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

[tetrasodium]

I've been running monsters and adversaries considering intelligence, what they know and how I think instinctively the less intelligent and wild things would act. only had a few players get whiney about me being adverserial. Generally after a few encounters they start using common sense instead of just hack and slash/give me my treasure. Where I see most other DM's fail this type of handling things is they get hung up on the treasure/reward ratio's and start actually playing against the players. If I jack up an encounter and the players manage to "Get over" because of my mistake that's real world as it gets. Sometime's being lucky is better than being good.

If the DM trys too hard to make every encounter "balanced" or "hard" or "whatever" eventually the players will start to notice that things are always stacked against them and then they will lock horns and begin to play against the DM instead of simply playing the game. Trying to week out the luck good and bad to keep everything "balanced" and controlled is the biggest problem I see with the DM's who want the game to be perfect. Things are never always balanced an even in real life. IMO they shouldn't be in game either. Sometimes the PC's should get to kick low level scumbags tails and sometimes they should just have to run like hell because they overreached.

Yes they will shift to view the gm as an enemy like with that bold bit and it hits to the core of why so many of the "have you tried [intro to obvious beginning gm 101]" solutions out forward by so many of the posters defending the default rest/recovery rules mechanics and design were dismissed largely as obvious ways to create new problems absent design elements no longer present in 5e

 

[Minigiant]

I will stop now. These are all the monsters in the 2014 MM up to the letter G. All of the ones I listed have a CR rating below the group's expected level for combat. And all of them have an intelligence above a 10! It is literally not that hard to see with this evidence that these creatures are intelligent enough to make life miserable for the group once they come out of LTH.

I think we are coming from different arguments.

I was speaking about DMs who stick to common humaniods, giants, monstrosities, and beasts because they want to run simple to use monsters for low power lower magic settings. They are the ones who complain because if they don't have the monsters kidnap a bunch of children the monsters are destroyed systematically with gorilla warfare and the bosses are fought with full resources.

Look at your list. It's casters, caster adjacents, dragons, and extraplanars.

LTH is literally not a problem if you run them. Dispel the hut or summon reinforcements from another location.

However there is a large and noticeable amount of the full in the community who loves running "low magic grounded games" cool avoid using or rarely use these monsters saving them for special moments.

And for these people who love violent idiot savages, LTH is the worst thing ever.

Because many people do not want to accept that D&D as a high magic game and both the PC and the enemies have magic, Intelligence, and tech.

THEN you get to the people who do accept that D&D is a high magic game but will not accept that in order to make the game running easier you cannot build the monsters the same way as the player characters.

 

[Scott Christian]

I think we are coming from different arguments.

I was speaking about DMs who stick to common humaniods, giants, monstrosities, and beasts because they want to run simple to use monsters for low power lower magic settings. They are the ones who complain because if they don't have the monsters kidnap a bunch of children the monsters are destroyed systematically with gorilla warfare and the bosses are fought with full resources.

Look at your list. It's casters, caster adjacents, dragons, and extraplanars.

LTH is literally not a problem if you run them. Dispel the hut or summon reinforcements from another location.

However there is a large and noticeable amount of the full in the community who loves running "low magic grounded games" cool avoid using or rarely use these monsters saving them for special moments.

And for these people who love violent idiot savages, LTH is the worst thing ever.

Because many people do not want to accept that D&D as a high magic game and both the PC and the enemies have magic, Intelligence, and tech.

THEN you get to the people who do accept that D&D is a high magic game but will not accept that in order to make the game running easier you cannot build the monsters the same way as the player characters.

I want to believe you Minigiant, but I am having a hard time. Here are your two previous quotes:

I'm the one who brought it up and I dressed it when I brought it up.

The way DND describes most of its monsters for the first half of the game for the first three editions* and the first half of the fifth edition is that the majority are idiotic primitive warriors or non-combatives who have no connections for reinforcement of where they are where they can get reinforcements in quick time frame of a long rest

So when the majority of players encountered these monsters using the default assumption of them or a custom world by the DM it is highly likely they are assuming that the monsters have:

little to no magic
little to no tech
little to no reinforcement.

Many of the common monsters in the first 2 tiers of 5.0e are Intelligence 9 or lower and are described as warlike, violent, chaotic, rough, or cowardly and have Charisma under 10.

First, your claim was about monsters being primitive warriors, therefore incapable of doing anything against LTH. Then your claim is it's just extraplanar and caster adjacent dragons, and therefore, they don't count either. You have switched stances twice when presented with overwhelming evidence against your claim.
I went through the MM to G, and over 80% of the CRs 1-5 have an intelligence over 10. They are comparable to knights. And now, you want to switch the table again to someone who prefers to run a swords and sorcery style game.
Please - just admit you were wrong. The spell may be overpowered for your table. But for the normal table - it is fine.

 

[Minigiant]

First, your claim was about monsters being primitive warriors, therefore incapable of doing anything against LTH. Then your claim is it's just extraplanar and caster adjacent dragons, and therefore, they don't count either. You have switched stances twice when presented with overwhelming evidence against your claim.
I went through the MM to G, and over 80% of the CRs 1-5 have an intelligence over 10. They are comparable to knights. And now, you want to switch the table again to someone who prefers to run a swords and sorcery style game.

My claim was always that 5e was designed for PCs to do 4-7 encounters of dumb warrior enemies like goblins, kobolds, or lesser giants, before fighting the dungeons boss. Orcs, goblins, and bandits are the show and the grunts. This means you reach the boss drained. However if the boss was also a dumb savage or the monster lacked casters (because they were rarely in the standard humanoid monster entry), you could dominate with spell assisted guerrilla warfare.

This isn't a problem when your dungeon or adventure is themed around necromancers, drow or illithids or demon cultists.

The problem only arrives if you shorten the number of encounters or use simple noncaster monsters to squeeze in 8 fights

Please - just admit you were wrong. The spell may be overpowered for your table. But for the normal table - it is fine.

I don't have the problem. My goblins have hexers and connection to the Goblin King or Goblin Ka. And my orcs have clerics, paladins, and warlocks and live in formal military chains.

The problem occurs at "normal tables" that don't follow the secret assumptions.

Like I said earlier, 2014 5e was written for people who did not want to be told what to do so it did not tell them what the game was designed for. This many newcomers did not know how to adjust it.