D&D 5E last encounter was totally one-sided

[CapnZapp]

You are not stuck with the generic 'one size badly fits all' spells chosen for the NPCs.

You NPC group essentially came loaded for bear and got a herd of mammoths in the face...

More generally - no, I want to be able to respect the spell loadouts of monsters.

Monsters generally get shi**y shi*y spells. And that must be deliberate.

Take for instance the one time my player got to have an adventure transmogrified into a Drow. A Drow Mage to be precise.

It didn't take long for him to ask if he could replace the spells the Drow had memorized.

I did what I usually do instead of saying "no", and rolled a die. The higher the more generous. I rolled a six, he asked if he could switch in Bigby's Hand, I okayed it.

I'm pretty sure he never used any of the official Drow Mage spells (other than Fireball), since Bigby's Hand is so much better

 

[CapnZapp]

I think the take home for this kind of thing is sometimes you get the bear and sometimes the bear gets you.

Funnily enough, in our current Dragonlance game, we just had two pretty big encounters, back to back. A very big dragon backed up with a potion of invulnerability (don't ask) followed by an encounter with three undead baddies, several invisible stalkers and a vampire.

The big nasty dragon went down like a chump. We obliterated it, even with its defensive bonuses. This thing got curb stomped, even if it was way above us in level.

The next encounter, with lots of smaller stuff is handing us our asses. We haven't finished the encounter yet, but, it's turned into a MUCH more difficult encounter.

So, it all just goes down to swinginess a lot of times. I mean, in our second encounter, my defensive fighter with a magic buffed AC, still got tagged 5 times out of 6. Granted most of those attacks were at advantage, but, sheesh, they needed an 18 or better to hit my character and still did it 5 out of 6 times. Yikes.

5e can be very swingy at times.

Another way of expressing this is to (not) quote the Father of Nations, the Gardener of Human Happiness:

-- Quantity is a quality of its own

Nowhere (except possibly in the area of main battle tank production) is this more true than in D&D

Meaning, that if you start taking the number of enemies into account, you will probably find that the results might still be swingy, but not that swingy

 

[knasser]

But you do agree the encounter could have easily swung the other way?

As long as the players realize that they were very lucky then I think it's OK? If they felt like it was a cakewalk then that would be different. Sometimes luck is on your side.

This is rather alarming as a new GM just starting a 5e campaign. Super-swingy combats are a bad thing to me and poor design. It feels like the game system telling me "Hey, roll this die. On a 1-5 your campaign ends".

 

[Morrus]

Please take your passive agressive BS elsewhere, thank you

Completely inappropriate. You know better. Try not to get yourself evicted from your own thread.

 

[Charles Rampant]

You've presented the (pretty interesting) fight. What I didn't see was a comprehensive summary of your thoughts: did you find that this fight was a good one? Did the Volo's NPC statblocks meet your expectations? It sounds like they were simple and interesting to run, and that you could handle the fight with some very complicated characters in a good manner. You did note that the combat could have gone the other way, and that the players feel very lucky, which is arguably a much better outcome than one that they thought was boringly easy.

For my part, I've had reasonably similar fights - I had five 14th level characters get into a three-way battle between various high level Rogues, Ruffians and Warlocks (chosen from the Skullduggery book). I found that they won, but took reasonable damage in the process; the players seem to remember it as "that really hard fight with the other PC-rules guys". I've also made liberal use of Archmage and Mage statblocks, which tend to turn up, hit the party with a really tough AoE, then die instantly the turn afterwards

 

[Krachek]

The player characters defeat a stronger enemy.
The game Work as intended.

 

[Ancalagon]

It sounds like the party has a very light "go nova" trigger. This could get them into trouble. One, they might go nova on a trash fight and then be weak for the real one. Two, they might go nova on *not the bad guys*.

Have fun with that

Before running towards the Diviner the Monk reapplied the stunlock on the Druid. I had the Druid at AC 19 so he actually had to spend his Action Surge to achieve this. (Yes, all three fighters in this party has a couple of Fighter levels, including the "ranger" and monk. Action Surge is that good)

Ah, I see my decision not to allow multi classing gets another sign it was the correct one! If you want all the cool fighter stuff, you gotta be a fighter.

... there is no fighter.

 

[Caliburn101]

More generally - no, I want to be able to respect the spell loadouts of monsters.

Monsters generally get shi**y shi*y spells. And that must be deliberate.

This is the wrong conclusion.

The spell choices are made to be 'generically useful' to someone without the time and/or inclination to choose their own spell list...

... check out the CR rules. There is no increase in CR for choosing the spells that fill the slots of a spellcaster, so you are in no way bound to the ones listed as an example.

It's nothing to do with respecting the list in the book or WoTC deliberately gimping the caster, with respect, you have that all wrong.

 

[robus]

This is rather alarming as a new GM just starting a 5e campaign. Super-swingy combats are a bad thing to me and poor design. It feels like the game system telling me "Hey, roll this die. On a 1-5 your campaign ends".

Well this was a combat encounter of CapnZapp's devising. If you stick with published adventures and play the monsters gently the first couple of levels you'll find that the PCs are pretty capable of defending themselves.

are you running a homebrew campaign? If yes, the general consensus is that the DMG encounter building guidelines are well within safety limits.

in summary don't take this 1 encounter as representative of combat in D&D 5E

 

[Krachek]

DnD material is designed for cool casual play.
If you want a challenge similar to a PvP video game, you will need to adjust everything that way.
And if you wait for an official errata on GWP and SS, better homebrew your own nerf.