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

[Zardnaar]

Yep. Despite the DMG saying exactly that, people have been denying it for a decade.

I said it 2015 got told to "shut up Zard you're wrong".

Got the 5 power feats right kinda.

 

[Charlaquin]

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.

To be fair, the sudden and enormous influx of new players 5e brought to the game would have made it impossible to know what “the vast majority” would prefer, since most of them weren’t playing yet.

5e was originally playtested using keep on the borderlands, and the majority of the people participating in the playtest loved it. 5e was tailor-made to the specifications of people who wanted to use it for dungeon crawling. It just happened to break out of that market for reasons that probably had nothing to do with the way its combat math was designed.

 

[bedir than]

Double up the encounter difficulty and have roughly two per short rest with only one of those per day. Mix up the expected order of encounters so that boss monsters aren't usually last (ish).
Yes, that means each fight is longer, but there's more stakes and the heroes are still heroes.

 

[John Lloyd1]

I would prefer the assumptions were that one adventuring day can be completed in 3 hours including all 3 pillars.

 

[Zardnaar]

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.

Attrition model takes time IRL. 6-8 encounters may be 3 or 4 sessions.

And after 1-3 weeks between sessions people tend to forget things so....

 

[Zardnaar]

Double up the encounter difficulty and have roughly two per short rest with only one of those per day. Mix up the expected order of encounters so that boss monsters aren't usually last (ish).
Yes, that means each fight is longer, but there's more stakes and the heroes are still heroes.

That wont fix the problem.

They've turned combat into hit point based attrition since 4E.

Without nasty abilities or immunities critters are just sad sacks of HP.

Greater magic resistance on Raksgasa. Needs to be on more critters.

200 hp critters don't matter if they have bad saves or when martials can do 100+ damage.

 

[Staffan]

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

True. That doesn't make it a good choice, though. Attrition-based adventuring was an issue back in 3e (which had a similar set of assumptions, though based on a 4-encounter adventuring day), and was less of an issue during 4e due to short rests allowing partial refills (so you could bounce back from challenging encounters).

I do remember a 3e variant called Iron Heroes that reminds me a little of Draw Steel, in that many classes had resources you would accumulate and spend over the course of an encounter instead of starting at full power and gradually weaken as the day went, in addition to having a reserve pool of hit points you could "refill" from with a brief rest (so sort of similar to healing surges/recoveries). I wonder what the schmuck who designed that would have to say on the topic. Let's see... oh.

 

[Charlaquin]

Clarification?

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

Yeah, because they didn’t want to do that many encounters. But that is what the system was built around.

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

Well, your group is far more optimized than most.

 

[Zardnaar]

Yeah, because they didn’t want to do that many encounters. But that is what the system was built around.

Well, your group is far more optimized than most.

Maybe 5.0 critters were weaksauce.

I suspect I've ran more 5.5 than most here. Sitting behind the DM screen.

2. Saving throws are bad. Even a high wisdom save with spell resistance cant shrug off command/tashas laughter/hold person/monster spam.

2. If your PCs are optimized they would target intelligence saves instead. Tashas mind whip your way through the game.

3. ACs are to low.

4. Martial damage is really high even with moderate optimization (pick your weapon style feat eg great weapon master).

5. Spellcasters don't deal much damage acomparatively but there's to many level 1 spells that hose encounters. CR 13 bad will save may as well be CR 0.

6. To many ways to manipulate dice rolls. Eg alert feat and lucky being origin feats (low opportunity cost to pick them).

7. Weak monsters.

5.0. Even worse and even weaker monsters.

 

[Staffan]

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.

Yes, it's subjective, but considering the number of people who aren't playing it with 20 rounds of fighting per day I think I have some support for my thesis.

I think part of the issue is also that the default starting level for 5.0 was 1, and at level 1 you absolutely can't handle 20 rounds of combat without a long rest. (I believe 5.5 recommends starting at 3 unless it's your first time playing in which case you might need the "tutorial levels" 1 and 2). People recognized this and designed accordingly, and then kept that design going at higher levels. Another factor is that a 6-9 encounter adventure, as described in the 5.0 DMG is really very long, and it's hard to keep interest for that kind of time. There's a reason the "five-room dungeon" is a thing.