D&D 5E (2024) NPCs, and the poverty of the core books

[ECMO3]

You still need to be able to ballpark it. The line between really hard and TPK is razor thin.

But being able to ballpark it is fundamentally different than being able to do it expertly.

I also disagree about it being razor thin. Poor dice, poor tactics (bonehead moves) and poor party composition for a specific monster can turn a moderate difficulty encounter into a TPK even with the best "balancing", but the line between high difficulty and a likely TPK is quite vast if we are assuming good play and average luck.

When TPKs happen it almost never is driven primarily by encounter difficulty. The factors that cause TPKs in order are:

1. Low level PCs where individual die rolls have more impact.
2. Poor tactics/play by the PCs
3. Statistically poor luck, off by a standard deviation or more (either extremely great monster rolls or extremely poor party rolls or both).

I would say at least half of TPKs I have seen in 5E have all 3 of these things, every one I have seen has at least one of those things and not all of them had particularly difficult monsters.

Edit: Two weeks ago our party of 5 level 2 PCs went into a fight against 20 Gnolls, 9 Dire Wolves, one Ogre and won. We are playing in a sandbox and walked into an area intended for 4th level PCs. We then made things worse when the alarm got raised and went from fighting 4 Gnolls on round 1 to fighting all those things on round 2. This is way, way above high difficulty in terms of balance, it is off the charts difficult and by all rights we should have either fled or statistically taken a TPK (and a three of us were very close to fleeing and leaving the two Barbarians behind).

 

[J-H]

Were I a player and found the spell in the looted spellbook worked differently than the same spell we'd just had cast at us, I'd raise one hell of a stink.

You've got to do that write-up process before the spell ever enters play, be it from an opposition NPC casting it or the PCs finding it in a treasure hoard. Once the spell enters play you're stuck with it as is.

Or you have to have an explanation for the abilities.
Osteomantic Shield spell doesn't work as well for you, because you're a living being, not an undead like the Bone Death Wizard you just fought.
Phil's Phlebotomy only does 4d8 damage when you cast it because you're not a vampire. If you were a vampire, it'd do 6d8+cha mod damage. Willing to give up on a suntan forever?
Burst of Magic Missiles doesn't work as well for you because you're a Conjurer, not a Force Missile Mage specialist.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Or you have to have an explanation for the abilities.
Osteomantic Shield spell doesn't work as well for you, because you're a living being, not an undead like the Bone Death Wizard you just fought.
Phil's Phlebotomy only does 4d8 damage when you cast it because you're not a vampire. If you were a vampire, it'd do 6d8+cha mod damage. Willing to give up on a suntan forever?
Burst of Magic Missiles doesn't work as well for you because you're a Conjurer, not a Force Missile Mage specialist.

I'm always in the market for explanations.

 

[TiQuinn]

The PCs are adventurers, but not the only ones in the setting; and it's reasonable to expect or even demand that those NPC adventurers are using the same game mechanics etc. as the PCs are.

Never mind that an NPC adventurer one minute can become a PC adventurer the next; I've seen this happen on more than one occasion where an NPC adventurer joins a party and a player then or later takes that character on as a PC.

Within the context of 5e, the PCs are the PCs - the rules for players are generally for the players, not for NPCs. NPCs are typically built under a different framework from the PCs. So a PC adventurer and an NPC adventurer could look completely different based from the standpoint of how they were created.

If you’re coming from an earlier edition, and trying to apply the idea that their creation is the same, I can understand why that is a difficult thing to jive with.

 

[nevin]

As it does here. It says "One or more" party members.

Which in the means there is a tiny chance one party member will be killed in my experience. Chances of winning lotto might be higher than multiple Players.

In some other games it can mean high chance of multiple fatalities and a flip of the coin for party wipe. But you knew that was what I meant when you got snarky.

 

[Chaltab]

Which in the means there is a tiny chance one party member will be killed in my experience. Chances of winning lotto might be higher than multiple Players.

In some other games it can mean high chance of multiple fatalities and a flip of the coin for party wipe. But you knew that was what I meant when you got snarky.

I wasn't being snarky, was pointing out that a high difficulty encounter has a chance of wiping a party even in 5E. There's no point in making rules for anything higher because at that point so much depends on planning, luck, and whether or not the party knows when discretion is the better part of valour.

 

[Stormonu]

As a strong opponent of PC exceptionalism, I agree with this statement. No PC is, IMO, capable of things beyond what any NPC can do. They simply aren't different creatures based on whether or not they're attached to a player.

I have to analyze how I do things and state I'm in the opposite camp. The PCs are different and more exceptional because of their importance to the story at hand. And yeah, I'm a story DM who cares more about the antics of the player characters over an ever-changing group. It's bitten me more than once, but I'll stick with it.

 

[dave2008]

I agree with this in general but I do have to wonder about the long-term effects to both game and lore of the specific implementation. Arcane Burst as depicted in the monster manual is an absurdly powerful ability compared to any PC-facing at-will power, able to do 108 damage a round without crits when used by an Archmage. How do you scale that for a PC?

One of the reasons I don't like it just from a game perspective is that spamming it often just feels like the 'correct' answer for the mage tactically.

The issue there is not Arcane Burst, but that the Archmage can cast it 4x per round. I think WotC made some bad choices with spellcasting creatures in 5e24. That is not how I would do it.

 

[Maxperson]

But being able to ballpark it is fundamentally different than being able to do it expertly.

You don't need to be an expert, but you do need to be proficient. And it's still an important part of encounter design.

I also disagree about it being razor thin. Poor dice, poor tactics (bonehead moves) and poor party composition for a specific monster can turn a moderate difficulty encounter into a TPK even with the best "balancing", but the line between high difficulty and a likely TPK is quite vast if we are assuming good play and average luck.

None of that alters what I said. Just because players can turn an encounter from moderate to a TPK, does not mean that the difference between a really hard encounter(if the group is skilled) and a TPK isn't razor thin.

When TPKs happen it almost never is driven primarily by encounter difficulty. The factors that cause TPKs in order are:

1. Low level PCs where individual die rolls have more impact.
2. Poor tactics/play by the PCs
3. Statistically poor luck, off by a standard deviation or more (either extremely great monster rolls or extremely poor party rolls or both).

I would say at least half of TPKs I have seen in 5E have all 3 of these things, every one I have seen has at least one of those things and not all of them had particularly difficult monsters.

Edit: Two weeks ago our party of 5 level 2 PCs went into a fight against 20 Gnolls, 9 Dire Wolves, one Ogre and won. We are playing in a sandbox and walked into an area intended for 4th level PCs. We then made things worse when the alarm got raised and went from fighting 4 Gnolls on round 1 to fighting all those things on round 2. This is way, way above high difficulty in terms of balance, it is off the charts difficult and by all rights we should have either fled or statistically taken a TPK (and a three of us were very close to fleeing and leaving the two Barbarians behind).

I agree with you that poor decision making, low level and bad luck can all play a part. That's not the problem. What you are missing is that it takes a LOT of that stuff to turn a moderate encounter into a TPK. It takes very little to turn a very hard encounter into a TPK, because the line is razor thin.

And if the DM doesn't know what he is doing, it's pretty easy to misjudge what a hard encounter is and step over that line.

 

[Lanefan]

But being able to ballpark it is fundamentally different than being able to do it expertly.

I also disagree about it being razor thin. Poor dice, poor tactics (bonehead moves) and poor party composition for a specific monster can turn a moderate difficulty encounter into a TPK even with the best "balancing", but the line between high difficulty and a likely TPK is quite vast if we are assuming good play and average luck.

When TPKs happen it almost never is driven primarily by encounter difficulty. The factors that cause TPKs in order are:

1. Low level PCs where individual die rolls have more impact.
2. Poor tactics/play by the PCs
3. Statistically poor luck, off by a standard deviation or more (either extremely great monster rolls or extremely poor party rolls or both).

I'll add a 4th one:

4. One key thing going wrong that starts a cascade of problems that eventually wipes out the party.

The only TPK I've ever DMed was like this: the one key thing that went wrong was the party's main Fighter was first into the room, failed a save, and immediately got dominated against them. He pretty much wiped out each of the other characters as they entered the room (via climbing down a ladder, so they were coming in one per round). The Fighter then became the enemy's puppet until he died of starvation a week or two later.

As TPKs go, this one was pretty solid: the PCs managed to put a grand total of 3 points of damage into the enemy in that fight.