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

[overgeeked]

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

That's because it was designed as a dungeon crawler. Because it had to cover that aspect of play that people would certainly use. That the vast majority don't play that way apparently never occurred to the designers of the game.

 

[Parmandur]

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.

Right, it made a more focused fight simulate a full Adventure Day. Pretty clever.

 

[soviet]

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.

No, this is bad design. Why wouldn't you need combat to be balanced? That doesn't make any sense.

How many of the fights in LotR were the sixth to eight one that happened that day? A lot of groups play D&D in this epic quest kind of way that doesn't involve a huge amount of fights per day. Meaning, the fight that does happen is skewed towards the PCs, and specifically it is skewed towards the spellcasters and short rest/long rest powers.

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.

So it isn't a problem that needs to be addressed but obviously it does need to be made up for in the way people prep their games. OK.

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

The point of an ambush is to pick an advantageous place for the fight to take place and to get the first attacks in. Not to benefit from the system happening to expect a bunch of your expendable powers to have been already used up in the half a dozen interstitial fights you got in after breakfast.

 

[prabe]

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.

No snark: It sounds as though you reinvented/repurposed the Mythic Monsters mechanic. I've found that works well for boss-type combats--I had a Mythic CR 30 dragon as the climactic fight in the last campaign I wrapped up, it worked well.

 

[overgeeked]

There's also the issue that attrition-based adventuring is boring.

That's literally all of D&D. The game is designed around attrition-based adventuring.

 

[Zardnaar]

Modern players are more 5MW vs older players imho.

I normally go 3-5 combats 2-3 rounds each.

Current session they'll get around 10 encounters but that's because boss fight+ end campaign soon.

Mearls is basically saying 1-2 fights long rest.

Bosses are to easy. Legendary saves 3 don't cut it and 200-300hp doesn't cut it (level 10ish).

Even with mooks.

 

[Charlaquin]

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.

I mean, that’s subjective, but “I don’t like the way this system is designed to work” is a very different complaint than “this system doesn’t work as designed.” People decided they thought long adventuring days with many combats sounded boring, refused to run the game that way, and then complained that the game wasn’t balanced. The game was balanced, it was just balanced around a play pattern you thought sounded boring.

The problem with designing combat balance around fewer, harder combats is that it’s much swingier than an attrition model. Variance favors the less likely outcomes, and in D&D, the PCs winning is the most likely outcome. The players are statistically favored to win, but fewer combats means fewer dice rolled, which means results are less likely to hew closely to the statistical expectation. Therefore, the more rounds of combat the system expects, the more confident the system can be in its expectation of the results. If you build a system around the expectation of fewer, harder encounters, that difficulty therefore has to come more from the inherent swinginess of the dice, which means more combats where you either feel like the bug or the windshield, instead of feeling like a well-tuned challenge that you have to use all the tools at your disposal to succeed at.

 

[Zardnaar]

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.

Clarification?

Mist here were saying 6-8 encounters were to many vs how people were playing.

Games to easy we did 10-12 encounters once in 2014 going x5 over deadly for one encounter.

 

[Parmandur]

I mean, that’s subjective, but “I don’t like the way this system is designed to work” is a very different complaint than “this system doesn’t work as designed.” People decided they thought long adventuring days with many combats sounded boring, refused to run the game that way, and then complained that the game wasn’t balanced. The game was balanced, it was just balanced around a play pattern you thought sounded boring.

The problem with designing combat balance around fewer, harder combats is that it’s much swingier than an attrition model. Variance favors the less likely outcomes, and in D&D, the PCs winning is the most likely outcome. The players are statistically favored to win, but fewer combats means fewer dice rolled, which means results are less likely to hew closely to the statistical expectation. Therefore, the more rounds of combat the system expects, the more confident the system can be in its expectation of the results. If you build a system around the expectation of fewer, harder encounters, that difficulty therefore has to come more from the inherent swinginess of the dice, which means more combats where you either feel like the bug or the windshield, instead of feeling like a well-tuned challenge that you have to use all the tools at your disposal to succeed at.

I think more people didn't run the game that way and were perfectly happy or blissfully ignorant of the whole thing: 5E serves two markets very well, those who want big attrition challenges and those who don't care about challenge. I reckon tjwt covers most people

 

[Zardnaar]

Mearls. "It's quite likely that a semi-optimized party can vaporize boss monsters in a round or even less."

LOL.

Referees been saying that about 5E for a damn decade. But nope, it's a perfectly balanced game.

To say nothing of players optimizing to the Nth. Ugh.

My Bane DM specual peopke at ENWORLD claimed was CR24 or so died start of round 2. To level 10 PCs. Only 1 or 2 were optimized 1 was played quite badly.