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<blockquote data-quote="Don Durito" data-source="post: 7925737" data-attributes="member: 6687260">Perhaps WotC felt that by making feats and multi-classing optional and designing the game without requiring them, they could reset the baseline of the game somewhat and that most people wouldn't use the options.&nbsp; If so they have clearly failed.Going back to points I made earlier.&nbsp; The difficulty is not so much whether you can challenge the party when you really need to - of course you can - add in more monsters -, it's that there's little chance for an average encounter to go bad.&nbsp; This kind of makes them feel pointless.&nbsp; They drain resources but there's so little genuine risk.&nbsp; This in turn means the party can be pretty confident and complacent in their decisions about spending resources.Of course there's lots of gming tricks you can do to address this - there always is - you can have it so if the goblins aren't all wiped in two rounds, a huge load of reinforcements will arrive and flood the action economy, or that an alarm is sounded, but the system brings little to the table here.And the options we have been given, such as for example the brutal criticals in the DMG, which would make pedestrian battles something to worry about are bad poor ones that are badly thought out and don't show any evidence of having been through any cycles of playtesting and tweaking.Another house rules I've seen mentioned, is levels of Exhaustion for being reduced to 0 hit points (or failing deathsaves).&nbsp; I haven't seen this one in play, but I doubt it would really achieve the desired effect.&nbsp; (But exhaustion is one of the few things you can throw at the pcs that is hard to remove and can stick for longer than a single long rest.)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Don Durito, post: 7925737, member: 6687260"] Perhaps WotC felt that by making feats and multi-classing optional and designing the game without requiring them, they could reset the baseline of the game somewhat and that most people wouldn't use the options. If so they have clearly failed. Going back to points I made earlier. The difficulty is not so much whether you can challenge the party when you really need to - of course you can - add in more monsters -, it's that there's little chance for an average encounter to go bad. This kind of makes them feel pointless. They drain resources but there's so little genuine risk. This in turn means the party can be pretty confident and complacent in their decisions about spending resources. Of course there's lots of gming tricks you can do to address this - there always is - you can have it so if the goblins aren't all wiped in two rounds, a huge load of reinforcements will arrive and flood the action economy, or that an alarm is sounded, but the system brings little to the table here. And the options we have been given, such as for example the brutal criticals in the DMG, which would make pedestrian battles something to worry about are bad poor ones that are badly thought out and don't show any evidence of having been through any cycles of playtesting and tweaking. Another house rules I've seen mentioned, is levels of Exhaustion for being reduced to 0 hit points (or failing deathsaves). I haven't seen this one in play, but I doubt it would really achieve the desired effect. (But exhaustion is one of the few things you can throw at the pcs that is hard to remove and can stick for longer than a single long rest.) [/QUOTE]

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