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

[Maxperson]

We called "Tiny Hut" Leomund's Tiny Bunker.

They use it in combat. (we have a lot of military folks playing) And in 2024 you can cast 4th level spells out of it!

That's crazy talk! Why would they do that?!

 

[Micah Sweet]

There are many reasons why the “adventuring day” remains one of the most problematic concepts in D&D, and most of them trace back to D&D itself—across all editions. The game has always tried to define a formula that balances player strength against monster power, distributed over a certain number of encounters per day. The intent is clear: players should manage their limited resources so their strength ebbs and flows across multiple challenges. In theory, this creates tension and meaningful decision-making.

In practice, that tension rarely exists.

The entire model collapses under the weight of how easily rest and recovery occur. The rules assume that players will space their encounters across a long stretch of adventuring, but at any point they can simply stop, take a rest, and return to full power. Attrition—the supposed balancing factor—is mostly a smokescreen. It only works if the game enforces scarcity, but the game doesn’t. The moment rest becomes a trivial choice, the whole attrition economy breaks down.

A “balanced” encounter, as defined by the rulebooks, compares the party’s strength and number to the monsters’ challenge rating, assuming the party is operating at or near full capability. But what happens if they’re not? What if they’ve gone through several encounters without resting, or if the DM enforces constraints that limit recovery? The system offers no clear guidance for that situation. Balance is built on the assumption of full readiness, yet the rules also suggest that attrition matters. Those two ideas can’t coexist cleanly.

The larger issue isn’t about encounter math—it’s about the lack of a consistent definition for the “adventuring day” itself. What is a “day” supposed to represent in play terms? A real-time session? A sequence of encounters? A narrative block? The rules are deliberately noncommittal, leaving DMs to improvise one of the most critical pacing structures in the game.

This problem only deepens when you look at what rest actually costs. The benefits are obvious: recovery of hit points, spells, and abilities. But the price? Virtually nothing. Monsters wait patiently in their rooms. Treasure doesn’t vanish. Events rarely move forward unless the DM explicitly scripts a countdown. The rest of the world freezes until the players decide to resume. When time itself carries no weight, rest becomes a free reset button—and with that, any notion of balance tied to endurance loses meaning.

So, how do you balance a system that allows infinite resets? More importantly, why does the game continue to offer design guidance based on resource attrition when the mechanics actively undermine it? The result isn’t balance at all, but an illusion of one—a fragile construct that depends on restraint and self-discipline rather than coherent system design.

The problem IMO is, video games have taught players to more or less expect infinite resets. If any problem can't be fixed with a night's sleep, IME many players will literally consider it unfair.

 

[tetrasodium]

There are many reasons why the “adventuring day” remains one of the most problematic concepts in D&D, and most of them trace back to D&D itself—across all editions. The game has always tried to define a formula that balances player strength against monster power, distributed over a certain number of encounters per day. The intent is clear: players should manage their limited resources so their strength ebbs and flows across multiple challenges. In theory, this creates tension and meaningful decision-making.

In practice, that tension rarely exists.

The entire model collapses under the weight of how easily rest and recovery occur. The rules assume that players will space their encounters across a long stretch of adventuring, but at any point they can simply stop, take a rest, and return to full power. Attrition—the supposed balancing factor—is mostly a smokescreen. It only works if the game enforces scarcity, but the game doesn’t. The moment rest becomes a trivial choice, the whole attrition economy breaks down.

A “balanced” encounter, as defined by the rulebooks, compares the party’s strength and number to the monsters’ challenge rating, assuming the party is operating at or near full capability. But what happens if they’re not? What if they’ve gone through several encounters without resting, or if the DM enforces constraints that limit recovery? The system offers no clear guidance for that situation. Balance is built on the assumption of full readiness, yet the rules also suggest that attrition matters. Those two ideas can’t coexist cleanly.

The larger issue isn’t about encounter math—it’s about the lack of a consistent definition for the “adventuring day” itself. What is a “day” supposed to represent in play terms? A real-time session? A sequence of encounters? A narrative block? The rules are deliberately noncommittal, leaving DMs to improvise one of the most critical pacing structures in the game.

This problem only deepens when you look at what rest actually costs. The benefits are obvious: recovery of hit points, spells, and abilities. But the price? Virtually nothing. Monsters wait patiently in their rooms. Treasure doesn’t vanish. Events rarely move forward unless the DM explicitly scripts a countdown. The rest of the world freezes until the players decide to resume. When time itself carries no weight, rest becomes a free reset button—and with that, any notion of balance tied to endurance loses meaning.

So, how do you balance a system that allows infinite resets? More importantly, why does the game continue to offer design guidance based on resource attrition when the mechanics actively undermine it? The result isn’t balance at all, but an illusion of one—a fragile construct that depends on restraint and self-discipline rather than coherent system design.

No. D&d was always pretty much attrition over an adventuring day but 5e shifted it from the 2ish,-4ish with vancian spell prep & slower ml to near quantum prep and trivialized rest/recovery across a number of encounters likely to violate point 4 of the Hickman manifesto while claiming it's done to turbocharger points 1-3

Spoiler

1. 
   A player objective more worthwhile than simply pillaging and killing.
2. An intriguing story that is intricately woven into play itself.
3. Dungeons with an architectural sense.
4. An attainable and honorable end within one to two sessions playing time.

By the time players slog through 6-8 you have players who forgot why they were doing 1-3 and worse the gm can't meaningfully tweak the difficulty knob much of encounter number is going to be a bit off

@AnotherGuy ghast ghoul and wraith across editions is probably the easiest set of examples. They went from downright scary kill on sight or flee from asap targets at any level to meaningless fodder

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

If you’re doing one-encounter days in a city setting you can just crank the difficulty of that one encounter way up. Alternatively, you can switch to a one day short rest, one week long rest model so your “adventuring day” happens over the course of a week of one-encounter days.

I can make the encounter harder to challenge the party. But how do I deal with the Wizard throwing high level spells at the enemy, and the fighter just doing what he does every counter? He finally gets the one thing he's supposed to be good at, but often those fireballs or disintegrates or whatever the the attack spell of the edition/level of the day are just have so much more impact per turn...

 

[Paul Farquhar]

There’s no real reason the brand couldn’t sustain parallel versions

I think Business Studies 101 would like to have a chat with you….

 

[billd91]

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.

If we're living in the recoil from the 4e period, and D&D's the most successful it has ever been, then I think it may indicate that this recoil period is a better place for it to be. Specifically, if 4e's solution to encounter balancing alienated a part of the audience, it seems likely that part of the audience is larger than the segment of the audience that is extremely frustrated with the encounter balance 5e delivers. As payn indicated above, tight encounter balance isn't why a lot of people are playing - they're playing for the power fantasy, the fun of doing things they can't normally do, the ass kicking, the fellowship around the table, whatever else that isn't always a hard fought, balanced bout every time.

 

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

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 result is an absolute boatload of money. Wide audience = lots of purchases.

Even if they create gameplay problems in the process, D&D fans who actually care enough about those problems to notice them are more likely to buy product and complain than abandon the brand and play something else.

If we're living in the recoil from the 4e period, and D&D's the most successful it has ever been, then I think it may indicate that this recoil period is a better place for it to be.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

If we're living in the recoil from the 4e period, and D&D's the most successful it has ever been, then I think it may indicate that this recoil period is a better place for it to be. Specifically, if 4e's solution to encounter balancing alienated a part of the audience, it seems likely that part of the audience is larger than the segment of the audience that is extremely frustrated with the encounter balance 5e delivers. As payn indicated above, tight encounter balance isn't why a lot of people are playing - they're playing for the power fantasy, the fun of doing things they can't normally do, the ass kicking, the fellowship around the table, whatever else that isn't always a hard fought, balanced bout every time.

Sure, but that people really did not like how 4e solved the issue doesn't mean that they still wouldn't like to have some solution for it. Just not that one.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

It’s interesting how this thread continues unfolding, because the variety of responses almost is the point. Every take here represents a different expectation of what D&D should accomplish—tactical endurance, narrative pacing, player challenge, story cohesion, social fun, power fantasy, etc. None of them are wrong, but they’re mutually incompatible if the system tries to serve them all equally.

That’s what I meant by D&D’s “self-inflicted wound.” When a single framework promises to support every style, each group inevitably defines “balance” through its own lens: one table sees it as fairness and pacing; another as freedom and flexibility; another as cinematic payoff. So the debate never resolves, because everyone’s technically playing a different game under the same banner.

Which is fine—until the rules themselves start assuming universal behavior (like a fixed adventuring-day rhythm) that doesn’t actually exist across tables. The moment that happens, design advice becomes less guidance and more illusion: it only works if everyone agrees on a foundation that the game itself refuses to define.

 

[billd91]

This thread is a perfect example of why having the board game take precedence over the narrative is the wrong way to go for a lot people. And in truth goes completely against the whole main premise of this thread in the first place. That of the existence of a so-called "Boss Monster".

Why is there a "Boss Monster" at all? Why is it a "Boss" and not just merely a more powerful monster amongst all the other monsters in the fight? It's because our STORY of the adventurers getting up to face this creature has been denoted in the NARRATIVE that this more powerful monster is "in charge" over all the others. But being "in charge" is a NARRATIVE distinction and reasoning, and NOT a mechanical one. And this is the entire reason why people do not want their "Boss Monster" dying so quickly... because it makes for a BAD STORY. Not for a bad "winning of the combat", but a BAD STORY. This story and narrative we have in all our heads about how a fight like this should go based upon the years and decades of other stories and books and movies and shows we have experienced and enjoyed that do just that.

The DM wants to keep the "Boss Monster" alive for as long as possible because they want the STORY of the guy in charge being the last one to fall after all the other waves of henchmen and mooks before them have been killed. But this idea or concept is a NARRATIVE conceit. It has NOTHING to do with just "winning the combat" or "winning the game"-- that would be the board game talking.

I think you've got some definite good points here. It's hard to keep the Boss Monster from going down like a chump if the PCs have the power to direct their ire at it other than by scenario design - you keep him where nobody can get to him until he's the last encounter. But that just creates linear adventures that we accept... sometimes but not always. We accept it in computer games because of limitations on the design/computer/code's ability to accommodate any curve coming at it. We might accept it in a particular situation due to terrain or the rationale of the dungeon setting. But we also like when we can bypass combat with minions to get the boss early because that's playing cleverly. Having to deal with everything in wave after wave isn't clever - it's brute force.

Which means the game itself does not believe in the concept of the "Boss Monster" as a mechanical thing. So if you still want to use it, you have to give up trying to only use the written-down game rules to accomplish it.

We've had over 30 years of this issue. It's something we should have all come to terms with years ago and not something that should still be bothering us. The "Boss Monster" phenomenon should not still be a thing to get mad at the rules for after all this time.

But I think the game does recognize that we want some monsters to be extra resilient Bosses. Legendary Resistance/Actions help us keep that Boss from going down like a complete chump and that's why I use them at all levels for Boss-type monster in adapting scenarios. But they're not complete fixes to all possible circumstances. And I'm not sure I'd want them to be. What the game doesn't want to do is constrain things too much - if those PCs hoard their resources and don't nova early because they want to unlimber that force on the Boss - more power to them.

And then if the Boss goes down fast, whether because the PCs hoarded their novas, avoided the minions, or just got lucky, I think we need to get used to that being a possibility and accept it.