D&D General Is WotC's 5E D&D easy? Trust me this isn't what you think... maybe

[DrJawaPhD]

Anyway rambling. I find the official adventures are meant to be conquered (and 5E and it's power fantasy complement this). Anyone else find this to be true most of the time?

I'm having major trouble interpreting the wording of the thread title vs the question in the poll. Is 5e somehow easier than any other edition? No absolutely not, you can easily run an impossibly brutal 5e adventure just as you can easily run a cakewalk adventure in 1e or 2e or any edition of any game out there.

The question seems to actually want to be about whether modern/recent official adventures are easy, and YES they absolutely are ridiculously easy. Modern adventures are balanced to be semi-challenging to brand new players who have never played DnD before and are still learning d8's from d20's. This is a problem with the adventures but not a problem with 5th Edition itself. You could switch the game rules back to 1e or Shadowdark or whatever you want, and WotC would still publish laughably easy adventures because they think that is what modern consumers want.

In short, 5e difficulty is perfectly fine, but modern adventures should only be considered useful for the story, and will take work on the part of the DM to pump up the difficulty unless your players are literally brand new to DnD.

 

[overgeeked]

No, they don't. If given the choice, I think most players would prefer to hit every encounter at full power. It is, after all, a smart thing to want to face every point of opposition when you are at your strongest and the enemy is at its weakest. To do less is to risk unexpected defeat. The 5MWD exists because it works to the player's advantage.

As a DM, you have to push past the player's distaste for "holding back" and encourage them in some form to tough it out and be willing to continue onward without taking the opportunity to stop and recharge back to full. In essence, the DM in some way has to reward, prod or convince the group that they still have enough resources to risk make it through the gauntlet vs. stopping or pulling back and assuring they maximize their chances through superior force.

In ten years of running 5E I never found a carrot the players liked more than full resources. The only thing that worked (for a little while) was time-based scenarios. You have two days to X, you have three days to Y. Eventually the players just stopped caring and let the bad stuff happen. They’d let villages and kingdoms burn, NPC die, and dark rituals go off without a hitch rather than go into a fight even a few hit points down, to say nothing of a few spell slots.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I think you're misunderstanding the math here, and honestly understating it because of the misunderstanding.

Here's a statistic I remember off the top of my head from my old Warhammer days. Your odds of rolling a 5+ on a d6 are ~33%. Your odds of rolling a 5+ on at least one of two d6s are ~54%. So the "unlikely" result, the one in three chance, becomes more likely than not to crop up at least once, assuming just two tries.

Similarly, if you stack a bunch of encounters in a row whose odds are individually 80% to win, it actually doesn't take that many tries to reach a greater than 50/50 odds of a loss occurring. If I'm doing my back-of-the-napkin math right, it's only four rolls until we cross the 50% threshold (about 59%, from ~48.8% in three trials). If that 20% loss means a TPK, only having 80% odds in any given fight, and assuming that 80% remains consistent, within the space of four encounters you can expect it to be slightly more likely than not that the party will lose one of them and die.

I have two takeaways from this.

1. The baseline encounter math must assume better than 80% odds.
2. This is done for a reason, because TPKs aren't fun if they happen often. And they will happen pretty regularly unless you put your thumb on the scales or let the players do so.

I dig old school games, but the math still has to be in the players' favor for parties to survive those. Although as folks have noted, in order to survive under less forgiving rules and encounter scaling, old school encourages the players to think tactically and stack the odds in their favor.

I think the feeling of 5e too easy is the high chance of a TPK. It is rare that only a single person dies giving the lack of instant kill abilities and the generous healing rules from 0hp.
So it is either all or nothing. All die or no one. Older games felt more deadly becaus you always fear your character just dies once in a while.

 

[Sulicius]

The last pc death I had was in Curse of Strahd. I forgot to adjust the encounter to only 3 pc’s being there, and then I got great rolls and their AOE spellcasters were taken out before they could turn the tide of battle. I think it would have been easy otherwise.

But for the big encounters that I want to make count? Bosses have their hp doubled, and I often change hp, leave out abilities or add reinforcements as a dial I keep my hand on. That has worked best for me so far. As long as the story makes sense, it works for my players.

 

[tetrasodium]

In ten years of running 5E I never found a carrot the players liked more than full resources. The only thing that worked (for a little while) was time-based scenarios. You have two days to X, you have three days to Y. Eventually the players just stopped caring and let the bad stuff happen. They’d let villages and kingdoms burn, NPC die, and dark rituals go off without a hitch rather than go into a fight even a few hit points down, to say nothing of a few spell slots.

This has been my experience as well but I'd go further and say that the group will often call the bluff or shrug at the idea of letting it burn and nova>rest>repeat anyways, especially the short rest classes who say "but my class was designed to neeeeeed them”if at all pressed by time. Inevitably it just leads to complaints about how the GM runs s horrible crapsack world where the players are to often not allowed to succeed at saving the day or whatever

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I haven't run or played (apart one aborted attempts) any published adventure paths, but if they follow the suggested encounter difficulties, I expect them to be easy. I kinda feel anything below "deadly" is a complete pushover, and for real challenge you need to ramp up the difficulty way beyond "deadly." That being said, I run less than the suggested six to eight encounters. Even though I use gritty rests, shoving that many fights between rests seems to be most of the time nearly impossible. It would just feel like a slog and slow down the game too much. I think I might do three or four typically, some short rests between them.

Do published the adventures usually have any sort of narrative structures that limit how often the PCs can rest? Because with normal rests stopping to have a long rest is very easy in most situations, so if the PCs rest often and don't face those six to eight pushover encounters between rests like suggested, it will be even easier.

 

[Shardstone]

I haven't run or played (apart one aborted attempts) any published adventure paths, but if they follow the suggested encounter difficulties, I expect them to be easy. I kinda feel anything below "deadly" is a complete pushover, and for real challenge you need to ramp up the difficulty way beyond "deadly." That being said, I run less than the suggested six to eight encounters. Even though I use gritty rests, shoving that many fights between rests seems to be most of the time nearly impossible. It would just feel like a slog and slow down the game too much. I think I might do three or four typically, some short rests between them.

Do published the adventures usually have any sort of narrative structures that limit how often the PCs can rest? Because with normal rests stopping to have a long rest is very easy in most situations, so if the PCs rest often and don't face those six to eight pushover encounters between rests like suggested, it will be even easier.

To the bolded, its all self-decided by the DM. Sometimes the books may offer guidance, but its really a "Whenever you think it would be good, allow it" kind of thing.

 

[Oofta]

In ten years of running 5E I never found a carrot the players liked more than full resources. The only thing that worked (for a little while) was time-based scenarios. You have two days to X, you have three days to Y. Eventually the players just stopped caring and let the bad stuff happen. They’d let villages and kingdoms burn, NPC die, and dark rituals go off without a hitch rather than go into a fight even a few hit points down, to say nothing of a few spell slots.

Then tie advancement and rewards to goals. Grant XP for saving the village, if they don't save the princess, they get no gold. Have the bad guys summon reinforcements and they have a triple deadly fight on their hands. Heck, just flat out tell them that no one wants to work with them, no one is willing to give them treasure maps because they'll just stir up trouble and run away.

Or, radical concept here, talk to them about it. If you're not having fun, let them know you no longer want to DM because of their attitude. If you do want to continue to run make every fight deadly with multiple waves and more than one goal.

But seriously. Just discuss it with them.

 

[Scott Christian]

Aren’t those old updated adventures?

Rime and Candlekeep are not what I would consider old. Since Horde and Rise came out early, I guess you could consider them early 5e adventures. But I have to ask, what does the age of a 5e adventure have to do with whether it is "easy most of the time." They are all 5e adventures.
I will stress again, a lot of it comes down to the DM. There are many encounters in these adventures where the DM can take liberty to give their players a break, and in my experience, they often do. In Rime, Auril's Abode (built for 7th level, my experienced players were 8th) did not have a single encounter where one of my players did not have to roll death saves. Not one. I would consider that to be as consistent as an adventure can get regarding being difficult.
It seems to me this conversation really revolves around the ruleset of 5e and the many chances players have of keeping their PCs alive - not how the 5e adventures are written.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

if they follow the suggested encounter difficulties

Not even remotely.