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

[Undrave]

Looking at the game from a big picture view. I'd say 5e is definitely one of the less challenging versions of the game.

Mainly because of the stakes of choice in 5e seem to have been purposefully reduced. I attribute this to a number of factors:

• Ubiquity of magic and spells. Magic is easily accessible and available to every class. Spells are rules elements that overcome challenges. They are made more easily available. There are more ways to have character resources overcome challenges, instead of player choices.
• Spells and abilities that present challenges have been practically eliminated. There are very few detrimental effects that are not easily overcome. Life drain, damage, petrification is recovered after an 8 hour rest. Charm person only lasts an hour. There are less debilitating effects and those that exist are easily recovered from.
• Monsters that were previously immune to magical attacks are now only mostly resistant (1/2 damage). Even monsters that are actually immune are less challenging. Nearly every class has access to magical attacks such that resistance or immunity to normal attacks is all but irrelevant by 4th level. There is less need to think of alternate solutions. Just blast away.
• Death and dying rules are very easy. This couples with increased access to magic. Dropping to zero is not dangerous because of how much magic is available. Death saves make dying very rare. There is very little risk to being at 0 hit points.

I kill PCs mostly by massive damage at 1st level, or multi-attack against already 0 hp characters. Otherwise there is very little risk for PCs and there are very little long term consequences to PC actions in the game. By the rules of the default game, there is little consideration beyond the adventuring day.

At even 4th, 5th level, D&D 5E starts looking more like The Avengers than actual fantasy. At even 3rd to 4th level, every character is throwing magic lasers and turning into flame and flying like superheroes. The default style of play in 5e is definitely super hero fantasy. Add the new UA and now you have Iron Man.

Sleep 8 hours and multitudes of wounds, death touches by wraiths, and charm spells are immediately negated as if nothing ever happened. 5e is D&D easy mode.

what is ‘long term’ though? We’re playing a game where we can say ‘200 years later...’ without skipping a beat OR spend two hours playing a ten minute fight.

in the end, the 5e designer decided that it’s ‘unit of challenge’ was gonna be the “Adventuring Day” and balanced the game around it. It’s a decision that is no less valid than making your ‘unit of challenge’ a week, a month, a year or a single encounter even.

when evaluating 5e’s challenge level, you should essentially ignore anything not bookended by Long Rests. It is irrelevant. How does the challenge level of 5e over it’s ‘unit of challenge’ compares to other games over THEIR ‘unit of challenge’ and not vice versa.

I think older editions, especially the pre-3e ones, where balanced over a more vague and long term unit of challenge. It’s why Magic Users were balance over this idea of ‘weak at early level and powerful at later level’.

5e just has a more defined unit of challenge is all.

 

[Monayuris]

what is ‘long term’ though? We’re playing a game where we can say ‘200 years later...’ without skipping a beat OR spend two hours playing a ten minute fight.

Long term means that the effect becomes an element that adds to the game experience that it changes the parameters of your normal baseline that causes a non-trivial means of mitigation. It is the consequences of the game result and the difficulty in overcoming them.

There is no difference between your campaign stating '200 years later...' and '8 hours later...'. They are the same. It's not about fictional or narrative time passage. It is about consequences and choices that they require.

Long term means that the game doesn't sweep the complications and consequences of adventuring under the rug. The consequence is an issue that requires active action and choice by the player and the point of anything that happens to your character is that it adds to the choices you have to make as a player.

in the end, the 5e designer decided that it’s ‘unit of challenge’ was gonna be the “Adventuring Day” and balanced the game around it. It’s a decision that is no less valid than making your ‘unit of challenge’ a week, a month, a year or a single encounter even.

when evaluating 5e’s challenge level, you should essentially ignore anything not bookended by Long Rests. It is irrelevant. How does the challenge level of 5e over it’s ‘unit of challenge’ compares to other games over THEIR ‘unit of challenge’ and not vice versa.

I think older editions, especially the pre-3e ones, where balanced over a more vague and long term unit of challenge. It’s why Magic Users were balance over this idea of ‘weak at early level and powerful at later level’.

5e just has a more defined unit of challenge is all.

Within the same unit of challenge.

Resource management and its implications are easier in 5e.

Light cantrip makes torches unnecessary.
Goodberry makes rations unnecessary.
Hit Dice makes healing easier and more plentiful and removes risk of attrition.
Death saves make character death less likely and provides more time for other characters to heal them.
Ubiquitous cantrip attacks make magic attacks more common and devalue the threat of monsters that are resistant or immune to non-magical attacks.
Greater number of spell slots grant more access to magic and allow for more 'baked-in' solutions to game problems.
Majority of debilitating effects are guaranteed to end after the unit of challenge.
Recovery to full capability at the end of the unit of challenge is guaranteed which removes interesting and compelling changes in challenge.

 

[Lanefan]

what is ‘long term’ though? We’re playing a game where we can say ‘200 years later...’ without skipping a beat OR spend two hours playing a ten minute fight.

in the end, the 5e designer decided that it’s ‘unit of challenge’ was gonna be the “Adventuring Day” and balanced the game around it. It’s a decision that is no less valid than making your ‘unit of challenge’ a week, a month, a year or a single encounter even.

when evaluating 5e’s challenge level, you should essentially ignore anything not bookended by Long Rests. It is irrelevant. How does the challenge level of 5e over it’s ‘unit of challenge’ compares to other games over THEIR ‘unit of challenge’ and not vice versa.

I think older editions, especially the pre-3e ones, where balanced over a more vague and long term unit of challenge. It’s why Magic Users were balance over this idea of ‘weak at early level and powerful at later level’.

5e just has a more defined unit of challenge is all.

Ideally there should be no such thing as a temporal "unit of challenge".

Instead, there'd be varying challenges over all time frames: immediate challenges (the combat or other here-and-now situation you're in), short-term challenges (often exploration-related), mid-term challenges (incomplete overnight resource recovery), long-term challenges (adventure-length resource management), and campaign-length challenges (plot-related or wealth-related usually).

And the game should be able to throw 'em all at you at once.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Deadly is indeed challenging. When the game is more deadly, more thought, care, and strategy needs to be considered in order to succeed. With games like B/X and OSR games, which have death at zero hit points, save or die poisons, and minimal hit points, you have to approach the game from beyond just the rules. The rules will not help you and you don't have a safety net to fall back on. You have to use the world around you and develop strategies and tactics to flip the scales to your favor. You can't just use the abilities on your character sheet and expect to survive.

That is the ideal, but people will use the strategies and care they are going to use either way. And this sometimes leads to "pixel-ing" because if you trigger any trap, you die, so you take a 10 ft pole, give it to a hireling and have them tap every. single. square.

Actually, traps are a good example. Let me ask you this. Is the Tomb of Horrors challenging? Is it equally challenging if you know the answers to all the traps?

In video game design, this is a phenomena, though I can't remember the official term, but I tend to think of it as shallow challenge. Do the wrong thing, die. Do the right thing, move on. The problem is, after you solve it, it is boring. Because you just repeat the same steps.

And, another part of this, is that death is not a failure condition of DnD. "My character died" does not mean you have failed to complete the game, because you simply roll up another character. Killing PCs is meaningless in the grand scheme of the game, unless you make it meaningful, and part of making it meaningful to me, is making it rare. I've had players freak out over dropping to 0 hp. 0 hp, there are three healers in the party and only two enemies left. They freak out, and it becomes a bit of a scramble to save the party member, who is objectively in no real danger.

So, I don't need to make it so poisons instant kill, or dropping to zero hp instant kills, because my players already fear death, even though I can't think of a single 5e PC I've killed without the player asking me to (they were leaving the game, wanted to go out in a cool manner, so I did)

The lack of long term consequences and the reset of everything on a long rest removes a lot of strategic considerations. You don't have to worry about attrition or resource management. When you have limited resources and limited recovery of resources you are forced to make strategic decisions on how to use them. It forces tough choices like when to use a spell, whether or not to engage in a combat, what path to take in the wilds, whether to keep the ogre that has been charmed for 3 weeks around, etc. These kinds of choices are eliminated from the game in 5e.

They haven't been eliminated, they've been shortened.

The attrition is on the daily side of the scale, so you have to consider your resources for the day. Now, I will fully admit, that causes some issues with wilderness survival campaigns. Traveling three weeks through the woods where you fight maybe once every two days, is not a challenge for the party.

I've somewhat mitigated that by having HP require you spend HD during a long rest to heal, it shows some attrition on the parties resources. But on the daily scale, such as clearing a temple complex where you can get into two or three fights a day, those strategic decisions still appear, just on a shorter time scale. It isn't "do I use this spell now that I might need in three days" it is "do I use this spell now, or will I need it in the next room".

The point is the game is easier and less challenging because it eliminates challenging and difficult choices from the game. Having to roll a higher number does not make a game more challenging. Nor does having more powers and abilities. Nor does having more complicated mechanics.

My apologies because I did not define what I consider challenging...

What makes a game challenging is the difficulty of the choices the game presents to the players.

5e presents less difficult choices in its game play (compared to say B/X or OD&D), and that makes it easier and less challenging.

See, I agree with you, choices make the game challenging.

But "poison kills you if you fail a save" doesn't give the player a choice. What choice is there? Never get ambushed by a spider? You don't want to get ambushed anyways, so you are already trying to prevent that. Don't fail a save? You don't have a choice in that matter.

Now, I've never played B/X or OD&D, so maybe you are right, but it seems to me that all 5e did, is make it so that one bad choice doesn't kill a character. Which, I appreciate, because a dead character doesn't make choices. I like the chance for them to make multiple bad choices and get more and more desperate to get out of them.

Sure you can just roll up a new character, but you still got your previous one killed. You still got to live with that.

You have to live with it, if you made a choice.

The party lays down for the night, checking the campsite. The DM asks them to roll dice for perception. They all fail, especially the person on watch. The DM declares they never wake up, they are dead.

What do you as the player have to live with here? That you made a bad roll? You don't even know what killed you, so you have no way to change anything you did.

The thief checks for traps on the door, rolls poorly, dies. What do they do next time differently?

The fighter is walking through the woods with the party, goblin archers spring out of an ambush and shoot him with poisoned arrows. He fails the save, dies. What regrets should he have?

"Sometimes bad things just happen" is generally the response to these sort of scenarios, but that kind of highlights the point. Those things are deadly, but they aren't challenging, because the players made no decisions. "Next time they scout ahead for the goblins", who said they didn't do that this time? IF you make all the correct decisions, and still die due to bad luck, then there are no regrets, but also no challenge. Except to get luckier next time.

Yeah we are just going to have to agree to disagree on that issue.

When you might have to go up against save or die affects - that encounter is gonna prove challenging.
There is an overall loss condition - TPK. Just because you can draw up a new character sheet, it doesn't mean you haven't failed.

You can fail without dying too. Being captured by Drow Slavers instead of rescuing the princess is still failing. Yet, no one died.

TPK just means the story ends and you have to start another. And, save or die effects aren't challenging, they are a coin flip. Earlier in this thread I gave the example of a coin flip dungeon.

Enter a room, flip a coin. Heads you lived, tails you died. Go to the next room.

That is deadly, 50% chance of any character dying at any time. But it isn't challenging, because you can't make any decisions to effect the outcome.

In 5e there is no resurrection survival roll, no loss in constitution. Your hit points increase well over 9th level, you have feats nows, your abilities increase, magic is much easier to cast, the vancian magic system has been watered down, rogue skills are much easier to perform no more % and anyone can attempt to climb, pick pocket, detect/disarm traps or walk stealthily with reasonable (compared to prior editions) chance of success, especially if they are proficient, revivify & healing spirit, no -10 or 0 = dead - instead you have 3 death saves, attacks hit often enough...etc. I do not know how anyone can call that less challenging.

It is a no brainer. The real question is this less challenging than 4e. That answer I'm not so sure about.

Thank all the dice gods that Vancian is nearly dead. I hate the idea of trying to predict how many times I need a spell.

I'm also not sure why hp increasing past 9th level, in a game that goes to 20th level, is a bad thing. I'd be a little miffed to gain no benefits for 11 levels of play.

I like that skills are easier to perform, means I can succeed on things instead of randomly flailing about. I also like that anyone can climb or sneak. After all... anyone can climb or sneak. Seen a nine month old climb up a playset up past my shoulders. If they can climb, why can't any adult try climbing a surface.

Also, side note, what does most of this have to do with deadliness?

"Anyone can climb, the game is so much less challenging", what, previously if you fell in a pit you just died because you couldn't climb out? "Now anyone can talk the duke around to increasing the bounty" doesn't make the game less challenging.

And, frankly, less missing, less dying, more actual things happening that allow for decisons, which are the real challenging part of the game... I'm not seeing a lot of problems here.

Within the same unit of challenge.

Resource management and its implications are easier in 5e.

Light cantrip makes torches unnecessary.
Goodberry makes rations unnecessary.
Hit Dice makes healing easier and more plentiful and removes risk of attrition.
Death saves make character death less likely and provides more time for other characters to heal them.
Ubiquitous cantrip attacks make magic attacks more common and devalue the threat of monsters that are resistant or immune to non-magical attacks.
Greater number of spell slots grant more access to magic and allow for more 'baked-in' solutions to game problems.
Majority of debilitating effects are guaranteed to end after the unit of challenge.
Recovery to full capability at the end of the unit of challenge is guaranteed which removes interesting and compelling changes in challenge.

Alternatively:
Torches make Light cantrips unnecessary
Rations make Goodberry cantrips unnecessary.

Torches cost coppers, rations 5 silver. 10 gold will last you nearly a full week and that is pocket change to most adventuring parties. Plus, survival rolls or even the Outlander background (because if you've spent your life living off the land... you should be able to live off the land) do the same thing.

Also, a Giant in the Playground thread I was in pointed out that 3.X had far more spell slots that 5e. So, maybe more spell slots compared to B/X, but not the last twenty years of the game.

Recovering to full after the unit of challenge is kind of what you expect, isn't it?

After a month of resting in 3.5, pretty much every debilitating effect in the game was gone, right? Ability score drain recovered at a point a day, hp recovered at a point a day, spells slots recovered daily and healing spells, scrolls, potions, and wands were plentiful.

Magic attack cantrips may be more plentiful, but that allows magic users to be more than poor fighters at low levels. Most of my magic users don't bother getting a crossbow, it isn't worth it to them. Which I like, I want my mage using magic, not shooting a crossbow. If I wanted to shoot a crossbow, I'd play a rogue.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Death saving throws make it easier to kill characters for me. I just view surviving unconsciousness as the equivalent of the common response to character death in the old days: "Oh, Ragnar the Fighter has died...well, introducing Gragnar, the Slightly Different Fighter." I know that's not RAW, but it sure was done that way a lot. So when a character really does die in 5e, by golly, you're dead, and no, you can't just make somebody that's almost the same.

That said, I don't like the ease with which conditions dissipate. Practically, there's not a big difference between a condition that makes you leave the dungeon for a week and one that makes you leave it for a day, but outside of petrification, there's not much in 5e that requires the characters to do much outside of fighting and resting. For example, nearly all the Massive Damage effects in the DMG are immediately erased by magical healing. I had initially used them, but once the party had the ability to cast Healing Word more than three or four times a day, there was no point.

 

[JeffB]

That said, I don't like the ease with which conditions dissipate.

Me too. I'm not up for save or die all the time, or brutal level drain, but 5E just has a nice shiny veneer of deadliness on top when it comes to conditions. Nothing solid underneath. This also goes for 4E.

 

[Garthanos]

It isn't "do I use this spell now that I might need in three days" it is "do I use this spell now, or will I need it in the next room".

This and in 4e everyone had that kind of choice do I use my daily or wait till the next encounter.

 

[jayoungr]

But some games attach long term side effects from being raised from the dead which makes it more of a consequence. I agree that raise dead should have some significant consequence.

That's more a function of setting than system, in D&D. In Ravenloft, for example, there are more consequences for being raised from the dead than in the baseline assumption of the game: you may end up with a Dark Gift, and (in AL, at least) you're Touched by the Mists, which means certain enemies will do more damage to you.

 

[Chaosmancer]

That's more a function of setting than system, in D&D. In Ravenloft, for example, there are more consequences for being raised from the dead than in the baseline assumption of the game: you may end up with a Dark Gift, and (in AL, at least) you're Touched by the Mists, which means certain enemies will do more damage to you.

And that is a thing that can't be stated enough times.

For things like "how do you bring back the dead" homebrewing the crap out of it is perfectly fine. I like Mercer's ritual system, which brings more player involvement in the process than just marking off a spell slot. But, I also tend to not use the penalties, because no one ever remembers them. I think I did use them once that someone actually remembered, but it just didn't seem to have a big impact compared to the actual process of bringing them back from the dead.

 

[Undrave]

You can't just use the abilities on your character sheet and expect to survive.

Why even have character abilities then?

Within the same unit of challenge.

Resource management and its implications are easier in 5e.

Light cantrip makes torches unnecessary.
Goodberry makes rations unnecessary.

I think this is a result of the designer not being able to make tracking these things interesting, thus nobody ever bothered to track them so they just made them irrelevant to speed it up. Tracking torches and rations is bookkeeping and that's not an interesting challenge. Even picking who holds the torch isn't much of a challenge once you solve it one time. And Darkvision makes torches unnecessary before even taking a cantrip That said, Goodberry takes a spell slot and at lower level that could be a problem.

Hit Dice makes healing easier and more plentiful and removes risk of attrition.

Only if you consider attrition beyond the base Unit of Challenge of one day. Hit Dice don't regenerate during the day and they're one of the few resource that doesn't fully restore at the end of the Unit of Challenge, instead giving you HALF your HD back.

Death saves make character death less likely and provides more time for other characters to heal them.

Don't forget that if you take damage while at 0 HP you AUTOMATICALLY fail 2 death saves. Not 3, 2. That's a deliberate decision to make 0 HP a ticking clock and not an auto-death.

Let's say the DM scores a crit and brings you character from full to 0 HP in one single attack.

Scenario A: You're dead. Your allies can't do anything about it, so they go on without you and you sit back and watch them play with different tactics. Bad luck. Maybe the Mage pops an extra Slot he wasn't gonna use on this combat to make up for you dropping.

Scenario B: You're unconscious. Your allies need to position themselves so the enemies can't attack you, they'll drop what they do and try to heal you or make you stable, you're making death saving throws and feeling nervous. There's tension between finishing the combat, while dealing with your absence like in scenario A, and protecting your defenceless form.

Ubiquitous cantrip attacks make magic attacks more common and devalue the threat of monsters that are resistant or immune to non-magical attacks.

Cantrips exist because when you play a class you want to PLAY THAT CLASS. A spell caster that can only caster one spell a day is not a spell caster to me. By being able to do MAGIC all the time you feel more magical.

I will agree with you that something is missing, but I think it's because they didn't replace the old system with something new.

See, I'm not a fan of the way DnD uses immunity and resistance. Like, I'm a fan of Pokémon (I've played every gen since the beginning) and in that game I favour challenging in-game trainers with neutral Pokémon rather than go all out on the type coverage... But even there type match-ups are more interesting in Pokémon because of the reciprocity.

Aside from the Barbarian and a few spells it's hard for PCs to be on the receiving end of the Imunity/Resist/Weakness system. If, for exemple, using a weapon (or Cantrip) that does X damage type made you vulnerable to damage Type Y you'd have an interesting trade off and, again, tension. But damage in DnD is basically just a key for the monster-shape key hole, otherwise resistance just becomes like adding extra HP. You could give a monster more HP instead of resistance and no one would notice the difference.

So yes, Cantrip devalue the 'threat' of resistant monster, but I personally don't find that we lost anything particularly interesting or of value, but I do wish we'd gotten something else in return. Something more dynamic.

Greater number of spell slots grant more access to magic and allow for more 'baked-in' solutions to game problems.

I think that was a problem starting with 3e so this isn't anything new. I don't think the number of spell slots mean anything, it's more the impact of each individual slot that matters. If you had 20 spells slot but all you could do with them is cantrip level effect, it doesn't really have the same impact. In that respect I feel like 5e Spell Slots are less impactful than 3e Spell Slot (or 4e Dailies for that matter, of which you had less).

Majority of debilitating effects are guaranteed to end after the unit of challenge.
Recovery to full capability at the end of the unit of challenge is guaranteed which removes interesting and compelling changes in challenge.

Exept for HD that only recover at half-per unit. But that's really the point of a unit of challenge, you start relatively fresh at the start of each so it's not really an issue. It's just that you don't like the choice of Unit of Challenge and that's totally fair. I can respect that.

Heck, I think in most circumstance the base game IS easy for its unit of challenge, but that's a decision based on approachability of the game. What IS missing is more interesting tools to increase the difficulty. I just don't agree with your choices of tools to increase that difficulty.

Ideally there should be no such thing as a temporal "unit of challenge".

Instead, there'd be varying challenges over all time frames: immediate challenges (the combat or other here-and-now situation you're in), short-term challenges (often exploration-related), mid-term challenges (incomplete overnight resource recovery), long-term challenges (adventure-length resource management), and campaign-length challenges (plot-related or wealth-related usually).

And the game should be able to throw 'em all at you at once.

Ideally yeah, but the game has trouble even balancing ONE temporal unit of challenge, so I find it hard to believe they would be able to pull off multiple units in a single game. There's not standard length for an Adventure, or a Campaign for exemple, so how do you balance out the mechanics so that player have the ressources to overcome the challenge? Let alone balance it so one character doesn't obviate the participation of others? At best you'd need a type of reset mechanic (AKA rest types) for each different unit of challenge AND each classes would need a suite of ressources that fit each unit of challenge (AKA an AEDU style system) with maybe the ratio between each tweaked to avoid samey-ness.

It's a tough act to pull off to begin with, but doing all that while keeping the game as light and approachable as 5e? I think that it would have taken a LOT more play testing. I'd still be curious to see it though.

"Sometimes bad things just happen" is generally the response to these sort of scenarios, but that kind of highlights the point. Those things are deadly, but they aren't challenging, because the players made no decisions. "Next time they scout ahead for the goblins", who said they didn't do that this time? IF you make all the correct decisions, and still die due to bad luck, then there are no regrets, but also no challenge. Except to get luckier next time.

I agree!