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

[Zardnaar]

Saying "no" to your players is not automatically railroading.

However, saying "no" to your players is quite common with the more ham-fisted, clumsy forms of railroading.

It's sort of like how frequent urination is a common sign of diabetes, but not a smoking gun by any means. You could also have enlarged prostate, or you could be consuming excess amounts of water, or you could have a 1st trimester pregnancy, or you could be taking a medication that has that side effect, etc. But if you do have the symptom, and you don't know why, it's probably a good idea to look into it.

For myself, I vastly prefer to:

• Say "yes"
• Set out conditions and get player assent, then roll
• Dig deeper and ask what the player is aiming for or what they really desire
• Say "no, but..." and offer one or more alternatives in a similar direction
• In truly desperate cases, explain my position as much as I can, then ask for their input

I have only had to say a hard "no" like...twice, in something like seven and a half years of running this game. "Yes", "yes, and...", "yes, but...", and "no, but..." have served me extremely well in that time, and functionally every case where they don't, a quick (<5 min) conversation clears up the issue and puts us on a track to giving everyone what they really care about.

I said no recently.

Silvery Barbs spell.

 

[Zardnaar]

Frankly, the claim that there always is such time pressure is what is ridiculous. "You cannot ever wait 8-16 hours. Period. Never. Oh, but taking four hour-long naps? Yeah that's fine. Nothing will change."

That's the critical problem with how 5e did its rests. Spending 3+ hours a day doing nothing, but you never ever see consequences for it, while taking the rest of the day, guaranteed problems? Really?? It's just so patently ridiculous.

If folks disliked 5-minute SRs so much, then something like 15, 20 minutes would make far more sense. Still can be interrupted, still makes sense that you'd need to take a real breather. But with that model, three SRs per day is only one hour total spent resting. Perfectly reasonable to squeeze an hour in bite-sized chunks throughout the day.

Even then, though, the idea that time pressure is always so incredibly, unbelievably dire that it is ALWAYS unacceptable to take a day's rest? Beggars belief. Not all time-sensitive threats are sensitive at the scale of a single day. That's just a fact of life. Anyone who claims otherwise is actively manufacturing an unnatural world in order to force gameplay decisions--exactly what others in this thread have been (allegedly) railing against.

Its not a short rest problem. Its RAI vs how people are playing.

4E is in same boat here. Due to longer combats in 4E its 1 encounter vs 1-2 in 5E.

 

[Retros_x]

Which is what a lot of us have been saying for the past 10 years.

This. I hope nobody is really surprised about that it literally is stated in the DMG.

Such obvious things as "rest as often as possible" and "hit fast and hard" were completely overlooked in the game's basic design.

A later post by Mearls. "A party that unloads with their best powers simply breaks the system."

No they are not overlooked. In the DMG it clearly states how much combat is expected for a full adventuring day. People not playing the game as intented is not the fault of the design. This is the reason why I debate people who argue that you can play every genre with 5e. I am like, sure you can play a political campaign with only a few cinematic boss battles every few sessions and nothing else, but don't be surprised if the balancing doesn't work at all. Yes you can forcefully squeeze every genre in the 5e framework because the core resolution system is flexible enough, but the whole resource management is about dungeon crawling or any other form of having multiple encounters between rests. The core question every PC should ask themselve in the gameplay loop on a regular basis is "do I use my finite ability X now or do I save it for later".

 

[Paul Farquhar]

People not playing the game as intented is not the fault of the design.

Yes it is. And Mearls admits it himself in the original article.

 

[Zardnaar]

Yes it is. And Mearls admits it himself in the original article.

Context was hindsight though. I remember voting on it. Iirc it went for 3 or 4 encounters. 4 was 3E iirc.
. Yes they designed it that way based on feedback at the time.

They didn't see it blowing up like it did. No one did.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Context was hindsight though.

Sure, hindsight is wonderful, and making mistakes is normal. Admitting to them leads to growth. I was simply responding to someone who seems to think the original rules were perfect, and it’s all the players who have it wrong.

As for the play test, it’s worth noting that very few current 5e players actually took part in it. Obviously, it doesn’t include the players who were attracted to the game because of the success of 5e (despite flaws). Less obviously, it didn’t include people like me, who had already jumped ship in favour of Pathfinder, various retro editions and other RPGs.

 

[tetrasodium]

They don't? That will teach a lot of people some bad practices...

Pretty sure I've run almost every one of them as AL till COVID. Very few sections have a time crunch of any relevance and the few that do tend to be so loose that the crunch is more like a symbolic suggestion that might only really apply to long rests to further calcify the idea that warlock and monk would need a SR every encounter or two minimum to keep up. The most convincing time crunch I can think of is the mountain climber in frostmaiden and I'm pretty sure that they were dead for days/weeks before the players even get the quest.

I think that also answers your other question in 779. Most of the AL gms quit at the time and the shop keeps asking if we are thinking about coming back to restart AL again but I think a homebrew west Marches was the only one with some interest in being maintained and not sure if they are still running it. I'm in a heavy tourism area with a lot of short term snowbirds and summertime beach goers, that leaves for an awful lot of short term players who are probably only going to be in town for a couple weeks to 3-6 months∆.

Examples of how wotc adventures add bricks to the wall of "we are expected to play this way" in service of the short rest class nova loop in the spoiler below. I originally went looking for one or two I knew of and found more:

Spoiler

Nothing about short rests. playerToGM:"my monk/warlock class needs those rests, it's designed to play this way"

Players want to take a short rest every fight or two? "obviously wotc intended that, the gm should stop trying to punish us for playing short rest classes."

Yet another brick

Endless short rests for short rest classes though? those are once againprotected by the blessing of obvious RAI

I've heard that keep on the new borderlands continues the pattern by requiring a trip back to the keep/town for long rests (good babystep) but allows short rests anywhere(wtf wotc?)

The drumbeat of long rest classes driving 5mwd loops is just bizarre and in no way stands up to the game wotc has been publishing

∆ ie summer vacation up till complicated tax reasons kick in at like 6(?) months

 

[Zardnaar]

Sure, hindsight is wonderful, and making mistakes is normal. Admitting to them leads to growth. I was simply responding to someone who seems to think the original rules were perfect, and it’s all the players who have it wrong.

As for the play test, it’s worth noting that very few current 5e players actually took part in it. Obviously, it doesn’t include the players who were attracted to the game because of the success of 5e (despite flaws). Less obviously, it didn’t include people like me, who had already jumped ship in favour of Pathfinder, various retro editions and other RPGs.

Did you ever fill out a survey for 5E?

I got oitvoted on encounters and iirc I wrote about dex to damage as a bad idea.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Lots of food for thought here. But one question that I have:

How does a DM be more strict about the rate of Long Rests without seeming too controlling or antagonistic towards the players?

I can tell you that players are always disappointed at best, frustrated at worst, the few times that I've explained to them that "it's too dangerous to take a long rest here; you can make camp, but you won't get the benefits of a Long Rest right now".

EDIT: I've tried to explain in a "metagame" way to the players during session zero that long rests will not be possible inside of a "dungeon environment". But that's never been well received, or they've found work arounds (spells and magic items that let them long rest anywhere that they damn well please).

Often, I find that it is helpful to pair sticks with related but distinct carrots. Helps the players feel like you aren't just making their lives harder solely to make their lives harder, but rather changing one benefit for a different benefit. So, for example...

"You may not always be able to take long rests. Dungeons are very, very dangerous places, where letting your guard down for an extended period of time is a very, very bad idea. All sorts of creepy-crawly nasties live there! But, since that's the case, there are some other effects in play. For example, if you take a Short Rest and don't spend any hit dice, you can regain up to half your proficiency score in recharged hit dice."

This, then, makes it feel like you are shifting the focus from long rests to short ones, when in practice what you're actually doing is just making long rests difficult and very, very slightly extending the party's ability to rest.

But honestly? Sometimes you're just going to have to tell your players, "The way the rules of the game work bothers me. I don't like it. I want it to be a scary challenge to actually use your class resources wisely. I want characters who aren't dependent on long rests to feel powerful some of the time because they aren't dependent on a night's rest. The game, as it stands, doesn't do that. Are you okay with playing a game like that, even if it means you will feel frustrated sometimes because you want to take a rest and can't? I think that will be overall a more satisfying experience."

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think it's less that they hadn't figured it out and more that they hadn't admitted it. Heck, WotC still hasn't. Mearls had to leave the company to say anything.

Given the "ghoul surprise", I think it's about 50/50 either way.

Neither speaks well of the design process that went into 5e, though. Seeing a problem is there, knowing it is a design issue, and then just flat choosing to do nothing about it...I mean, that sounds pretty blatantly like performative playtesting. Playtesting that isn't actually done to see if the game works as intended, but simply to drive up hype and make the audience feel included.