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

[Scott Christian]

I have. Met them in droves when running 5E. It‘s one of the many reasons I quit running it. The players pushed to rest as often as possible and refused to push through. Town invaded? Don‘t care. Prince sacrificed? Don‘t care. If they couldn‘t start every fight as close to full as possible they‘d simply shrug and wait. They had zero interest in risk or challenge of any kind.

Then they are not playing a roleplaying game, they are playing a combat simulation or tactical combat game. The fact that thousands of hours of D&D exists online for anyone to watch, and almost all of them have narrative driven stories should expressly teach, through direct and concrete examples, that D&D is not "just" a combat simulator.

Of course, if that is all you find, then maybe the finger pointing should turn 180 degrees.

 

[Parmandur]

OK, but taking a fifth level or higher party, what is acceptable chances of a TPK for a fight to be challenging? 40%, 20%, 10%?
Because any of these tend to me that a TPK will happen in a few sessions. Is that acceptable to you?

I mean, following the full Adventure Day or undershooting the day considerably (which seems to be the worst common approaches to the hame) that isn't terribly likely. But a chance of a TPK can add to the thrill of the game, certainly? Failure being an option is part of the fun.

 

[Minigiant]

Casters like casting spells. Why should they be ok with casting fewer of them?

Because the boss fights aren't fun.

They've already been lowered.

It needs to be lowered because...

I think that the problem is to some degree less a matter of how many than how flexible they have become under 5e's neo vancian prep.

exactly.

5e's NeoVanian magic and 5e's Rituals is more like double the available slots.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I mean, following the full Adventure Day or undershooting the day considerably (which seems to be the worst common approaches to the hame) that isn't terribly likely. But a chance of a TPK can add to the thrill of the game, certainly? Failure being an option is part of the fun.

Yes, but we are not talking about adventuring day model, we are talking about a full-resources-at-every-fight model, with those fights still being challenging. So what is the acceptable chance of a defeat (thus probably a TPK) for a fight to count as challenging? An actual answer, please.

 

[AnotherGuy]

The DM did react to our character's actions twice, when dealing with the Trollkin bandits. The first time, we returned to find they had reinforced their defenses and trapped some of the entrances to their lair. The second time, they attacked the nearby village in retaliation, forcing us to defend it.

IMO this is good stuff by your DM.

When the adventure was over, the DM confided in me that the main reason he did this was because my character kept reminding that there should be consequences- there was apparently some troubleshooting advice in the adventure, but by and large, he expected us to take our time with it, rather than constantly throw ourselves into the unknown. He'd never stated we were on a clock, I'd apparently done that all by myself because my character felt that was the most logical outcome.

I would have had similar expectations to yourself as a player. If I want a static setting I'd play a boardgame. I want a dynamic logical roleplaying experience - on both sides of the screen.

 

[Scott Christian]

Except there aren't any in that adventure...*

And saying "well the DM has to modify the adventure" is all well and good, but why does the DM have to do that, anyways, exactly? If the game is built around this attrition model, why does it have things like Tiny Hut that you have to work around to enforce it?

Why do I have to seed NPC's with access to a specific spell just to foil the players options? And yes, of course, I could ban or alter the proud nails- but there are so many of them!

Let's be very honest here. 5e doesn't work the way it's supposed to out of the box. Saying "well, I, as an experienced DM can wrangle it into submission" is all well and good, but not every DM has that experience, and really, it's counterproductive to have a game that doesn't work unless you fix it yourself.

In this modern age where a major video game studio can release a game full of bugs and reap the benefits of having a modding community fix it for them, this may seem normal, but I assure you, it's not! Imagine if you bought a car and discovered in order to get it to work as advertised, you had to put in your own time and labor!

I don't think anyone would be happy with that, and yet it's ok for D&D to be that way?

*When I ran the 5e version, in fact, I couldn't modify the adventure in large ways, since I was running it for our local Adventure League. This is where I ran afoul of Crawford's "a hemisphere has a floor" comment.

Which I still contend is BS- that's only true if it's a solid sphere, and last I checked, LTH isn't.

The thing I don't understand is when someone casts Leomund's, if the bad guys spot them (in any adventure), they can go get reinforcements - like a lot of them. There are drawbacks to that hut. There are, of course, other ways the hut can be made to hurt PCs as well, like trapping the area around where the PCs are resting. Creating glyphs in the next room. Leaving the area and going somewhere else to do your dirty work. Identifying exactly who is in the hut, where they live, and then leaving to go harm someone they care about. Etc, etc, etc.

I really like the spell and have used it many times without incidence. In Tomb, I used it to create a bug free sleeping zone. In another adventure, I used it to thwart the extreme cold that would have brought the exhausted condition. And of course I have used it for rests. But it never seemed like an issue. Of course, I have always played in a game where narrative consequences matter.

 

[Yaarel]

OK, but taking a fifth level or higher party, what is acceptable chances of a TPK for a fight to be challenging? 40%, 20%, 10%?
Because any of these tend to me that a TPK will happen in a few sessions. Is that acceptable to you?

Way of looking at this is, should an adventure include encounters that players should run away from?

I feel, yes. I intentionally add encounters that are too powerful in combat, that require players to avoid, sneak past, or resolve via noncombat. I consider this part of verisimilitude.

I prefer tighter math, so I can do this kind of thing on purpose. The current wonkier math accomplishes a similar goal, albeit more randomly.

 

[Parmandur]

Yes, but we are not talking about adventuring day model, we are talking about a full-resources-at-every-fight model, with those fights still being challenging. So what is the acceptable chance of a defeat (thus probably a TPK) for a fight to count as challenging? An actual answer, please.

In general terms, slightly above 2/3 is a good success/failure rate for that dopamine rush. If one insists on an encounter-full refresh that is also a challenge, failing just under a third of the time on average (all else being equal etc) would be about right, I reckon.

One of the nice things about the full day model is that it spreads that fail/success ratio over a number of mico-moments, not really reasonable to do that in a few minutes if each Encounter is a full refresh.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Because the boss fights aren't fun.

It needs to be lowered because...

exactly.

5e's NeoVanian magic and 5e's Rituals is more like double the available slots.

So I am not actually sure it is necessary for high level casters to still have the lowest levels of slots. It results of having a lot of slots, and is also annoying to manage. I think at some point the lowest level slots should just start converting to higher level slots instead of being retained.

 

[BenjaminPey]

You certainly can challenge a party like that. You just need to scale up the encounter difficulty a lot. And we really have no guidance for that, but this is really not the difficult part: it is still perfectly doable. The issue is that once you do this, the game becomes super deadly. Like I have explained a lot of times, in such approach the cost for fight going badly is not that you use your "break the glass in case of emergency" spell slots or that you lost most of your HP. Because none of those matter as you get them back for the next fight. Only cost is someone dying, or once you get revivify (at fifth level) a TPK. I don't understand why people just constantly keep ignoring this.

I did answer exactly to this in my previous post. More specifically to this:

OK, but taking a fifth level or higher party, what is acceptable chances of a TPK for a fight to be challenging? 40%, 20%, 10%?
Because any of these tend to me that a TPK will happen in a few sessions. Is that acceptable to you?

What would be yours? 0 %?

I mean, is the combat supposed to be challenging without the possibility of defeat? Or is the expectation here that fights only taxes ressources, they never threaten lives? If it is what you're after, there is guidance, as the difficulty levels of encounters are built exactly around that ("will the characters die if they are low on ressources?"). You lower the difficulty. The medium difficulty is not supposed to get you a TPK with fully-rested characters.

But if the goal here is to have super tensed encounters, with razor-sharp margins even with characters at full health, without ever threatening any lives, as I said in my previous post, what kind of guidance could possibily give us that without every fights becoming super predictible? If there is tension and razor-sharp margins, there is a risk of death. It's already quite cushioned with the various healing powers and death saves of the characters, I'd say, and if it's still not enough, there is, also, an entire entry of the DM's toolbox in the last DMG about characters death, which would provide you some guidance around how to play around that, like putting death as a hard limit, or giving alternatives to death in case of defeat. I play quite a lot with kids who very much mind losing their characters, so I'm familiar with this problem, and I wouldn't say it's not addressed.