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

Oh. My. God.

This is precisely and exactly what I've been arguing as a flaw in 5e's design since before it was even CALLED 5e.

Twelve years now, I've been told I'm crazy. Hateful. Biased. "White room"ing. Etc., etc., ad nauseam.

Now it's literally coming straight from the horse's mouth. Will folks retract any of that? Hell no!

Well, it is kind of a white room thing. The designers assumed more exploring, and more pressure by the GM. But the typical playstyle turned out to be tactical puzzle-solving. The DMG has given (fairly accurate) estimates of what encounters will make the game run as attended. And many, if not most, GMs just ignored that part.
 

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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.
And to control the pace, you don't need to run 20 rounds of combat every long rest, you just need the party to believe that there could be 20 rounds of combat before that long rest. Vary your adventure days, have the occasional after BBEG lieutenant fights (where the BBEGs lieutenants show up a minute or two after the initial battle), have 40 round combat days, etc. Also, I've found Deadly combats typically take about 6 rounds. 3 of those is 18, very close to the recommended 20 and fits in neatly with 2 short rests per day.

The DM has a million tools at their disposal to bring tension into combat. It's fine that the books leans in the direction of non system mastery. As the players master the system, so should the DM. And speaking of DM system mastery, I think BG3 has shown definitively that it's not impossible for 5e to be deadly with the right DM.
 

yeah, but usually a welcome one. No one is really expecting anything negative from going to a haunted house ride either, and they are popular for the scares

I mean, the danger mostly has to be fake, if the odds are 50:50 and you have a hundred fights over your adventure path, no one will ever even make it halfway through
I see the RPG experience as more than a haunted house ride. And I don't do adventure paths.
 

Do you build encounters according to the guidelines in the 2014 DMG? Including the XP multiplier based on the number of monsters in the encounter? And do you build those encounters for somewhere above the threshold for Medium difficulty and below the threshold for Deadly? Because if you’re doing those things, combats should take about 3 rounds. Maybe 4 if the dice are running really cold for your players. How long 3 rounds of combat takes your group to execute will of course depend on factors outside the designers’ control - I know well what it’s like to have players who can’t remember their own abilities or spells, or where anything is on their character sheet. But, if a single round of combat is taking you more than 5 minutes to get through, I’m not surprised you find the idea of more than one or two combats per session boring.
I mostly don't build encounters to any guidelines, no. I build them to be challenge to the PCs that'll A) do some work in the narrative and B) be worth playing out at the table. But even a combat that doesn't go more than three rounds is likely to be more than half an hour at my tables. Part of that will be because I run for five or six PCs, part of that will be because not all my players are super speedy about declaration and/or resolution (and I'm not bothered by how long things take, the players are attentive and responsive, no one's checked out).

That said, combat hasn't been all that speedy in the 5e games I've played in, so I'm not sure the games I run are all that slower than most.
 

I mostly don't build encounters to any guidelines, no. I build them to be challenge to the PCs that'll A) do some work in the narrative and B) be worth playing out at the table.
Alright, well that’s definitely the problem.
But even a combat that doesn't go more than three rounds is likely to be more than half an hour at my tables. Part of that will be because I run for five or six PCs, part of that will be because not all my players are super speedy about declaration and/or resolution (and I'm not bothered by how long things take, the players are attentive and responsive, no one's checked out).

That said, combat hasn't been all that speedy in the 5e games I've played in, so I'm not sure the games I run are all that slower than most.
I don’t suspect you’re much slower than most, no. You’ve just got an above average sized group of players who tend not to play at a very fast pace, fighting combats that are probably significantly above the expected difficulty. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but it does all contribute to your combats taking a long time to resolve. So, if you’re imagining 6+ combats like that a day, yeah, no wonder it sounds like a boring slog. I recommend at some point trying to run encounters according to the DMG guidelines for a group of 4 or 5 players. I think you will find that it’s much easier to get through them very quickly and get many more of them done in a session. You might not prefer that to how you currently run things, and that’s fine if so. But you might find it illuminating. In my experience, running any game as intended has a way of revealing why a lot of the design choices that would otherwise feel, frankly, stupid, were made, and even if you don’t like the game as it was designed, understanding how it was designed and why can be really helpful in coming up with house rules that directly and specifically fix the things you don’t like about it, with fewer unwanted side-effects.
 


Alright, well that’s definitely the problem.

I don’t suspect you’re much slower than most, no. You’ve just got an above average sized group of players who tend not to play at a very fast pace, fighting combats that are probably significantly above the expected difficulty. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but it does all contribute to your combats taking a long time to resolve. So, if you’re imagining 6+ combats like that a day, yeah, no wonder it sounds like a boring slog. I recommend at some point trying to run encounters according to the DMG guidelines for a group of 4 or 5 players. I think you will find that it’s much easier to get through them very quickly and get many more of them done in a session. You might not prefer that to how you currently run things, and that’s fine if so. But you might find it illuminating. In my experience, running any game as intended has a way of revealing why a lot of the design choices that would otherwise feel, frankly, stupid, were made, and even if you don’t like the game as it was designed, understanding how it was designed and why can be really helpful in coming up with house rules that directly and specifically fix the things you don’t like about it, with fewer unwanted side-effects.
Yeah, and there's also the problem of making six or eight fights in a day make any kind of narrative sense. I think I might have run a gantlet that intense once, in somewhere over 300 sessions of 5e-ish games. I'm also perfectly happy to run a ten- or eleven-round combat that consumes an entire four-hour session, if the narrative that emerges calls for such a fight.
 

Not sure what you mean by this. Poisons in both the 2014 and 2024 version of 5E frequently inflict the poisoned condition, which means disadvantage on attack rolls. That is no joke.
Prior to the 2024 DMG, most attacks that dealt poison damage first had to hit with an attack roll, usually dealing a very small amount of piercing or slashing damage on a hit, and then forcing a Constitution saving throw, dealing a much larger amount of poison damage on a failed save, and often (but not always) half as much poison damage on a successful one.

In the 2024 DMG, every attack that deals poison damage just deals that damage (along with the tiny amount of piercing or slashing) on a hit, without a chance to save for half or no damage.
 


Prior to the 2024 DMG, most attacks that dealt poison damage first had to hit with an attack roll, usually dealing a very small amount of piercing or slashing damage on a hit, and then forcing a Constitution saving throw, dealing a much larger amount of poison damage on a failed save
And not infrequently also inflicting the poisoned condition. I know I've run monsters like that quite recently, though admittedly I don't remember whether they came from the official MM or not.
 

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