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

[WayOfTheFourElements]

I would, if that was the situation I found myself in as DM.

I'd probably average out their initiatives so a vaguely equal number would fire on each segment (I use 6-segment rounds); unless they were under command in which case they' d more or less all fire at once.

I'd make each roll mostly because I'd want to know how many critted and how many fumbled, and what the consequences of said fumbles were; and partly to get a sense of when the target went down if at all. (relevant if the archers aren't all firing at once, when can they switch to another target?)

In those situations, I always ask the players to help me with the rolls. One person make 100 rolls takes a while; 7 people making 10-15 rolls is much more efficient.

 

[Garthanos]

I would, if that was the situation I found myself in as DM.

fundamentally impractical

 

[Garthanos]

We are kind of back tracking on the thread here.

You might have back tracked it was a side branch unrelated to my comment about newer D&D being less greed and fear driven ... that you thought this diatribe somehow refuted. One where modern D&D made opposing and fighting evil NOT a mistake any more.

Somehow this relates to amount of combat in a day it takes to challenge characters and how you think that recovering alone makes something mythic.

 

[Oofta]

Your right that I did, but the kinds of & volume of things you need to send at players as they advance combined with the ability to erase the consequences of resource expenditure and attrition from combat shifts towards that direction. Take the earlier example that @Man in the Funny Hat made about a group fighting off waves of vampires with the gm remarking in astonishment at how much the group could dish out & shrug off as an example.

We have no idea of the details. I've seen DMs run monsters poorly, ignoring or misreading abilities. Assuming vampire spawn instead of Vampire Lords maybe they didn't realize the claw attack gave the vampires a grapple check or didn't understand that escaping a grapple required an action. Maybe they didn't understand how multi attack worked. Last, but not least we have no idea of the party level,average AC, if a cleric could cast multiple Turn Undeads, if his dice were cold or if the vampires always showed up in fireball formation.

As a DM if you feel like you have to throw armies or gods as the PCs, you're playing a different game than the one I play. I follow fairly close to the base rules and suggestions and crank up the difficulty a fraction. If I wanted to kill off PCs I could easily do it by double tapping more often, but it's not what my current group wants.

Oh and because you continuously claim that my house rules invalidate my experience (and apparently, the experience of everyone else that has no difficulty challenging PCs), the only house rules I use that apply to this are that Raise Dead is difficult, Resurrection effectively doesn't exist. I use the alternate long rest rule but compensate by multiplying duration for spells that last an hour or more by 5. The only effect of the alternate rest rule is pacing, not power or deadliness.

 

[tetrasodium]

You might have back tracked it was a side branch unrelated to my comment about newer D&D being less greed and fear driven ... that you thought this diatribe somehow refuted. One where modern D&D made opposing and fighting evil NOT a mistake any more.

Somehow this relates to amount of combat in a day it takes to challenge characters and how you think that recovering alone makes something mythic.

"alone" I've also talked at length about how monsters with scary effects like ghoul/whight/trog/rust monster/ooze/etc were scaled back so far that they were defanged & no longer particularly scary... I've also talked about how 5e gives pc's a damage reduction equal to current hp up to max hp that can be completely negated with a single 1d4 healing word over & over again... I've also talked about how combined with dialing back the hurt on baddy save or x effects like life drain & such the opportunity cost to have "enough but not too much" was affected from moving from vancian to spontanious casting on top of toning back the effects themselves. I've also talked about how that same vancian to spontanious casting switch made it possilble to ignore things like heal kit dependency & slow natural healing by just dumping any leftover spell slots up to just enough in case of surprise attack into the right amount of heals before recovering all of those slots plus the ones used being $class since the last time the party decided to sleep for the night rather than aim for forced march penalties & not get all their stuff back.. I'm sure that I've also talked about quite a bit else through this thread.and am not alone in talking about those things..... If you wanted to discuss something without the weight of the thread you were discussing them in being relevant in any way there's a new thread button for that but you didn't use that button

 

[R_J_K75]

Yeah I would say so. I was just coming up with a trap for a locked box with Glyph of Warding on it and thought it'd be pretty devious to put a Water breathing spell. Figured that any air breathing creature that triggered the glyph would have "x" amount of time to find water or start to suffocate. Once again 5E had to make it player friendly by stipulating in the spell that the recipient must be willing, and even then the creature retains their normal mode of respiration. LAME!! Of course as the DM I could override this but it seems sometimes a DM has to bend the RAW too much to add a sense of danger to the game.

 

[Garthanos]

"alone" I've also talked at length about how monsters with scary effects like ghoul/whight/trog/rust monster/ooze/etc were scaled back so far that they were defanged & no longer particularly scary

Yes if you make fighting evil not an error ... you cannot make it usually or frequently a maiming choice. You treat things like that as a McGuffin Quest to find the thing to make it fightable or you defang them so that stoning has intermediate effects and the hero can undo his allies being stoned by wiping the Medusas own blood on them.

 

[Chaosmancer]

There you go, every butler is a literal demon like sebastian from black butler, former SIS like Alfred, every maid a literal dragon like tohru, everyone in the kitchen is choji, & everyone else is secretly an almighty janitor. 5e is setup to enforce that.

Could you actually read the post I made instead of declaring your righteousness?

Butlers, maids, scullery workers? Those all make up the other 175 skilled and unskilled workers. I'm literally just talking about the guards and the non-essential figures, like mutated experiments from the local mad wizard. 175 staff is over half the people in the building. So, over half of them can likely just be normal civilians. Still leaves 125 guards.

In fact, I watched a little Black Butler. How many of the staff in the castle were literal demons? 1.

And that makes sense. The head butler is a demon, great. The others are not. But the 100's of guards patrolling the grounds probably aren't street toughs in fancy duds. They probably are something more dangerous, like vampire spawn, since the Vampire Lord would probably much prefer perfectly loyal soldiers.

The head chef? Might be tougher than a mortal, but doesn't have to be. He could be the one to open the pen and let out the master's hunting dogs, who aren't in that section of 300 staff, because they are dogs. And a vampire lord isn't going to have greyhounds or poodles as their hunting dogs. They will have Hell Hounds, or Shadow Mastiffs. Something nasty.

So, no need for every single maid to be a dragon. That isn't the point here. But, there might be a dragon as a mage advisor. Or a mount. And it still wouldn't tip the scales like you seem to think.

 

[tetrasodium]

Could you actually read the post I made instead of declaring your righteousness?

Butlers, maids, scullery workers? Those all make up the other 175 skilled and unskilled workers. I'm literally just talking about the guards and the non-essential figures, like mutated experiments from the local mad wizard. 175 staff is over half the people in the building. So, over half of them can likely just be normal civilians. Still leaves 125 guards.

In fact, I watched a little Black Butler. How many of the staff in the castle were literal demons? 1.

And that makes sense. The head butler is a demon, great. The others are not. But the 100's of guards patrolling the grounds probably aren't street toughs in fancy duds. They probably are something more dangerous, like vampire spawn, since the Vampire Lord would probably much prefer perfectly loyal soldiers.

The head chef? Might be tougher than a mortal, but doesn't have to be. He could be the one to open the pen and let out the master's hunting dogs, who aren't in that section of 300 staff, because they are dogs. And a vampire lord isn't going to have greyhounds or poodles as their hunting dogs. They will have Hell Hounds, or Shadow Mastiffs. Something nasty.

So, no need for every single maid to be a dragon. That isn't the point here. But, there might be a dragon as a mage advisor. Or a mount. And it still wouldn't tip the scales like you seem to think.

You still aren't getting it. The 6-8 encounter adam west baman style combined with the ease of recovery, lack of danger, lack of attrition, & how fewer encounters encourages mythic powerscale level nova usage puts up a badWrongFun fence around the playstyles not squarely in the playstyles wotc wanted to "encourage" like was done elsewhere with deliberately imbalanced mechanics.

 

[Oofta]

You still aren't getting it. The 6-8 encounter adam west baman style combined with the ease of recovery, lack of danger, lack of attrition, & how fewer encounters encourages mythic powerscale level nova usage puts up a badWrongFun fence around the playstyles not squarely in the playstyles wotc wanted to "encourage" like was done elsewhere with deliberately imbalanced mechanics.

Maybe, just maybe you just don't get it. If it's an issue at your table, let's talk solutions because it's far from a universal issue like you keep asserting.

But if you just want to continue screaming at the rain I guess nobody can stop you.