typically hit above it’s CR, due to sucking the life out of a PC.

Now If you feel the 5e Wraith is weak compared to the 3e Wraith in reference to their place in their respective systems, I would be interested in your thoughts.

Not even close, from your reply I'm thinking you underestimate either what it took to remove in 3.5 or massively overestimate what it takes to remove in 3.5

Hopefully I don't need to go over incorporeal traits again. The 3.5 wraith was almost guaranteed to hit your tanks because of that, the only people who had a reasonable chance of avoiding it for more than just luck were dex types who were usually rogues & rangers lacking in co as well as fort saves so whoever was probably taking them was doing it with roughly mage armor+dex at best or close to touch ac.

Now getting rid of those 1d6 points of con damage, you recovered one point per day or 1d4 points with lesser restoration. Greater restoration was a 5th level spell that could recover all of it sure, but because everyone who had either needed to explicitly prepare X many uses of it you couldn't just prepare it & use it if needed like now those were even more significant

In closing on the 3.5 wraith, a character with very high con might have con in the low to high 20's while having hp in the 60-80+ range so that 1d6 was chipping away at a much smaller pool where you simply died if it reached zero. Not only that is because con bonus applies each level getting hit for an average of 3.5 (lets say 3) meant that a level 10 character was losing 10-20 hp from con damage alone each round & even if they hit the wraith still had a 50% chance of doing nothing on that attack. Not only that, because it's targeting con you have worse and worse odds of saving the more you go. Because of that it wasn't uncommon to be more afraid of being killed by con damage with lots of hit points left.

Now the 5e wraith. It's not ignoring armor so that +6 to hit vrs just plate & a shield needs to roll a 14 or better. Yes 4d8+3 averages out to a similar number of hit points lost, but it's only target it hp & you've got gobs more hp than con.

Not only does the wraith have very poor odds of hitting in 5e, but it also no longer causes a death spiral to build as those hits land. You no longer need to rest one day per point either, get a single good night's sleep & the lifedrain is all gone in the morning.

There is also the fact that it's necrotic rather than ability score damage so any necrotic resistance halves the damage it does when it does hit in 5e. You also only need a magic weapon or elemental damage to ignore resistance & don't have the 50%miss even if you hit

a creature that imposes "we should take a long rest to let everyone recover all of their hp damage and recover all our spell slots plus maybe nova those a bit more if we see them again" isn't scary... a creature that can quickly impose "guys we need to spend a week plus recovering con damage but can maybe get that down to two or three days if someone can prepare lesser restoration a bunch after the first... do we have anything that works better than mage armor if we see more?" is

Rust monsters... various oozes, trog stench, everything with level drain, stuff with nasty poisons, & probably lots more I'm overlooking that did ability damage & other save or suck/save and suck/suc/save or lose abilities, etc all got similar defang'ing treatment in 5e