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

[Distracted DM]

If that's truly the case then perhaps the game has designed PCs to be too powerful relative to their surroundings - and also relative to themselves.

Yep, that's how it feels.
I have found that increasing baddie damage by 35% and dropping their hp by the same amount helps a bit, at mearls' advice.
It's a bandaid but it's also a bit of a pain to do on a VTT.

 

[Remathilis]

And yet when during the D&D playtest, classes received substantial rebalancing nerfs (Sneak attack to 1/round, limits on paladin smites, wild shape limitations, concentration on spiritual weapon, and the death of twin spell) the community cried bloody murder. Luckily, some of those made it through anyway, but it is a constant reminder that once the smoke is out of the bottle, you can't get it back in so easily. Hence the arms-race in the MM for monsters that do far more consistent damage and can resist nova bursts.

 

[Lanefan]

Could just have them face their own clones in a battle (idea isn't mine, was in a book I read years ago).

There's a couple of TSR-era modules that set up this situation, where some or all of the party end up fighting their clones.

In terms of round count, the longest combat I've ever run was one of these: a defense-first Fighter fighting her own clone where each needed something like a natural 19 to hit the other and their damage output wasn't stellar.

38 rounds later.......

Which does poke a small hole in the PC-as-glass-cannon theory.

 

[Lanefan]

In 5e the PCS play and run exactly how you don't want a DM to run a monster nor build an encounter.

Which tells me loud and clear that the PCs need some serious toning down across the board in order to fit in better with their settings.

And that, sadly, won't happen: 5e is designed to let the players wade through the vast majority of their opposition, more like a scaled-back supers game than anything the least bit gritty.

 

[Lanefan]

But why tho?

This is where you're losing me. Mechanical consistency is useful, but not at the expense of playability. Representing an NPC the same way as you would a PC of the same level leads to multi-page statistics full of mostly-useless information that isn't going to even be relevant when representing a creature that dies in two or three rounds.

1 - you don't need every last detail of background etc. unless the PCs are likely to get to know the NPC beyond combat.
2 - if "multi-page statistics" are required, that tells me character generation has become vastly too complex.
3 - all that matters in the end is that the NPC fall within PC-available guidelines for the same class-species combination, regardless how you note it all down.