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

[SkidAce]

I legit solved this problem and am super happy with it.

I'll bite....how?

 

[SkidAce]

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.

After all these years, I can't (and probably won't) get away from a long rest being like slleping after a days work, getting up and being ready to work again.

No worries, I've always adjusted the pacing to accommodate the play.

 

[Parmandur]

People keep saying that, but it simply wasn't true. I've been playing since 1983 and my first experience with PC power having to be distributed over multiple encounters per day started with 5e.

Gygaxian D&D didn't have a strict balance paradigm per se, but it is a fact that the D&D Next playtest was built around making a trek through the Caves of Chaos or a similar classic Dungeon Crawl a balanced experience thwt would work. Thing is, 5E does this while keeping a lot of 3E/4E superpowers that allow for Novas, that weren't necessarily a thing in AD&D.

I don't know where you get this from. The books don't tell the DMs to have monsters wait patiently. This particular issue is a DM issue, not a game issue.

The books actuay auggest that adversaries be clever and reactionary in a potentially very mean Gygaxian way, both the core books and Adventures with specific advice on responses in a given Dungeon.

 

[SkidAce]

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.

Interesting, how do you accumulate the power to cast a big spell out of combat, say a teleport at the beginning of the day to get where you are going?

 

[zakael19]

The other wider solution to this is a move away from static dungeon crawling that leaves timing entirely at the players whim and a move towards, mysteries, heists, city crawls, event based adventure etc. What I would call modern adventuring.

Secondly - design boss encounters to be a challenge to PCs at their peak. Assume they will have their highest level spells, action surge and limited use powers. Train players not to splurge limited use powers on lead-up encounters.

Either of these two things help. In combination the resting problem is then solved.

Daggerheart went this way along with a story focus with how it deals with resting; on a long rest the GM advances a Dastardly Plot or similar countdown (plus on both sorts of rest they get the GM currency). If what the players care about is story and narrative, makes sense to have your system use that as a limiting factor.

FWIW, in years of running 5.2014 inclusive of multiple pre-written modules, I can only think of a couple of times when the 6-8 "normal" encounters before a long rest was hit. When it was, most of the time it just felt boring and bad to play.

 

[zakael19]

Interesting, how do you accumulate the power to cast a big spell out of combat, say a teleport at the beginning of the day to get where you are going?

Any "in combat" ability that costs Heroic Resources you can use once per "respite" (or again once you gain more Victories). Stuff like "teleport back to a place we've been" is a simple fictional permission ability a L3 elementalist can use at the end of a respite.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

Really its because D&D has to accommodate so many playstyles it cant pick a lane. When it does, things tend to get incendiary one way or the other. I think the modular concepts of the design were supposed to allow folks to lean in, meaning the foundation had to be flexible. Turned out the modular set pieces never needed to materialize becasue folks are making the game work on their own (and buying the crap out of it anyways).

You’re right—D&D’s flexibility wasn’t accidental. It was a deliberate choice to stay ambiguously neutral, refusing to pick a lane so it could appeal to the widest possible audience. The result is a self-inflicted wound that never heals.

The problem isn’t that the game supports multiple playstyles—it’s that it tries to do so within one universal expression of D&D. There’s no real reason the brand couldn’t sustain parallel versions: a lighter, narrative-focused mode alongside a crunchier, tactical one. The counterargument is always market fragmentation—splitting one big audience into smaller, incompatible groups. But the alternative isn’t any better: a large audience that can’t agree on what the game should be, perpetually cycling through frustration no matter what’s released.

Of course, the moment you suggest parallel versions, people point to TSR’s 2E era as the cautionary tale. The company flooded the market with settings and styles, assuming players would buy everything simply because it all carried the D&D name. That misread the audience. Not every approach appealed to every player, and not everyone could afford (or even wanted) the full product line.

So from a business perspective, it’s easy to see why Wizards prefers a single, unified audience they can market every product to. It’s safer, cleaner, and more predictable. But that safety comes at a cost—the inability to truly commit to a defined identity for the game itself.

And that’s really the core of it. The decision to remain flexible and broadly accommodating is exactly what prevents D&D from ever resolving its encounter balance issues. Any real fix would require enforcing structure—prescribing pacing, resource limits, and rest constraints. But the designers treat that kind of prescription as antithetical to D&D’s identity. They see too much authority as stripping away the freedom that supposedly defines the game.

4E was the closest they ever came to breaking that pattern. It offered DMs genuine control and predictability—encounter budgets, transparent math, and mechanical consistency that made the “adventuring day” an actual, testable framework. But for many players, that clarity felt like overreach. It pulled the curtain back too far, revealing that the fantasy wasn’t just a story—it was a game with visible machinery. The reaction was loud enough that the pendulum swung back, and we’re still living in that recoil.

The result is a design philosophy trapped by its own success: a game that wants to be everything to everyone, but can’t fix its foundational problems without alienating part of its audience. Encounter balance will always be an illusion so long as D&D refuses to define what it’s actually balancing for.

 

[SkidAce]

Any "in combat" ability that costs Heroic Resources you can use once per "respite" (or again once you gain more Victories). Stuff like "teleport back to a place we've been" is a simple fictional permission ability a L3 elementalist can use at the end of a respite.

Thank you.

 

[Staffan]

Interesting, how do you accumulate the power to cast a big spell out of combat, say a teleport at the beginning of the day to get where you are going?

You don't. You mainly don't have strategic magic like that except as class features or magic items. For example, a 3rd level (out of 10) Void elementalist gets:

Conduits (~clerics) with the Nature domain can gain this at level 4:

But that sort of thing is separate from your combat powers.

 

[Stalker0]

I banned hut, rope trick and more.

I had a game where I asked the players if they wanted to ban Tiny hut in this short series of adventurers I was doing. They decided to play it straight up. Even used it once for a pretty solid ambush.

Then I used it against them....and asked them again if they wanted to keep it. Slight change in their answer


There are always spells that are a bit over the top, and I can understand how that makes it through the process. But when you see something as jaw droppingly powerful as Tiny hut at just 3rd level, I cannot fathom how actual playtesting was done on that spell, and no one went "um....isn't this a bit crazy?"