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

[Charlaquin]

I legit solved this problem and am super happy with it.

How do you handle it?

 

[TerraDave]

Well at least someone finally admitted it, including the 20 rounds a day.

I have long standing limits on resting, though from 4e (it actually wasn't perfect in this regard). And those limits are now common in 3rd party products.

But at least they are finally out with it.

 

[Charlaquin]

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.

And for those people, the 2014 DMG offered the (admittedly poorly named) “gritty realism” variant resting rules. Short rests take 24 hours, long rests take a week. Now your “adventuring day” is spread out over a week, and you can have your one or two combats a day and still have the game balance work as intended.

 

[aco175]

He explains it in the thread. It means alpha strike vs at-wills. That is how the players play the game (alpha) vs how the designers assumed the players would play the game (at-will).

I'm now not seeing how a fighter's basic attack / at-wills are so unbalanced vs the fighter's alpha / Daily powers. What else is there besides action surge that would make the damage so high? I mean they get the extra attacks at level 5/11... but these are part of the basic attacks.

Unless he means fighters as the PCs and not the fighter class. If this is the case, it is just poor wording.

 

[Parmandur]

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.

I mean, it does work without doing that. It just means the party will cream anything they come across. There is a choice between piling on Encounters and not having a challenge on a few focused Encounters...it give an easy difficulty know in practice, and most tables that aren't interested in attrition likely don't notice that they are in easy mode (like the Critical Role crew...the players domkmow.how stcked the odds are in their favor).

 

[Minigiant]

Mearls helped design 5e and he crunches the numbers.

I knew this and said this for years now.

Under "normal optimization", casters' offense craps out at around round 15-25.

Also an equally optimized warrior equalizing damage at about the same round.

 

[soviet]

Oh, they did. It’s just that no one read the DMG. And when people quoted the DMG saying “look, it says right here you should have 6-8 combats per adventuring day,” no one believed it. They argued it was just a recommendation of how much a party can handle, not how much they need to be facing every day for combat to be balanced.

Surely the other issue is that mandating 6 to 8 combat encounters a day is ludicrously bad design. For a dungeonbash type adventure that's one thing. But overland travel? Courtly intrigue? Information gathering in the underworld? A PC ambush on the big bad? All of these types of adventuring days probably involve 1 or 2 fights at best.

 

[prabe]

And for those people, the 2014 DMG offered the (admittedly poorly named) “gritty realism” variant resting rules. Short rests take 24 hours, long rests take a week. Now your “adventuring day” is spread out over a week, and you can have your one or two combats a day and still have the game balance work as intended.

Shortening short rests balances things at least as well, IME, and add much less work in the sense of rebalancing spells (and other effects) clearly intended to last between short rests. I've never had any problem challenging the PCs in the 5e-ish games I've run--obviously, YMMV.

 

[Charlaquin]

It’s because they introduced a new term that forced people to search for the context: Adventuring Day.

Actually 4e introduced it and 5e repurposed it.

Well what does that mean? It isn’t clear that’s the same as 20 rounds of combat.

It means 6-8 combats with one or two short rests in between. Which the DMG explains. It doesn’t explain that combats are expected to take about 3 rounds, and it probably should, but all the rest of these assumptions were explicitly stated. A lot of people just… didn’t like those assumptions and decide to ignore them, and then complain that the game wasn’t balanced.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Actually I think most people don't want to lose. They want their characters to be powerful.

I think throwing in a day where they are doing 20 rounds of combatonce in a while is enough to teach the players not to alpha strike all the time. And to show them how much their characters can actually take.