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

[Charlaquin]

It’s almost as if stating one’s assumptions when designing a system could actually help GMs running that system! Crazy!

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.

 

[Mort]

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.

If you look at the threads here, there are MANY people who understood what the DMG said perfectly. But here is not a representative sample.

And a bigger problem, many of the people writing adventures didn't seem to get it!

 

[prabe]

So the argument is, because the party will approach the BBEG with all abilities ready (e.g. fully rested) they need to be differently designed.

That's one take.

But a likely better one, the DM needs to understand and control the pace of play. There can be many ways to ensure the party can't always rest, certainly not after EVERY combat.

Seems to me as though the best approach is something along the lines of "some of both, with some variation." Design things for the role/s they're going to play in the game, run the game so sometimes the party can rest, sometimes they can't (I think here, the best thought is that the GM should be able to predict when and whether the PCs will rest) and probably in this "best approach" there'd be variance in the kinds of situations and challenges the PCs would be engaging with. That puts a lot on the GM, of course; oh, well.

 

[Reynard]

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

 

[Parmandur]

Wow, 20 rounds of combat between long rests, with combats assumed to last about 3 rounds means they were expecting approximately 6 or 7 combats between long rests.

Which is what the 2014 DMG recommended.

Which is what a lot of us have been saying for the past 10 years.

And it does work really well when that rhythm is followed, in my experience. And it works fine when it is not followed, it just makes the game a cakewalk. Doesn't make that big a difference if everyone is having fun.

I don't think D&D can escape it's identity as a resource attrition game at heart, but diving into the Cosmere RPG recently it is interesting how much smoother balance is when you take pretty similar surface mechanics but make the Encounter ("Scene" in the Cosmere RPG terminology) the basis of gameplay instead of a more potentially varied basis like a full Adventure Day.

 

[overgeeked]

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.

Some much pointless frustration.

 

[Campbell]

If you look at the threads here, there are MANY people who understood what the DMG said perfectly. But here is not a representative sample.

And a bigger problem, many of the people writing adventures didn't seem to get it!

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.

 

[TiQuinn]

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.

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

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

 

[overgeeked]

The next obvious question is: would 5E be as wildly popular if the majority of referees got this right? That is to say, if 5E wasn't played as an alpha-strike cakewalk by the majority of tables, would it have become as popular as it is?

 

[Charlaquin]

If you look at the threads here, there are MANY people who understood what the DMG said perfectly. But here is not a representative sample.

And a bigger problem, many of the people writing adventures didn't seem to get it!

Oh, yeah, some people understood the assignment, but I think a lot more didn’t, and moreover they refused to accept it when it was explained to them.