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

Don't let me interrupt your conversation, but I need to clarify something right away:

I am in no way shape or form advocating a return to 4E's mechanics.

If anything I want its presentation.



But still presentation on top of the 5E rules engine. I consider 5E great because I consider it to be a streamlined and heavily upgraded d20 engine. But what's good can be bettered, and what better start than to point out where D&D actually took a step backwards compared to 4E...


The goal of the DnD team was to be back as #1 role playing game. They aimed large. To be at the top, they sacrificed combat complexity and sharpness like a lamb to the mighty Belzebuth. They sacrificed as well most of their Dev team, some good things from 4ed, and finally this poor Archdruid who made this post happen.

They are a lot of experts DM in this forum, but 5ed have been made to reach the Sunday afternoon DM who play once a month with its old friends from school. They don’t want to overwhelmed and fear out these players. So the game is designed to be as simple as possible and they have take no time to shield the game against optimizer and smart game breaker.

If you follow the SageAdvice posts you will realize that they don’t want complex or sharp ruling. They always encourage DM empowerment. On one hand they stay close to rules as intended but on the other hand they agree to opposite homebrew of the game.
There is a lot of tuning to be done to satisfy expert players and DM. Tactical guide, tuned up for monsters and rules, guideline to restraint optimization can be very useful for those who want to push the game challenge harder.

But the DnD dev team will always keep their goal of reaching a large audience of new players and DMs.
 

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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).

And, as I said above, most of the people I played with did not. So whose anecdote wins?

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.

If the books are telling them how to do it, then that's not their creativity. And it's hardly an argument against people calling for new books to tell people how to do it.

(And that's also leaving aside the fact that the readership of Dragon and those various supplements was always a fairly small minority of players.)
 

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"
First, in the opposite direction, in 1979 (1e DMG & Village of Hommlet, I'll argue). Then, in the direction you mean, c2000 (3.x/d20).

That is, 'put the pieces on the table and roll the dice' is how games had generally been played before, a 'judge' at a wargame just mediated the rules for contesting players. In the early game, the DM created dungeons and combats (using Chainmail) or hexcrawls (using Wilderness Survival), the creativity of dungeon-design was new, but the game-play was based on a wargame or boardgame (and though system-native rules for combat were quickly added, they weren't that different in nature). The advice in the 1e DMG, IMHO, really cemented the role of the DM as trying to challenge the players with prepared adventures. And Village of Hommlet presented a collection of NPCs that at least suggested some real 'living being' motivations (though it was still a little shaded to combat stats and treasure, so you could have raided the village like an above-ground dungeon).

From then until 3.0, the DM was increasingly the auteur of the game, the rules were there as a starting point, but it was prettymuch entirely on him to make it work. Then, WotC took over and shifted the emphasis from DM to player. 3.0 gave players unprecedented control over the definition of the characters they played, and consequently, a great deal more influence over the campaign, itself. The DM still had a tremendous amount of work to do, but had CR guidelines (if not very dependable ones) as a tool to help with that, while the zeitgeist of the community gravitated towards 'the RAW' taking much pressure for rulings and rule modifications off the DM - and fostering a lot of criticism of the rules' relative lack of balance that, before, when it was only a DM issue, would have been irrelevant. 4e responded to those criticisms with a much more balanced and, perhaps incidentally, much easier-to-DM, system with much-simplified prep work using encounter building guidelines that were actually somewhat dependable - or even just running out of a module more or less cold.

5e of course, goes all the way back to AD&D (but not exactly all the way back to 0D&D), in putting everything on the DM again. Evoking the Classic Game. DM Empowerment. Rulings not Rules.

Why are you using "trash" encounters?
It's a necessary part of keeping the resource-management meta-game challenging, and, incidentally, a way of imposing some sort of class balance.

The problem with this sensation is that it's almost entirely false. Because, if those people really could wipe you in a heartbeat, they would have. Encounters can never be that difficult because you TPK too often.
But it's such a great illusion if you can pull it off!

Older edition monsters were even weaker relative to the PC's than 5e ones are. It wasn't unusual for even low level groups to go through eight or ten encounters in a single day. The monster attacks were so poor (an orc has a THAC0 of 19, and achieving an AC of 1 or 2 is easily doable for even a 1st level AD&D character) that they hit rarely, and even when they did, they didn't do much damage. It was quite common to go entire combats with the main fighters losing no HP's.
A good point. 2e did beef up monsters (especially Dragons) considerably. And 3e made monsters hit very hard, indeed, nudging the game towards a 'rocket tag' style (while optimized save DCs shoved it in that direction a lot harder) and the 5MWD, drawing lots of criticism...

4e countered with milestone incentives for longer days, and classes that balanced with eachother regardless of day length, drawing lots of, well 'criticism' really doesn't do it justice...
Only problem is, we saw what happened when WotC tried that. People lost their collective minds. So, it's not really a surprise that they are not going to go down that road again.
D&D was, as the first RPG, necessarily a relatively 'primitive' game that people adapted to their needs, and stayed so for a long time, building an established fan-base that demanded just that. The thing WotC may have been thinking in 2007 (aside from "how are we going to hit $50million to be a 'core' brand?") was "D&D needs to build a new fan-base," even if that were the case, they must have radically underestimated just how reactionary that 'old' fan base was going to be. Now that they're conforming to tradition, again, everything's fine. They can't get a 'new' fan base (ie with radically new attitudes), per se, but they can grow the existing one, which could presumably slowly change over time, like any other little sub-culture, as the old guard kick the bucket, and it becomes safer to try new things.


I agree that DnD does not dictate a way of play. It propose a kind of middle line style of play.
I can't consider fast-combat TotM (since we were talking about monster stats in combat) to be squarely 'middle-line' in terms of range of styles. Not as far off on the edge as freestyle RP, but off on that side of the spectrum.

Rather, 5e sought to capture the feel of the classic game (and, IMHO, succeeded admirably).

So the more you put emphasis on a precise aspect of play, the more you have to patch up, because middle line rules don't cover your needs.
Though you could always (at least try to) play D&D by-the-book, in most editions, as in 5e, making good use of it in any specific style probably meant tinkering under the hood a bit. In 5e, specifically, the 'by the book' rules call for DM rulings frequently, so it's not a matter of needing to 'patch it up' when you deviate from the standard game, as needing to work with it as a matter of course.

If you break down stat block in action, reaction, priority spell, you are not so far away from 4ed stat block. It was an easy shot.
4e and PF monster stat blocks both used shading & headings to break things down in a helpful, easy-to-reference way. 5e didn't entirely abandon that kind of breakdown, but it did compromise it a bit for a more classic look.

The goal of the DnD team was to be back as #1 role playing game.
I don't recall ever hearing that goal mentioned. Though, I'm sure they wanted to boost revenue, and, tiny as the RPG market is, and as big a part of it as D&D stayed, even when releasing no new product at all, re-claiming the #1 slot would all but inevitably be part of that. ;)

They are a lot of experts DM in this forum, but 5ed have been made to reach the Sunday afternoon DM who play once a month with its old friends from school. They don’t want to overwhelmed and fear out these players. So the game is designed to be as simple as possible
That guy may well have run games heavily back in the day, and be quite expert (ok, had been quite expert, at running AD&D). By making the game reasonably familiar, they tap into that expertise, and, like riding a bike, the returning DM can get back up to speed fairly easily.
Brilliant, really.

and they have take no time to shield the game against optimizer and smart game breaker.
Sure, that's the DM's job.

There is a lot of tuning to be done to satisfy expert players and DM. Tactical guide, tuned up for monsters and rules, guideline to restraint optimization
Ironically, while long-time gamers are acutely aware of things like that, and some of us may even be in the market for them for want of extensive prep/tinkering time, it's really new/casual gamers who benefit most from a clear/functional/balanced system like that.

But the DnD dev team will always keep their goal of reaching a large audience of new players and DMs.
That goal did get floated during the playtest, but it was always, as I recall, in the context of /looking back at what made the game appealing to the player base, when they were new to it/, which was inevitably through that special lens of hindsight we humans all come equipped with...


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.
Aren't video-game 'boss fights' climactic battles at the end of a series of lesser fights leading up to them? D&D's resource-attrition model has worked for that kind of thing since the beginning - and video games have imitated that.

If 5E truly have abandoned support for solo boss fights, that needs to be more discussed, more widely known.
IMHO, Legendary creatures (and Lair Actions) are clearly intended as such support.

I think some posters here are too anxious to throw rocks.
Existing improvised weapon rules cover that action adequately. ;)
 
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Thank you (I'll stop you right there).

Yes, the monk rolled very high on both his initiatives (he went first both against the archdruid, and later the post-forcecaged Death Knight). That's a huge win for the party.

As for the stun, the Diviner (whom I will call Master Thalder from now on, since he was a dragon cultist first and foremost, and only used the Diviner stat block because I liked that one better than, say, Evoker or Conjurer) did use Portent on himself. Or tried to, anyway.

Making a DC 18 Con save is extremely hard for regular humanoids that aren't supernaturally strong.

Even if you have a reroll, and even if you had had advantage (somehow), you still need to roll 18 on one out of three d20 rolls. That still only happens less than 40% of the time.

I think people (that criticize the way my NPCs acted) are seriously selling player character heroes short in this edition.

I don't think I am selling PCs short. Indeed, I understand how potent they are. And when compared to monsters, they do tend to be the more powerful (assuming some kind of "equality" in levels and/or HD/CR). However, that's all the more reason to try and use the monsters effectively.

In your OP, you mentioned how all had fun and the encounter was cool. So that's good. But if you are citing this as evidence that the game is heavily flawed, then I have to point out that if it is so, it is only made worse by not utilizing the monsters as effectively as possible. Or even just a bit more effectively. I mean, you cite the fact that this group of PCs defeated such vaunted foes as the reason that it was cool..."wow, look what we did"....but these foes were not played as vaunted foes in any way. It may as well have been a bunch of low level threats.

You basically made a Death Knight as scary as a plain old skeleton. I don't think the design did that so much as the play.

Which is fine, if that's what you want to go with and if everyone had fun and so on. But I think the lesson to learn here is not "wow, high level threats are feeble" so much as "wow, high level threats can be ineffective if not run thoughtfully".

To assume a humanoid NPC can resist a Monk stun is to seriously underestimate just how supremely superpowered WotC has made player characters in this edition, compared to monsters and NPCs.

Remember that even if the Druid had resisted the first stun, the monk would just have tried again.

In this particular scenario, he jumps out from close to a hundred feet away, and still manages to get in, what, four attacks if necessary.

So even if the NPC gets three shots at saving against Stunning Fist on every attempt (which is generous), and even if I gave her AC 19 and disadvantaged attacks (which I didn't), chances are still that she would have ended up stunned when it was clear she lost initiative to the monk.

So why not make the enemies more than 100 feet away? Or whatever distance they need to be in order for the monk to not reach them immediately? Such a small change would then make the monk have to actually think about what she has to do instead of just flipping her on switch and going full combat mode. Should she approach the far off villains, knowing that the end of her move will leave her within their range, but far from her slower friends? Or should she instead slow down and remain close with her allies? The choice is one of her speed possibly working against her, or her speed being neutralized.

The battle field conditions are largely up to you....and since you have a group of players who are clearly optimized (many multiclassed, set tactics, etc.)...then you have to tip the scales back the other way a bit, and you have options on how to do so. Not just monster abilities, but also when and how a fight breaks out. And you also mention NPC behavior being "scripted" at times....I would say if these are the results, then go off script immediately. At least, if you want to avoid this outcome....which I am not sure you do, so YMMV,

You cite hubris as the reason your NPCs didn't perhaps consider the PC as threatening as they could have....and that's fine. Perfectly believable. But it works both ways. Have you ever had your PCs get in over their heads? I mean, did they have any idea the kinds of enemies they were approaching? Because just going into full on attack mode makes me think they either thought these were lesser foes, or were not worried at all about the foes that they actually were. "Death Knight? Bah, CHARGE!!!!!" (Not a perfect example because I know the DK was disguised, but it illustrates my point). These PCs seem to have hubris in spades, and my guess is that they've been conditioned to feel that way.


And there is the explanation for why Master Thalder didn't Portend her stun save. He had already used it to try to gain a better initiative for himself. (She rolled 13 I believe, a roll Thalder didn't dare try to improve. He himself rolled something in the single-digits, and so he rerolled, only to still roll poorly. Not that it would have mattered, since the Monk's initiative of 21 was still almost unbeatable. Yes, obviously the Monk has the Alert feat. What did you think? :))

Okay, so here is where my ignorance may affect things. I don't have Volo's Guide yet. Does the NPC Diviner stat block allow a reroll as their Portent ability? Or is it like the Diviner PC ability where they have two rolls they can swap out if they want? Because that would affect how useful it was.

But either way, stunning a foe for that many rounds, and possibly using flurry, is going to use up a good amount of Ki. And I am sure the monk has plenty of ki, but if you're going to give the fight away, at least make the PCs have to spend resources to do it. And although I don't want to use any triggers for you (:p), if there was another battle to follow, then this would matter more.

I'd personally immediately follow up such a fight with a second wave ("Lord Farquat and his powerful allies have been killed! We must avenge them!!!!" and a horde descends upon the PCs), but that's just me.

I'd say it speaks volumes about how exceedingly generous WotC has been in giving characters goodies. (Assuming your players know how to use them)

And not giving them to NPCs.

Yes, the game favors PCs. It favors them even more if they optimize using multiclassing and feats and tactics. And then it favors them even more if the enemies they face do not use what they have, the battlefield favors the PCs, and the enemies don't use any tactics at all.

At the end of the day, I agree to some extent about wanting enemies that are a little more effective or have some more variety in their abilities at their base entry. I'd like to see that. I personally use the Legendary Action design space to help make BBEGs that can face a party. I also use full PC Creation rules for a handful of major NPC Villains. I know the rules say to generally not do that, but nah, I'm gonna do what works best and creates a satisfying villain.

But I don't think I agree with you about the extent of the problem. To me, there are bigger contributing factors to the scenario you gave than the monsters lacking abilities. I mean, they didn't really get to use most of their abilities before they were utterly destroyed....right? Even if they had a ton of bells and whistles to put into play....unless they could do so while stunned or forcecaged, then those abilities would have been just as useless as the ones they do have.
 

And, as I said above, most of the people I played with did not. So whose anecdote wins?

Neither. Which is why I posted several examples that supported my position that aren't anecdotes.

If the books are telling them how to do it, then that's not their creativity. And it's hardly an argument against people calling for new books to tell people how to do it.

(And that's also leaving aside the fact that the readership of Dragon and those various supplements was always a fairly small minority of players.)

The books didn't tell them. They gave ideas. And, like I also mentioned that you ignored, was that most of the official adventures were like this as well. So no, you are objectively wrong when you say that was an era that never happened. Even getting past the idea that your personal experiences are hardly evidence and thus making a claim like you did cannot be universally true, the evidence we do have strongly suggests otherwise. You also realize that by 1985, there were over 107,000 subscribers to Dragon Magazine? Hardly a small minority of players at the time. Especially since only one person in our group had the subscription, so that one subscription was used by a half dozen players.
 

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.

Wasn't the randomness of a vampire showing up in a dungeon one of the motivations for creating Ravenloft? Seems like many DMs in the early days just put monsters randomly in the way of players to give them an obstacle to overcome?
 

Wasn't the randomness of a vampire showing up in a dungeon one of the motivations for creating Ravenloft? Seems like many DMs in the early days just put monsters randomly in the way of players to give them an obstacle to overcome?

Oh, sure, random encounters and "more or less random collection of baddies" was always a thing.

But, the thing to remember is, virtually all those encounters were, by the standards of "winning by the skin of your teeth" very, very easy. The idea that you would have that one or two big fights and this would actually challenge the party is largely absent from early D&D adventures. Whether you want to look at things like Keep on the Borderlands, or Hommlet or Slave Lords or Against the Giants, what you don't see in those adventures are very many "one big fight" days.

Remember, you were rolling random encounters 1/10 minutes in a dungeon. You were supposed to have at least one per hour (usually 1 in 6 chance 1/turn (10 minutes)). So, you'd have your four or five regularly scheduled encounters, plus two or three random encounters.

This is the feel that 5e is looking for.
 

- 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.

Thank the heavens NPCs are not done like PCs. I ran several multi-year D&D 3.0 & 3.5 campaigns where monsters and NPCs were built exactly like PCs. As we got to higher levels, I wasted SO MANY HOURS doing math to build foes in my adventures that I would much rather have spent improving the adventures and the campaign.

When 4e came I disliked it a "D&D system" a lot (though grew to like it some over time), but I loved the exception based monster design. Taking that forward in 5e (and the 13th Age campaign I run) has been a blessing. Do what you need, here's some guidelines for around where the numbers should be. Spend your effort making interesting foes and adventures instead of mathematically equal to PCs, when it's really easy to min-max PCs so that's no guarantee of balance. Heck, PC creation is made richer so that each player, focusing on one character, has a enough to do. A DM running dozens of different foes during a night doesn't need that range for each of them.

Having NPCs built like PCs would be a dealbreaker for 5e - with the exception of the encounters-per-long/short-rest it's my favorite D&D mechanics by far. But I would toss the whole thing aside rather then DM that again.
 

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

AFB, but 100 percent certain the DMG (in the chapter on building encounters) expressly says just this. It also says something like the action economy of 4-5 PCs makes solo fights one sided.

You'd know this if you read that chapter and applied those guidelines instead of ignoring them and then complaining the system (that you dont use) sucks when it doesnt work out for you.

Even putting aside the express words of the DMG telling you this fact, does it really need pointing out?

I mean; 4-5 PCs, each dealing around 50 damage each per turn (probably around par for around 11th level PCs) dish out 200-250 damage per round. Thats just raw damage, and not other 'one-two' punches that they can dish out via owning the action economy, lobbing a single save or suck spell (or a barrage of them) and so forth.

This is the exact reason for the existence of legendary creatures. If you want to use a solo creature it generally needs to have a very high CR (the encounter building XP charts recommend about 4-5 CRs higher than the party). Better yet, use a legendary creature (the creatures legendary actions even up the action economy imbalance, and its legendary saves protect it from getting shut down on round 1 via a barrage of save or suck effects).

Higher CR solo creatures run the risk of devolving your encounters into rocket tag. They can generally deal enough damage in a single hit to cream a PC in a single round. Combats become much more swingy.

I had a similar houserule for SWSE (which like all iterations of d20 and many other games also features this problem). I simply added 2 'legendary actions' to solo encounters (they get an extra turn at initiative -10 and then again at initiative -20) giving them 3 turns per round, and tripled their HP. I also let them ignore getting moved down the CT [or remove a debilitating effect like getting Force Gripped] 3/ encounter. The EL for such an encounter is = to the critters CR (instead of CR/3).

'Legendary' Darth Vader in this system has 450 odd HP, and gets three turns per round. He can choose to ignore getting knocked down the CT (or choose to automatically resist a talent or force power used on him) 3 times per encounter.

He's an approriate solo encounter for 4 x 19th level SWSE PCs.
 

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