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

[tetrasodium]

Two different weapons and maybe a ranged weapon for flying enemies is perfectly fine. But having a cold iron weapon, a good weapon, a chaotic weapon, a fire weapon etc etc?




To me, it feels like a lot of old challenges were rooted in 'gotcha!' mechanics and were rendered moot by enough system mastery, especially in relation to spells.

It's interesting to note that a lot of what made old challenges 'challenging' like not having the right spell prepared at the right level, were rendered moot by giving the casters a boost to their flexibility. I find it ironic you, who want the Wizard to be better, complain the game is too easy at the same time

I don't know why a +3 Ice Burst Sword wouldn't be Magical if not used as a sword. Just make it a +3 Icy Burst Club. I mean, in 5e a Greatsword is a two handed 2D6 weapon. A Greatclub is two handed 1D8. Seem like a fair drop in effectiveness if used as a blunt instrument.

On your first point, That's why I liked eberron's addition of byeshek & flametouched iron. Byeshk let you overcome the dr on "daelkyr"(basically aberrations) & flaemtouched iron counted as good(so undead, fiends, etc) without the alignment needs of holy/lawful/chaotic weapons so if you carried a bludgeoning, a slashing & piercing weapon with one of them being flametouched iron ad another byeshek you were probably good against everything but damage specific stuff like skeleton & zombie had even if those metals weren't your +3 icy burst greatsword named glacier's edge. I don't remember a lot of fey players were likely to battle & ctrl-f in the 3.5 mm only lists a handful of goodish low level types.

things like level drain /ability damage/etc weren't so much rendered moot by having the right spell prepared because greater restoration was something a level thirteen cleric could cast once, while lesser spells like lesser restoration only helped recover faster than 1 point per day. That also certainly had nothing to do with the fact that con & other ability damage was hitting a pool of what was likely to be ~10-20something with d6 damage as opposed to a much larger pool of 60-80+ hitpoints. If multiple people wound up with ability score damage that's going to be a big hit to the group & not something you could just solve by getting a single good night's sleep. Take the wraith though, switching from ability score damage to hp reduction that goes away after a good nap was only part of what changed since the 5e wraith is no longer ignoring armor & takes a 14 to hit off the rack plate+shield making it harder to get and trivial to remove

On the wanting wizard more powerful point, I think you are probably misinterpreting some stuff said elsewhere or reading in some of your own biases as implied with things not said. Switching from prepared vancian to spontaneous casting absolutely changed the cost of many mitigating spells, keeping all spell slots recovered after a good night's sleep while simultaneously changing it so you recover all hp after that sleep threw off the balance in other areas though & shifted the cost of using those mitigating spells to near zero. Getting away from subjective things like meaningful dr, ability damage, incorporeal traits & so on... look at how that affects healer's kit dependency & slow natural healing from dmg 266 & 267.

Spoiler

Those are unquestionably written for a gm who wants to make it nontrivial to recover from combat so the discussion should be purely objective. In theory you can't spend hit dice on short rests & need to use a healer's kit (hope you have enough for everyone!) so it should be pretty effective... but it's quite the opposite. Unlike in the past where the healer types might prepare X number of this that or the other healing spells they only need to prepare a healing spell & can use as many or as few spells as needed. Between a paladin & divine soul scorlock my ravenloft campaign using both of those was barely even affected when they got pulled through the mist around level 5 & subject to them. There was no change in play whatsoever

Yes there is the gritty realism dial

Spoiler

but that dial causes even larger problems unrelated to the ones it can have on campaign flow & pacing that others noted earlier. First is the problems trying to balance the needs of short rest & long rest classes, but also look at how many magic items recharge daily rather than by rest. So now by attempting to slow down the game you've ensured that those items are pretty much guaranteed to completely refill on every long rest allowing them to be pretty spammable & managed to dramatically raise the power level by slowing down long rests.

Some of these problems created by spontaneous casting as the norm could have been fixed by using things like the spell slot recovery rate from ad&d(?) where it took a number of days(hours?) times the level of spell slot you were preparing a spell for with each spell/spell slot; but doing that would run back into gritty realism's problems & possibly create problems of its own. Healer's kit dependency suddenly looks a lot more impactful when everyone with a cure spell & unused spellslots is hesitant to start a rest with the words "I've got xyz spell slots unused who needs healing" because that 111122 s slot burn is going to take 8 hours, 8 days, or whatever & still won't even touch the spell slots they burned being a $class so better stock up on healing kits.

 

[Undrave]

Between a paladin & divine soul scorlock my ravenloft campaign using both of those was barely even affected when they got pulled through the mist around level 5 & subject to them. There was no change in play whatsoever

They really should have kept surge-based healing with surge-less being rare.

My group has a Paladin, a GOO Warlock, a Barbarian and a Monk and we end up spending HD a lot more than other groups I've been in, so really the problem is probably in the free healing of full casters.

 

[billd91]

This isn't a direct response to anybody but let me just say: I don't really care much for 'appeal to tradition' as a design ethos. It's interesting to learn how the game used to be designed but I'm not interested in replicating it 1:1 in 5e just because it's 'how it used to be'.

5e doesn't replicate previous design 1:1, no later edition of D&D has ever done that after the first. But if there's no tradition at all, what's the point of calling a game a new edition? It wouldn't be a new edition, it would be a new game. So like it or not, you can expect that there's going to be something from the old in the new to maintain the game's character (or tradition if that's what you want to call it).

 

[tetrasodium]

They really should have kept surge-based healing with surge-less being rare.

My group has a Paladin, a GOO Warlock, a Barbarian and a Monk and we end up spending HD a lot more than other groups I've been in, so really the problem is probably in the free healing of full casters.

your probably right but changing the availability of surgeless healing would be very difficult because so many classes get cure wounds healing word or some other healing spell(s).

Death saves & the removal of negative hp/bleeding out/-5hp=ded was trying to get around the fact that it didn't scale well & became trivial to blow well past -5 in too many situations... it was a laudable goal, but it also meant having even a single point of health was good to protect you against everything between current health+max health & that had rediculous side effects as many have brought up in the thread.
I think a better method than death saves & wishing damage away into the corn field would be something like this
Each level you gain a number of grit points equal to your costitution mod plus half your strength mod (minimum zero) that represents your ability to continue fighting in the fact of mortal & potentially lethal wounds. When you fall below zero hit points you continue to accumulate damage until you reach your maximum grit. For example: Alice is level 10 with 20 strength & 16 con so has 55 grit while Bob has 6 strength & 12 con so has 5 points of grit. Well into a combat where alice has 18hp & bob 12hp remaining both are hit by a fireball dealing 33 fire damage resulting in alice at -15 hp while bob is dead at -21. While Alice will live she needs to heal all of those 15 points before she can begin recovering hit points normally. Bob is hoping for options other than reincarnate.

 

[Undrave]

your probably right but changing the availability of surgeless healing would be very difficult because so many classes get cure wounds healing word or some other healing spell(s).

Death saves & the removal of negative hp/bleeding out/-5hp=ded was trying to get around the fact that it didn't scale well & became trivial to blow well past -5 in too many situations... it was a laudable goal, but it also meant having even a single point of health was good to protect you against everything between current health+max health & that had rediculous side effects as many have brought up in the thread.
I think a better method than death saves & wishing damage away into the corn field would be something like this
Each level you gain a number of grit points equal to your costitution mod plus half your strength mod (minimum zero) that represents your ability to continue fighting in the fact of mortal & potentially lethal wounds. When you fall below zero hit points you continue to accumulate damage until you reach your maximum grit. For example: Alice is level 10 with 20 strength & 16 con so has 55 grit while Bob has 6 strength & 12 con so has 5 points of grit. Well into a combat where alice has 18hp & bob 12hp remaining both are hit by a fireball dealing 33 fire damage resulting in alice at -15 hp while bob is dead at -21. While Alice will live she needs to heal all of those 15 points before she can begin recovering hit points normally. Bob is hoping for options other than reincarnate.

Surgeless Healing was super rare in 4e. Cure Wounds and Healing Word were all surge based. They also scaled better since the basis was the healed character's 1/4 max HP value.

Your solution is interesting but feels a bit too fiddly.

And 5e HAS rules for Instant Death:

Instant Death
Massive damage can kill you instantly. When damage reduces you to 0 Hit Points and there is damage remaining, you die if the remaining damage equals or exceeds your hit point maximum.

For example, a Cleric with a maximum of 12 Hit Points currently has 6 Hit Points. If she takes 18 damage from an Attack, she is reduced to 0 Hit Points, but 12 damage remains. Because the remaining damage equals her hit point maximum, the Cleric dies.

Of course this doesn't applies to higher level that much but still... 1 HP isn't a sure thing.

And taking damage after your down to 0 means you auto fail 2 Death Save, so if you fail on your turn you're dead... You could rule that taking half your max HP equals one failed Death Save.

Also, in 4e, your Death Saves didn't reset until you took a rest, so there was consequences to dropping to 0 HP. That also seems like a decent variant to me.

 

[Imaro]

This isn't a direct response to anybody but let me just say: I don't really care much for 'appeal to tradition' as a design ethos. It's interesting to learn how the game used to be designed but I'm not interested in replicating it 1:1 in 5e just because it's 'how it used to be'.



I think the 6-8 encounter guidelines are a bit much. I feel like the game would be better served if it was balanced around 4-5 encounters per day instead.

So combine two encounters into one and a short rest afterwards...

 

[tetrasodium]

Surgeless Healing was super rare in 4e. Cure Wounds and Healing Word were all surge based. They also scaled better since the basis was the healed character's 1/4 max HP value.

Your solution is interesting but feels a bit too fiddly.

And 5e HAS rules for Instant Death:



Of course this doesn't applies to higher level that much but still... 1 HP isn't a sure thing.

And taking damage after your down to 0 means you auto fail 2 Death Save, so if you fail on your turn you're dead... You could rule that taking half your max HP equals one failed Death Save.

Also, in 4e, your Death Saves didn't reset until you took a rest, so there was consequences to dropping to 0 HP. That also seems like a decent variant to me.

Yea, the fiddly I agree that something feels unfinished with it & that's part of why I haven't started using it but I think it does a nice job of scaling while niche protecting strength/con types likely to be taking the brunt of damage without things like the rogue's evasion & cunning action BA disengage or whomever's range/absorb elements since we are talking about it, this might remove some of the fiddly feel

Yea it has death by massive damage but without the old 3&4x crit multipliers it's almost impossible to occur outside the early levels

 

[Lanefan]

anyway, I think 5e is simply the second least accidentally lethal game, but least challenging? I’d give that to 3.5, personally. Much to easy to powergame a group into invulnerability, IME.

The challenge there just gets moved from in-game (character risk in the fiction) to the metagame (how well can I build this thing at the table).

Bleah.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Not exactly- I'm saying the game should not assume X amount of combat, and design the game and PC's abilities around X amount of combat- with very specific rules. In typical D&D where classes all have their own little set of internal rules to "refresh"- per short rest, per long rest. and there is the inherent caster vs non caster issue of Vancian casting-The DM now has to design the adventure around a game mechanic to "ensure balance" instead of what is appropriate for the adventure/story/fiction. Fiction should inform the rules, not Rules informing the fiction (IMO of course)

See the new article from JT and how they handled it in 13th Age- which eliminates this because thecaster classes are far more balanced and all classes work off the same general frameworks and uses a per 4 combat model. Doesn't matter if it's 4 combats in 3 days or 4 combats in 4 hours or how level appropriate they are/aren't.

I don't know, I think they have to.

Like, sleep wrecks a single low level encounter. Casting sleep will 9 times out of 10 win the fight at levels 1-3. This isn't a big problem though, because the game assumes there will be more than one fight, and the limited nature of spell slots means that the caster can't cast sleep in every single one of them

If the designers did not make any assumptions, those spells would have to be nerfed, because you could not assume they will be balanced by not showing up in every fight. You have to act as though there will only be 1 fight in the day.

And then the DM who does 4 or 5 fights ends up with the problem of that being far too deadly, because players were designed to handle 1 fight.

Lol no. It’s RAW. Fire damage isn’t “non-magical bludgeoning slashing or piercing damage”. It needn’t be magical fire.

I think they was refering to dumping oil on the sword and letting it deal fire damage.

It is possible they thought the example was that the sword would then deal 1d8+mod fire damage, or they were referring to being able to get enough oil on a sword for it to burn for the entire combat for use against the weres.

Edit: Seems that was addressed.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The challenge there just gets moved from in-game (character risk in the fiction) to the metagame (how well can I build this thing at the table).

Bleah.

That’s the case in every edition. DMs either craft encounters in an effort to hit a certain difficulty, or they don’t. In every edition. 5e, and even more so 4e, just make it easier for the DM to accurately predict what the difficulty level will actually be.

unless you mean character build, which, I guess has only Really been a major thing since 2e? Still, in game challenge is still exactly as much a part of the game in 5e as the DM decides to make it.