CapnZapp
Legend
You're the one who opened my eyes. Godspeed, C!
D&D 5E last encounter was totally one-sided
Helldritch
Hero
Although this makes D&D out to be a game that's somehow inherently unsuited to other adventure locales than 40x40 dungeon rooms, and that's balderdash of course.
What I'm saying is: look at 3rd edition!
It's completely legit D&D. There were archers! Yet, there were axe dwarfs too.
Reverting the incredibly generous gifts given to ranged combatants in 5E is too me a much simpler solution than "don't play D&D".
Especially since I suspect nobody at WotC thought this through. Individually, each and every change looks completely sensible as in "playing movie Legolas sounds fun, what's the harm in supporting this archetype..."
Well, we now know what the harm is. The 7th or so (!) fun change became the straw that broke the slow axe-wielding camel's back...
Noone's playing Gimli anymore.
And even that's not true - plenty of people play melee warriors and love it, so let me rephrase:
It's gotten way harder for Gimli to tie Legolas 50-50 in their Orc contest, if they use 5E rules compared to 3E.
To me all this "don't fight the system" malarkey is a bit balooneyI mean, if switching away D&D works for you, fine. If resigning yourself to having monsters pop up right behind the heroes isn't a big deal, more power to you.
What *I* am fighting, however, is not D&D or the system - I'm just fighting the collective impact of all those changes made by well-meaning but not enough-far-looking 5E designers!
And to me that's both natural and easy and true to the spirit of D&D
Well... you should come to my games. Archery is not that broken if you take ammunitions into account. It is not in every campaing that you will find a +1 bow. Against monsters that requires silver or magic to hit, your archer will suffer greatly, to the point where cantrip will be better.
Not every campaing finds +1 arrows and even then, you can't repair them with mending. Current archer is carrying 40 arrows and other members are carrying about 20 more each. Despite the facts that the archer takes arrows from fallen ennemies, the total amount of arrows is slowly declining as no one wants to spend 20 rounds to mend broken arrows even with spare time. If you take into consideration that sometimes a group has to flee; amunitions should slowly go down as the adventure goes on and the archer's supply are running lower and lower. In fact a few games ago, our archer was forced to fight with short swords! Usualy, he prefers to shoot in melee even with disadvantage but he had run out of arrows.
We have ruled that even with mending, arrow retrival should be around 90%. There are some arrow that get lost or pieces of them flew everywhere and some were not recoverable. Our archer is a ranger and he makes a lot of dmg, mainly due to the fact that the battlemaster targets him for the attack command. The paladin, although able to match the potential dmg with smites prefers to keep spells for emergency healing despite the fact that there are two clerics in the group and one is a life cleric!
Monsters are using dodge action, cover, oil and everything at their disposal to make the player sweat. The grab and push actions are often used in cooperation against one front melee character and if successful, the players know they're in big trouble. One enemy will try to sneak in, and the unlucky player will be attack with advantage from all possible attacker that can get it.
In my games, the dodge action is actualy used quite often by the players (I tend to be really lucky on the dice and all rolls are seen by the players) so as to take minimal dmg. I do strictly enforce the 6-8 encounters per day filling out the missing encounters with random encounters from tables I made for each specific adventures. The possibility to have an encounter is 1/6 every hours. Sometimes they get no encounters for the entire rest period but I always stop at 8 encounters. The nova thing that so many ppl complain about? It simply doesn't exist in my campaing. Some combat lasts up to 12 rounds with an average of about 6-8 rounds for meaningful combats (hard and deadly). An average difficulty combat can go to 3-5 rounds and easy difficulty rarely goes past round 3. It should be mention that inspiration is given at every start of each session and awarded in game for good RP. We also use the Hero point system. Even with these, combats are the length I have told you earlier.
I know that many people do not like the 6-8 encounters per day. But a dungeon, region, tribe is and should feel alive. The world does not cease to move when the players are resting. It is quite the contrary. Players raided a camp/dungeon/whatever? The survivors and the leader will be out searching for them. All this ruffus might stir up some local monsters/undead/wild life enough so that they stumble on the players.
If the players are using Leomund's tiny hut spells or even the M. Magnificient Mansion, and they are not found; you can bet that if the inhabitant can work together, that they will set up more traps and be more alert to players possible incursion. This forces the players to enforce the 6-8 EPD by themselves. They are keeping major ressources so that they can do more encounters per day if logic dictates it.
This lead to a very equilibrated campaing style where I have absolutely no problems with Sharp Shooter and GWM feats. The defensive style is actualy taken now as the higher the AC the better the player feel. And yet, given the chance between +1 chain mail and adamantine chain mail, almost all my players take the adamantine armor. They hate critical hit and with the tactics the monsters are using, critical hit are numerous enough to be a concern.
Gimly is my games, Legolas too. So is the Grey Mouser, Lancelot, Morgan the Fey and almost all the characters from fiction and movies that can come to mind. It is as easy for them to be in your games as you are ready to prepare their/your adventures.
5ed works out pretty well good. The thing you have to keep in mind is that the more options you use, the more preparation the game will take.
This is a fact that is true for all games. I know of no system that do not take a minimum of preperation time. In fact, aside from the OD&D, the 5ed is probably the edition that takes the less time to prepare (3rd and 3.5 were the worst).
Keep in mind that MM and all monsters and Adventures are assumed to be played with the basic rules in mind. Feats and other options made available downgrade the monsters' power levels. With each options you add in favor of the players, you have to adjust appropriately. Do this and you will have no problems with 5ed. In fact, you will ask yourself why you didn't do it earlier.
hawkeyefan
Legend
[MENTION=6855114]Helldritch[/MENTION] Excellent post.
@Helldritch it really is an excellent post. Too bad it will fall on deaf ears.
re
As Vargas says, the powergaming combos are still easier to deal with than 3E/Pathfinder. It's a lot easier to play with the math in 5E than 3E to try to get a feel you like. There's no perfect games. Been playing Star Wars and even that game has some stupid sick power combos that have essentially broken the game meaning made it too easy for the players to win against just about everything. Vader wouldn't survive the players using their rules.
As Vargas says, the powergaming combos are still easier to deal with than 3E/Pathfinder. It's a lot easier to play with the math in 5E than 3E to try to get a feel you like. There's no perfect games. Been playing Star Wars and even that game has some stupid sick power combos that have essentially broken the game meaning made it too easy for the players to win against just about everything. Vader wouldn't survive the players using their rules.
CapnZapp
Legend
There is a reason we're here after all...
This statement in one form or another has been repeated ad infinitum. All I can say is glad 5E is working well for you. It isn't for me and my style of play even though I've used every single tactic you've mentioned. Most of those tactics do work to a certain point, then they don't. The players reach a point where acquiring arrow ammunition is very, very easy. Dodge action is a useless action by a solo creature being attack by four to six player characters. Common tribal races like orcs and gnolls are no longer challenging, not even an entire tribe of them unless you customize the tribe to be more like a group of giants and even that challenge becomes relatively easy after a while.
Yep. Well aware the MM monsters are designed for no feats, the only substantial customization option.
If you're not having trouble with Sharpshooter, I do hope you are aware that cover (other than full) doesn't work against Sharpshooter. They can shoot a guy hiding behind an arrow hole without penalty with Sharpshooter. If you have houseruled that part of the feat away, kudos. You are right about GWM. It isn't very bad once you learn melee characters are pretty weak at higher level and easy to maneuver away from with a mobile creature.
As far as the six to eight encounters a day, works great a lower levels. Not as well at higher levels, though it does occasionally help. But sometimes the players become so badass that anything less than six to eight deadly (unless carefully constructed to exploit weaknesses and adding environment factors more powerful than the creaures) doesn't do much, sometimes even that doesn't help. The players have too many ways to push things in their favor.
I'd agree with most of what you write at lower levels. It takes some real work to challenge high level players consistently. They roll over most standard encounters, even six to eight a day. But put them in an extremely dark place or similar environment more dangerous than the monsters to take away their abilities so they can't do what they do well, and you're good. Players won't have much fun, but you can feel empowered as a DM. At least that has been my experience by DMs that have successfully consistently challenged higher level characters that even moderately optimize. Then again, most games are this way. You get used to it and learn to adapt.
Flamestrike
Legend
From memory the game you were running had several 'beyond artifact' items like +3 intelligent weapons with the spellcasting ability of 13th level casters (and their own pool of actions and ability to maintain concentration independent of the weilder) and other abilities, plus IIRC you also had houserules allowing multiple concentration spells at once and so forth.
I wouldnt be entirely surprised if that throws the maths out a tad.
Not that there is anything wrong with that kind of epic play, but it messes with class balance and encounter balance something fierce.
Effectively there were whole additional party members as magic items.
CapnZapp
Legend
If it only had thrown out the math "a tad"...
...instead of revealing the entire upper-level game design as shockingly naive and rudimentary
As you yourself say
The difference is that we don't accept that using magic items wreck the game. We want the game to be robust enough to work both with and without magic items.
At least to some degree. The DMG could have made it much more clear that you should probably be much more careful with plus items in this edition than in previous editions, after all.
And if you look at what I did, you would have seen I more than accounted for the artifacts by boosting the monsters substantially. If you look at the monsters I designed, they were far more powerful than the monsters in the actual module because of the power level of the players.
And it wasn't the only campaign I played, just the only one I posted on here. The other campaigns had the same issues, including the ones I didn't run.
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