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

[Maxperson]

They are a crutch if it is basically your only way to deny a long rest, e.g. you are forced to do random encounters in order to stop long resting when it would hinder the pace of the game.

These are mutually exclusive things. You cannot have an encounter that is both random and an encounter with the express purpose stopping long rests. The latter is not random.

A random encounter can happen at any time in a 24 period and is not controlled at all. It's possible one will happen during the long rest, but it's more likely to happen in the other 16 hours of the day, if it happens at all during that 24 hour period.

If the DM is deliberately throwing an encounter at the party during the long rest in order to disrupt it, there's nothing random about that.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I don't think with eight hour long rests and Leomund's hut existing random encounters are a viable deterrent unless the GM constantly tailors the random encounter list with monsters designed to overcome this obstacle.

 

[Maxperson]

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.


Exactly. Mearls explicitly confirmed this as the design intent:










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

The rule is unusable as written then, because it includes no more than 2 hours of light activity as a qualifier as well. Well, what happens if you only have 300 rounds of combat(30 minute), but you also have 1.5 hours of light activity? How much light activity does 30 minutes of strenuous activity take up? Or is it really 3 hours of interrupted sleep. What about 20 minutes of light and 20 minutes of strenuous?

Or maybe it's in addition to the light. You can do 120 minutes of light, and 59 minutes 54 seconds of heavy without ruining your rest. However, if you do 120 minutes and 6 seconds of light, it's also ruined.

The rule as written is nonsensical. It cannot be followed since you can have combinations of light and strenuous, but cannot know how much of each you can have when you combine them, and they will virtually always be combined if ANY strenuous activity happens. It's exceedingly rare for no watches(light activity) to happen.

 

[Charlaquin]

I don't think with eight hour long rests and Leomund's hut existing random encounters are a viable deterrent unless the GM constantly tailors the random encounter list with monsters designed to overcome this obstacle.

Leomund’s Tiny Hut is definitely a problem, if your players have access to it and use it for resting in dungeons. I’ve only actually been in one game where this happened, and I wasn’t the DM, but it’s something I would probably discuss with my players if they started using it. I’d probably suggest making it take very time consuming and/or expensive to cast.

 

[TheSword]

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.

Removing the problem is a defacto way of dealing with it.

Secondly why is matching the difficulty to the players capabilities offloading it? Surely that is one of the DMs prime responsibilities?

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Actually 4e introduced it and 5e repurposed it.

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.

It introduced in the sense that it gave a name to something and the rules were built with the concept in mind. It predades 4E as an aspect that affected D&D games before, since it has some game reosurces that are limited by uses per day - spells, rage, or whatever. The less combats you have per day, the more domineering those "dailies" become, the stronger opposition they can face.
I think 3E (or 3.5) also had some sort of mentioning of encounters per day when it came to dealing with challenge ratings and encounter levels.
4E made it a stronger point to design aspects of the game around the notion that this effect simply exists. It kinda reigned in the power of those daily powers, so they were a little less powerful, but also gave every class such abilities, so that diverging from some baseline assumption of encounters per day wouldn't benefit only some classes.

In my own games, we rarely managed to reach the baseline of combat encounters per day that D&D 3rd Edtion, 4th Edition or 5E Edition assumed. With 4E I at least knew running them that my party could handle more powerful opposition (though I still underestimated them often), and no class would suffer from it.


I think if you really want those daily (or weekly or whatever) resources in game, you should be transparent about what your baseline is, and what kind of issues could arise (ideally also with ways to fix them.)

 

[mamba]

I don't think with eight hour long rests and Leomund's hut existing random encounters are a viable deterrent unless the GM constantly tailors the random encounter list with monsters designed to overcome this obstacle.

this is the problem right here, it has a relatively easy fix too

 

[Crimson Longinus]

this is the problem right here, it has a relatively easy fix too

Yes. Just ban it. I however find a lot of GMs are for some reason reluctant to ban problematic spells and features. And regardless, it is ludicrous that they included in the first place at least in the invincible bunker from it exists in 5e.

 

[Parmandur]

Leomund’s Tiny Hut is definitely a problem, if your players have access to it and use it for resting in dungeons. I’ve only actually been in one game where this happened, and I wasn’t the DM, but it’s something I would probably discuss with my players if they started using it. I’d probably suggest making it take very time consuming and/or expensive to cast.

this is the problem right here, it has a relatively easy fix too

I would go so far as to suggest that stuff like Leomund's Tiny Hut are a direct cause of high Level play breaking down and not being common.

 

[Maxperson]

Yes. Just ban it. I however find a lot of GMs are for some reason reluctant to ban problematic spells and features. And regardless, it is ludicrous that they included in the first place at least in the invincible bunker from it exists in 5e.

I banned hut, rope trick and more.