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

[Zardnaar]

You absolutely can. It just requires actual playtesting, not the performative nonsense that WotC (and Paizo!) have been billing as "playtesting".


I'm not doing that, so...not a concern.


That is far, far from the best designers can do. That's straight-up pretending designers are somehow utterly powerless, which is ridiculous. I know you don't actually think designers are powerless. Otherwise you wouldn't complain about design you think is bad, like silvery barbs.


That any edition has, despite never even trying to do so, is proof enough that it is possible.

Silvery barbs is bad. Its somewhere between overpowered to broken, slows down the game and sucks the fun out of it for the DM (you will never crit again sorta) and players are gonna hate having it used on them.

The player who asked to use it likes using chromatic orb. I could have just said I'll use it as will if I let it into the game.

Its a stupid spell.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Silvery barbs is bad. Its somewhere between overpowered to broken, slows down the game and sucks the fun out of it for the DM (you will never crit again sorta) and players are gonna hate having it used on them.

The player who asked to use it likes using chromatic orb. I could have just said I'll use it as will if I let it into the game.

Its a stupid spell.

But that's precisely my point.

You are calling it out as bad. I am not interested in arguing with you about that. My interest, here, is simply that you know what you believe is good design; you know that these designers did not practice that idea; you know that they could have, but chose not to; and that the fact that they did not practice your idea of good game design negatively affects the game.

That, that right there, is predicated on the idea that designers do, in fact, have a great deal of power over how people play the game. If you truly believed that the designers were powerless to affect how the game was played, you'd never even mention silvery barbs because its existence would be totally irrelevant. Yet you do. You have done so repeatedly. The only way that makes any sense at all, is for you to believe that game designers' choices actually do matter for how the game gets played at real tables.

They aren't ironclad law. Very little in this life is. But you cannot pretend that those choices are totally irrelevant in one argument, and then make a different argument that critically depends on those choices being very, very relevant. Well, I mean, you can--it just means folks (such as myself) are going to look askance at those arguments.

 

[Minigiant]

What I'm detecting in this thread is really two different schools of thought:

• Attrition is bad and we should refocus balance around one encounter and make it easier to restore full power (with the possible exception of attrition through hp reserve á la healing surges).
• Attrition is good and we should make it harder to rest and/or make rests less effective.

These two groups are likely not going to come to any form of useful agreement on things.

Can't we make a game that focuses on providing both experiences?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Can't we make a game that focuses on providing both experiences?

Wonderful news: we can!

Less wonderful news: It requires starting with clear and specific design goals, creating designs which attempt to implement those goals, and then doing rigorous and specifically statistical testing to ensure that those goals are met.

To the best of my knowledge, neither WotC nor Paizo has shown much, if any, interest in actually doing these things. They vastly prefer airy-fairy design "goals" that are little more than abstract aspirations, dream up designs without much regard for whether they actually implement those goals because (more or less) "testing will figure it out", and then their testing is so scattershot, un- or even anti-systematic, and push-poll-driven, little to no useful data can actually be extracted from the analysis.

It's perfectly doable, and two and a half years is plenty of time to do it in. I just haven't seen any will to actually DO it.

 

[Staffan]

Can't we make a game that focuses on providing both experiences?

No, because they are opposite experiences. One wants recovery to be difficult, with multiple encounters wearing the party down over the course of some time frame. The other wants recovery to be easy with PCs being at full offensive power in each encounter.

I suppose you could get an Expert to do it.

 

[Parmandur]

5e is kind of boringly consistent.

Here is the thing: a lot of people find 5E super fun.

 

[Minigiant]

Wonderful news: we can!

Less wonderful news: It requires starting with clear and specific design goals, creating designs which attempt to implement those goals, and then doing rigorous and specifically statistical testing to ensure that those goals are met.

To the best of my knowledge, neither WotC nor Paizo has shown much, if any, interest in actually doing these things. They vastly prefer airy-fairy design "goals" that are little more than abstract aspirations, dream up designs without much regard for whether they actually implement those goals because (more or less) "testing will figure it out", and then their testing is so scattershot, un- or even anti-systematic, and push-poll-driven, little to no useful data can actually be extracted from the analysis.

It's perfectly doable, and two and a half years is plenty of time to do it in. I just haven't seen any will to actually DO it.

I fear that many designers are too afraid to kill sacred cows, forge new paradigms, and upset vocal subcommunities to create strong design goals and stick to them when things they don't like don't neatly fit in them

It's less then not playtesting right and more being unwilling to use what the testing acknowledges because it suggests something different.

It's only when the status quo is so messed up, like with Monks, do designers feel the need and mandate to do something different.

I mean...isn't one of the problems obvious....

Spellcasters have too many base spells slots and too few regained spells slots on "short rest".

 

[Zardnaar]

Wonderful news: we can!

Less wonderful news: It requires starting with clear and specific design goals, creating designs which attempt to implement those goals, and then doing rigorous and specifically statistical testing to ensure that those goals are met.

To the best of my knowledge, neither WotC nor Paizo has shown much, if any, interest in actually doing these things. They vastly prefer airy-fairy design "goals" that are little more than abstract aspirations, dream up designs without much regard for whether they actually implement those goals because (more or less) "testing will figure it out", and then their testing is so scattershot, un- or even anti-systematic, and push-poll-driven, little to no useful data can actually be extracted from the analysis.

It's perfectly doable, and two and a half years is plenty of time to do it in. I just haven't seen any will to actually DO it.

They cant match your criteria.
5E playtest was to establish what people actually wanted.

What youre demanding is essentially they design an edition from scratch and spend years refining. What happens if playtesting reveals its completely flawed and requires dunking?

4E was rushed out the door on a roughly 18 month development cycle. They had to rewrite the MM and 72 pages in an attempt to make it work.

If the did a playtest and waited a year they would have revised they have to junk the whole thing. The thats another 3 years and if that doesn't work......

That's why you get revisions. The two times they built something completely from scratch the edition lasted 3 or 4 years.

Takes about 3 to design an edition, 2 years if you revise an existing one. At least a modern 800-1000 page one.

Pre 3E they essentially revised OD&D over and over until TSR went bankrupt. 3.0 took 3 years.

D&Ds never really done what youre advocating because its basically impossible to do on a realistic budget.

 

[Minigiant]

No, because they are opposite experiences. One wants recovery to be difficult, with multiple encounters wearing the party down over the course of some time frame. The other wants recovery to be easy with PCs being at full offensive power in each encounter.

I suppose you could get an Expert to do it.

I don't think that's true.

One group wants it to be hard to recover to 100% if you have 6 encounters
One group wants you to have 100% power every fight but only have 2 encounters..

It seems the obvious solution is restrictions on the recharge/recovery mechanic.

Everyone only gets X uses of their "Get all your points back" feature. X is 1 less than the number of encounters Group B wants but less than a third the number of encounters Group A wants.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

5E playtest was to establish what people actually wanted.

And yet....