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

[Hussar]

Thank you for your reasoned reply.

My comment is:

If 5E truly have abandoned support for solo boss fights, that needs to be more discussed, more widely known.

This is the cost of moving D&D back closer to its roots. They didn't make any secret that 5e is treading heavily on the heels of 1e and 2e. Which means that solo boss fights aren't really going to work very well.

IOW, you can't have it both ways. You can't have strong individual monsters that eat up large chunks of PC resources and at the same time try to have earlier edition pacing with 6+ encounters per day.

You can have one or the other. You can't have both. The votes came in and the 15 MAD went away. Which means that if you WANT to run 5e with 1 or 2 bigs fights per day, the system isn't going to help you. I mean, the DMG is pretty clear on this point. You are supposed to have 6-8 encounters in an adventuring day. How much clearer could they be?

 

[Helldritch]

What most people fail to see is that feats are optionals. Monsters are not built with feats in mind. You have to either add something equivalent in the monsters' stat block or tweak the encounter rules a bit. I personnaly did both. I found that adding a feat or an ASI per tier to monsters works wonders. To humanoids I usualy go for either and monsters usualy only get the ASI.
So far, it made fights go as I planned with the difficulty I was planning/expecting. Try it and you will see that it works.

 

[robus]

That's great!

...but seeing this has little relevance to my example (its a completely different - but equally valid - playstyle after all; I would say it's a fun improvisational battle, but as such it makes for a poor stress test, since it uses ad hoc decisions that aren't reproducible), doesn't your story deserve a thread of its own?

I think we've found the next supercomputer/AI challenge. Run the same adventuring day over and over, just the dice rolls are different. Then we can finally see if the CRs align with the guidelines

 

[CapnZapp]

Mike Shea (who does consultant work for D&D from time to time) also agrees with Cap on this subject and has provided at least 2 articles on making monsters tougher in his blog

Thank you for this tip.

Yes, I completely agree to the following

I feel like most of the monsters in 5th ed D&D are just boring palette swaps of one another, and it makes it really hard to run on-the-fly combats that are interesting.

http://slyflourish.com/making_monsters_interesting.html​

Special emphasis on "on-the-fly combats", which I call "plug and play monsters". Not the special snowflake encounter where you spend hours perfecting the evil overlord's plans, in other words.

Really the only questions interesting in this context is: How come the D&D designers ended up here? And why do we let them get away with it (not protesting loudly etc)?

 

[dave2008]

Really the only questions interesting in this context is: How come the D&D designers ended up here? And why do we let them get away with it (not protesting loudly etc)?

Well, most of the monsters we have are from the initial release (MM) and there is nothing we can do about that. I don't expect any updates like they did in 4e after MM3 came out. So what is the point.

However, it does seem they have learned some of the lessons. Tiamat is better than Tarrasque and the Volo monsters appear generally better than MM (though not enough of what you want).

 

[Sacrosanct]

When exactly did this paradigm shift happen with DMs? Where it went from, "If you're the DM, it's your world and you need to prepare the adventures your players will take their PCs on, and control all the monsters and NPCs as living beings" to "I just want to put pieces on the table and roll dice as the DM, and can't be bothered with learning powers/spells/abilities/rules"

Because that's what I keep hearing from folks like CapnZapp. The refusal to put in the work required (and I'm not talking hours "perfecting the evil overlord's plan") of a DM is NOT a failure on the design team, like you keep saying. As the DM, you have a LOT of power at your hands. Literally everything about the game has to go through you, which includes role-playing monsters/NPCs like they would normally act. If you (general you) don't want to use the role-playing elements of the game as a DM, then maybe you should be playing a boardgame instead, or don't DM. The trade off for having all that power is the responsibility of preparing. It's the DM's job to make monsters interesting, and it's not that hard. All you have to do is play them as they would normally behave, which includes behavior outside of the immediate combat round. Because if you don't, then all you do have is nothing more than a boardgame. What are the enemies doing in their normal day to day life? What would they do if they discovered PCs lurking about? etc, etc. Kobolds are certainly intelligent enough to utilize things like ball bearings, burning oil, baskets of snakes, traps, etc and get those things prepared before a battle. Do you really need those things listed in individual stat blocks when most everyone else has already figured that out? I certainly hope not, because that's limiting by implying that kobolds can ONLY do those things, when the truth is they are only limited by what you can come up with as the DM that is appropriate to their intelligence and/or ability. Which should be noted is a lot more stuff than can fit in a stat block.

And if you want an answer to "how did the designers end up here", the answer is pretty obvious. Because most players didn't want and/or need redundantly listed abilities that resulted in full page stat blocks and increased page count, and didn't want and/or need everything a bad guy could do spelled out for them or they felt restricted. Sales #s of the previous edition and the current edition seem to back this up. And from a purely business perspective, the designers seem to have given the majority of players what they wanted and put together a very highly successful game, so that means they did a helluva good job, regardless of what your or my individual opinions are.

 

[Sacrosanct]

One more note re: solo boss fights, and this ties in with my comment above. Solo boss fights are not broken or bad in 5e unless you handle your fights like a video game encounter, where nothing else has led up to that or is happening outside of the immediate encounter and trade hps. First, you need to ask yourself if this is a solo boss, how did it get there, and what would it likely have at its disposal. 5e gave a lot of hints by implementing the lair actions mechanics, but just because something doesn't officially have lair actions doesn't mean they don't have anything else available outside of their statblock. For example, if a hobgoblin chief is a solo boss, does it stand to reason it's just gonna sit in it's encounter area waiting for the PCs to arrive, and once they do, just go into arena combat mode? Or is it more likely that it will have an entourage or guards and other allies, an escape path if things go south, and tools/items near it to help give it an advantage if forced into combat? Especially if it's been alerted of the PCs presence in it's clan? Hobgoblins are tacticians, so they should be treated as such, using smart tactics and utilization of their environment.

 

[dco]

From the last posts:
- One of the problems is that NPCs are not done like player characters. I think that's a great mistake, worse when I see in the monster manual that appart from class features NPCs (and monsters) lack a lot of proficiency bonuses.
- Feats are extremely powerful, in a lot of cases better than some class features. They also change balance between different classes and the same class builds, GWM is for example giving an extra attack under some conditions and a lot of extra damage, suddenly the damage using a great weapon can skyrocket, classes that already have a bonus attack are at a disadvantage, etc.
- D&D is always video gamey, demonstrated with the short rest mechanics, resource management class features... and the expectation of 6-8 daily fights as someone said. If you only use one encounter then PCs can go nova, specially some classes, on the other hand the NPCs are buit differently and are far weaker, only the luck of the dice could change things if both parties play ideally.

 

[delericho]

When exactly did this paradigm shift happen with DMs?

Around 1974. You're pining for a golden age that never actually happened.

Seriously, there have always been plenty of DMs who treated their monsters as nothing more than bags of hit points to be dropped in, with little or no thought given to how best to apply all those special features. Indeed, that was one of the factors that led to me taking up the mantle myself: I was convinced I could do a better job.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Around 1974. You're pining for a golden age that never actually happened..

Yeah it did. Everyone I played with during TSR era D&D played that way (not limited by monster stat blocks, but by DM creativity). Even in many of the official adventures, there was plenty of monster variation going on. From the goblins partnering with the Ogre in Caves of Chaos to the various clans in ToEE to pretty much every humanoid having variants that were heavily armored to the lightly armored ranged scout. The core stat blocks were all the same, but what the monster was equipped with, and how it interacted with the area it lived in and other inhabitants all varied. And that's not even factoring in the plethora of dragon magazine articles on the subject, or books like Creative Campaigning or Complete guide to villains. Sorry, but you're simply wrong here. Not only with my own experience, but with official published material as well. It did happen, and we can point to objectively provable sources to show as such.