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

[Reynard]

How do you handle it?

When i get a minute, I will dig up the thread. But long story short, I built boss monsters as staged and tiered enemies and managed a super successful convention game of 17th level PCs hunting "gods."

 

[TiQuinn]

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.

All I’ll say is it was not clear to a lot of people including adventure designers, third party publishers, actual play streamers and a host of others - some very experienced people.

 

[prabe]

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.

Yeah, an occasional gantlet works well both as a pacing thing and as a learning thing.

 

[Charlaquin]

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?

I mean, if you’re doing those things, you don’t really need combat to be balanced. Combat is balanced around adventures where combat is happening regularly. If it isn’t happening regularly, obviously you would need to make up for that in the way you design the few combat encounters you do have.

A PC ambush on the big bad? All of these types of adventuring days probably involve 1 or 2 fights at best.

If the PCs successfully ambush the big bad, the fight should be easy. That’s… the point of an ambush…

 

[Staffan]

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.

There's also the issue that attrition-based adventuring is boring. I want encounters to be (somewhat) dangerous in and of themselves, not just speed bumps where the challenge is to see how few resources I can spend dealing with them.

While I haven't had the opportunity to actually play it yet, I like Draw Steel's solution in theory. The only real daily* resource there are your recoveries, which are what you spend to heal up during and in between encounters. Other than that you have Signature abilities (at-wills) and Heroic abilities, which cost X heroic resources to use. Heroic resources are accumulated during combat, so basically you have to "charge up" in order to do the cool stuff. In addition, after every encounter you get a Victory (or sometimes two if it's a particularly tough one), and at the start of each encounter you get extra heroic resources equal to your Victories. This creates a "push your luck" tension, where you get more powerful throughout the adventuring "day", but at the same time you're running low on recoveries. When you take a Respite (which is a period of at least 24 hours of good rest in a safe place like a village, not just making camp for the night) you recover all damage and recoveries, convert your Victories to XP, and can do a respite activity which can be things like crafting, research, replacing certain class features, and so on.

* Not really daily but serving the same purpose.

 

[Parmandur]

When i get a minute, I will dig up the thread. But long story short, I built boss monsters as staged and tiered enemies and managed a super successful convention game of 17th level PCs hunting "gods."

Making the math serve the narrative, nice.

 

[Charlaquin]

When i get a minute, I will dig up the thread. But long story short, I built boss monsters as staged and tiered enemies and managed a super successful convention game of 17th level PCs hunting "gods."

Sounds like a lot of fun!

 

[Charlaquin]

All I’ll say is it was not clear to a lot of people including adventure designers, third party publishers, actual play streamers and a host of others - some very experienced people.

Again, I think a lot of these people actively worked to find ways to read the advice that would support the way they already wanted to interpret it. And also apparently didn’t try running it as it was recommended, cause if they did they’d have seen it worked well.

 

[Staffan]

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.

Things like Battlemaster maneuvers and whatever equivalent limited resource other subclasses have.

 

[Reynard]

Making the math serve the narrative, nice.

Sounds like a lot of fun!

More to the point, the problem is aimed to solve was PCs going nova and ending a fight before it was a threat. I wanted the battle to last a certain amount of time, with inherent threat in that time. The point was to keep the stakes high, as opposed to doing the dwindling resources thing where the fight gets boring and you're just trying to whittle away those last HP.

So instead, I set an HP threshold for each stage, and whenever s new stage came up, monsters refreshed their LAs, LRs and recharge abilities. It created real tension. Worked great.