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

[S'mon]

The point isn't that the staff shouldn't be good against the skeleton, the point I was making is that there's no reason a sword should be losing effectiveness against a skeleton just because it's 'slashing damage'. The sword is still heavy and made of metal, so it should still have the heft and toughness to break bones the same way a stick of hard wood does. It shouldn't be, in this scenario, a situation so desperate as to require a switch of weapon.

I'm totally with you on the rapier.

Also, turning any weapon into an improvised club should be a basic part of the rules

I agree with you enough that for my Mini Six RPG campaign I have blunt & slashing do full damage to skeletons, piercing half damage. Zombies take half from blunt & piercing, full from slashing.

 

[Lanefan]

OK, now this has my attention. A few quick thoughts...

1) bloodied HP (BHP = [STR mod + Con Mod x size]) in addition to HP as normal

Maybe I'm just dumb, but what are you using to get a number for "size" to use as a multiplier? I ask because I'd like to get an idea of how many BHP a typical character would have.

2) Armor w/ DR (only when attacking BHP: DR = AC-10), this makes heavy armor more important which we like
3) death at 0 BHP

Death outright, or death saves as per 5e RAW?

And, do you have any mechanism for going unconscious without dying?

One that leaps to mind would be any time you take damage that leaves you in positive BHP you need to make a Con save at DC [5 + the amount of BHP you have lost from your total] or collapse unconscious.

Example: character has however many normal hit points (I'll call these Fatigue Points, or FP) plus 14 BP. Character takes damage that leave it with 12 BP, meaning it's lost 2 thus its consciousness save is DC [5 + 2] 7. Character then gets hit again for 9 more points damage leaving it at 3 BP; it now has to make a save at DC [5 + 9 + 2] 16 to stay upright.

Unconscious characters cannot benefit from second-wind-like effects, nor can they heal themselves in any way, but can be healed as normal by someone else (but see below!), or awoken without healing if someone spends an action to do so and is within touch reach.

If not awoken by combat's end the downed PC makes a save of the same DC that knocked it out, success meaning it awakens on its own and failure meaning the character will bleed out and die in [some time period based on how damaged it is] if not tended. (most of the time someone will tend the fallen PC right after combat anyway, making this largely moot; this mechanism exists for cases where there's no-one left to help e.g. everyone is dead, unconscious, or fleeing for their lives) EDIT TO ADD: For added interest, if on such a roll the result is 1 under, 1 over, or bang on the DC number then nothing happens, the character remains unconscious but stable, and the process repeats in 1d30 minutes.

5) regular healing for HP, slow healing for BHP (1 HP per week)

To make BP damage even more significant you could also have magical healing of any kind be only half as effective when curing BP.

 

[dave2008]

Maybe I'm just dumb, but what are you using to get a number for "size" to use as a multiplier? I ask because I'd like to get an idea of how many BHP a typical character would have.

First I wrote the forumla wrong (bracket in wrong place), it is (CON mod + STR mod) x SIZE. Medium is 1 (L = 2, H = 3, G = 4). So for most humanoids it is simply CON mod + STR mod

Death outright, or death saves as per 5e RAW?

Death at 0, no death saves. But you could add them if you want.

And, do you have any mechanism for going unconscious without dying?

We don't other than the standard, you can say they are unconscious rather than dead at 0.

One that leaps to mind would be any time you take damage that leaves you in positive BHP you need to make a Con save at DC [5 + the amount of BHP you have lost from your total] or collapse unconscious.

Example: character has however many normal hit points (I'll call these Fatigue Points, or FP) plus 14 BP. Character takes damage that leave it with 12 BP, meaning it's lost 2 thus its consciousness save is DC [5 + 2] 7. Character then gets hit again for 9 more points damage leaving it at 3 BP; it now has to make a save at DC [5 + 9 + 2] 16 to stay upright.

Unconscious characters cannot benefit from second-wind-like effects, nor can they heal themselves in any way, but can be healed as normal by someone else (but see below!), or awoken without healing if someone spends an action to do so and is within touch reach.

If not awoken by combat's end the downed PC makes a save of the same DC that knocked it out, success meaning it awakens on its own and failure meaning the character will bleed out and die in [some time period based on how damaged it is] if not tended. (most of the time someone will tend the fallen PC right after combat anyway, making this largely moot; this mechanism exists for cases where there's no-one left to help e.g. everyone is dead, unconscious, or fleeing for their lives) EDIT TO ADD: For added interest, if on such a roll the result is 1 under, 1 over, or bang on the DC number then nothing happens, the character remains unconscious but stable, and the process repeats in 1d30 minutes.

That makes some sense. I think there are lots of ways to add more grit & "realism" to our base system, but my group wasn't interested in going that next level.

To make BP damage even more significant you could also have magical healing of any kind be only half as effective when curing BP.

Possibly, right now the only thing we do is that any extra healing after healing BHP is lost. You have to cast another spell of spend HD to heal up your HP.

I guess I should explain a little how it works.
1) AC works normally.
2) You take damage to HP first. When that is gone, you take damage to BHP.
2a) We had a rule that crit take damage from both (which makes sense to me), but it was too deadly for my group. I have thought about bringing back, confirmation roles for crits to see if that helps.
3)Any hit to your BHP, the damage is first reduced by your armors DR (AC-10). Since your BHP are so few it makes heavy armor more valuable.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Using HD to heal, and it being dependent on healer's kit is part of my game since (almost) the beginning of 5ed and it works quite well. Healer's kit are a valued ressource as they help the healers in keeping their spell slots for emergency or something other than healing. It does not render our martial characters weaker by any stretch as they are the ones that are usually targeted for magical healing. By using this rule, it does help in making the characters more cautious.

In addition, it made the Healer and Inspiring leader's feat quite desirable at my table. At least one of these always appear in any group I'm DMing.

I'd like to chime in and say that both Healer and Inspiring Leader are feats I've taken in game with normal healing and rest rules, and both have been quite valuable.

In fact, I seem to have started a little movement for a while, where everyone took Inspiring Leader.

 

[tetrasodium]

I've bolded a word there - what does it mean?

Guessing either massive typo or this.

Byeshk - Eberron Unlimited

eberronunlimited.wikidot.com

 

[fearsomepirate]

To answer the OP, and having read most of the discussion:

As others have noted, random character destruction isn't actually very challenging in itself; it merely makes guessing where the DM put something that will instantly kill you a more prominent element of the game. But on that front, 5e is the 2nd least-challenging edition after 4e. You probably aren't going to be randomly killed by a single bad roll, and you definitely aren't getting level-drained.

This means the overall game environment is one where you're much less actively paranoid about getting killed, and need to expend a great deal less effort, such as constantly tapping the floor with a ten-foot pole, to not die. But this is more about changing conventions. There is, of course, nothing in the 5e rules that says I can't throw a save-or-die at my players, but this is largely frowned upon, because most people hate that mechanic. It is still not that hard to kill 5e characters, especially if you frequently have multi-attacking monsters continue to hit downed characters.

However, 5e is much more challenging than 3.5 at high level. A decent 3.5 player can pretty easily craft a 17th-level character that controls the multiverse with his farts, and there isn't much a DM can do about it beyond rocks-fall-you-die. An AD&D party with the right spells can make absolute mincemeat of the fabric of reality. 5e characters aren't nearly so overwhelming, due in large part to the Concentration mechanic and Bounded Accuracy.

In the end, 5e probably doesn't feel that challenging more because D&D culture has changed than anything. Traps that kill players are a no-no. Orcs aren't supposed to cut the rope bridge over the chasm as the party crosses it. If you know the wizard never learned Feather Fall, you're not supposed to have a Roc pick him up and drop him off a cliff. You're not supposed to have a room the party can't Leroy Jenkins through. An 11th-level assassin who disguises himself as a bartender and quietly slips deadly poison into a player's drink with a SoH check he easily, easily rolls over 20 on isn't the sort of thing you're supposed to do. An Alien-style monster that lays a deadly egg into a player that will certainly kill him in five days if the party fails to check him for diseases after battle is bad form. A dragon is supposed to land on the ground and fight honorably, not hang around in the sky and sweep the party with his breath weapon every time it recharges. That's just bad form.

Bad form, but not forbidden by RAW, as my players have learned over the years.

 

[slobster]

I've bolded a word there - what does it mean?

It's a special metal from the Eberron campaign setting that is effective against aberrations there. The silver to their werewolf, essentially. I mentioned it because I made aboleths immune to all physical damage, including magical weapons, unless it was made of byeshk in one of my games, to contribute to how alien and weird they were. To my knowledge they've never been printed that way in Eberron, but I thought it was cool.

 

[Chaosmancer]

In the end, 5e probably doesn't feel that challenging more because D&D culture has changed than anything. Traps that kill players are a no-no. Orcs aren't supposed to cut the rope bridge over the chasm as the party crosses it. If you know the wizard never learned Feather Fall, you're not supposed to have a Roc pick him up and drop him off a cliff. You're not supposed to have a room the party can't Leroy Jenkins through. An 11th-level assassin who disguises himself as a bartender and quietly slips deadly poison into a player's drink with a SoH check he easily, easily rolls over 20 on isn't the sort of thing you're supposed to do. An Alien-style monster that lays a deadly egg into a player that will certainly kill him in five days if the party fails to check him for diseases after battle is bad form. A dragon is supposed to land on the ground and fight honorably, not hang around in the sky and sweep the party with his breath weapon every time it recharges. That's just bad form.

Bad form, but not forbidden by RAW, as my players have learned over the years.

I agree with most of your post, but a few of your examples here a feel are a little overreaching.

For example, I agree that a trap that if you fail the DM just says "your character is dead" is bad form.

I disagree that the dragon is supposed to act like an idiot and die on the ground.

I agree secretly infecting a player with a deadly egg that they have no reason to suspect is bad form. Doing it in a way that they suspect something is wrong is perfectly fine.

Having an assassin kill them out of the blue for no reason? Bad form. Have an assassin poison and possibly kill them after they angered someone powerful enough to hire that assassin who threatened "you'll never see it coming"? Perfectly fine in my opinion. Though, I probably would do it in a way that isn't instant death, because that's boring.


And I feel like that is the core issue I have with some of the ways you can kill players. A high level assassin poisons the bottle of wine that the party is served. They drink it and they all die at the table. That's a "rocks fall" scenario, the game is just over now. And the example of the Roc, I'm iffy about. The Roc would logical grab people, fly up, and throw them to their deaths. But, doing it specifically because you know the party can't defend against that tactic is... skeevy. Sort of like every superman villain pulling out a chunk of kryptonite. It's specifically targeting a weak point on the meta level, not the game level and that just feels bad to me.

But if the party charges an orc band across a rope bridge, and the orcs just want to kill the party? Yeah, they are cutting that bridge. Might take an extra turn instead of doing it all at once, but they aren't going to let the players across to fight them fair and square, they are going to act intelligently to win.

 

[Krachek]

Long time ago, the role of the DM was to beat down the players.
Gotcha was a style of DMing.
I don’t know where it come from, but like a virus it spread out to a whole generation of players.
And today we have still resurgence of these old time.
but things have changed, people are wiser and smarter today, and challenge take now different forms.

 

[Garthanos]

Your particular whimsy meant their "ingenious" ways to avoid a fight were acceptable. GMs will not always agree on the realism or acceptability of any given plan, nor will they adjudicate them the same way...some calling for a roll here or there where others would not.

"Gotcha" monsters include things as simple as skeletons. You're dungeoneering, you listen at doors regularly....but skeletons don't talk, and just wait (one might say dead silent....ahem) for you to enter the room. They range up to things like earworms(?) that actually wait in the door to "punish" you for listening before entering.

I brought up those death in 24 hours for listening at the door traps and showed how I could very much adjudicate one of them into an interesting story using the tools in 4e once.... an elaborate skill challenge really with a nice feeling increasing anxiety factor going on.