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

[Parmandur]

1e and 2e did just fine. Slow healing and save or die meant that resting didn't bring you anywhere close to full on hit points after a nasty fight, and even magic healing was really limited and would take you days to heal everyone up from a big fight. Couple that with save or die effects and energy drains which can hurt/kill a PC who has just woken up and is full on everything, and you have editions that really don't care about the 5 minute workday.

And it had more wandering monsters to boot, so resting was more dangerous.

That makes sense, but I doubt D&D will go back to AD&D style resting rules just as much as I doubt they will eliminate attrition gameplay for Encounter-centered drsign.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

Pointless.

What is pointless?

Couldn't you create a random encounter table and make tokens for every creature on it?

I did that for larger modules like Isle of Dread, and it was still a time-saver to choose which encounter to use in advance. Also, sometimes it's not feasible or worth it to create 10+ random encounters for short module, instead of picking the good ones.

Taking out the boss is a valid strategy.
Intelligent Boss monsters also know this and prepare for it.

So,

• they are in another room while their Minions fight the Party.
• The 5 enslaved wizards all cast warding bond on the BBEG giving him +5 to AC and Saving Throws and resistance to everything.
• The BBEG is protected by a force field that is powered by Crystals protected by Quantum Orges, that need to be destroyed first.
• Use a Goblin Boss with redirect attack.

Or just double the HP of the Boss and give him higher AC.

• Ignore the minions, rush to another room, focus fire on the boss.
• Warding Bond text specifies "It also ends if the spell is cast again on either of the connected creatures.", boss gets only 1 resistance, +1 to AC, Wizard who cast it dies in a single turn, when party begins to focus fire on the boss and he gets half of that.
• That sounds like you call any attempt at balancing the combat railroading.
• I use maximalized HP of bosses, but this leads to fights taking to long and becoming boring once PCs run out of resources, so does the boss, and msot rounds are just swinging swords and mutual bonking.

The cane toad problem prevents fixing it with house rules. Cane toads were first brought to Florida in the 1930s and 1940s to control sugar cane-eating beetles. This initial attempt at biological pest control was unsuccessful because they liked it better to spread outside the sugar cane fields and without their predators they cause lots of problems.

Too many parts of 5e are designed to enshrine the unholy abomination of the long or short rest for anything shy of a major overhaul of the ruleset to fix the structural problems absent top down GM support from wotc. Everything from not particularly threatening debuffs from "dangerous" monsters vanishing "after a long or short rest" to individual class resources being tied to one or the other makes a mess for any minor rest level house rule fix .... And that's before factoring in the poisonous malicious compliance level shift away from 4e ADEU design back to d&d style adventuring day attrition based design that short rest classes like monk and warlock bring.

"We" haven't been able to homebrew a fix in the last 10+ years because wotc has spent that time actively undermining any efforts at doing so like with all of the times Crawford denied the 6-8 encounter expectation being something designed for. Too many parts of 5e (both core and splat based additions) are designed to ensure that any singythe god awful munchkin level rest mechanics can be forced to return after house rule just by making build choices that make any change as difficult and catch 22 quani edge case prone as possible as often as needed to declare the change an unplayable failure.

Long Rest rules themselves fix this issue as they state:

A character can't benefit from more than one long rest in a 24-hour period

And

The character also regains spent Hit Dice, up to a number of dice equal to half of the character's total number of them (minimum of one die). For example, if a character has eight Hit Dice, he or she can regain four spent Hit Dice upon finishing a long rest.

So you can RAW only do one long rest per 24 hours and your short rests will have progressively diminishing returns, as yout hit die pool depletes.

And just to add:

Why do we even want attrition based design for more than one combat?
Because it gives the DMs more tools to pace the game.
If everything resets after every encounter (like with a 5mwd), the stakes are only during one combat. You either win or loose, nothing in between. No costly victories, no defeats that are not to bad.
A combat has no impact outside of itself.
That's why you want attrition based design. So combat matters afterwards, too.

I like Draw Steel approach, where you have limited number of recoveries for your hit points, but you acucmulate victories that make you stronger and escalate fights. But if you rest, you regain recoveries, while your victories turn into xps. It creates nice tension between desire to rest and desire to do one more room on a good winnign streak. Then again, Draw Steel is designed so fights are short and escalate the longer they go.

 

[payn]

Does anyone here miss the five minute adventuring day???

We are in the era of the 7 lunch break work day now!

 

[overgeeked]

The rule for interrupting long rests quite clearly defines "a period of strenuous activity" as "at least one hour of" certain types of activity. The examples given are "walking, fighting, casting spells, or similar adventuring activity". The fact that it's unreasonable to expect anyone to engage in an hour of nothing but fighting or an hour of nothing but casting spells is irrelevant.

Sorry, but no. This is one of those clear examples of dumb rules that should not be blindly followed. Like surviving swimming in lava without magic and a person filling a 5-foot square.

 

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

Sounds like you are reading the list as follows:
"Interrupted by a period of strenuous activity - at least 1 hour of

• walking
• fighting
• casting spells
• or similar adventuring activity"

I read it as:
"Interrupted by a period of strenuous activity -

• at least 1 hour of walking
• fighting
• casting spells
• or similar adventuring activity"

Note the change in emphasis - I'm emphasizing "strenuous activity" while you are emphasizing "1 hour" - I do happen to think the punctuation (with the dash indicating the beginning of the list, with commas breaking off individual items) favors my reading of the text. I also think common sense favors my version since when is the last time you saw a combat (fighting) go at least 60 rounds?

Both Mearls and Crawford have clarified that the first reading is the correct one, multiple times. Yes its not the best rule in a lot of cases, but that is what the rule is. The design intent is that it should be hard to prevent resting.

Note that 5.5 CHANGED the rule, but the end result is the same - a swiftly-solved interruption to a rest allows the rest to complete and the party to heal.

The rule for interrupting long rests quite clearly defines "a period of strenuous activity" as "at least one hour of" certain types of activity. The examples given are "walking, fighting, casting spells, or similar adventuring activity". The fact that it's unreasonable to expect anyone to engage in an hour of nothing but fighting or an hour of nothing but casting spells is irrelevant. (...) if the party can deal with the threat by achieving a swift victory, nothing is lost.

Exactly. Mearls explicitly confirmed this as the design intent:

Questioner: "But that means combat will never interrupt rest, since a 600-round combat is unheard of. Why list it at all then?"

Mearls: "there could be cases where it's valid - fight starts, now you need to leave the dungeon"

Questioner: "Ah, so it’s meant to be fairly rare, more “we’ve given up resting for now,” not just attacks on the camp."

Mearls: "exactly"

Sorry, but no. This is one of those clear examples of dumb rules that should not be blindly followed.

Just because you made a house rule for your specific table, doesn't mean the rules in the book have changed for other people's tables.

Note - edited

 

[tetrasodium]

Long Rest rules themselves fix this issue as they state:

And

So you can RAW only do one long rest per 24 hours and your short rests will have progressively diminishing returns, as yout hit die pool depletes.

You say that like a gm who has never had a player IMMEDIATELY respond with a shameless "ok so we wait and take one tomorrow" as if even being forced to vocalize such an obvious work around was the result of an unreasonable bit of pedantry from the GM who pointlessly forced the issue.

There are no diminishing returns either because death saves and total hp recovery means that it's super efficient to heal even while scraping the bottom of the barrel & being low going into a rest doesn't mean you are starting off at the bottom of a hole that needs climbing before the PC is at "safe" levels. Toss in a short rest class like warlock& monk and the party really isn't even hurting for effectiveness.

And yes, it absolutely a pointless bit of pedantry because everyone at the table knows without a doubt that the party can ROFLstomp anything shy of Cthulhu in power armor smiting them dead with the sheer power of rocks fall lightning strikes fiat level kills. Sure the GM could murder the session and probably the campaign by actually trolling the party with endless interruptions to prevent short tests during that wait till tomorrow, but that's an epic lose epic lose scenario for the GM at that point.

I like Draw Steel approach, where you have limited number of recoveries for your hit points, but you acucmulate victories that make you stronger and escalate fights. But if you rest, you regain recoveries, while your victories turn into xps. It creates nice tension between desire to rest and desire to do one more room on a good winnign streak. Then again, Draw Steel is designed so fights are short and escalate the longer they go.

I'm a big fan of draw steel and love the way that players themselves resist the urge to rest so they can preserve those victories. I'm saying that having ran it during the patreon phase and a few times since release.

 

[TheSword]

The other wider solution to this is a move away from static dungeon crawling that leaves timing entirely at the players whim and a move towards, mysteries, heists, city crawls, event based adventure etc. What I would call modern adventuring.

Secondly - design boss encounters to be a challenge to PCs at their peak. Assume they will have their highest level spells, action surge and limited use powers. Train players not to splurge limited use powers on lead-up encounters.

Either of these two things help. In combination the resting problem is then solved.

 

[AnotherGuy]

The cane toad problem prevents fixing it with house rules. Cane toads were first brought to Florida in the 1930s and 1940s to control sugar cane-eating beetles. This initial attempt at biological pest control was unsuccessful because they liked it better to spread outside the sugar cane fields and without their predators they cause lots of problems.

I enjoyed this tidbit of information.

Too many parts of 5e are designed to enshrine the unholy abomination of the long or short rest for anything shy of a major overhaul of the ruleset to fix the structural problems absent top down GM support from wotc.

Okay...I agree that it requires a more involved fix.

Everything from not particularly threatening debuffs from "dangerous" monsters vanishing "after a long or short rest" to individual class resources being tied to one or the other makes a mess for any minor rest level house rule fix .... And that's before factoring in the poisonous malicious compliance level shift away from 4e ADEU design back to d&d style adventuring day attrition based design that short rest classes like monk and warlock bring.

I'm a little slow, can you provide me an example of what you mean by not particularly threatening debuffs?
And dangerous monsters vanishing after a long or short rest?

"We" haven't been able to homebrew a fix in the last 10+ years because wotc has spent that time actively undermining any efforts at doing so like with all of the times Crawford denied the 6-8 encounter expectation being something designed for.

Agree, it is amazing how easy it is for people to not believe their own eyes or ears.

Too many parts of 5e (both core and splat based additions) are designed to ensure that any singythe god awful munchkin level rest mechanics can be forced to return after house rule just by making build choices that make any change as difficult and catch 22 quani edge case prone as possible as often as needed to declare the change an unplayable failure.

I'm lucky enough to play with friends, so there is much leeway allowed when it comes to changing the rules.

RESTS
Short Rest remain.
Long Rest becomes a full 24-hours in a safe haven.
So, the refreshes to class features etc work as normal without any change there.

Introduce Travel Rest (8 hours in unsafe environments) which restores 1/2 hit dice only.

HD AND REFRESHING
Allow the expenditure of HD to refresh abilities/class features.
This is the trickiest part of the exercise as you need to find a cost structure that works for you and your table and it should be tied to the level of the class feature being used by the character for fairness reasons.
i.e. So for instance, a 14th level fighter can spend Hit Dice to use their Action Surge for additional attacks at

• levels 1-4 (1 attack);
• Level 5-10 (2 attacks); or
• Level 11 (3 attacks).

Each of the above will have a different cost.

EXHAUSTION
Tie exhaustion into the above.
RESTS - Our homebrew is a Travel Rests allows you to recover a Level of Exhaustion. If you do not have Exhaustion, only then can you recover 1/2 HD. Our preference is grittier.
HD & REFRESHING - If one does not have enough HD to expend to use an ability/class feature one can also pay the cost via Levels of Exhaustion.

That is the basic idea.
We have expanded our ideas on Exhaustion and Lingering Injuries.
We have expanded on the Feat system, Abilities and Skills and we have borrowed and stolen plenty from 5e non-5e content.

What Crawford and the rest say or not say these days and even what they put out is not a concern anymore...

 

[AnotherGuy]

The other wider solution to this is a move away from static dungeon crawling that leaves timing entirely at the players whim and a move towards, mysteries, heists, city crawls, event based adventure etc. What I would call modern adventuring.

Secondly - design boss encounters to be a challenge to PCs at their peak. Assume they will have their highest level spells, action surge and limited use powers. Train players not to splurge limited use powers on lead-up encounters.

Either of these two things help. In combination the resting problem is then solved.

Totally disagree.
In the first, you're avoiding the problem with the system to scenarios that have a better chance of dealing with its short-comings/failures
In the second, the system problem is offloaded onto the players.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

That the game has been designed to work roughly like Mearls says has been clear from the get go. That most people actually do not play like this has been clear about as long.

I agree that the design goal is absurd. In all my decades of playing RPGs, I don't think there has ever been an in-game day with six to eight combats. I don't think how they tested it, but in my experience this simply is not a thing that happens at all, let alone commonly enough to be a sensible design benchmark. And of course having spells like Leomund's invincible bunker that allows players to dictate safe rest whenever is utterly insane is such a paradigm.

But be that as it may, that's the logic the game is based on, and I think a lot of people run into problems by simply ignoring it. There have been countless threads where people complain about things where this is the underlying cause. If you don't want to run the game the way it was designed to be ran (and I don't blame you, me neither) then you actually need to make some adjustments. The easiest one is to use gritty rests or sanctuary-only long rests or both (I use both.) This is not exactly a panacea, but it is sort of "have you tried switching it on and off" type of thing. It solves most of the issues, and you should try it before doing something more complicated. Basically what it does is make the your "daily budget" your "adventure budget." You have this amount of resources to solve the whole situation, before you pack your things and go home to properly rest. And it has the added benefit of being somewhat more verisimilitudious. It is utterly ludicrous that you can be beaten within an inch of your life, be lying on the ground bleeding to death, but as long as you pull though, you'll be perfectly fine the next day.

All this being said, I think seven medium fights is still way too may, and they will in most part be boring pushover fights. I usually opt for 3-4 way more challenging ones. Granted, they still are pushovers a lot of time, as at least in 5.0 monsters are weak, challenge rating is a lie and characters are immortal. I doubt that using 5.0 encounter building rules, in mid levels and beyond six medium fights would deplete much resources beyond the player patience. They made encounters way more deadly and boosted monster in 5.5, so that has probably been at least partially fixed, but I really don't know as I have not been bothering with encounter building math in a long while. I just throw some crazy stuff on the PCs and watch them triumph. I'm sure that with 5.5 boosted monster I end up accidentally killing them at some point.

A week from the gritty realism variant rule was too long - the bbeg was going to complete his ritual, and whole armies could force march!

I think this is a feature rather than a bug. It means that if you take long rest before "solving" the situation, you're basically giving up or at least having the direction to significantly evolve into unfavourable direction.

As for other fixes. The issue with getting rid of attrition altogether, is that then fights risk becoming even more meaningless as the victory is quaranteed and nothing is lost, or alternatively you need to ramp up the deadliness of the game up significantly. In attrition game loss of precious resources can be the cost of a fight gone badly, but if resources refresh for each encounter, only mechanical cost available is character death, and after revivify comes available, a TPK.

Why do we even want attrition based design for more than one combat?
Because it gives the DMs more tools to pace the game.
If everything resets after every encounter (like with a 5mwd), the stakes are only during one combat. You either win or loose, nothing in between. No costly victories, no defeats that are not to bad.
A combat has no impact outside of itself.
That's why you want attrition based design. So combat matters afterwards, too.

Yes, exactly this!

As for gamey suggestions such as requiring twenty rounds of combat before long rest or similar, I think those are a non-starter. It is simply a terrible idea if you want to have any sort of connection between the fiction and the rules instead of treating it just like a hack and slash computer game. It also creates weird incentives such as making it impossible to play smart by trying to avoid combats, or making picking up fights with random weak NPCs to fill the "combat round gauge" and optimal thing to do. Roleplaying games are bout the fiction, and the characters inhabiting that fiction. The primary role of rules is to represent the fiction, and these sort of attempts utterly fail at that.