D&D 5E (2024) Mike Mearls explains why your boss monsters die too easily

[Charlaquin]

Facetious?

That's my basic DM advice for adventure planning.

Create an encounter
Record who's winning at the end of round two
Look for an out on turn three.
Repeat 4 to 7 more times depending on recovery equipment.

Oh, ok, so it was meant genuinely. In that case, yeah, I agree. This is excellent advice for DMing 5e!

 

[Parmandur]

Yeah, I will say one of 5e’s strengths is that it can make players feel like their characters are in great danger, even when their victory is basically assured.

It is a dopamine machine: Mike Mearla himself compared ktndjring one of the Happy Fun Hours to being like a casino, but the players are designed to be the House.

 

[John Lloyd1]

I would focus less on the amount of real time it takes and more on the number of rounds it takes. If 10 minutes seems blindingly fast, I get it. I’m currently a player in a game with two players who are over 50 and a DM who has a severe stutter, I know the feeling of rounds taking a long time to resolve. Point being though, I think most players who balk at the idea of 6-8 combats per day are not thinking about those combats as being only 3 rounds. They’re probably thinking of them being at least twice that long.

I'm doing mostly one-shots at the moment. Real-time is very important to me.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah, I will say one of 5e’s strengths is that it can make players feel like their characters are in great danger, even when their victory is basically assured.

I've never seen that as a strength. Every time I see a live play where the players act like their PCs are in mortal danger when by the rules of the game they're playing I know they're really not, it bugs the heck out if me. Even worse if the players are being manipulated by the mechanics and think they really are in danger. That's just an illusion.

 

[MGibster]

Or that people just don't want to play that way (with lots of filler encounters that exist basically for attrition).
One thing that would likely help is making a long rest more like stopping at Rivendell for an extended period and less like taking a nap.

This is kind of where I am. I like how everything works in 5E, more or less, but I don't care for a bunch of filler combat where victory is a foregone conclusion at the cost of some resources. In my current campaign, I've started to get a little better about spacing out several encounters that don't allow many opportunities for short rests let alone long rests. If I don't do that then the PCs ROFL stomp all over the big bad guy.

 

[overgeeked]

To be fair, the sudden and enormous influx of new players 5e brought to the game would have made it impossible to know what “the vast majority” would prefer, since most of them weren’t playing yet.

The enormous influx of new players Critical Role and Stranger Things brought to 5E.

5e was originally playtested using keep on the borderlands,

I remember.

and the majority of the people participating in the playtest loved it.

I was not one of them. I pushed for freeform skills and other wild departures.

5e was tailor-made to the specifications of people who wanted to use it for dungeon crawling. It just happened to break out of that market for reasons that probably had nothing to do with the way its combat math was designed.

It got far more eyes than it otherwise would have because of Critical Role and Stranger Things. But people quite likely stayed because it was deeply satisfying to people who wanted power fantasy...because of how the combat math was designed combined with how the majority of people did not play it that way.

 

[overgeeked]

20 rounds of combat is really not that long. Again, 3 rounds should be doable in about 10 minutes, maybe 15 for a slow group, so 20 rounds should be doable in an hour or two, leaving a typical D&D session with an hour or two for exploring the dungeon between those combats and and hour or two of interacting with NPCs in town before and/or after.

In a decade of playing 5E I've literally never had a combat go that fast.

 

[AlViking]

So the argument is, because the party will approach the BBEG with all abilities ready (e.g. fully rested) they need to be differently designed.

That's one take.

But a likely better one, the DM needs to understand and control the pace of play. There can be many ways to ensure the party can't always rest, certainly not after EVERY combat.

Every once in a while the party stomps on the BBEG in my game. But party effectiveness varies wildly and it will never be something that can be boiled down to a spreadsheet that works for every group. I've (almost) always been able to throw challenging encounters, but as a DM you need to be willing to set pacing and adjust difficulty as needed.

You can do a lot with environment, tactics, mixing up the goals of the combat. Nothing I do is magic, if combats are regularly too easy, I make them more difficult. If the group wants to take a long rest after every fight there are consequences. Finding the right balance will always be an art more than a science but it can be done and I've been doing it for over a decade now.

 

[Charlaquin]

I was not one of them. I pushed for freeform skills and other wild departures.

They had Freeform skills in the first few packets, and I loved it! Narrowing it down to a set list was one of the changes I was most unhappy with.

EDIT: Also, I think the influx came well before Critical Role and Stranger Things (though those both rode the wave and helped it get even bigger by a great deal). But, yeah.

 

[mamba]

Even worse if the players are being manipulated by the mechanics and think they really are in danger. That's just an illusion.

yeah, but usually a welcome one. No one is really expecting anything negative from going to a haunted house ride either, and they are popular for the scares

I mean, the danger mostly has to be fake, if the odds are 50:50 and you have a hundred fights over your adventure path, no one will ever even make it halfway through