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

[tetrasodium]

Hardly. The math is trivia & it's even easy to eyeball as totally borked. l made this on a whim five or six years ago on a whim because I was frustrated and bored. It's not even the most advanced way I could have done it using things like Excel's lambda function or any sort of actual code. Basic spreadsheet functions because they are super accessable as w thing generally covered to some degree in standard middlesvool or highschool coursework

 

[Parmandur]

It's interesting to see Draw Steel!, and likely other RPGs, address this issue in their core mechanics.

In DS!, your most powerful spells/abilities require hero resources, which you don't have at the start of your first fight of the day. You build them up each round so that by round 3 (combat generally lasts 3 to 5 rounds), you can hit with your hardest spells / combat abilities.

More importantly, you get a Victory for each combat or obstacle you overcome. At the start of the next combat, you have an extra hero resource for each Victory you start the combat with. So you hit harder, earlier. But you're also likely dinged up and closer to needing a rest.

When you take a long rest, you get healed back up and gain experience points based on the number of Victories you have. But then you lose those Victories and start the next cycle back at zero. Also, you can't take a long rest in a standard dungeon, you need to retreat back to a completely safe location.

So from a design perspective, if you put a boss fight at the end of a chain of encounters, you have a pretty good sense of how powerful the heroes will be when they tackle the boss. Either they'll be sporting a bunch of Victories to hit hard from the get go, or they'll be fully rested up and have the endurance to go an extra round or two. But they won't have both, like they would in D&D after a rest.

The Cosmere RPG just has the attrition resources reset on an Encounter; it straight up rexommwnda handwacium for all matters of money, food, magical power restoration, etc.

 

[Blue]

It would be simple to do so.

Treat the game like a game. Stop worrying about verisimilitude.

Rest Update: You cannot take a long rest until you've had ~20 rounds of combat.

Done.

It's kinda hilarious though.

Such obvious things as "rest as often as possible" and "hit fast and hard" were completely overlooked in the game's basic design.

A later post by Mearls. "A party that unloads with their best powers simply breaks the system."

This is how 13th Age does it, and I get an amazing amount of push back from people who cannot fathom the possibility. Like removing that touch of verisimilitude for a much better game experience will break the entire game for them.

 

[darjr]

I’d argue that for those folks it isn’t a better game experience. These things are subjective.

 

[Clint_L]

my solution is to make ‘dungeons’ smaller. 3-4 encounters in a 5 room-ish dungeon format where each combat is relevant and matters. The location is dynamic and it would be counter intuitive for the party to stop to long rest half way through.

Dungeons of Drakkenheim is a good example of this in practice.

I agree, and this is basically the format of the Heroes of the Borderlands adventure.

To me, a dungeon-type environment is a valuable resource for its inhabitants, and they are going to use that space, so all of it should be meaningful.

 

[Minigiant]

1st: This is what happens when you do not exclusively use power players to playtest your material

It's that they didn't have power players.

It's more the 5e was designed for the sensibilities of old school dungeoneers.

It's just like how they were shocked during the design of Tasha's that somebody will want to play an orc wizard and not play a stereotypical race class combination.

D&D 5e was designed for dungeons first, dungeons second, traditional tropes third.

 

[overgeeked]

I’d argue that for those folks it isn’t a better game experience. These things are subjective.

Yeah, it’s all subjective. Everyone has different lines in different places.

For me, making the referee’s life a touch easier by just accepting the game is a game makes for a better experience. Like so many of the other “little things” we do or ignore to make the game run smoothly.

Shrugging and biting the hook instead of insisting on a well thought out and thoroughly roleplayed motivation for one. Instantly trusting total strangers (the other PCs) with our PC’s life. Playing to the game’s mechanics not any sense of a real world, re: popup healing, lack of scars, easy resurrection, etc. Ignoring the absurdity of a complete and total heal from 8-hours’ sleep. Physics of giant creatures. Ignoring the absurdity of being at full combat readiness at 1 hp but on death’s door at 0 hp. Not having PCs go insane from the constant danger and stress the PCs face. Zero to hero, i.e. peasant farmer to demigod in a few weeks. Lack of economics and inflation due to PCs dumping hundreds or thousands of gold into a small town’s economy. Not having the BBEG just stomp the PCs at the earliest opportunity. High-level NPCs sending low-level PCs on conveniently level-appropriate missions. Balanced combats and encounter building. Etc.

There’s a whole lot of verisimilitude that is given up or glossed over to make these kinds of games function at a basic level. Adding decoupling mechanical rests from in-game sleep is just one more that’s easily added to that massive list.

 

[darjr]

Eh. Tracking 20 encounters on top of everything else isn’t one more thing I want to do as a dm.

Some people just want less of the meta. Or tolerate different meta.

It’s not really that simple.

 

[Zardnaar]

Lots of food for thought here. But one question that I have:

How does a DM be more strict about the rate of Long Rests without seeming too controlling or antagonistic towards the players?

I can tell you that players are always disappointed at best, frustrated at worst, the few times that I've explained to them that "it's too dangerous to take a long rest here; you can make camp, but you won't get the benefits of a Long Rest right now".

EDIT: I've tried to explain in a "metagame" way to the players during session zero that long rests will not be possible inside of a "dungeon environment". But that's never been well received, or they've found work arounds (spells and magic items that let them long rest anywhere that they damn well please).

Ocasional use of time limits and im game consequences.

Go into a dungeon and go nova. Retreat for long rest. Next day inhabitants have bugged out taking loot with them. OR the entire dungeon has reinforced the entrance.

Some newer players tried this. I had cultists of Shar drop glyphs of warding everywhere and hit them at night after resting in tiny hut in the dungeon. They had dispel magic.

 

[Zardnaar]

Eh. Tracking 20 encounters on top of everything else isn’t one more thing I want to do as a dm.

Some people just want less of the meta. Or tolerate different meta.

It’s not really that simple.

20 rounds not encounters.