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

[Maxperson]

Although it really does depend on how you marinade the steak knife. If you let the steak knife sit in a teriyaki sauce long enough, it does get to a point where the steak knife becomes quite tender.

 

[overgeeked]

The problem is, that long rests give back 100% of spend ressources no matter what. So all challenge attrition gets reserted after a night's sleep.

I'm not sure I see what you're objecting to. They have to eventually get a long rest.

If you make long rests a resource they gain after 18 rounds of combat and disconnect it from sleep, it solves all the problems with rests and balance.

 

[M_Natas]

I'm not sure I see what you're objecting to. They have to eventually get a long rest.

If you make long rests a resource they gain after 18 rounds of combat and disconnect it from sleep, it solves all the problems with rests and balance.

You see, for me this is too far removed from the in game world. Like a meta timer.
It also incentivises sub-optimal combat behaviour. The longer you draw a fight out, the better.
As long as you have a "get 100% of ressources back" button, players will find ways to push it, because it is the best strategy to do so.

 

[Basic Expert]

That’s why I love OSE/OSR/Shadowdark etc old school styles. The team can’t really “Supernova” like they can in modern D&D.

I tend to agree. However, the modern playerbase likes the "press shiny button" modern game design while disliking the "why can't I press the shiny button all the time?" aspect of resource management.

This is natural. Gamers, people really, will always try to maximize the upside while minimizing the downside. They always want their PCs to be at full health, with their full complement of abilities whenever possible. This gives them maximum effectiveness but, more importantly, it is a buffer against PC death. Remember, players (unlike the DM) don't know what's coming. They don't know how many hp the boss has or where the traps are or if reinforcements are going to show up. What happens if the PC has a chance to rest, doesn't, and ends up dying as a result?

The smart play is to rest early and rest often, but this is in direct tension with the DM's job to control the pace and intensity of play to reach a desired challenge level. That creates an adversarial stance where anything the DM does to "make things interesting", players see as a removal of agency and a direct threat to their survivability (which it kinda is).

Unfortunatly, 5E isn't particularly forthcoming about this tension. They didn't give the DM many tools to deal with it and even compounded the problem with easy access to pace-controlling resources (Rope Trick, Tiny Hut, etc.). The party controls the pace of play, very much by design, UNLESS the DM contrives scenarios in which time pressures, environmental factors, or other consequences (random encounters) are at play. It is very possible to do this, but advice on how to do it is hard to find. The DMG needed to be far more explicit in this area.

The other problem is the 6-8 encounters/20 rounds expectation, which is too much for most groups, about not properly explained. Sure, the game works as intended if the model is followed, but if only 20%* of tables do this, something is off. *That number is just thrown out there, I have no data for what the actual number is.

This is without getting into the tension between short-rest classes and long-rest classes so that shorter adventuring days naturally favor long-rest classes. The designers maybe thought the thieves and fighters and warlocks would persuade their wizard and cleric brethren to keep adventuring with expended slots, but the reverse seems to be the case.

I've given up on 5E for a lot of the above reasons. My last 5E game used the poorly-named "Gritty Rest Variant" that should have been called the "Cinematic" or "Epic Rest Variant" of 8 hour short rests and 1 week long rests. I can't recommend it enough for the majority of D&D campaigns.

And, while I have no intention of running 5E (2014 or 2024) any time soon. If a good DM wanted to run it and wanted to impose a 20-rounds of combat before long rest restriction, I wouldn't be opposed.

 

[overgeeked]

You see, for me this is too far removed from the in game world. Like a meta timer.

You see it as a con, I see it as a pro.

It also incentivises sub-optimal combat behaviour. The longer you draw a fight out, the better.

Not really. The longer the combat lasts, the more damage you take and the more resources you spend.

As long as you have a "get 100% of ressources back" button, players will find ways to push it, because it is the best strategy to do so.

It's not possible to design a game that gamers won't try to exploit. There's no perfect solution, only a series of compromises. To me, not having to deal with the constant fight between the game's busted mechanics and the fictional world is ideal. It's a game, so let it be a game.

 

[mamba]

The problem is, that long rests give back 100% of spend ressources no matter what. So all challenge attrition gets reserted after a night's sleep.

that is only a problem if you do not gain some resources from not resting. I like how Draw Steel makes you stronger in combat if you do not rest while attrition comes from your health. So you have an incentive to not rest every chance you get but to push forward (and if timed right, you are at your strongest for the boss fight, but also at your most vulnerable / exhausted)

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Not during the Hexcrawl, no, it would be weird to have a maximum adventure day in a Hexcrawl. But if you look to page 113 of ToA, the Temple Roster for the Fane of the Night Serpant is a solid example of precisely what I mean...and that is never the only example on ToA?

The Adventure Day is a maximum threshold, not a prescription for every day. When the narrative provides a reason that a party has to tackle something like the Fane od the Night Serpent in one go...they can, and it will be balanced.

I’m pretty sure that when the majority of the adventure has one encounter per day, and one chapter has about eight, it averages out at about two per day.

 

[Halifax Brent]

It's interesting to see Draw Steel!, and likely other RPGs, address this issue in their core mechanics.

In DS!, your most powerful spells/abilities require hero resources, which you don't have at the start of your first fight of the day. You build them up each round so that by round 3 (combat generally lasts 3 to 5 rounds), you can hit with your hardest spells / combat abilities.

More importantly, you get a Victory for each combat or obstacle you overcome. At the start of the next combat, you have an extra hero resource for each Victory you start the combat with. So you hit harder, earlier. But you're also likely dinged up and closer to needing a rest.

When you take a long rest, you get healed back up and gain experience points based on the number of Victories you have. But then you lose those Victories and start the next cycle back at zero. Also, you can't take a long rest in a standard dungeon, you need to retreat back to a completely safe location.

So from a design perspective, if you put a boss fight at the end of a chain of encounters, you have a pretty good sense of how powerful the heroes will be when they tackle the boss. Either they'll be sporting a bunch of Victories to hit hard from the get go, or they'll be fully rested up and have the endurance to go an extra round or two. But they won't have both, like they would in D&D after a rest.

 

[Aldarc]

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.

I suspect that Monte Cook's idea is what was incorporated into the Cypher System. There is not so much Short Rest vs. Long Rest mechanic. Instead, every time you take the equivalent of a Rest to recover, it's longer before you can take the next one until finally you need the equivalent of a Long Rest.

 

[Parmandur]

I’m pretty sure that when the majority of the adventure has one encounter per day, and one chapter has about eight, it averages out at about two per day.

Nobody is talking about an "average" day, but about the maximum day, yhsy would usually mean a stocked dungeon under time pressure.

But just going off of ToA as a for-example of full Adventuee Days (most of Chapter 1 & 2 being small or social encounters, though some could easily be Adventure Days in themselves if things get weird):

- In Chapter 2, Dungrunglung on pp
49-51

• Chapter 2, pp 52-54 is pretty close, it should fall within the 12-24 round limit at least in the 4 Dungeon levels
• Chapter 2, Hrakhamar, pp 60-64, easily fits the bill
• Chapter 2, Bangalore, pp 75-80
• Chapter 2, Wyrmheart Mine, pp 85-89.
• Chapter 3, Dwellera of the Forbidden City, in total, pp 91-110
• Chapter 4, Fane of the Night Serpant, in toto, pp 111-124
• Chapter 5, 6 Levels each of which can take a whole Advebfhre Day of resources easily

Some of those may or may not come up, but by estimation the book has has handily 13 full Advendays across various PC tiers of play served up and ready to go...and the ingredients for more, easy to imagine a situation in which the PCs take out the colonial fort supplying the local pirate gangs, it is keyed up and everything wven if the commander is supposedly "Good".