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

[Maxperson]

Yeaj, I do think ot is likely that Critical Role is more representative of normal play these days than the strict maximum Adventure Day in the DMG...but if so, then the system is still serving them.

Yep. Several times they've been running on cantrip fumes before they get to rest.

 

[Parmandur]

Yep. Several times they've been running on cantrip fumes before they get to rest.

Which is also impressive when you consider that they are a large enough party that both the 2014 and 2024 DMG just throw their hands up in the air about recommending anything challenge wise. Really, what can't 8 5E PCs handle if they work together??

 

[Zardnaar]

Players will fight tooth and nail against changes that force their PCs into being the subjects of attrition play. They will try very hard to have their PCs be at their best as often as possible.

Some GMs will use the natural passage of time along with various time-pressure strategies as an anti-PC tool, to deliberately prevent the PCs from being at their best. If I see a GM as doing this, then yes I will leave the table - or preferably not join it in the first place. I will do so even if the GM does swear up, down, and sideways that he truly and honestly is treating the passage of time as a neutral & realistic environmental condition and not as an anti-PC tool at all.



First, in my experience players become bored with such things much more slowly than GMs do - GMs become bored and want to change things to make them more interesting when the players are still having good fun with the way things are.

Second, and again in my experience, players having to deal with not being at their best can sometimes be fun as a very rare and unusual thing but it quickly becomes unfun for the players (if still fun for the GM) if this becomes a frequent or regular occurrence.

So even when boringly same-way fights become a problem, I don't see trying to fix this by arranging fights when the PCs are partially depleted of resources as a good solution.


It's artificial for control of the pace of play to be purely a GM privilege, with the players and PCs having little or no input. So if the PCs are depleted after going through the mooks and minions, and decide to rest and recover for 8 hour before taking on the BBEG (or even decide "We lost this one. We should withdraw and try again some time in the future.") then it's cool if the players can trust the GM to be honest about the effects of time passage, but uncool if the GM abuses those effects or otherwise acts to create a "But thou must!"

Players abusing it can easily be countered with liing world.

Obvious one is enemies just leave.
No loot for PCs, no magic items, no XP for killing stuff, no milestone leveling.

Or the enemies reinforce. Its kinda moronic any NPC with intelligence of 10 (8?) Or higher doesn't redeploy or prepare. Or flee.

Il mix it up a bit. Sometimes 5MW works, sometimes there's a time limit, sometimes living world.

RAW 5E is already easy mode. If youre running by the book the DM can't really stop you RAW using standard encounters. Except maybe at lowest levels, terrain or cherry picked monsters.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Saying no to your players is not railroading. "No" is as much a tool in DM's arsenal, as is "yes", "yes and", "yes but", "no but" and "no and"

Saying "no" to your players is not automatically railroading.

However, saying "no" to your players is quite common with the more ham-fisted, clumsy forms of railroading.

It's sort of like how frequent urination is a common sign of diabetes, but not a smoking gun by any means. You could also have enlarged prostate, or you could be consuming excess amounts of water, or you could have a 1st trimester pregnancy, or you could be taking a medication that has that side effect, etc. But if you do have the symptom, and you don't know why, it's probably a good idea to look into it.

For myself, I vastly prefer to:

• Say "yes"
• Set out conditions and get player assent, then roll
• Dig deeper and ask what the player is aiming for or what they really desire
• Say "no, but..." and offer one or more alternatives in a similar direction
• In truly desperate cases, explain my position as much as I can, then ask for their input

I have only had to say a hard "no" like...twice, in something like seven and a half years of running this game. "Yes", "yes, and...", "yes, but...", and "no, but..." have served me extremely well in that time, and functionally every case where they don't, a quick (<5 min) conversation clears up the issue and puts us on a track to giving everyone what they really care about.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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."

It's nice of them to finally admit this.

But yeah. I was making noises about this way back when it was still called "D&D Next." More than a little irritating that it took them 12 years to figure out something that a casual observer, simply looking at the numbers, could point out plainly...

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The problem is that we can show you infintie examples of the time pressure being present in the back or implied, and you can dismiss all with this argument. It's a thought-termianting cliche that shuts down discussion.

As if your "this situation had time pressure, therefore ALL SITUATIONS EVER ALWAYS have time pressure" isn't a thought-terminating cliche?

Time pressure is possible. It is not guaranteed. These are both facts.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

There can be time pressure, it just isn't always or nearly always a thing in every adventuring activity IMO. Even when it is there, it isn't always or nearly always so strong that taking a day off to rest is ridiculous. That's part of the setting too.

Frankly, the claim that there always is such time pressure is what is ridiculous. "You cannot ever wait 8-16 hours. Period. Never. Oh, but taking four hour-long naps? Yeah that's fine. Nothing will change."

That's the critical problem with how 5e did its rests. Spending 3+ hours a day doing nothing, but you never ever see consequences for it, while taking the rest of the day, guaranteed problems? Really?? It's just so patently ridiculous.

If folks disliked 5-minute SRs so much, then something like 15, 20 minutes would make far more sense. Still can be interrupted, still makes sense that you'd need to take a real breather. But with that model, three SRs per day is only one hour total spent resting. Perfectly reasonable to squeeze an hour in bite-sized chunks throughout the day.

Even then, though, the idea that time pressure is always so incredibly, unbelievably dire that it is ALWAYS unacceptable to take a day's rest? Beggars belief. Not all time-sensitive threats are sensitive at the scale of a single day. That's just a fact of life. Anyone who claims otherwise is actively manufacturing an unnatural world in order to force gameplay decisions--exactly what others in this thread have been (allegedly) railing against.

 

[M_Natas]

But because that's just where the story is at a given point, they aren't breaking up longer strings of fights by cheesing rests: they know Mercer has time based consequences when there is a big Dungeon on the line. If they tried 5MWD at the end of the Vox Machina campaign to "play optimally", the world would have ended.

Days without a full complement of fights happen, even whole campaigns that don't push the limit: but I doubt many tables are cheesing rests like a static 90s video game.

Yeah, this right here is the crux of it.

It’s not that players are trying to cheese the five-minute workday (5MWD). It’s that the 5MWD has basically become the default, simply because most groups don’t run dungeon crawls or long adventuring days very often.

If players start forcing rests in ways that don’t make sense in the world, that’s something a DM can handle with in-game consequences. But the bigger issue is that the dominant 5e playstyle, influenced by shows like Critical Role, is very narrative-focused. You usually get one or two major fights before it makes sense in the story to rest. Those “6 to 8 encounters per long rest” guidelines from the DMG are the exception, not the rule.

That’s where things start to break down. If you follow the DMG encounter guidelines as a new DM, you’ll quickly notice that “deadly” doesn’t really mean deadly for a fully rested party. You often need to double or even triple up on encounters to make things feel like a real challenge.

On top of that, only having one combat between full resource refreshes removes a lot of the tactical and strategic depth that comes from managing resources. With just one fight per day, there’s no real consequence to burning everything, because you’ll get it all back. The only feedback loop left is “are we winning, losing, or dead?” If you misjudge the difficulty or roll badly, you’re done, because there’s no chance to adjust or adapt over time.

When you have multiple encounters between long rests, you get gradual feedback. If the first fight hits harder than expected and the second leaves the party barely standing, now they have choices. Do we push on and risk it, or fall back and rest while the enemies regroup? That layer of tension and decision-making doesn’t exist in the one-fight-per-day setup.

To really fix this, whether you want one big cinematic fight or a full six-to-eight encounter day, the resting system needs to adapt to both styles of play.

And that’s not hard to do.

Just make long rests restore only a fraction of resources, somewhere between 0% and 30%, depending on conditions. Did they have a good campsite and real sleep, or did they crash in the mud during a storm? Let that matter.

Now resources deplete over multiple days, and wilderness exploration actually means something again. Casting Goodberry or Create Food and Water becomes a real choice, not just a “might as well, I’ve got spell slots left” action at the end of the day.

A fully rested party can still handle six to eight encounters in a single day, but that same resource pool can also stretch across ten encounters over ten days, depending on how they manage it.

Gradual resource regeneration, like in my Gradual Gritty Realism Rest Rules, literally fixes all the problems mentioned in this thread.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It's nice of them to finally admit this.

But yeah. I was making noises about this way back when it was still called "D&D Next." More than a little irritating that it took them 12 years to figure out something that a casual observer, simply looking at the numbers, could point out plainly...

I think it's less that they hadn't figured it out and more that they hadn't admitted it. Heck, WotC still hasn't. Mearls had to leave the company to say anything.