D&D 5E Length of Combat

[FormerlyHemlock]

Yep. And your analysis was more or less fine (though it did have an issue that you chose to ignore the beholder's anti-magic when all of the attack against it were magical).

But the issue with the example was that what works theoretically doesn't always work in practice, and while the theory says that creature lasts two rounds, that doesn't match with what I've experienced in practice. And, really, it's the practice that matters.

And one of the reasons the theory doesn't match the practice is...

Exactly this. Amongst other things, if the beholder has a bunch of allies, then those allies serve to soak up a lot of attacks, meaning that lots of that lovely DPS is 'wasted' - a 20 damage hit to a 14 damage hobgoblin 'wastes' 6 damage. Or, perhaps more to the point, it means those 20 points aren't coming off the beholder. Probably.

To be fair about this though: 5E achieves short combats primarily through making combats easy. A lone beholder is a Medium combat, over in two rounds after contact is made in earnest. "Contact in earnest" isn't necessarily synonymous with "you see a beholder" or "roll initiative". The GWM Barbarians might have to jump through some hoops to bring their melee attacks to bear on the beholder. It's impossible to estimate in general how long that will take though because it's very terrain- and DM-dependent.

The point is though that 50 hobgoblins + 1 beholder is no longer a Medium encounter. It's a triple-Deadly encounter. On the one hand, I highly recommend triple-Deadly encounters and above because unlike Medium encounters they are not usually boring and contrived. On the other hand, it's not a surprise that a triple-Deadly encounter takes much longer to run than a Medium encounter, not least because the players will be taking longer in real-time to make their decisions in this high-stakes environment.

An encounter like that may only feel like a few minutes, but it's not at all unlikely that at the end of it you look at the clock and discover that it's really been two hours.

 

[knasser]

Whereas Schrodinger's Monsters were precisely what drove other people nuts.

All rules are an abstraction, necessarily just an imperfect tool to represent the platonic monster (and I don't mean modrons!). Being able to represent the thing that I am describing in different ways according to need was really useful. It gave me detail when a creature was a big deal to the PCs and simplicity when it wasn't. That, along with the general lack of varying power level within the same creature type, are possibly the things I think are the biggest baby-bathwater loss.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

You can still have simplicity even without Schrodinger's Monster. There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing an encounter as an abstract challenge. For example:

DM: There's a couple of ogres there. Make a stealth check, DC 16.
Player: Pass.
DM: You surprise them. Roll 1d20.
Player: 14
DM: You vanquish both ogres, losing 16 HP in the process. You wipe the ogre blood off your weapon. You're now in a wine cellar with exits to the north and south and a trap door in through which you have just rappelled...

The difference of course is that in 5E, "ogre" is an actual monster with real stats, and players can judge whether it's reasonable to expect to lose 16 HP while taking out a couple of ogres. In 5E, it wouldn't be unreasonable for this to happen:

Player: I'd actually be really surprised if the ogre managed to deal 16 HP of damage to me. Can we play this out in detail instead?
DM: Sure, if you want to. You've surprised two ogres in a wine cellar. Their eyes widen in shock as you... what are you doing when you surprise them?
Player: I'm tripping one while I... [etc.]

I don't get the impression, when people talk about 4E, that 4E DMs would have found it equally reasonable for players to ask to use a different set of stats for the monsters in 4E. In 4E, the simplification wasn't just an abstraction on top of an underlying reality--there WAS no specific underlying reality, it was a collection of parallel realities all of equal validity. That kind of thing drives me nuts, and so tossing out that bathwater is vital to making a game that I'd be willing to play. If they'd called that "baby" instead of "bathwater" and kept it around, I'd still be playing GURPS or XCOM instead of 5E.

 

[wedgeski]

I enjoyed Minions, and have imported them into 5E to some extent. But, let's not jump into the gamism vs. verisimilitude tar-pit again! Only evil can come of it.